Cunning plan that: if this generates enough power to drive a light rail, then the light rail becomes a viable alternative for travel and there are fewer cars to drive the turbines. I presume it achieves an equilibrium at some point. Otherwise you'd be in the daft position of encouraging car transport in order to drive the electric train...
Surely a slightly more practical approach to green energy would be to bar the New Jersey Turnpike to cars that do less than the average mpg? (Note this cunningly moves the figure upwards as people are persuaded into sensible cars.)
To be fair to the BBC the solution they have picked works with for the majority of people and makes more content available than would be in a non-DRMed solution. On the face of it then their argument that they've picked the least worst solution is valid.
However the BBC is a public broadcaster that levies a flat tax on virtually all UK households. That tax therefore becomes discriminatory if the user is only able to access a subset of BBC services. To me that means the BBC is not free to pick a majority solution: it has to pick a universal solution or not enter the market at all.
Moreover the market distorting effect of the BBC's decision is not just limited to the BBC. This is a huge coup for Microsoft, who are competing against Apple (and used to be competing against Sony until they blew it) for the digital hub market. By "relying on third parties" what the BBC means is "waiting for Microsoft to port WMP 10 to OS X and Linux properly". Or "never" as it's more popularly known.
The alternative is some BBC lash up of its own codec plus a Real + Adobe + Apple approved DRM solution. I'll leave it to the reader to try and remember any other DRM solution that has successfully been set up by an industry consortium. People who work in mobile media may want to recall the glorious success of OMA DRM.
Er, yes. That is indeed a video codec. Is it used in iPlayer? Not at the moment, no. The Dirac team seem to think it may "possibly" be used as the codec for a future platform agnostic iPlayer. Note "future".
Even if it were added to iPlayer WMP is a container and can handle multiple codecs so there'd be nothing to stop the BBC encoding content using its own codec and still have it viewable in WMP. The codec is much less significant than the DRM approach chosen.
They might have been in the dim and distant past, but the version that's been in trial for the last two and a bit years is Windows Media Player with a bit of P2P underneath. Don't expect anything to change either. The BBC is fully Microsofted: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5390000.stm
But the trust has asked the BBC to ensure that the iPlayer computer application can run on different systems - such as Apple Macs - within "a reasonable time frame".
Earlier this month BBC Future Media boss Ashley Highfield said the corporation was committed to rolling out the iPlayer on Windows PCs first of all, and then cable TV services, Apple Macs, and eventually Freeview boxes.
But the BBC said it could not commit to a two-year deadline to achieve this goal, saying it was up to the third parties concerned. (my emphasis)
iPlayer is built on top of Windows Media Player using Windows DRM - part of the BBC's stunning support for open standards and multiplatform development. Even if they do ship it for Mac the DRM issue will probably limit the programmes you can download.
Would it be churlish to suggest that "The Americas" would therefore be a better term to use as unambiguous and less likely to irritate those of US who happen to be sat less than a dozen miles west of the prime meridian but who don't count for some reason?
I should have done my Googling before I posted... turns out this ground has been covered extensively elsewhere and a> yes, Vonage's voice codec is reputedly so bad that faxes are known to have a problem with it but, b> you can sometimes get fax to work by switching you fax into the slowest most error-correcting mode it has available. It is almost exactly the same as TCP over a really lossy network. On a lossy network like narrowband wireless TCP goes into ultra pedantic error correction and fragments packets to atoms to ensure delivery. The end result is that at the application layer (say a Web browser on a phone) the service becomes effectively unusable: I suspect much the same is happening here.
POTS is most definitely not analogue all the way unless you're running two yoghurt pots with a piece of string between your house and the house opposite. Once you've moved out of the local exchange your call will be digitised and funnelled into a big fat fibre pipe as bits. And POTS is automatically lossy to begin with as it only uses frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz; the question is whether the psychoacoustic model used in VoIP affects the fax's ability to error correct more than the simple high and low band filters used ion the normal phone system.
