I remember seeing a probability of death in a commercial airline crash based on 20 years of airline data (viewed sometime between 1994 and 1996, because I remember where I saw it and who I showed it to) and it was extremely grim - people in the tail have a 99.9% chance of dying and I don't think it got better than about 79% (so 21% survival chance), which was just in front of the wing, and it went up by about 4-6% per row going forward until evening out at almost 100% again (pilots had a slightly better chance of survival than first class passengers, as I recall - by about.1% and the front was 99.7 I believe). So basically, you're right - given that, at best, you have a 1 in 5 chance of surviving a plane crash to begin with and it could be 1 in 1000 or worse (the rounding was to.1%), That doesn't account for survivors with horrific burns and will suffer the rest of their lives. I'd say just don't be in a crash.
I think most people agree Enterprise was the be-all, end-all of bad in the series, and you missed cast and directed (far too many scenes should have been reshot, IMO) - about the only thing good was filming (camera angles, zoom, etc all were fine, but also fairly well established). DS9 was a hard buy-in because it was about a space station (um, where's the Trek?), but wasn't really a bad series. I admittedly missed a large chunk of it though (my computer died, and that was also my TV when it was on, and that wasn't replaced for about a year due to financial problems). TNG - I agree with you there, they also went more lowbrow with Ensign Buxom (if you're a heterosexual guy, you probably can't remember her name or her character's name, either, but you know who I'm talking about) and probably hurt themselves by trying to relate to the nerd crowd by casting Wil Wheaton, though these days we have a bit greater reverence for him (kinda like we dissed Doogie Howser, MD, but think Neil Patrick Harris is great, unless you're anti-gay and judge people that way, but most people I know think he's hysterical).
The original was campy, but not nearly as much as some of its contemporaries, and it was on-par with shows of the 50s-60s like Lost in Space. It really was a show that stretched boundaries by not only casting inter-racially, but also the part Mr Shatner played in inter-racial relations of the times vs their depiction of the future - specifically the kiss with Nichelle (Uhura) that the creators had originally planned to make optional (the actor and actress flubbed the retakes intentionally). It would be like casting a show with openly gay people in the 1980s - it just didn't happen. Today you'd need something like an openly gay and married captain making out on the bridge to get anywhere near as controversial.
What good sci-fi are you talking about? The only new TV show on major networks that is sci-fi is Terra Nova, and that has laughable science and the premise is inane. And yeah - dinosaurs are invulnerable to machine guns, including really big ones from the future - I can believe that. If you want to succeed with invulnerable dinosaurs, dumb it down, lessen the violence, increase the action, and sell the show to 10 year olds as Land of the Lost revisited. Also if you want to attract any mainstream audience, don't put it up against the biggest shows on TV (premier was against Monday Night Football, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, and Dancing with the Stars, so 99% of the mainstream audience already is watching something else).
What the writers should do is ask themselves how are they going to relate to their audience. Alien worked because it played on the human condition - fear of parasites, monsters, and the unknown. Star Trek worked because it was about exploration and discovery. Star Wars worked because it was a battle between right and wrong (or good and evil) and also occurred during a time when people's perceptions were more black and white rather than gray. Battlestar Galactica worked because it explored intelligent machine turning on man (incidentally, that one got canceled the first time because it cost too much, despite being wildly successful).
Some shows like Max Headroom could have done much better if they'd have used a different name and dropped the commercial based gimmick. I think the Bionic Woman remake might have done better with a different name, as well, because it really was more of a drama targeting women than an action show, and people expected an action show, so it was dismissed by women and men both. Automan... well, nothing could save Automan - trying to make a show based on a special effects based movie (Tron) is impossible on small screen budget. Some shows flopped on premise alone, like Firefly (western in space?) and didn't find an audience until later. Some should have just let sleeping dogs lie, like the attempt to rez Flash Gordon in 2007 (there was a review I remember calling one of the episodes the worst episode of anything, anywhere - I'd quote that, but I'm not positive I got the quote right, or who it attributes to).
