Somebody is going to make around $3 billion on this, but it isn't going to be eBay, who sold Skype last year for $2 billion, which was less than what they paid for the company when they bought it.
Your rhetoric doesn't make sense. You're making the argument that the Iranian government's crackdown on demonstrators last year doesn't justify an invasion, which would have been a valid argument had someone actually suggested that the crackdown justifies an invasion - which no one has. So it's a non sequitur, if using big words makes you happy, or just plain bullshit if it doesn't.
I live in Colorado, but I've never been to Kansas. Somehow, whenever I want to drive someplace, I can pick either the mountains on the west or the big flatness on the east, and guess what I end up picking...
It's definitely on my list of places to visit, though.
Please, anybody BUT Ken Burns. He'll go on and on about how great Figrin D'an's early work was, and completely ignore his later groundbreaking musical accomplishments.
I used to work for a small game publisher in the mid '90s. We estimated the piracy rate of our product to be at around 90%, and we were probably optimistic about it - I personally met many people who admitted to copying our products, and we even got technical support calls for pirated copies occasionally.
Since not every pirated copy automatically translates to a lost sale, everything that follows is guesswork. We know that pirates liked our products and kept using them, so most of these copies weren't DIY product demos (most of the pirates were parents of young children, who were our target end user - if you think your job is rewarding, you haven't seen a 4 year old being dragged kicking and screaming (literally) from your product. Now that's job satisfaction!)
So I think assuming that 10% of all pirated copies would have been paid copies if copying was suddenly made impossible. That would have been enough to avoid laying off a couple of developers, and would certainly have made a huge difference for the company, which was just profitable enough to stick around.
I think it's easy to look at the MPAA and RIAA, and the amount of money involved in their products, and not feel too sorry for them. I sure don't, but I always felt the story for small developers, less popular musicians and independent film makers can be very different.
Don't get me wrong - MIDI guitars have their uses, and I've seen people using them live and sounding great. They just take some time to get used to, like any new instrument.
I don't know if I would call them "common." I have one of those beasts, and it's a lot of fun to play with, but not quite as much fun to play, if you get my drift.
The main problem with the ones that use a 6-way pickup to analyze each string's pitch and convert that to a MIDI signal is that they have a noticeable delay. Until you learn how to compensate for that in your playing, it can be quite annoying and distracting.
The other kind (and I've seen various designs, but this applies to all of the ones I've seen) suffers from not feeling exactly like a guitar, or not feeling much like a guitar at all. Again, this is something you can get used to if you're motivated, but guitarists are kinda picky about things that most people don't care about, like string gauge, and neck scale, and just the right neck profile - if you go and change all the strings to a single gauge (I've seen a model with all G strings) it's just not going to feel right when you pick it up and start playing.
Oh, I don't know what everyone is complaining about.
First, the sequence header is STILL part of the video elementary stream, so the metadata is still codec dependent... Even if a container would store it (redundantly) outside of the elementary stream, robust code would still need to get it from the elementary stream. Why? Because it might be different from the container stored values. I've seen that in MP4 and MOV files in the past, I think. How they ended up this way? How should I know? I'm just decoding here.
Even in MPEG, you need to at the very least understand the video and the audio headers. Want to mux something else in there? (private data, maybe?) There's no standard for that. Framing in PES headers is defined for MPEG video and audio (and AC-3, outside the standard per-se) so the PTS and DTS encoding is up to you, basically. Or the implementer of the private data. In any case, you can't find it unless you know what you're doing. The only thing you have at the systems layer is the PCR, so you can seek, but then you have to go looking around for a good place to start decoding.
PES packets can be smaller or larger than frames. MP4 files store data in a downright weird way - packets? Ha. Ha ha. I laugh at your packets. I have tables of pointers to tables in three different places that all have to agree and you still can't seek without an index, and there's this hinting thing that's optional but you can't stream without it.
I guess what I'm saying is that all video formats are weird, quirky, and rely on mind numbing complexity to achieve their design goals. Picking one format to bitch about is counter productive. Don't like it? Go play with RLE encoded AVIs circa '93 or so. That's easy.
Hey, I wish MPEG didn't have a 9 bit extension field for the PCR, or multiple bits in the sequence header that can go out of sync with each other forcing you to stay up until 4 am trying to figure out that the top-field-first needs to be in agreement with some chroma related bit, and that there's only one hardware decoder in existence that cares about this, but that decoder is 4000 miles away and is about to be used for a demo in 6 hours, and there I am, looking for this one bit, not even knowing that the problem is a single flipped bit, because the only thing I have to go on is a guy on the phone telling me that the picture "jumps."
