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Comment Re:AV1 lacks hardware support compared with H.264 (Score 1) 29

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

Comment Re:backups (Score 3, Interesting) 37

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Comment Re:Life is extremely improbable (Score 3, Insightful) 39

LUCA's descendants were able to go to every possible life niche on Earth and displace all other types of life? That makes very little sense.

It makes perfect sense, you explained clearly how it could happen.

The reasonable way of looking at it is, "What is the probability of that happening?" That's a scientific question.

Comment Passing a school bus is no joke in Texas (Score -1) 81

A school bus, with the red lights flashing, may NOT be passed on either side. This is to prevent children from being run over. Texas cops are quick to fine anyone who does, and it's hammered into your head in Drivers Ed.

In some states it's not a big deal, and so many of those people moved to Texas to get away from their states, only to turn Texas into what they hated. They don't learn.

Comment Re:Macroeconomics 101 (Score 1) 87

No, inflation is an expansion of the money supply. When the government prints more money than the population growth requires, banks lend more money at lower rates, people and businesses borrow more, and the surplus money chasing the same goods and services increases the demand and prices rise. That is economic inflation, my term, which is different from what laymen call inflation: some prices going up, as from tariffs or other taxes.

Comment STOP, WAIT, PAUSE, or what? (Score 2) 81

I have read of people given tickets for passing stopped school buses with their red STOP signs swung out, who got the ticket dismissed by pointing out that normal STOP signs mean PAUSE then continue. I have no idea if the original stories were true or if that still works. STOP signs really mean wait until the intersection clears, and arguably the temporary intersection created by the school bus doesn't clear until the kiddies are across the street.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 2) 87

Fair enough - it is easy to forget just how much real functionality there actually is in these stacks. It is nice to live in a world where a handful of lines of glue code yield a rich application.

However, there is a lot of stuff that does not *need* all that and generally isnt worth the trade off for many/most users. There is also the reality that all that to frequently gets delivered in the laziest way possible. Rather than a few shared libs that the OS could map into multiple virtual address spaces, we get everything having its own copy, because its 'easier' if less efficent. It is a question of what you optimize around.

Look at an older house, every single door with be hung/framed and all the jointing will have been done on site. Look at new house, every door will be a pre-hung door. We incur the costs of packaging, shipping, stocking an array of sizes, to de-skill the install and save time. Its different optimization.

Software is not different, if RAM is expensive people will find ways to use less of it. What is special and uniquely good about software is we get to keep using it as long as we want. If expensive RAM drives development of memory efficent stacks, well when RAM gets cheap again (it will eventually) we still have the more efficent software, and we can pile even more debatable features on top...

Comment Re:This can't be the right way to run Samsung (Score 1) 87

I don't know how their structured sounds more like a parent holding company with subsidiaries that are their own legal entities not just divisions/departments.

So they probably independently have their own CEOs. The folks running the holding company though might very well be asking, well why would we not want each sub to make itself as profitable as it can be.

They only reason to step in is if/when Samsung Electronics is actually endangered in terms of market share. If they have to design around cheaper slower memory sourced outside while we make bank selling top drawer chips at a premium, so what? If they have to redesign devices around shipping with less memory, again so what as long as all our competitors are in the same positions.

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