I'm sure he doesn't regret it because he even poked fun at it later, but you mean other than that 1968 album with his interpretation of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Mr Tambourine Man that went viral on the Captain James T Kirk Sing Along page in the early 1990s?
Hopefully it was better than the show I saw. Not the worst I've ever seen (Run Westy Run, a band that drunkenly played a Duluth, MN show for 10 minutes before leaving stage and then one guy came back and said the rest of the band had passed out wins), but definitely memorable in the show wasn't very good kind of way. On the plus side, I got those tickets as comps, so no major loss. Everyone else has always raved about their shows, but I think the guys were possibly sick (or wasted? haven't heard they had a reputation for that, though) - I admittedly didn't have a great vantage (we had a table, and there aren't very many at First Avenue in Minneapolis), but from what I could see they weren't very animated and they certainly didn't sound very good (and I've seen some very good sounding bands there).
I've even taken them to a metal scrapyard (specifically the metal scrapyard at the transfer/waste station) and they toss the electronics in a scrap heap and shred the body and platters (which are made out of a cobalt alloy) in front of me. I didn't have any sensitive data on those drives, but thought I'd mention it.
Extensions. They invalidate them every major revision and they've been revising on a schedule where many of these plugins aren't keeping up. It was much better when there were point releases that didn't break the extensions, but now they're broken every 3 months and the vendors can't keep up.
Java plugin based internet apps for enterprise are very common, especially in the CAD/CAM/CAE space because they can run on multiple platforms and some of those spaces are heavily entrenched in UNIX (with a trend toward Linux UNIX-like), and many of those depend on Firefox for cross platform support.
I know a guy that does no gaming, but has 3 terrabytes of music CDs backed up on his computer (and yes, he does DJ and works for an indie radio station in addition to his real job as an intellectual property attorney). I imagine if he backed up his video library (I think about 2000 DVDs - it's ridiculous - his entire garage is filled with CDs and DVDs) he could fill several more terrabyte+ drives.
I've burned a few terrabytes myself with work stuff, but CAD models can get pretty large.
What I read was equipment in similar results wasn't accurate enough to eliminate margin of error, which is why they weren't published. The CERN measurements are beyond the margin of error (by about 20% I think).
Anyhow, I see no proof that neutrinos are moving faster than light rather than further than light, which is entirely valid within Einstein theory (an exact neutrino count may be enough to validate, however). For instance, what is the shortest distance between two points on a piece of paper? It isn't a straight line if you fold the paper (if you fold the paper together, you get a wormhole when the two points overlap, and if you fold it part way and take the 3D path, you have extra-dimensional travel, aka "warp space"). Theoretically the same idea can be applied to 3-space and 4-space and higher dimensions.
You're missing the WebGL factor - this is an interface to OpenGL ES, currently version 2.0 and is supported by most major browsers that are not IE. Microsoft has claimed they will not support WebGL because it is a massive security risk (something some game luminaries like John Carmack agrees with). Mozilla thinks WebGL can be secured similar to how Microsoft secured Direct3D in Silverlight 5 and it is just experiencing growing pains.
OpenGL ES 2.0 isn't too bad, but it is dated already and certainly behind DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.2. That said, if you're looking for something that works on most mainstream hardware including iPads, Android, PCs, etc, WebGL is fine. Just don't expect Battlefield 3 quality visuals. It'd work fine for WoW.
Right - and Apple's MacOS X always has required EFI or UEFI and not BIOS on Intel processors (and even have their own proprietary partition map rather than MBR or GPT), so it's not like the tech itself is the problem, it's the vendor lockout possibility that Microsoft may use that is the problem. Even then it doesn't stop you from running Linux in a virtual machine, but the fact that you can't install Linux as the primary boot or set up a dual boot system on Windows preloaded PCs is what people are complaining about.
