...A very nice computer for what an iPod costs. I'll never buy one. It seems like a colossal waste of money to me. $300 for what amounts to a walkman? Geez. I'll stick to my $50 CD/MP3 player. 700MB of MP3s per CD. Stick that on your pricing chart. And I can jog with it too.
And you can buy a nice house for the price of a high-end exotic sports car, too. Does that mean that Ferrari should give up, stop making cars, and go out of business?
This device is not primarily targeted at college kids working at a burger-flipping job for whom $250 is a major investment. It's targeted towards people for whom $250 is not that big of a deal. If you're not one of those people, feel free not to buy one, just like I'm not going to buy a Ferrari.
Finally, the sticker shock is just too much. Why would I get off my ass to go check out an iPod that'll save me $50?
You think Apple is going to complain if you spend the extra $50 to get the 15GB model? Oh yes, they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
I have a pink iPod mini on order for my wife's birthday present. She's incredibly excited about it and specifically wanted the pink one. There is a very large segment of people for whom A) $250 is not "sticker shock" territory, and B) small size and pretty colors matter.
You're not a member of that segment. Fine. What's your point? I must have missed the "every product must appeal to every person on the planet" memo.
Why not just dump MHZ as a rating altogether? Wouldn't FLOPS-based (Floating Operations Per Sec) or something similar be a better measurement? Maybe how far a simple program can compute PI in a second? We should really be looking at an operational-based measurement rather than a clock-based one.
Unfortunately, these things are very, very easy to fake. One quarter after you switched over to a PI-digit-computation metric, Intel and AMD would both have the most heavily-optimized-for-PI-computation processors that you've ever seen. They might suck for everything else, but hot damn they'd compute PI fast.
Plus, then you get into the huge gray area of "well, this processor can compute PI unbelievably fast when you use a good compiler with the right settings, but gcc with default settingsproduces lousy code for it...". What compiler do you use to compile the benchmark? Do you have to use the default settings for every option? How can you be sure that you're seeing actual differences between the processors, instead of just differences in how well the compiler optimizes for each processor? For that matter, maybe the source code itself is biased toward a particular processor -- just restructuring it so that the loop is a little tighter (and thus fits into L1 cache) might boost the performance on one processor by 5x, but make absolutely no difference on another processor.
Benchmarking is very much a black art despite the huge number of research papers published on this subject. In short, there is no simple and reliable standard for judging a system's performance today. With no good objective standards to cling to, MHz are a simple and easy number to go by, and so that's what the market does.
1. History -- Argument: Lots of languages are case sensitive, and people seem to be capable of dealing with it, so this is a non-issue. Response: The problem is, of course, that this response completely avoids making a point relevant to the argument.
Rebuttal: If people are really good at dealing with it, then that makes a pretty strong point that this is a non-issue. Why should we waste a lot of time and effort fixing a non-issue?
2a. Readability -- Argument: Forcing people to type "if" instead of "IF", "If" or god forbid, "iF" will enhance readability. Response: I personally feel that all-lowercase individual words are a lot easier to read than leading capitals or all-uppercase, but this is only a solution for the predefined keywords of a language, and really fails to address the question of case *sensitivity* to case in programmer-defined names.
Rebuttal: You admit that you feel all-lowercase keywords are easier to read. So do I. So does almost everybody else. Let's enforce 'em.
What benefit is there to some people deciding to write "IF A=B THEN..." and other people deciding to write "if a=b then..." other than making everything difficult to read?
2b. Readability -- Argument: If I define myCleverMethod, I don't want to debug code littered with MYcleVERMetHOD. Response: Somebody inevitably posts some variation on this, and I can't imagine why they bother. What kind of idiot would bother with such screwy capitalization?
Rebuttal: It's not just MYcleVERMetHOD we're worried about. We're also worried about myclevermethod and MYCLEVERMETHOD which, at first glance, do not even look remotely related to one another but are in fact the same thing in a case-insensitive language. And people will very much decide to type it in all-lowercase or all-uppercase, because if they intended to type it in the "correct" case, they wouldn't be arguing for case-insensitivity.
3. Flexibility -- Argument: Case sensitivity allows you to use the same multi-word phrase for two unrelated things when they both happen to require the same spelling. Response: I actually had somebody use the examples CarPass and CarpAss to illustrate the flexibility of case sensitivity (on the pre-release C# mailing list at Don Box's develop.com). To date I have not seen an example of this which is even remotely defensible. Elsewhere in this/. discussion someone posted SetsLow and SetSlow, which sounds slightly more realistic, but it's still reaching. Somebody show me one where the "obvious" names are significantly better than simply choosing an alternative.
Rebuttal: Fine.