Except that's exactly what faxes do, as they use modem technology underneath. There might be an irreconcilable difference between the tendency of UDP to drop packets and the V series' ability to error-correct (rather like the extreme degradation TCP can suffer on narrowband high-latency networks like mobile phones) but in theory the fax shouldn't notice the loss of packets as the sample rate of the VoIP will be much higher than the modem's. It's all just voiceband whistling after all.
I wasn't claiming that sub pixel works on CRTs, just that anti-aliasing in general was designed to deal with rendering on low resolution devices (actually just on lower resolution devices than the source material, but I'm trying not to get distracted). And ditto, sub-pixel on my mac is good enough that I have to use hardware zoom to see it. On PCs it's lousy, which is the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Nope, I know the screen is horizontal RGB. It's just that ClearType sucks and I notice these things. No matter how good the monitor ClearType always looks to me like you're looking at the screen through a cheap pair of binoculars. Fiddling around with the ClearType Tuner improves matters somewhat but only near the limit where ClearType is basically turned off.
There are three parameters at work here: one is the preference of the user (and my preference, as a result of my years of work on print I suspect, is for crisp graphics with minimal anti-aliasing); one is the implementation of the anti-alising scheme (and Microsoft's sucks and has always sucked ever since it appeared in PocketPC, which is where I first came across it); and three is the quality of the monitor. The only one you can really do anything about is the quality of your monitor.
Anti-aliasing began as a technology to avoid artefacts in rendering especially on low resolution displays such as the CRTs available when the technology was first developed (early 70s). Now that we are seeing TFT displays with resolutions higher than 110 ppi AA becomes less significant. The first laser printers with an acceptable print quality had a resolution of 300dpi. Once we get up to that we won't need Microsoft's moire fringes anymore.
F-Secure have a particular knack for the headline grabbing initiative don't they now? They spent considerable time and effort a few years ago warning us of the virus epidemic that would engulf mobile phones. To date we've still only seen one proof of concept virus, and that required the user to physically install it.
Depends on the quality of the implementation and the quality/density of the screen. Ironically, the inventor's implementation is poor.
On a 72dpi LCD attached to a PC running Windows the effect is obvious (and hideous) all the glyphs have red and blue fringes. Turning ClearType off is the first thing I do on a Windows box after disabling the Windows XP theme.
On my 100dpi+ MacBook Pro I had to use the zoom function to confirm that it was using sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Even on my second monitor it's acceptable, and that's a cheap low density screen.
Apple have spent some time getting font anti-aliasing right: the initial AA in OS X looked like someone had just applied gaussian blur to the whole screen. Now it actually does what it's supposed to do, which is reduce eye fatigue.
On the other hand, once we get our long promised 300dpi screens monitor resolution will be the same as paper and we can dump kludgy hacks like ClearType.
Tufte's objection is entirely to do with the replacement of the basic unit of argument (the sentence) with the bulletpoint. Sounds like you're in the clear.
(Excellent screenname btw)
And now, as bullet points for those that don't speak english any more:
* Basic unit of text no longer sentence * Bullet point abbreviates thought * Discourages argument * Kills flow
But Google Desktop isn't solely web search: it indexes your hard drive as well.
1. I already have something that indexes my hard drive. The resource usage implied in running a second indexing service is a tad excessive. 2. I already have a plug-in enabled framework for desktop search. Google *could* have released a Spotlight plug-in for search and Gmail. 3. Google desktop adds a server to your network profile. Just because it's so far proven secure doesn't mean its not borked.
This is just petty completism on the part of google. We don't need it; what we needed something that would fit the existing Mac framework.
1. Buy gallon of petrol/gas 2. Wait fifty years 3. Sell gallon of petrol to automotive museum for $50,000 4. Buy train ticket anywhere I damn well like
From a European perspective this looks like the scene in Austin Powers where Dr Evil, confused by the the future, demands $1 million and everybody looks at him and asks "is that all?". I suppose in a country where single figure mpg figures are normal 100mpg looks awfully daunting, but from a European perspective it seems somewhat plausible.
*Admittedly because 100 miles per imperial gallon is equal to 83 miles per US gallon
That's a fair contrast. And indeed, if there's a four year waiting list for a car, there's not much of a civilian economy to move such a project into.