While Linux supports UEFI, I have never known anyone to install with it, but I know of at least one person that could - me. From what I remember, Windows 64 bit (Vista or 7 I think - I don't think XP 64 bit supported it) needs to be installed with UEFI/GPT partitioning or BIOS/MBR partitioning and it defaults to the latter, but it can be changed. I thought that maybe setting it up with UEFI I could make it dual boot MacOS X on non-mac hardware but I never got that working (I did manage to get it working in a VM on my laptop, however - on my desktop I believe my hardware got invalidated for not supporting Vx instructions, whereas on my laptop I have hardware essentially identical to a machine Apple ships). As far as Apple's legal requirements go, I own a real mac too, and I think their EULA is on shaky ground because copyright law allows me to back up licensed software on any hardware I want.
People have had some success with hardware passthrough on various VMs, but in my experience it is incredibly unreliable (I've mostly tried with VirtualBox, not VMWare, but I have access to both - VirtualBox at home and VMWare at work). Personally I just run Windows 7 and put Linux (and occasionally MacOS) in the VM and get a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver for the other OSes rather than monkey around with it the other way around or with dual boot.
I anticipate this will create problems for running Windows in a VM if the virtual machine doesn't support UEFI...
It would be nice, but I am using some extensions that are only supported on two browsers - IE and Firefox. I had to fricking use IE at home... grr. IE is for work only because I still need to use the damn ActiveX heavy HR web system that integrates with that godawful HR system SAP puts out (dear SAP - hire a usability engineer already... as someone trained in usability, I can attest your software is not, and my companies' custom web interface isn't much better - I have a theory that is your goal however, as HR tend to like sadism...). I'd go Chrome, but our internal apps don't support Chrome at all (but they work in Chrome, Opera, and Safari - we're just not allowed to validate against them except Safari on mac).
To make matters worse, some extensions weren't done updating from the last update when Firefox invalidated them again.
What I think he was trying to say, in context with some of the rest of the article, is that he failed to predict that gaming would be the driving factor for the development of cyberspace rather than corporations driving it to conduct business online. He thinks that video game commerce (like gold selling) will be far bigger than big business commerce and that will be a driving force for development of the internet, and thus his new book seems to be about that or have it an integral plot.
I don't necessarily think he's wrong, but I think corporations are starting to realize that controlling the market is impossible and starting to cash in - look no further than Diablo III with its built in real world trading for loot. If I were running a game I would do it, too, and use that for income instead of a monthly fee for a sustainment model.
No need to exercise - there's a pill for that... or will be.
Kidding aside, I have a friend with a laptop stand on top of her treadmill so she can exercise and play WoW at the same time (actually, I believe she and her hubby quit WoW recently, but my point is she combines exercise with gaming). I usually stationary bike while watching TV, but the only problem is I don't watch much TV. The last show I found worth watching was Game of Thrones. I guess my despising reality TV doesn't help (I live in reality - I want escapism).
There is little difference between the far left and far right - they both want to force their dogma and agenda down your throat and don't care that 99% of the population disagrees with them. It is hard to believe extremist nutbags get into office, but when you look at their competition it usually was one nutjob at one extreme or another at the other. You'd think we'd then favor a 3rd party, but when you look at them, they are almost all variants of the Green party, which is a bunch of tree hugging hippies and pot smokers (no offense meant if I stereotyped the Greens there - all of the ones I know, and I know a lot, are both of those - pot smoking and neo-hippies, and in the past election I could not find a party that was even close to moderate - there were 2 ultra conservative parties and 5 save the trees and/or smoke something parties [one of which was tobacco - their sole platform was reversing the state ban on smoking in public]). And yes I vote in primaries for both major parties. It's too bad only extremists from both sides vote in primaries aside from me though - and yes, I talk to people in line at the polls, and they are all crazies:(
WebKit supports some of SVG, but not all of it, so iPhones and iPads should support it to some extent.
The problem with SVG is nobody ever finished an implementation of it, even to this day. For a long time everyone used Adobe's SVG plugin because it supported about 70% of the spec.I had to support code for years that only worked in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with Adobe's SVG viewer (which Adobe itself hasn't supported since 2009) because support for features we needed was never implemented by anyone else. I got pulled off that project nearly 2 years ago, but I imagine the IE 6 dependency is still there and that just makes me cringe. I do know the attempt to get it working on Safari failed just after I left the team (and native IE was MUCH, MUCH worse).