User user = new User();
is better than
User theUser = new User();
4a. Parsing -- Argument: The main reason case sensitivity exists is because uppercase and lowercase letters really are different things to a computer. Response: This mattered a lot in the old days of computing (which also yielded the terseness we see in languages like C). The machine on my desktop has a 3GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. It can compile tens of thousands of lines of code in a matter of seconds. Although it can probably be argued that non-ASCII platforms would have a harder time performing this conversion, I'd also point out that databases and other applications in those same environments perform case conversions quite easily on those same platforms. I do not consider this a valid argument.
4b. Parsing -- Response: The standard parsing argument could be extended in equally ridiculous directions. With the considerable power of modern desktop computers, we can do all sorts of things with text. Why not treat red, blue, and boldface text as separate characters, too?
Rebuttal: It takes long enough to compile, say, Linux, that I'm not out looking for ways to slow it down further.
As for the red and blue argument, last I checked we were working with plain text files. If we were working with styled text files,
I've owned three Apple laptops-- A powerbook 140, an Powerbook 1400, and an iBook 500. They've all had problems with the backlight or scan lines turning on or off. It's probably not specific to Apple, though.
You had problems with three out of three laptops. Admittedly a very small sample size, but judging by the other posts here, it seems to be a very widespread problem with Apple laptops.
Here's my experience. My wife is on her second Sony Vaio, I used to have a Thinkpad, and I know at least a dozen people at work with a company-standard-issue Compaq laptop.
Know how many backlight/scan line problems I've seen or heard of? Zero. Not one of these laptops has, to the best of my knowledge, ever had any problems more significant than a worn-out cooling fan.
Well, other than the time I set my wife's Vaio down on an unsteady surface and it fell two feet to the floor, but that was obviously my fault. And even then the damage was minor.
Again, I hate to draw conclusions from a small sample size, but this is definitely scaring me away from wanting to own an Apple laptop (which I was actually considering).
I wish advertisers would use the MiB, GiB, and TiB notations for storage space - it would make shopping for hard drives a bit more honest...
This is asinine. Why don't we just have our operating systems report numbers in base 10, like, oh, say, ALL OF HUMANITY DOES?
I'm being serious. Is there some reason you actually want your operating system to tell you that 100,000,000 bytes is "95 megabytes"? Do you value that behavior? Would you be upset if it said "100 megabytes" instead?
Please, explain the rationale behind this. "Computers work in binary" is not an acceptable answer, unless you want the computer to report the value as "1011111 megabytes". I don't give a crap how computers represent numbers -- as a human, I operate in base 10, and I want to see my numbers (including prefixes like "mega") represent base 10 numbers.
Why don't you want the same?
(Before anybody brings this up, yes, I am aware that this would make e.g. 256MB memory modules actually be 268MB memory modules. So? To the average, ordinary person, 256 is no more meaningful a number than 268, so I don't see any reason that we should favor seeing 256 over 268.)
1365x768 on a 61" display?!? I wouldn't pay for a 19" display that couldn't do better than that. At 61" the pixel pitch must be, what? 11.5mm?
And yet you probably happily paid for a television which has around one quarter that resolution.
I have a 50" plasma that I use as a TV, and if it weren't for the problem of burn-in, I would already have bought a 42" to use as a computer monitor. Until you've seen your desktop stretching across FOUR FEET, you cannot possibly understand how cool this is.
I've also used a computer hooked up to a 110" front projector. Now that was nice.
Which means you don't have predictable destruction. Which means you don't have destructors. Which means you can't use idioms like resource-allocation-is-initialization.
So in the presence of exceptions, you won't leak memory on the heap. But you will leak mutexes, file handles, etc. You need another idiom to handle those cases.
Java is probably the most widely-used garbage-collected language in existence. I think I speak for all Java programmers when I say "WTF are you talking about?"
It is true that you can't guarantee timely execution of finalizers. Because of that, Java is no different than any other language in that you should close files when you're done with them. However, if you forget to close a file here and there, it's generally no big deal because they will be closed during finalization. It only becomes a problem when you're leaking tons of file handles very quickly.
Now, this article is about C, so let's compare the two.
Java: failing to close a file == usually no problem whatsoever
C: failing to close a file == permanently leaked handle
I'd take the garbage-collected case any day of the week, personally.
As far as the other case you mention, mutexes, goes, Java has two means of providing mutual exclusion. The "synchronized" keyword, which is almost always the way things are done, works properly in the face of exceptions, with no extra work by the user. The wait and notify methods, which are the more advanced case, need to be balanced, so you can end up with deadlocks if you fail to do a notify for some reason (such as an exception).
Well, that's what the "finally" clause is for. Yes, you need to be careful to do things the right way, but that's true of any language.
I freely admit that Java is not the be-all and end-all of languages. There may be ways of handling these situations that guarantee these problems can never occur. But you make it sound as if garbage collection is a step backwards from malloc/free, and it most certainly is not. Everywhere you can get into trouble with a garbage collected language, you can get into ten times as much trouble with a manual-free language.
