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Comment Re:Lithium batteries? (Score 1) 335

Lithium batteries don't "explode". The worst are lithium polymer, which vent highly toxic gas and burn uncontrollably... while this would be pretty bad, the forced ventilation system would take care of the gas within a few minutes, and a fire in the passenger area won't take down the plane with relatively modern designs.

Comment Re:Enough already (Score 1) 243

Which is sad because a single VGA cable can handle that without thinking about it.

Ever tried 2560x1600 over VGA? Unless you have a really good cable and hardware, I guarantee it will make your eyes bleed. The ringing is pretty terrible on most highres VGA setups I've seen.

Comment Running Linux is obviously a major hindrance (Score 5, Insightful) 74

I mean, look at the most popular gaming handheld today... the nintendo DS! It does not run Linux, and so therefore requires no porting work on it at all! I can play portal and crysis on it no problem, as well as Minesweeper from Windows 95. And don't forget Chip's Challenge. Man, that game was awesome.

Seriously, the whole games-are-bad-on-Linux thing is taken out of context. The argument makes sense for desktop systems, not for a portable gaming platform that's for custom designed games. If something like that ran Windows 7, it would be a disaster. And the fact that TFA mentions how OS X would have been a better choice for Panasonic makes it even more laughable. For something like this, a custom API, architecture, and software distribution is what they are after, and it hardly matters how they implement it. There is little chance this will run the X window system, and if it does, I would hardly enjoy using openoffice with a d-pad.

Comment Yay for heating my house! (Score 0, Troll) 163

For serious? Their leading feature is the ability to run even less efficiency than before? Extra speed at expense of power is great for desktops - too bad people hardly buy those anymore. Some of us actually want to run these things ON A BATTERY - can you imagine? Then again, being in Minnesota, I welcome the added heat.

Comment Re:Don't trust MPEG LA. Buy Theora hardware (Score 2, Insightful) 262

Don't let these MPEG LA devils fool you.

Oh my, we're really in for it now.

By continuing to use h264, you support the developers who support intellectual property and DRM protected hardware. Do you really want to do that? I don't want to support developers who stand behind "intellectual property" and "Digital Rights Management" software and hardware.

Excuse me, but what does H.264 have to do with DRM?

It stifles innovation and widens the disparity between the rich and the poor because the poor will have less opportunity to learn how all of this hardware works in order to create and innovate similar products.

Hmm? Patents are freely viewable online, as is the H.264 spec. "create and innovate similar products"... similar products? I thought innovation generally resulted in original products? I digress.

Don't let all those intellectual assholes "smoke and mirrors" confuse you and and distract you by saying there are other codecs "technically superior" to Theora.

So you can magically make facts not important by enclosing them with double quotes?

I've been witness to all this video intellectual property crapola since the mid 1990's. All these different audio/video formats to obfuscate, divide and conquer the open-source world: mpeg, mp4, aac, nmr-nb, nmr-wb, 3gp, 3gp2. dirac, matroska, wav, mp3, flac.

Great job listing off open formats like dirac, matroska, wav, and flac, I see you really did your homework there. Also, mp4, 3gp, and 3gp2 are containers for the MPEG-4 format, of which aac is a component. I don't see a lot of division there - just different containers for certain specific applications with specific needs.

Not to mention the price to purchase the hardware had been quite exclusive for the longest time for the cameras and the encoder cards.

Man, if that $200 MPEG-4 encoding video camera was only $0.20 cheaper...

The phone makers and the MID makers should be supporting the open-source route because it makes their hardware less expensive to buy in the long-run.

Uhh, that's the whole point of selling or licensing things. To delegate production or R&D to other parties, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Why is it they are still selling stuff with mp4/mpeg chipsets? Why are they supporting these intellectual property guys?

Consumers have buying power. They will vote for open-source with their money if well-informed.

Let's see... a well-informed customer would know that the Theora product would offer two advantages over the H.264 product... $0.20 cheaper and significantly worse video quality. This is assuming, of course, that Theora encoders and decoders are manufactured in great enough volumes to make the cost equal to H.264.

I know the real point of your post is promoting ideals, and I'm a bit of a practical type... but seriously, isn't there something better for you to campaign about?

Comment MPEG LA is reasonable? (Score 1) 262

Hey guys, before assuming MPEG LA has patents and is therefore evil, have you actually checked the license terms?

The licensing is really quite cheap. At low quantities, the licensing per codec is only $0.20. You really only should need one of these per computer, and there is no particular reason why every piece of video software get for free should need to have its dedicated codec.

Pay per view is the lower of 2% and $0.02 per view.

Based on what the x264 developer diary says, VP8 is a blatant ripoff of H.264 anyway, so I'm a bit dissapointed that Google was tricked into supporting this for WebM. I would have much rather supported an entirely new format that made use of new ideas, rather than something that steals original work and gives it enough tweaks to make it questionably legal.

Seriously, guys, this is what patents are for. H.264 is an excellent format, quite efficient to implement in hardware. The guys who designed it deserve to get paid something, even if much of the complexity is in the codec - as the x264 blog says, there is only so much you can do with a bad format.

Comment Re:Probability in computers: it's called a float (Score 1) 153

Sounds like someone has been living in a perfect reality (aka drugs). I dare you to make a voltage regulator with better precision than an IEEE 64-bit floating point number... or even a 32-bit one.

Then try to implement mixers and actual logic.

Then embed it into a tiny circuit amid an extremely noisy environment.

Of course, the last two are just academic, as you're never even going to manage the voltage regulator without some extreme equipment.

Comment Re:The actual thesis (Score 1) 153

See slide 41 for the NAND gate they are bragging about.

I'm a bit worried about them being completely fabless. I'm sure all their circuits work in SPICE, but how is this going to deal with real world noise, especially embedded on some other digital chip? The powerpoint explicitly states that is adversely affected especially by the sudden spikes caused by digital noise...

I was about to post the slideshow myself, but I see you beat me to it :)

Comment Re:No it was just too dark (Score 1) 266

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

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