Open source h.264 encoders probably aren't legal to use in the US or Germany due to software patents (and I don't know about other countries). Since software patents need to be filed by country (except for the European Union where they can be filed for the entire EU, but software patents are harder to get in the EU than in Germany, so in some cases they are filed in both), such an encoder may be perfectly legal to use in most countries outside the United States. Just because you can legally download something doesn't mean you can legally use it. I can legally download DVD Shrink in the US, too, but using it to copy a DVD violates patents, the DMCA, and the way the US throws around copyright law, probably an assload of other copyright legislation. OTOH, DVD Shrink and probably h.264 encoders are illegal to even download in Germany because they circumvent copyright protection and such products are forbidden to exist by German law (yes, the Germans think their laws apply to everyone, too, just like the US... sigh).
Actually, I don't find vp8 to be that bad, but h.264 compresses slightly better and shows fast motion better in my experience, so I think the MPEG 4 team did choose the best choice (which was actually h.264 vs vp7, but even vp8 didn't quite catch up to h.264).
And incidentally, Flash makes their money in the same way as H.264, which is give away free decoders and charge for encoders.
H.264 is free for browsers to support, and while it would be nice for it to support something patent free like Ogg Theora, it probably isn't worth it now that the substantially better VP8 was released with a perpetual free license. The only real argument for H.264 is that while VP8 isn't bad, it isn't quite the quality of H.264 at the same compression ratio (VP8 tends to get artifact-y mainly during high motion video, otherwise there isn't much difference). Ogg Theora picture quality isn't bad, but it can't keep up on compression (2+ times larger files for the same quality video in my experience), and is in fact based on earlier On2 VP3 technology (the same company that developed VP8). I don't know much about the generations in-between other than VP6 was used in Flash (8?) and VP7 was a competitor to H.264 for MPEG 4 inclusion and lost.
I can see both Microsoft and Apple wanting H.264 to win, as both companies have their fingers in that patent cookie jar. Google didn't have any patents in that jar that I know of, but they may have some after the purchase of On2 - I haven't really kept up on that front. Google has released VP8 under a perpetual free license, but I'm fairly sure they didn't release all of the On2 patents.
It is colloquial for Great Britain (including Ireland, whether they want to be included or not), Australia, and New Zealand to be more specific, but incidentally American internet slang also uses it as a joke/insult for poor mathematics as a form of sarcasm, but usually as the subject in the sentence (for instance, "let's do the maths").
This reminds me of the Telemedia Act in Germany, which requires an Impressum, and in 1998 (date is as I recall, so possibly incorrect) it was ruled that it applies to web sites, so Germans need to post at minimum name, street address, and telephone number or email address on the site. Technically it applies to anything written including blogs and posts to forums, but I doubt it is enforced much for forums (the government has gone after bloggers, however). Not sure why that law exists, but I imagine it is to keep track of radicals, and it certainly has nothing to do with privacy.
That and with Class Diagrams for C++ are incredibly useful for getting a hierarchy view of the code. XCode comes with a tool as do at least some versions of Visual Studio (I have Ultimate at work, so I'm a bit spoiled) and there are at least standalone versions that are FOSS (some may integrate, but I'm a bit out of touch with FOSS IDEs). The diagrams take a while to generate, but simplify the code down and put it in a dependency drawing so you can see the dependency chain. You also can open any files from the diagram.
There are free tools for Open Source that create these diagrams and they may or may not integrate with certain IDEs (I haven't looked into it). I know CodeBlocks can generate Nassi-Shneiderman charts with a plug-in, but those are more for checking logic in a functional program (so not much use on Libraries).