You obviously don't suffer from the same problem as the poster. I'm not that bad, and I have still had a few instances of getting out of bed, walking across the room, turning off the alarm, and crawling back in bed.
And then waking up with absolutely no memory of having done so. I thought I had slept through the alarm or it hadn't gone off. I only know what really happened because I have had multiple witnesses to the event in question that swear they watched me walk across the room and turn it off.
That's a 4x5 negative which is then scanned in being compared to a straight digital capture. This is like saying that a negative made from a slide is of lower quality than a straight negative, therefore slide must be inferior to negative.
Not sure what your point is. Virtually any use of a 4x5 image nowadays will involve scanning it, so this is very much a fair comparison. How do you think an image ends up on the cover of a magazine? Essentially all image handling is digital nowadays, even if the picture started out as film.
You could do the comparison the other way, if you wanted -- compare a print of a 4x5 to a print of a digital image -- and you'd see the same results. I stand by my assertion that a 4x5 image has a resolution of less than a hundred megapixels, and that most film apologists are smoking crack.
For example, a 4x5 using Velvia color film is in the 200 megapixel range, and the 8x10 would be closer to the gigapixel category using 25 ASA black and white...
That really depends on how you define "megapixel". If you are using your film solely to capture images of black and white lines with 1000:1 contrast, which is what film resolution is measured using, then sure, film will beat any digital camera.
However, I've never met anybody that uses their camera to capture images of black and white line pairs. Most people I know use their cameras to take pictures of more interesting subjects, and the simple fact is that simplistic ways of measuring resolution relying on line pairs just don't hold up in the real world.
The only way to fairly compare film and digital in real-world use is a blind, side-by-side comparison of shots of identical scenes. Anything else is meaningless. So, surely such tests have been performed, right?
Well, the 100-megapixel Phase One PowerPhase, in every comparison I have ever heard of, beats all large-format films. Here is a page with comparisons done by several different groups, all of which concluded that the digital image is superior:
http://www.digitalpainter.com/hardware/digitalim ag ing/Phaseone/qualitytest.html
I have no idea where you get the 200 megapixel rating from, but everything I have seen says that (for real-world photography) large format film doesn't even match a 100-megapixel image, let alone more than that.
Folks, film is dead. Get over it. It just hasn't stopped kicking yet.
Kilmore says he disagrees with the Supreme Court for trying to make a new law.
Considering that laws are made by legislators, not courts, I would have a problem with the Supreme Court trying to make a new law, too. Fortunately, they generally let Congress do that.
Kilgore does indeed say that he disagrees with the Supreme Court. The specific point on which he disagrees with the Supreme Court is their ruling that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. He supports the existing anti-sodomy law, going on to state:
"The people of Virginia have a right to say that they do not want these acts performed in public and that such acts, if performed against someone's will, are criminal," said Mr. Kilgore in a written statement.
I have a PC, XBox, GameCube, PS2, GameBoy Advance, Dreamcast, N64, SNES, and a NES.
And a pair of wonderful, beautiful ladies who adore each other and, for whatever reason, me.
Of course, as soon as I step back and think to myself "DAMN, I am a lucky bastard!" I start to worry about when the fates are going to cackle wickedly and take it all away. Oh well, I'll enjoy things while I've got 'em. I know you fuckers will be laughing at me on my way back down;-).
Games that my wife and I have spent a lot of time playing together:
Diablo II SimCity The Sims various Zeldas Animal Crossing Mario Kart: Double Dash
I'm not sure what it is about Diablo II -- it's certainly not a traditional female-friendly game -- but for some reason my wife really loved it and burned serious hours playing it. Now that I think about it, my girlfriend is even less of a gamer than my wife, but for some reason she too is a huge Diablo II fan. It might have to do with the collecting & accessorizing aspect of the game.
The co-op mode in Mario Kart: DD is GREAT for spousal involvement. My wife rides on the back of the cart, helping me dodge things and using items, so she feels very involved and will happily sit and play for hours. But because I'm doing the driving, and therefore most of the success/failure rests on me, she doesn't feel extremely pressured. With my wife, at least, her main turn-off when it comes to video games is pressure: if she gets flustered while playing a game, she won't touch it again. Every single game my wife has ever gotten into has been low pressure, and generally also low-conflict.
I would say that in general Nintendo makes the best gender-neutral games. Buy a GameCube if you don't already have one.
Kinda cool technology, I guess, but speaking as someone who has programmed in C/C++ professionally for about 9 years now, I just don't see this as being useful in 99.99% of debugging cases, and the ones where it might be useful are pretty easy to solve just by tracing the stack once you know what the 'problem' input is.