The failure of the communist economy was far wider and more drastic than its inability to ship some robo-boots into the leisure market. The TFA blithely ignores the simple fact that Soviet Union was quietly collapsing when the boots were invented.
Funny that you think I'm complaining about the oppressive industrial-military complex. Couldn't give two hoots about that, to be frank. I was more interested in picking apart the TFA's author's logic. He was making an argument that the lack of access to a modern IP regime and a lack of experience in entrepreneurship has led to Russia falling behind the rest of the technologically developing nations, but chooses an eyecatching story to back him up that doesn't actually have anything to do with that thesis.
As far as "falsibly" equate: well, in the Soviet Union if you invented something that might have military use they'd make it a military secret. In the US (as in the UK, Australia, Germany etc) if you invent something that breaches a military secret or could be used by the military, they'll declare it a secret - read the links I attached with my post. The two systems are identical in that respect. Of course the rules were/are applied differently, and the Soviets were much keener on suppressing such information than the west, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
Indeed, there was nowhere else for Pajitnov to go. (Although if he'd waited a year then private research would have been entirely possible, as Gorbachev permitted private co-operatives from May 86.) So the problem is systemic, not individual. But the individual example is poor: would a NASA researcher be permitted to patent work that he'd developed on NASA hardware and on NASA time?
Slashdot Mirror
US GDP per capita = $39,319.40
China GDP per capita = $5,453.31
Or put another way: $150 dollars in China would be the same as charging $1200 for a Vista license in the US
Mark you I wouldn't be too outraged, if I were you. Vista Basic is 150 GBP here. That's $300.
And they need it that PR, badly:
h tml?gusrc=rss&feed=travel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2059430,00.
Cunning plan that: if this generates enough power to drive a light rail, then the light rail becomes a viable alternative for travel and there are fewer cars to drive the turbines. I presume it achieves an equilibrium at some point. Otherwise you'd be in the daft position of encouraging car transport in order to drive the electric train...
Surely a slightly more practical approach to green energy would be to bar the New Jersey Turnpike to cars that do less than the average mpg? (Note this cunningly moves the figure upwards as people are persuaded into sensible cars.)
To be fair to the BBC the solution they have picked works with for the majority of people and makes more content available than would be in a non-DRMed solution. On the face of it then their argument that they've picked the least worst solution is valid.
However the BBC is a public broadcaster that levies a flat tax on virtually all UK households. That tax therefore becomes discriminatory if the user is only able to access a subset of BBC services. To me that means the BBC is not free to pick a majority solution: it has to pick a universal solution or not enter the market at all.
Moreover the market distorting effect of the BBC's decision is not just limited to the BBC. This is a huge coup for Microsoft, who are competing against Apple (and used to be competing against Sony until they blew it) for the digital hub market. By "relying on third parties" what the BBC means is "waiting for Microsoft to port WMP 10 to OS X and Linux properly". Or "never" as it's more popularly known.
The alternative is some BBC lash up of its own codec plus a Real + Adobe + Apple approved DRM solution. I'll leave it to the reader to try and remember any other DRM solution that has successfully been set up by an industry consortium. People who work in mobile media may want to recall the glorious success of OMA DRM.
Er, yes. That is indeed a video codec. Is it used in iPlayer? Not at the moment, no. The Dirac team seem to think it may "possibly" be used as the codec for a future platform agnostic iPlayer. Note "future".
Even if it were added to iPlayer WMP is a container and can handle multiple codecs so there'd be nothing to stop the BBC encoding content using its own codec and still have it viewable in WMP. The codec is much less significant than the DRM approach chosen.