So no - I don't care anymore. The harder it is, the more they pay me.
The PTS isn't stored in the GOP header. The GOP header is defined in part 2 of the spec, the PTS is in part 1. So the PTS and the DTS are in the PES header. MPEG frames are typically sent out of order. You'll need to do a lot of decoding to figure out the frame rate from the PTS. The bitrate is just as tricky to determine if you're just looking at one layer. A transport multiplexer needs to know a lot about the video it's multiplexing to be able to maintain the proper bitrate and order the frames correctly, etc. etc.
So basically, without understanding your elementary stream to some degree, you can't do much with it in the system layer. Even something seemingly simple, like remuxing, isn't easy to do without knowing something about the structure of the elementary stream. I'm guessing that this is why Ogg doesn't even try to pretend like you can abstract the codec enough to do something meaningful with data you know nothing about - other than skip it, that is.
I've dealt with proprietary data that was multiplexed in MPEG-2 TS before, and there's not a whole lot you can do with it without knowing what it is.
In regards to the software, yeah, it isn't that great, but by no means do you have to use it. It stays out of your way so that you can freely use something else such as Calibre.
Oh, it sure stays out of your way. It took about a week on my system before it would just hang on startup before displaying the UI. Amazing. Sony's tech support couldn't resolve it, or do anything more useful than drool out loud at me.
I would advise people to just skip it - install Calibre and don't worry about it.
While I do have a irrational love of hackable devices (My phone is an Openmoko Neo, which is great because people stopped calling me since they can't hear a word I say - it's that bad. But hey - it's hackable!) I still prefer the Sony Reader to what I saw of the nook so far. It's one of the few devices I have that I never felt the need to go and modify. It does what it's supposed to do reasonably well, and unlike the nook, it's stable.
WiFi would have been nice. Sony does have a model with WiFi support, but it's limited in what it can do (that's where the nook wins, since you can run anything on it.)
My Sony Reader PRS 600 shows up as a drive (two, actually) when you plug it into your PC via USB, it has native support for PDF, LRF, ePub, plain text files and RTF. It also supports several image formats - if you like to see your photos in black and white, you'll be all set.
Yes, exactly. I have a PRS 600 and I think it's great. Works great with Linux and Calibre.
My only gripe used to be that Sony's software is pretty buggy, and their eBook store is as DRM infested as Amazon's. But the device itself is about as good as you can make with an E Ink screen, it's easy to use and I find myself actually using it for its intended purpose.
It means something to the author. A lot less to anyone who might read his words. The term is probably thrown around a lot at Microsoft, and the author makes the unwarranted assumption that people outside of Microsoft are supposed to try and figure out what he writes, instead of him trying to figure out a way to convey his idea to his readers. He's obviously free to do so, but he runs the risk of being misunderstood and looking like an arrogant prick.
Without an intimate knowledge of Microsoft's internal culture, can you point to anything in the words "collective ecosystem" that would imply that anyone spoke to battery manufacturers, or even Microsoft's engineers, for that matter? The term could mean anything at all, which amounts to having no meaning at all.
I don't work at Microsoft. I worked with people who have, and from my experience with them I can determine with some certainty that "collective ecosystem" doesn't mean "a sampling of Microsoft's engineers, as well as our hardware partners' engineers" but rather "a guy who fancies himself a UI expert who happened to be drunk when we asked him." But I could be wrong. It could actually mean "an interaction of life forms and dependence within a physical, non-biological framework on which the living forms in turn have some effect. [1]"
But that wouldn't make much sense, would it? But then again, neither does the original sentence.
[1] From Granite Outcrops: A Collective Ecosystem, by B York Main, Department of Zoology, University of Western Australia, Nedlands Western Australia 6907
Engineers tend to speak plainly and to the point. Most straight thinking technical people wouldn't want to work in a place where people utter phrases like "the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge." This is bullshit. If you don't know something, say "I don't know," not "to the best of the universal flux's knowledge."
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Somebody is going to make around $3 billion on this, but it isn't going to be eBay, who sold Skype last year for $2 billion, which was less than what they paid for the company when they bought it.
Drop what you're smoking and step on it.
Now take a deep breath.
Your rhetoric doesn't make sense. You're making the argument that the Iranian government's crackdown on demonstrators last year doesn't justify an invasion, which would have been a valid argument had someone actually suggested that the crackdown justifies an invasion - which no one has. So it's a non sequitur, if using big words makes you happy, or just plain bullshit if it doesn't.
A friend off mine was killed by a policeman at a gas station in Ohio last year, actually.
It wasn't part of a coordinated effort by the US government, though. You somehow think that the two are comparable. They're not.