I agree. I have ten years' professional experience, and I honestly can't recall a single instance in which something like this would have been useful. The really tough problems are usually more like "funny, it works on my machine...".
99% of the effort in my experience has been figuring out what causes something to fail, not finding the failure itself.
Again, not trying to belittle the effort -- this does sound neat. Just not terribly practical.
I work at a dot-com company. One you've heard of, trust me. Anyway, we survived the Internet bubble bursting, and most of us kept our jobs, but things were still tough around here for a couple of years.
After finding out that the raises one year would be much smaller than expected, a coworker of mine complained about it. I looked at him in bafflement, and told him he should be thankful to be getting a raise at all. He should be happy to have a job at all.
For that matter, I later reflected, he should be happy simply that he makes enough money to have food to eat, to provide for himself and his loved ones, and not to have to go to bed wondering where his next meal will be coming from. All of us that can say that should be thankful for it.
Yes, the job the submitter pointed to isn't spectacular pay, but it's enough to feed and clothe yourself in comfort. That's more than most people in the world can say. Try to keep a sense of perspective while you're busy complaining about things.
What happened to the super capacitors? You know, caps with such a high energy density that they could be used to replace batteries in many applications.
Nonsense.
1 Farad = 1 Amp at 1 Volt for 1 Second
As anyone who knows capacitors can tell you, a farad is a huge unit. To put things in perspective, common, everyday capacitors often have capacitances measured in picofarads (a picofarad is one-thousandth of one-billionth of a farad).
Now, how much capacitance would it take to equal a single AA battery?
A typical AA battery might be rated at 2200mAH at 1.5V. It doesn't actually keep that voltage up the entire time, but let's just pretend that it does.
2200mAH = 2.2AH = 7920As
So, a typical AA battery delivers 7,920 amp-seconds at 1.5V. An equivalent capacitor would need to have a capacitance of around 11,880 farads. That's to equal ONE AA battery. No such capacitor exists, and even if one did, it would be absurdly dangerous to handle.
The strength of a capacitor is its ability to deliver its power very, very quickly. That's why a big capacitor would be so dangerous -- imagine discharging all of the power in a AA battery in a ten-thousand of a second. The strength of a battery, on the other hand, is its ability to deliver (relatively) unbelievable amounts of power, but it can only do so over much longer periods of time.
There are lots of good games that were not terribly commercially successful. However, there are no bad games that are commercially successful.
What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?
There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.
A) I have waaaaaaaaaay too many MP3s to fit on my Xbox's hard drive.
B) I can't play my emulated games on an Xbox, at least not without modding the thing and installing Linux. At that point, I've just got an annoying and more-difficult-to-use PC. I'd rather just have a real PC at that point.
I'm building a small form factor computer to use in my entertainment center as a DVD player / MP3 player / web browser / game system (especially old emulated games).
My TV has a VGA in, and many of these PCs have digital audio out -- so why the hell not? A small PC is perfect for this sort of thing.
Sounds like you got burned. For 7 grand I could buy a Sony 70 inch high definition XBR that would beat the quality of any plasma TV out there. The reason middle income families don't buy plasmas is because plasma TVs are marketed towards people whose primary concerns are aesthetics and the ability to hang a TV on a wall.
A) I prefer plasma's image quality to any rear-projection TV I've ever seen. It's just my opinion, of course, but yes I have compared it to the Sonys, and I prefer my Panasonic plasma.
B) I didn't say that I was middle income. I actually make a shitload of money. I was merely pointing out that most people spend way more on cars than they need to, and could funnel that into a better TV if they wanted to.
I guess if you've shelled out $3k (more like $5-10k [plasma-tv-den.com]) for a freakin' television, another $500 isn't much more of a bite.
By the tone of your message, I assume that you feel $3,000 (much less $5K-$10K) for a television is a ridiculous extravagence.
Well, I have a $7,000 plasma TV. Of course, many of my friends drive nice cars -- BMWs, expensive SUVs, and the like. I don't. I drive a ten-year-old Camry with a hundred thousand miles on it. It's not flashy, and I could certainly afford a nicer one if I wanted, but I'm happy with it. And you know what? My car plus an unbelievably nice TV still cost a hell of a lot less than what my friends drive.
Personally, I feel that I got a much better deal. To me, the quality-of-life difference between a Camry and a BMW is much less than the difference between a 32" CRT and a 50" plasma. I have personally met people who think that I'm crazy for spending $7,000 on a TV, and then they turn around and spend $40,000 or more on a car. It's all about what you want out of life, I suppose. Plasma TVs are well within the reach of many middle-class folks, if they were just willing to spend a bit less on the status-symbol-on-wheels (oops, I mean "car").
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...A very nice computer for what an iPod costs. I'll never buy one. It seems like a colossal waste of money to me. $300 for what amounts to a walkman? Geez. I'll stick to my $50 CD/MP3 player. 700MB of MP3s per CD. Stick that on your pricing chart. And I can jog with it too.