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I remember seeing a probability of death in a commercial airline crash based on 20 years of airline data (viewed sometime between 1994 and 1996, because I remember where I saw it and who I showed it to) and it was extremely grim - people in the tail have a 99.9% chance of dying and I don't think it got better than about 79% (so 21% survival chance), which was just in front of the wing, and it went up by about 4-6% per row going forward until evening out at almost 100% again (pilots had a slightly better chance of survival than first class passengers, as I recall - by about .1% and the front was 99.7 I believe). So basically, you're right - given that, at best, you have a 1 in 5 chance of surviving a plane crash to begin with and it could be 1 in 1000 or worse (the rounding was to .1%), That doesn't account for survivors with horrific burns and will suffer the rest of their lives. I'd say just don't be in a crash.
I think most people agree Enterprise was the be-all, end-all of bad in the series, and you missed cast and directed (far too many scenes should have been reshot, IMO) - about the only thing good was filming (camera angles, zoom, etc all were fine, but also fairly well established). DS9 was a hard buy-in because it was about a space station (um, where's the Trek?), but wasn't really a bad series. I admittedly missed a large chunk of it though (my computer died, and that was also my TV when it was on, and that wasn't replaced for about a year due to financial problems). TNG - I agree with you there, they also went more lowbrow with Ensign Buxom (if you're a heterosexual guy, you probably can't remember her name or her character's name, either, but you know who I'm talking about) and probably hurt themselves by trying to relate to the nerd crowd by casting Wil Wheaton, though these days we have a bit greater reverence for him (kinda like we dissed Doogie Howser, MD, but think Neil Patrick Harris is great, unless you're anti-gay and judge people that way, but most people I know think he's hysterical).
The original was campy, but not nearly as much as some of its contemporaries, and it was on-par with shows of the 50s-60s like Lost in Space. It really was a show that stretched boundaries by not only casting inter-racially, but also the part Mr Shatner played in inter-racial relations of the times vs their depiction of the future - specifically the kiss with Nichelle (Uhura) that the creators had originally planned to make optional (the actor and actress flubbed the retakes intentionally). It would be like casting a show with openly gay people in the 1980s - it just didn't happen. Today you'd need something like an openly gay and married captain making out on the bridge to get anywhere near as controversial.
Hmm... confused - trying to call Bill Shatner God maybe? Maybe if I break down the question through reductions...
What DOES God want?
What DOES God?
er, don't answer that.
Maybe you should ask if he is a god before you go all big G - I mean, none of us want to get smote here, I don't think.
What good sci-fi are you talking about? The only new TV show on major networks that is sci-fi is Terra Nova, and that has laughable science and the premise is inane. And yeah - dinosaurs are invulnerable to machine guns, including really big ones from the future - I can believe that. If you want to succeed with invulnerable dinosaurs, dumb it down, lessen the violence, increase the action, and sell the show to 10 year olds as Land of the Lost revisited. Also if you want to attract any mainstream audience, don't put it up against the biggest shows on TV (premier was against Monday Night Football, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, and Dancing with the Stars, so 99% of the mainstream audience already is watching something else).
What the writers should do is ask themselves how are they going to relate to their audience. Alien worked because it played on the human condition - fear of parasites, monsters, and the unknown. Star Trek worked because it was about exploration and discovery. Star Wars worked because it was a battle between right and wrong (or good and evil) and also occurred during a time when people's perceptions were more black and white rather than gray. Battlestar Galactica worked because it explored intelligent machine turning on man (incidentally, that one got canceled the first time because it cost too much, despite being wildly successful).
Some shows like Max Headroom could have done much better if they'd have used a different name and dropped the commercial based gimmick. I think the Bionic Woman remake might have done better with a different name, as well, because it really was more of a drama targeting women than an action show, and people expected an action show, so it was dismissed by women and men both. Automan... well, nothing could save Automan - trying to make a show based on a special effects based movie (Tron) is impossible on small screen budget. Some shows flopped on premise alone, like Firefly (western in space?) and didn't find an audience until later. Some should have just let sleeping dogs lie, like the attempt to rez Flash Gordon in 2007 (there was a review I remember calling one of the episodes the worst episode of anything, anywhere - I'd quote that, but I'm not positive I got the quote right, or who it attributes to).