It's always great to find someone this knowledgeable.
So let me ask you this: What was Iran's justification for shooting at its own citizens last year?
Tel-Aviv has plenty of traffic lights and a reasonable level of law enforcement.
From what I've seen in other countries in the area, Israeli drivers are still kinda tame, though.
Howdy, neighbor! :)
I live in Colorado, but I've never been to Kansas. Somehow, whenever I want to drive someplace, I can pick either the mountains on the west or the big flatness on the east, and guess what I end up picking...
It's definitely on my list of places to visit, though.
5 hours by foot, or by broken ankle in a blizzard?
It's nice to have backup when your phone's battery dies. Or if the thing falls into a creek. Or is eaten by a bear.
Really, it isn't that hard to learn the basics, and it's fun - so why not do it?
Please, anybody BUT Ken Burns. He'll go on and on about how great Figrin D'an's early work was, and completely ignore his later groundbreaking musical accomplishments.
I used to work for a small game publisher in the mid '90s. We estimated the piracy rate of our product to be at around 90%, and we were probably optimistic about it - I personally met many people who admitted to copying our products, and we even got technical support calls for pirated copies occasionally.
Since not every pirated copy automatically translates to a lost sale, everything that follows is guesswork. We know that pirates liked our products and kept using them, so most of these copies weren't DIY product demos (most of the pirates were parents of young children, who were our target end user - if you think your job is rewarding, you haven't seen a 4 year old being dragged kicking and screaming (literally) from your product. Now that's job satisfaction!)
So I think assuming that 10% of all pirated copies would have been paid copies if copying was suddenly made impossible. That would have been enough to avoid laying off a couple of developers, and would certainly have made a huge difference for the company, which was just profitable enough to stick around.
I think it's easy to look at the MPAA and RIAA, and the amount of money involved in their products, and not feel too sorry for them. I sure don't, but I always felt the story for small developers, less popular musicians and independent film makers can be very different.
Don't get me wrong - MIDI guitars have their uses, and I've seen people using them live and sounding great. They just take some time to get used to, like any new instrument.
I don't know if I would call them "common." I have one of those beasts, and it's a lot of fun to play with, but not quite as much fun to play, if you get my drift.
The main problem with the ones that use a 6-way pickup to analyze each string's pitch and convert that to a MIDI signal is that they have a noticeable delay. Until you learn how to compensate for that in your playing, it can be quite annoying and distracting.
The other kind (and I've seen various designs, but this applies to all of the ones I've seen) suffers from not feeling exactly like a guitar, or not feeling much like a guitar at all. Again, this is something you can get used to if you're motivated, but guitarists are kinda picky about things that most people don't care about, like string gauge, and neck scale, and just the right neck profile - if you go and change all the strings to a single gauge (I've seen a model with all G strings) it's just not going to feel right when you pick it up and start playing.
The iPad is a game console. As game consoles go, it's actually very open, and very cheap to develop for.
> no Flash support
We are still fracking talking about this? Please.
It's spelled F-U-C-K.
Oh, I don't know what everyone is complaining about.
First, the sequence header is STILL part of the video elementary stream, so the metadata is still codec dependent... Even if a container would store it (redundantly) outside of the elementary stream, robust code would still need to get it from the elementary stream. Why? Because it might be different from the container stored values. I've seen that in MP4 and MOV files in the past, I think. How they ended up this way? How should I know? I'm just decoding here.
Even in MPEG, you need to at the very least understand the video and the audio headers. Want to mux something else in there? (private data, maybe?) There's no standard for that. Framing in PES headers is defined for MPEG video and audio (and AC-3, outside the standard per-se) so the PTS and DTS encoding is up to you, basically. Or the implementer of the private data. In any case, you can't find it unless you know what you're doing. The only thing you have at the systems layer is the PCR, so you can seek, but then you have to go looking around for a good place to start decoding.
PES packets can be smaller or larger than frames. MP4 files store data in a downright weird way - packets? Ha. Ha ha. I laugh at your packets. I have tables of pointers to tables in three different places that all have to agree and you still can't seek without an index, and there's this hinting thing that's optional but you can't stream without it.
I guess what I'm saying is that all video formats are weird, quirky, and rely on mind numbing complexity to achieve their design goals. Picking one format to bitch about is counter productive. Don't like it? Go play with RLE encoded AVIs circa '93 or so. That's easy.
Hey, I wish MPEG didn't have a 9 bit extension field for the PCR, or multiple bits in the sequence header that can go out of sync with each other forcing you to stay up until 4 am trying to figure out that the top-field-first needs to be in agreement with some chroma related bit, and that there's only one hardware decoder in existence that cares about this, but that decoder is 4000 miles away and is about to be used for a demo in 6 hours, and there I am, looking for this one bit, not even knowing that the problem is a single flipped bit, because the only thing I have to go on is a guy on the phone telling me that the picture "jumps."