And you can buy a nice house for the price of a high-end exotic sports car, too. Does that mean that Ferrari should give up, stop making cars, and go out of business?
This device is not primarily targeted at college kids working at a burger-flipping job for whom $250 is a major investment. It's targeted towards people for whom $250 is not that big of a deal. If you're not one of those people, feel free not to buy one, just like I'm not going to buy a Ferrari.
Because:
A) Like it or not, they're a major industry player.
B) They're a competitor to Microsoft. Possibly the most significant competitor.
C) We need more competition in this market.
D) MacOS is Unix-based, and Slashdot has a Unix-centric userbase.
I thought those were pretty good reasons, personally.
Finally, the sticker shock is just too much. Why would I get off my ass to go check out an iPod that'll save me $50?
You think Apple is going to complain if you spend the extra $50 to get the 15GB model? Oh yes, they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
I have a pink iPod mini on order for my wife's birthday present. She's incredibly excited about it and specifically wanted the pink one. There is a very large segment of people for whom A) $250 is not "sticker shock" territory, and B) small size and pretty colors matter.
You're not a member of that segment. Fine. What's your point? I must have missed the "every product must appeal to every person on the planet" memo.
Why not just dump MHZ as a rating altogether? Wouldn't FLOPS-based (Floating Operations Per Sec) or something similar be a better measurement? Maybe how far a simple program can compute PI in a second? We should really be looking at an operational-based measurement rather than a clock-based one.
Unfortunately, these things are very, very easy to fake. One quarter after you switched over to a PI-digit-computation metric, Intel and AMD would both have the most heavily-optimized-for-PI-computation processors that you've ever seen. They might suck for everything else, but hot damn they'd compute PI fast.
Plus, then you get into the huge gray area of "well, this processor can compute PI unbelievably fast when you use a good compiler with the right settings, but gcc with default settingsproduces lousy code for it...". What compiler do you use to compile the benchmark? Do you have to use the default settings for every option? How can you be sure that you're seeing actual differences between the processors, instead of just differences in how well the compiler optimizes for each processor? For that matter, maybe the source code itself is biased toward a particular processor -- just restructuring it so that the loop is a little tighter (and thus fits into L1 cache) might boost the performance on one processor by 5x, but make absolutely no difference on another processor.
Benchmarking is very much a black art despite the huge number of research papers published on this subject. In short, there is no simple and reliable standard for judging a system's performance today. With no good objective standards to cling to, MHz are a simple and easy number to go by, and so that's what the market does.
1. History -- Argument: Lots of languages are case sensitive, and people seem to be capable of dealing with it, so this is a non-issue. Response: The problem is, of course, that this response completely avoids making a point relevant to the argument.
/. discussion someone posted SetsLow and SetSlow, which sounds slightly more realistic, but it's still reaching. Somebody show me one where the "obvious" names are significantly better than simply choosing an alternative.
Rebuttal: If people are really good at dealing with it, then that makes a pretty strong point that this is a non-issue. Why should we waste a lot of time and effort fixing a non-issue?
2a. Readability -- Argument: Forcing people to type "if" instead of "IF", "If" or god forbid, "iF" will enhance readability. Response: I personally feel that all-lowercase individual words are a lot easier to read than leading capitals or all-uppercase, but this is only a solution for the predefined keywords of a language, and really fails to address the question of case *sensitivity* to case in programmer-defined names.
Rebuttal: You admit that you feel all-lowercase keywords are easier to read. So do I. So does almost everybody else. Let's enforce 'em.
What benefit is there to some people deciding to write "IF A=B THEN..." and other people deciding to write "if a=b then..." other than making everything difficult to read?
2b. Readability -- Argument: If I define myCleverMethod, I don't want to debug code littered with MYcleVERMetHOD. Response: Somebody inevitably posts some variation on this, and I can't imagine why they bother. What kind of idiot would bother with such screwy capitalization?
Rebuttal: It's not just MYcleVERMetHOD we're worried about. We're also worried about myclevermethod and MYCLEVERMETHOD which, at first glance, do not even look remotely related to one another but are in fact the same thing in a case-insensitive language. And people will very much decide to type it in all-lowercase or all-uppercase, because if they intended to type it in the "correct" case, they wouldn't be arguing for case-insensitivity.
3. Flexibility -- Argument: Case sensitivity allows you to use the same multi-word phrase for two unrelated things when they both happen to require the same spelling. Response: I actually had somebody use the examples CarPass and CarpAss to illustrate the flexibility of case sensitivity (on the pre-release C# mailing list at Don Box's develop.com). To date I have not seen an example of this which is even remotely defensible. Elsewhere in this
Rebuttal: Fine.