They might have been in the dim and distant past, but the version that's been in trial for the last two and a bit years is Windows Media Player with a bit of P2P underneath. Don't expect anything to change either. The BBC is fully Microsofted: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5390000.stm
Not according to the BBC:
But the trust has asked the BBC to ensure that the iPlayer computer application can run on different systems - such as Apple Macs - within "a reasonable time frame". Earlier this month BBC Future Media boss Ashley Highfield said the corporation was committed to rolling out the iPlayer on Windows PCs first of all, and then cable TV services, Apple Macs, and eventually Freeview boxes. But the BBC said it could not commit to a two-year deadline to achieve this goal, saying it was up to the third parties concerned. (my emphasis)Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6607083.s tm
iPlayer is built on top of Windows Media Player using Windows DRM - part of the BBC's stunning support for open standards and multiplatform development. Even if they do ship it for Mac the DRM issue will probably limit the programmes you can download.
Would it be churlish to suggest that "The Americas" would therefore be a better term to use as unambiguous and less likely to irritate those of US who happen to be sat less than a dozen miles west of the prime meridian but who don't count for some reason?
e re
The Wikipedia article you cite is accompanied with an extensive discussion of exactly this sort of ambiguity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Western_Hemisph
I'm deliberately trying not to google things instantly these days, just to make sure my memory is up to scratch...
I should have done my Googling before I posted... turns out this ground has been covered extensively elsewhere and a> yes, Vonage's voice codec is reputedly so bad that faxes are known to have a problem with it but, b> you can sometimes get fax to work by switching you fax into the slowest most error-correcting mode it has available. It is almost exactly the same as TCP over a really lossy network. On a lossy network like narrowband wireless TCP goes into ultra pedantic error correction and fragments packets to atoms to ensure delivery. The end result is that at the application layer (say a Web browser on a phone) the service becomes effectively unusable: I suspect much the same is happening here.
POTS is most definitely not analogue all the way unless you're running two yoghurt pots with a piece of string between your house and the house opposite. Once you've moved out of the local exchange your call will be digitised and funnelled into a big fat fibre pipe as bits. And POTS is automatically lossy to begin with as it only uses frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz; the question is whether the psychoacoustic model used in VoIP affects the fax's ability to error correct more than the simple high and low band filters used ion the normal phone system.
Except that's exactly what faxes do, as they use modem technology underneath. There might be an irreconcilable difference between the tendency of UDP to drop packets and the V series' ability to error-correct (rather like the extreme degradation TCP can suffer on narrowband high-latency networks like mobile phones) but in theory the fax shouldn't notice the loss of packets as the sample rate of the VoIP will be much higher than the modem's. It's all just voiceband whistling after all.
I wasn't claiming that sub pixel works on CRTs, just that anti-aliasing in general was designed to deal with rendering on low resolution devices (actually just on lower resolution devices than the source material, but I'm trying not to get distracted). And ditto, sub-pixel on my mac is good enough that I have to use hardware zoom to see it. On PCs it's lousy, which is the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Nope, I know the screen is horizontal RGB. It's just that ClearType sucks and I notice these things. No matter how good the monitor ClearType always looks to me like you're looking at the screen through a cheap pair of binoculars. Fiddling around with the ClearType Tuner improves matters somewhat but only near the limit where ClearType is basically turned off.
There are three parameters at work here: one is the preference of the user (and my preference, as a result of my years of work on print I suspect, is for crisp graphics with minimal anti-aliasing); one is the implementation of the anti-alising scheme (and Microsoft's sucks and has always sucked ever since it appeared in PocketPC, which is where I first came across it); and three is the quality of the monitor. The only one you can really do anything about is the quality of your monitor.
Anti-aliasing began as a technology to avoid artefacts in rendering especially on low resolution displays such as the CRTs available when the technology was first developed (early 70s). Now that we are seeing TFT displays with resolutions higher than 110 ppi AA becomes less significant. The first laser printers with an acceptable print quality had a resolution of 300dpi. Once we get up to that we won't need Microsoft's moire fringes anymore.
F-Secure have a particular knack for the headline grabbing initiative don't they now? They spent considerable time and effort a few years ago warning us of the virus epidemic that would engulf mobile phones. To date we've still only seen one proof of concept virus, and that required the user to physically install it.
Meanwhile their security software is insecure: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/87063 - leaving a buffer overflow in your flagship security suite is a tad dumb.
F-Secure press releases should be regarded as denial of service attacks as they stop the flow of sensible information about security.