So no - I don't care anymore. The harder it is, the more they pay me.
But I still want my hair back.
The PTS isn't stored in the GOP header. The GOP header is defined in part 2 of the spec, the PTS is in part 1. So the PTS and the DTS are in the PES header. MPEG frames are typically sent out of order. You'll need to do a lot of decoding to figure out the frame rate from the PTS. The bitrate is just as tricky to determine if you're just looking at one layer. A transport multiplexer needs to know a lot about the video it's multiplexing to be able to maintain the proper bitrate and order the frames correctly, etc. etc.
So basically, without understanding your elementary stream to some degree, you can't do much with it in the system layer. Even something seemingly simple, like remuxing, isn't easy to do without knowing something about the structure of the elementary stream. I'm guessing that this is why Ogg doesn't even try to pretend like you can abstract the codec enough to do something meaningful with data you know nothing about - other than skip it, that is.
I've dealt with proprietary data that was multiplexed in MPEG-2 TS before, and there's not a whole lot you can do with it without knowing what it is.
A DVD is MPEG-PS, not MPEG-TS. Your cable system and satellite feed are TS. Both are built on top of the PES layer.
MPEG-2 is the reason I have no hair left on my head.
I'm pretty sure the titlebars are an option in some apps.
I have an R4 which I use to load my own code to the DS. I never used it to play pirated ROMs. The R4 does have legitimate uses as a development tool.
In regards to the software, yeah, it isn't that great, but by no means do you have to use it. It stays out of your way so that you can freely use something else such as Calibre.
Oh, it sure stays out of your way. It took about a week on my system before it would just hang on startup before displaying the UI. Amazing. Sony's tech support couldn't resolve it, or do anything more useful than drool out loud at me.
I would advise people to just skip it - install Calibre and don't worry about it.
Yes, the nook does appear to be more hackable.
While I do have a irrational love of hackable devices (My phone is an Openmoko Neo, which is great because people stopped calling me since they can't hear a word I say - it's that bad. But hey - it's hackable!) I still prefer the Sony Reader to what I saw of the nook so far. It's one of the few devices I have that I never felt the need to go and modify. It does what it's supposed to do reasonably well, and unlike the nook, it's stable.
WiFi would have been nice. Sony does have a model with WiFi support, but it's limited in what it can do (that's where the nook wins, since you can run anything on it.)
My Sony Reader PRS 600 shows up as a drive (two, actually) when you plug it into your PC via USB, it has native support for PDF, LRF, ePub, plain text files and RTF. It also supports several image formats - if you like to see your photos in black and white, you'll be all set.
Yes, exactly. I have a PRS 600 and I think it's great. Works great with Linux and Calibre.
My only gripe used to be that Sony's software is pretty buggy, and their eBook store is as DRM infested as Amazon's. But the device itself is about as good as you can make with an E Ink screen, it's easy to use and I find myself actually using it for its intended purpose.
It means something to the author. A lot less to anyone who might read his words. The term is probably thrown around a lot at Microsoft, and the author makes the unwarranted assumption that people outside of Microsoft are supposed to try and figure out what he writes, instead of him trying to figure out a way to convey his idea to his readers. He's obviously free to do so, but he runs the risk of being misunderstood and looking like an arrogant prick.
Without an intimate knowledge of Microsoft's internal culture, can you point to anything in the words "collective ecosystem" that would imply that anyone spoke to battery manufacturers, or even Microsoft's engineers, for that matter? The term could mean anything at all, which amounts to having no meaning at all.
I don't work at Microsoft. I worked with people who have, and from my experience with them I can determine with some certainty that "collective ecosystem" doesn't mean "a sampling of Microsoft's engineers, as well as our hardware partners' engineers" but rather "a guy who fancies himself a UI expert who happened to be drunk when we asked him." But I could be wrong. It could actually mean "an interaction of life forms and dependence within a physical, non-biological framework on which the living forms in turn have some effect. [1]"
But that wouldn't make much sense, would it? But then again, neither does the original sentence.
[1] From Granite Outcrops: A Collective Ecosystem, by B York Main, Department of Zoology, University of Western Australia, Nedlands Western Australia 6907
Engineers tend to speak plainly and to the point. Most straight thinking technical people wouldn't want to work in a place where people utter phrases like "the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge." This is bullshit. If you don't know something, say "I don't know," not "to the best of the universal flux's knowledge."
More on that here: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/30.html