User user = new User();
is better than
User theUser = new User();
4a. Parsing -- Argument: The main reason case sensitivity exists is because uppercase and lowercase letters really are different things to a computer. Response: This mattered a lot in the old days of computing (which also yielded the terseness we see in languages like C). The machine on my desktop has a 3GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. It can compile tens of thousands of lines of code in a matter of seconds. Although it can probably be argued that non-ASCII platforms would have a harder time performing this conversion, I'd also point out that databases and other applications in those same environments perform case conversions quite easily on those same platforms. I do not consider this a valid argument.
4b. Parsing -- Response: The standard parsing argument could be extended in equally ridiculous directions. With the considerable power of modern desktop computers, we can do all sorts of things with text. Why not treat red, blue, and boldface text as separate characters, too?
Rebuttal: It takes long enough to compile, say, Linux, that I'm not out looking for ways to slow it down further.
As for the red and blue argument, last I checked we were working with plain text files. If we were working with styled text files,
I've owned three Apple laptops-- A powerbook 140, an Powerbook 1400, and an iBook 500. They've all had problems with the backlight or scan lines turning on or off. It's probably not specific to Apple, though.
You had problems with three out of three laptops. Admittedly a very small sample size, but judging by the other posts here, it seems to be a very widespread problem with Apple laptops.
Here's my experience. My wife is on her second Sony Vaio, I used to have a Thinkpad, and I know at least a dozen people at work with a company-standard-issue Compaq laptop.
Know how many backlight/scan line problems I've seen or heard of? Zero. Not one of these laptops has, to the best of my knowledge, ever had any problems more significant than a worn-out cooling fan.
Well, other than the time I set my wife's Vaio down on an unsteady surface and it fell two feet to the floor, but that was obviously my fault. And even then the damage was minor.
Again, I hate to draw conclusions from a small sample size, but this is definitely scaring me away from wanting to own an Apple laptop (which I was actually considering).
I wish advertisers would use the MiB, GiB, and TiB notations for storage space - it would make shopping for hard drives a bit more honest...
This is asinine. Why don't we just have our operating systems report numbers in base 10, like, oh, say, ALL OF HUMANITY DOES?
I'm being serious. Is there some reason you actually want your operating system to tell you that 100,000,000 bytes is "95 megabytes"? Do you value that behavior? Would you be upset if it said "100 megabytes" instead?
Please, explain the rationale behind this. "Computers work in binary" is not an acceptable answer, unless you want the computer to report the value as "1011111 megabytes". I don't give a crap how computers represent numbers -- as a human, I operate in base 10, and I want to see my numbers (including prefixes like "mega") represent base 10 numbers.
Why don't you want the same?
(Before anybody brings this up, yes, I am aware that this would make e.g. 256MB memory modules actually be 268MB memory modules. So? To the average, ordinary person, 256 is no more meaningful a number than 268, so I don't see any reason that we should favor seeing 256 over 268.)
1365x768 on a 61" display?!? I wouldn't pay for a 19" display that couldn't do better than that. At 61" the pixel pitch must be, what? 11.5mm?
And yet you probably happily paid for a television which has around one quarter that resolution.
I have a 50" plasma that I use as a TV, and if it weren't for the problem of burn-in, I would already have bought a 42" to use as a computer monitor. Until you've seen your desktop stretching across FOUR FEET, you cannot possibly understand how cool this is.
I've also used a computer hooked up to a 110" front projector. Now that was nice.
Which means you don't have predictable destruction. Which means you don't have destructors. Which means you can't use idioms like resource-allocation-is-initialization.
So in the presence of exceptions, you won't leak memory on the heap. But you will leak mutexes, file handles, etc. You need another idiom to handle those cases.
Java is probably the most widely-used garbage-collected language in existence. I think I speak for all Java programmers when I say "WTF are you talking about?"
It is true that you can't guarantee timely execution of finalizers. Because of that, Java is no different than any other language in that you should close files when you're done with them. However, if you forget to close a file here and there, it's generally no big deal because they will be closed during finalization. It only becomes a problem when you're leaking tons of file handles very quickly.
Now, this article is about C, so let's compare the two.
Java: failing to close a file == usually no problem whatsoever
C: failing to close a file == permanently leaked handle
I'd take the garbage-collected case any day of the week, personally.
As far as the other case you mention, mutexes, goes, Java has two means of providing mutual exclusion. The "synchronized" keyword, which is almost always the way things are done, works properly in the face of exceptions, with no extra work by the user. The wait and notify methods, which are the more advanced case, need to be balanced, so you can end up with deadlocks if you fail to do a notify for some reason (such as an exception).
Well, that's what the "finally" clause is for. Yes, you need to be careful to do things the right way, but that's true of any language.