I'm sure he doesn't regret it because he even poked fun at it later, but you mean other than that 1968 album with his interpretation of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Mr Tambourine Man that went viral on the Captain James T Kirk Sing Along page in the early 1990s?
Hopefully it was better than the show I saw. Not the worst I've ever seen (Run Westy Run, a band that drunkenly played a Duluth, MN show for 10 minutes before leaving stage and then one guy came back and said the rest of the band had passed out wins), but definitely memorable in the show wasn't very good kind of way. On the plus side, I got those tickets as comps, so no major loss. Everyone else has always raved about their shows, but I think the guys were possibly sick (or wasted? haven't heard they had a reputation for that, though) - I admittedly didn't have a great vantage (we had a table, and there aren't very many at First Avenue in Minneapolis), but from what I could see they weren't very animated and they certainly didn't sound very good (and I've seen some very good sounding bands there).
I've even taken them to a metal scrapyard (specifically the metal scrapyard at the transfer/waste station) and they toss the electronics in a scrap heap and shred the body and platters (which are made out of a cobalt alloy) in front of me. I didn't have any sensitive data on those drives, but thought I'd mention it.
Extensions. They invalidate them every major revision and they've been revising on a schedule where many of these plugins aren't keeping up. It was much better when there were point releases that didn't break the extensions, but now they're broken every 3 months and the vendors can't keep up.
Java plugin based internet apps for enterprise are very common, especially in the CAD/CAM/CAE space because they can run on multiple platforms and some of those spaces are heavily entrenched in UNIX (with a trend toward Linux UNIX-like), and many of those depend on Firefox for cross platform support.
I guess that is case-by-case.
I know a guy that does no gaming, but has 3 terrabytes of music CDs backed up on his computer (and yes, he does DJ and works for an indie radio station in addition to his real job as an intellectual property attorney). I imagine if he backed up his video library (I think about 2000 DVDs - it's ridiculous - his entire garage is filled with CDs and DVDs) he could fill several more terrabyte+ drives.
I've burned a few terrabytes myself with work stuff, but CAD models can get pretty large.
What I read was equipment in similar results wasn't accurate enough to eliminate margin of error, which is why they weren't published. The CERN measurements are beyond the margin of error (by about 20% I think).
Anyhow, I see no proof that neutrinos are moving faster than light rather than further than light, which is entirely valid within Einstein theory (an exact neutrino count may be enough to validate, however). For instance, what is the shortest distance between two points on a piece of paper? It isn't a straight line if you fold the paper (if you fold the paper together, you get a wormhole when the two points overlap, and if you fold it part way and take the 3D path, you have extra-dimensional travel, aka "warp space"). Theoretically the same idea can be applied to 3-space and 4-space and higher dimensions.
You're missing the WebGL factor - this is an interface to OpenGL ES, currently version 2.0 and is supported by most major browsers that are not IE. Microsoft has claimed they will not support WebGL because it is a massive security risk (something some game luminaries like John Carmack agrees with). Mozilla thinks WebGL can be secured similar to how Microsoft secured Direct3D in Silverlight 5 and it is just experiencing growing pains.
OpenGL ES 2.0 isn't too bad, but it is dated already and certainly behind DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.2. That said, if you're looking for something that works on most mainstream hardware including iPads, Android, PCs, etc, WebGL is fine. Just don't expect Battlefield 3 quality visuals. It'd work fine for WoW.
Right - and Apple's MacOS X always has required EFI or UEFI and not BIOS on Intel processors (and even have their own proprietary partition map rather than MBR or GPT), so it's not like the tech itself is the problem, it's the vendor lockout possibility that Microsoft may use that is the problem. Even then it doesn't stop you from running Linux in a virtual machine, but the fact that you can't install Linux as the primary boot or set up a dual boot system on Windows preloaded PCs is what people are complaining about.