Depends on the quality of the implementation and the quality/density of the screen. Ironically, the inventor's implementation is poor.
On a 72dpi LCD attached to a PC running Windows the effect is obvious (and hideous) all the glyphs have red and blue fringes. Turning ClearType off is the first thing I do on a Windows box after disabling the Windows XP theme.
On my 100dpi+ MacBook Pro I had to use the zoom function to confirm that it was using sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Even on my second monitor it's acceptable, and that's a cheap low density screen.
Apple have spent some time getting font anti-aliasing right: the initial AA in OS X looked like someone had just applied gaussian blur to the whole screen. Now it actually does what it's supposed to do, which is reduce eye fatigue.
On the other hand, once we get our long promised 300dpi screens monitor resolution will be the same as paper and we can dump kludgy hacks like ClearType.
Tufte's objection is entirely to do with the replacement of the basic unit of argument (the sentence) with the bulletpoint. Sounds like you're in the clear.
(Excellent screenname btw)
And now, as bullet points for those that don't speak english any more:
* Basic unit of text no longer sentence
* Bullet point abbreviates thought
* Discourages argument
* Kills flow
And it's even time to report the Stalin picture: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
Powerpoint destroys the ability to think, both in presenters and recipients. Edward Tufte has been banging this drum for a decade, I'm glad someone's caught up with him: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-m sg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
But Google Desktop isn't solely web search: it indexes your hard drive as well.
1. I already have something that indexes my hard drive. The resource usage implied in running a second indexing service is a tad excessive.
2. I already have a plug-in enabled framework for desktop search. Google *could* have released a Spotlight plug-in for search and Gmail.
3. Google desktop adds a server to your network profile. Just because it's so far proven secure doesn't mean its not borked.
This is just petty completism on the part of google. We don't need it; what we needed something that would fit the existing Mac framework.
Simple:
1. Buy gallon of petrol/gas
2. Wait fifty years
3. Sell gallon of petrol to automotive museum for $50,000
4. Buy train ticket anywhere I damn well like
The EcoRacer has already done 100mpg*: http://www.topgear.co.uk/news/2005/10/26/meet-vws- 100mpg-coupe/
(and 0-60 in 6 secs)
From a European perspective this looks like the scene in Austin Powers where Dr Evil, confused by the the future, demands $1 million and everybody looks at him and asks "is that all?". I suppose in a country where single figure mpg figures are normal 100mpg looks awfully daunting, but from a European perspective it seems somewhat plausible.
*Admittedly because 100 miles per imperial gallon is equal to 83 miles per US gallon
Actually, my birthday is the 30th of December 1969. Why do you ask?
That's a fair contrast. And indeed, if there's a four year waiting list for a car, there's not much of a civilian economy to move such a project into.
The failure of the communist economy was far wider and more drastic than its inability to ship some robo-boots into the leisure market. The TFA blithely ignores the simple fact that Soviet Union was quietly collapsing when the boots were invented.
Funny that you think I'm complaining about the oppressive industrial-military complex. Couldn't give two hoots about that, to be frank. I was more interested in picking apart the TFA's author's logic. He was making an argument that the lack of access to a modern IP regime and a lack of experience in entrepreneurship has led to Russia falling behind the rest of the technologically developing nations, but chooses an eyecatching story to back him up that doesn't actually have anything to do with that thesis.
As far as "falsibly" equate: well, in the Soviet Union if you invented something that might have military use they'd make it a military secret. In the US (as in the UK, Australia, Germany etc) if you invent something that breaches a military secret or could be used by the military, they'll declare it a secret - read the links I attached with my post. The two systems are identical in that respect. Of course the rules were/are applied differently, and the Soviets were much keener on suppressing such information than the west, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
Indeed, there was nowhere else for Pajitnov to go. (Although if he'd waited a year then private research would have been entirely possible, as Gorbachev permitted private co-operatives from May 86.) So the problem is systemic, not individual. But the individual example is poor: would a NASA researcher be permitted to patent work that he'd developed on NASA hardware and on NASA time?