I freely admit that Java is not the be-all and end-all of languages. There may be ways of handling these situations that guarantee these problems can never occur. But you make it sound as if garbage collection is a step backwards from malloc/free, and it most certainly is not. Everywhere you can get into trouble with a garbage collected language, you can get into ten times as much trouble with a manual-free language.
You obviously don't suffer from the same problem as the poster. I'm not that bad, and I have still had a few instances of getting out of bed, walking across the room, turning off the alarm, and crawling back in bed.
And then waking up with absolutely no memory of having done so. I thought I had slept through the alarm or it hadn't gone off. I only know what really happened because I have had multiple witnesses to the event in question that swear they watched me walk across the room and turn it off.
Coincidentally, that's what I'm getting for Christmas this year.
Now I just need to work on the "millionaire" part...
That's a 4x5 negative which is then scanned in being compared to a straight digital capture. This is like saying that a negative made from a slide is of lower quality than a straight negative, therefore slide must be inferior to negative.
Not sure what your point is. Virtually any use of a 4x5 image nowadays will involve scanning it, so this is very much a fair comparison. How do you think an image ends up on the cover of a magazine? Essentially all image handling is digital nowadays, even if the picture started out as film.
You could do the comparison the other way, if you wanted -- compare a print of a 4x5 to a print of a digital image -- and you'd see the same results. I stand by my assertion that a 4x5 image has a resolution of less than a hundred megapixels, and that most film apologists are smoking crack.
For example, a 4x5 using Velvia color film is in the 200 megapixel range, and the 8x10 would be closer to the gigapixel category using 25 ASA black and white...
m ag ing/Phaseone/qualitytest.html
That really depends on how you define "megapixel". If you are using your film solely to capture images of black and white lines with 1000:1 contrast, which is what film resolution is measured using, then sure, film will beat any digital camera.
However, I've never met anybody that uses their camera to capture images of black and white line pairs. Most people I know use their cameras to take pictures of more interesting subjects, and the simple fact is that simplistic ways of measuring resolution relying on line pairs just don't hold up in the real world.
The only way to fairly compare film and digital in real-world use is a blind, side-by-side comparison of shots of identical scenes. Anything else is meaningless. So, surely such tests have been performed, right?
Well, the 100-megapixel Phase One PowerPhase, in every comparison I have ever heard of, beats all large-format films. Here is a page with comparisons done by several different groups, all of which concluded that the digital image is superior:
http://www.digitalpainter.com/hardware/digitali
I have no idea where you get the 200 megapixel rating from, but everything I have seen says that (for real-world photography) large format film doesn't even match a 100-megapixel image, let alone more than that.
Folks, film is dead. Get over it. It just hasn't stopped kicking yet.
Considering that laws are made by legislators, not courts, I would have a problem with the Supreme Court trying to make a new law, too. Fortunately, they generally let Congress do that.
Kilgore does indeed say that he disagrees with the Supreme Court. The specific point on which he disagrees with the Supreme Court is their ruling that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. He supports the existing anti-sodomy law, going on to state:
Go reread the article.
Hey, I'm an openminded sort of guy.
;-).
I have a PC, XBox, GameCube, PS2, GameBoy Advance, Dreamcast, N64, SNES, and a NES.
And a pair of wonderful, beautiful ladies who adore each other and, for whatever reason, me.
Of course, as soon as I step back and think to myself "DAMN, I am a lucky bastard!" I start to worry about when the fates are going to cackle wickedly and take it all away. Oh well, I'll enjoy things while I've got 'em. I know you fuckers will be laughing at me on my way back down
Yes, they know about each other. And our games together are a lot more fun than the one you suggest :-).
Games that my wife and I have spent a lot of time playing together:
Diablo II
SimCity
The Sims
various Zeldas
Animal Crossing
Mario Kart: Double Dash
I'm not sure what it is about Diablo II -- it's certainly not a traditional female-friendly game -- but for some reason my wife really loved it and burned serious hours playing it. Now that I think about it, my girlfriend is even less of a gamer than my wife, but for some reason she too is a huge Diablo II fan. It might have to do with the collecting & accessorizing aspect of the game.
The co-op mode in Mario Kart: DD is GREAT for spousal involvement. My wife rides on the back of the cart, helping me dodge things and using items, so she feels very involved and will happily sit and play for hours. But because I'm doing the driving, and therefore most of the success/failure rests on me, she doesn't feel extremely pressured. With my wife, at least, her main turn-off when it comes to video games is pressure: if she gets flustered while playing a game, she won't touch it again. Every single game my wife has ever gotten into has been low pressure, and generally also low-conflict.
I would say that in general Nintendo makes the best gender-neutral games. Buy a GameCube if you don't already have one.
Kinda cool technology, I guess, but speaking as someone who has programmed in C/C++ professionally for about 9 years now, I just don't see this as being useful in 99.99% of debugging cases, and the ones where it might be useful are pretty easy to solve just by tracing the stack once you know what the 'problem' input is.