While Linux supports UEFI, I have never known anyone to install with it, but I know of at least one person that could - me. From what I remember, Windows 64 bit (Vista or 7 I think - I don't think XP 64 bit supported it) needs to be installed with UEFI/GPT partitioning or BIOS/MBR partitioning and it defaults to the latter, but it can be changed. I thought that maybe setting it up with UEFI I could make it dual boot MacOS X on non-mac hardware but I never got that working (I did manage to get it working in a VM on my laptop, however - on my desktop I believe my hardware got invalidated for not supporting Vx instructions, whereas on my laptop I have hardware essentially identical to a machine Apple ships). As far as Apple's legal requirements go, I own a real mac too, and I think their EULA is on shaky ground because copyright law allows me to back up licensed software on any hardware I want.
People have had some success with hardware passthrough on various VMs, but in my experience it is incredibly unreliable (I've mostly tried with VirtualBox, not VMWare, but I have access to both - VirtualBox at home and VMWare at work). Personally I just run Windows 7 and put Linux (and occasionally MacOS) in the VM and get a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver for the other OSes rather than monkey around with it the other way around or with dual boot.
I anticipate this will create problems for running Windows in a VM if the virtual machine doesn't support UEFI...
It would be nice, but I am using some extensions that are only supported on two browsers - IE and Firefox. I had to fricking use IE at home... grr. IE is for work only because I still need to use the damn ActiveX heavy HR web system that integrates with that godawful HR system SAP puts out (dear SAP - hire a usability engineer already... as someone trained in usability, I can attest your software is not, and my companies' custom web interface isn't much better - I have a theory that is your goal however, as HR tend to like sadism...). I'd go Chrome, but our internal apps don't support Chrome at all (but they work in Chrome, Opera, and Safari - we're just not allowed to validate against them except Safari on mac).
To make matters worse, some extensions weren't done updating from the last update when Firefox invalidated them again.
What I think he was trying to say, in context with some of the rest of the article, is that he failed to predict that gaming would be the driving factor for the development of cyberspace rather than corporations driving it to conduct business online. He thinks that video game commerce (like gold selling) will be far bigger than big business commerce and that will be a driving force for development of the internet, and thus his new book seems to be about that or have it an integral plot.
I don't necessarily think he's wrong, but I think corporations are starting to realize that controlling the market is impossible and starting to cash in - look no further than Diablo III with its built in real world trading for loot. If I were running a game I would do it, too, and use that for income instead of a monthly fee for a sustainment model.
No need to exercise - there's a pill for that... or will be.
Kidding aside, I have a friend with a laptop stand on top of her treadmill so she can exercise and play WoW at the same time (actually, I believe she and her hubby quit WoW recently, but my point is she combines exercise with gaming). I usually stationary bike while watching TV, but the only problem is I don't watch much TV. The last show I found worth watching was Game of Thrones. I guess my despising reality TV doesn't help (I live in reality - I want escapism).
There is little difference between the far left and far right - they both want to force their dogma and agenda down your throat and don't care that 99% of the population disagrees with them. It is hard to believe extremist nutbags get into office, but when you look at their competition it usually was one nutjob at one extreme or another at the other. You'd think we'd then favor a 3rd party, but when you look at them, they are almost all variants of the Green party, which is a bunch of tree hugging hippies and pot smokers (no offense meant if I stereotyped the Greens there - all of the ones I know, and I know a lot, are both of those - pot smoking and neo-hippies, and in the past election I could not find a party that was even close to moderate - there were 2 ultra conservative parties and 5 save the trees and/or smoke something parties [one of which was tobacco - their sole platform was reversing the state ban on smoking in public]). And yes I vote in primaries for both major parties. It's too bad only extremists from both sides vote in primaries aside from me though - and yes, I talk to people in line at the polls, and they are all crazies :(
WebKit supports some of SVG, but not all of it, so iPhones and iPads should support it to some extent.
