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Comment Re:Snowden's an expert? (Score 2) 116

Wait a second, what on earth is he speaking at SXSW for? Is he now considered an expert on national security?

I don't know about national security, but he's shown himself time and again to be a very astute observer. It's the same with Bruce Schneier, he doesn't have a PhD in cryptography but people still listen to him because he's damn good at picking out the relevant bits and communicating them effectively to the masses.

Comment Re:digital utopianism (Score 1) 33

The idea that you can just throw tech at education problems is so common its got a name: 'digital utopianism'.

Beat me to it. The answer to the series of questions in the summary is "none of the above", instead of fancy gadgets we need a better pupil-to-teacher ratio, the ability for school boards to fire incompetent teachers, better support for teachers from parents (rather than treating them as glorified daycare nannies), and so on. Playing with gadgets is, at best, a distraction from addressing the real problems.

Comment Re:Why aren't we using PNG? (Score 1) 155

While JPEG 2000 has slightly better compression quality (less visible artifacts) at the same file sizes itâ(TM)s decode performance is substantially slower than JPEG XR (the same is true for encode performance, but decode is much more important).

How much of this is due to hardware support for core JPEG operations in GPUs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs? If wavelet-based JPEG took off, would it just be a matter of time before hardware vendors added explicit support for it to their instruction sets, at which point the speed difference would vanish?

Comment Re:Why aren't we using PNG? (Score 2) 155

I think it's mostly because JPEG is good enough. JPEG2000, for example, also provides perfectly acceptable performance and quality, with significantly-reduced file sizes. But unlike JPEG, JPEG2000 decoders aren't already available everywhere.

It's the fax-machine effect, JPEG will be around forever because everything, and I mean everything, that creates, processes, manipulates, and displays images, speaks JPEG. If Jobs was still alive and decided that from now on iWhatever's were only going to do JPEG2000 (and it's not just for file size reasons, image quality is also vastly improved), you can bet that we'd have a surge in JPEG2000 adoption as soon as the first JPEG2000-only iWhatever was released.

(Personally I'd opt for JPEG-XR, which is more flexible than JPEG2000, addressing the 20-odd-years' worth of issues that have emerged since the original JPEG first saw widespread adoption, but since it was developed by Microsoft I'm nervous even mentioning it here. You never saw these lines, move along, move along...).

Comment Alternative title: "Submarine patent issued" (Score 3, Insightful) 258

This sounds a lot like a submarine patent. The idea is that you file a patent on some generic idea, not necessarily realisable, and then continue it for years, sometimes decades, until the state of the art has advanced to the point where it can be realised. At that point your submarine patent emerges and you've now patented a field that others have spent years developing for you. The notorious Jerome Lemelson made a billion-dollar business out of this.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 359

Additionally, the man is effectively in captivity under a lot of stress. That can present a very different person than that individual might be if not for being locked in the fucking embassy, for example.

Julian has always had serious user interface bugs, for example he would take a laptop along to family Christmas dinners because he thought they were boring and didn't want to talk to them. Having said that, I know other geeks who are at least as poorly socialised, if not more so, than him. Unfortunately being a media personality he now has to put up with having his private life exposed, as does every other celebrity ever. In that case compared to the antics of Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and an infinite lineup of others, he's pretty tame. And before everyone jumps on the bandwagon to criticise him, how many of you could have started Wikileaks?

Comment Re:I agree (Score 1) 222

My biggest gripe with the PS4 so far is that I can't put a music cd in it and listen to it,

My biggest gripe is that when I put a DVD in it I get some error message about it being the wrong region. Even my $20 Chinese-made DVD player does better than that. How could Sony ship a product with a bug this fundamental?

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