I agree. I have ten years' professional experience, and I honestly can't recall a single instance in which something like this would have been useful. The really tough problems are usually more like "funny, it works on my machine...".
99% of the effort in my experience has been figuring out what causes something to fail, not finding the failure itself.
Again, not trying to belittle the effort -- this does sound neat. Just not terribly practical.
I work at a dot-com company. One you've heard of, trust me. Anyway, we survived the Internet bubble bursting, and most of us kept our jobs, but things were still tough around here for a couple of years.
After finding out that the raises one year would be much smaller than expected, a coworker of mine complained about it. I looked at him in bafflement, and told him he should be thankful to be getting a raise at all. He should be happy to have a job at all.
For that matter, I later reflected, he should be happy simply that he makes enough money to have food to eat, to provide for himself and his loved ones, and not to have to go to bed wondering where his next meal will be coming from. All of us that can say that should be thankful for it.
Yes, the job the submitter pointed to isn't spectacular pay, but it's enough to feed and clothe yourself in comfort. That's more than most people in the world can say. Try to keep a sense of perspective while you're busy complaining about things.
What happened to the super capacitors? You know, caps with such a high energy density that they could be used to replace batteries in many applications.
Nonsense.
1 Farad = 1 Amp at 1 Volt for 1 Second
As anyone who knows capacitors can tell you, a farad is a huge unit. To put things in perspective, common, everyday capacitors often have capacitances measured in picofarads (a picofarad is one-thousandth of one-billionth of a farad).
Now, how much capacitance would it take to equal a single AA battery?
A typical AA battery might be rated at 2200mAH at 1.5V. It doesn't actually keep that voltage up the entire time, but let's just pretend that it does.
2200mAH = 2.2AH = 7920As
So, a typical AA battery delivers 7,920 amp-seconds at 1.5V. An equivalent capacitor would need to have a capacitance of around 11,880 farads. That's to equal ONE AA battery. No such capacitor exists, and even if one did, it would be absurdly dangerous to handle.
The strength of a capacitor is its ability to deliver its power very, very quickly. That's why a big capacitor would be so dangerous -- imagine discharging all of the power in a AA battery in a ten-thousand of a second. The strength of a battery, on the other hand, is its ability to deliver (relatively) unbelievable amounts of power, but it can only do so over much longer periods of time.
There are lots of good games that were not terribly commercially successful. However, there are no bad games that are commercially successful.
What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?
There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.
A) I have waaaaaaaaaay too many MP3s to fit on my Xbox's hard drive.
B) I can't play my emulated games on an Xbox, at least not without modding the thing and installing Linux. At that point, I've just got an annoying and more-difficult-to-use PC. I'd rather just have a real PC at that point.
I'm building a small form factor computer to use in my entertainment center as a DVD player / MP3 player / web browser / game system (especially old emulated games).
My TV has a VGA in, and many of these PCs have digital audio out -- so why the hell not? A small PC is perfect for this sort of thing.
Sounds like you got burned. For 7 grand I could buy a Sony 70 inch high definition XBR that would beat the quality of any plasma TV out there. The reason middle income families don't buy plasmas is because plasma TVs are marketed towards people whose primary concerns are aesthetics and the ability to hang a TV on a wall.
A) I prefer plasma's image quality to any rear-projection TV I've ever seen. It's just my opinion, of course, but yes I have compared it to the Sonys, and I prefer my Panasonic plasma.
B) I didn't say that I was middle income. I actually make a shitload of money. I was merely pointing out that most people spend way more on cars than they need to, and could funnel that into a better TV if they wanted to.
I guess if you've shelled out $3k (more like $5-10k [plasma-tv-den.com]) for a freakin' television, another $500 isn't much more of a bite.
By the tone of your message, I assume that you feel $3,000 (much less $5K-$10K) for a television is a ridiculous extravagence.
Well, I have a $7,000 plasma TV. Of course, many of my friends drive nice cars -- BMWs, expensive SUVs, and the like. I don't. I drive a ten-year-old Camry with a hundred thousand miles on it. It's not flashy, and I could certainly afford a nicer one if I wanted, but I'm happy with it. And you know what? My car plus an unbelievably nice TV still cost a hell of a lot less than what my friends drive.
Personally, I feel that I got a much better deal. To me, the quality-of-life difference between a Camry and a BMW is much less than the difference between a 32" CRT and a 50" plasma. I have personally met people who think that I'm crazy for spending $7,000 on a TV, and then they turn around and spend $40,000 or more on a car. It's all about what you want out of life, I suppose. Plasma TVs are well within the reach of many middle-class folks, if they were just willing to spend a bit less on the status-symbol-on-wheels (oops, I mean "car").
Just my $0.02.