The problem with SVG is nobody ever finished an implementation of it, even to this day. For a long time everyone used Adobe's SVG plugin because it supported about 70% of the spec.I had to support code for years that only worked in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with Adobe's SVG viewer (which Adobe itself hasn't supported since 2009) because support for features we needed was never implemented by anyone else. I got pulled off that project nearly 2 years ago, but I imagine the IE 6 dependency is still there and that just makes me cringe. I do know the attempt to get it working on Safari failed just after I left the team (and native IE was MUCH, MUCH worse).
Open source h.264 encoders probably aren't legal to use in the US or Germany due to software patents (and I don't know about other countries). Since software patents need to be filed by country (except for the European Union where they can be filed for the entire EU, but software patents are harder to get in the EU than in Germany, so in some cases they are filed in both), such an encoder may be perfectly legal to use in most countries outside the United States. Just because you can legally download something doesn't mean you can legally use it. I can legally download DVD Shrink in the US, too, but using it to copy a DVD violates patents, the DMCA, and the way the US throws around copyright law, probably an assload of other copyright legislation. OTOH, DVD Shrink and probably h.264 encoders are illegal to even download in Germany because they circumvent copyright protection and such products are forbidden to exist by German law (yes, the Germans think their laws apply to everyone, too, just like the US... sigh).
Actually, I don't find vp8 to be that bad, but h.264 compresses slightly better and shows fast motion better in my experience, so I think the MPEG 4 team did choose the best choice (which was actually h.264 vs vp7, but even vp8 didn't quite catch up to h.264).
And incidentally, Flash makes their money in the same way as H.264, which is give away free decoders and charge for encoders.
H.264 is free for browsers to support, and while it would be nice for it to support something patent free like Ogg Theora, it probably isn't worth it now that the substantially better VP8 was released with a perpetual free license. The only real argument for H.264 is that while VP8 isn't bad, it isn't quite the quality of H.264 at the same compression ratio (VP8 tends to get artifact-y mainly during high motion video, otherwise there isn't much difference). Ogg Theora picture quality isn't bad, but it can't keep up on compression (2+ times larger files for the same quality video in my experience), and is in fact based on earlier On2 VP3 technology (the same company that developed VP8). I don't know much about the generations in-between other than VP6 was used in Flash (8?) and VP7 was a competitor to H.264 for MPEG 4 inclusion and lost.
I can see both Microsoft and Apple wanting H.264 to win, as both companies have their fingers in that patent cookie jar. Google didn't have any patents in that jar that I know of, but they may have some after the purchase of On2 - I haven't really kept up on that front. Google has released VP8 under a perpetual free license, but I'm fairly sure they didn't release all of the On2 patents.
It is colloquial for Great Britain (including Ireland, whether they want to be included or not), Australia, and New Zealand to be more specific, but incidentally American internet slang also uses it as a joke/insult for poor mathematics as a form of sarcasm, but usually as the subject in the sentence (for instance, "let's do the maths").
This reminds me of the Telemedia Act in Germany, which requires an Impressum, and in 1998 (date is as I recall, so possibly incorrect) it was ruled that it applies to web sites, so Germans need to post at minimum name, street address, and telephone number or email address on the site. Technically it applies to anything written including blogs and posts to forums, but I doubt it is enforced much for forums (the government has gone after bloggers, however). Not sure why that law exists, but I imagine it is to keep track of radicals, and it certainly has nothing to do with privacy.
That and with Class Diagrams for C++ are incredibly useful for getting a hierarchy view of the code. XCode comes with a tool as do at least some versions of Visual Studio (I have Ultimate at work, so I'm a bit spoiled) and there are at least standalone versions that are FOSS (some may integrate, but I'm a bit out of touch with FOSS IDEs). The diagrams take a while to generate, but simplify the code down and put it in a dependency drawing so you can see the dependency chain. You also can open any files from the diagram.
There are free tools for Open Source that create these diagrams and they may or may not integrate with certain IDEs (I haven't looked into it). I know CodeBlocks can generate Nassi-Shneiderman charts with a plug-in, but those are more for checking logic in a functional program (so not much use on Libraries).