> So for 8% of the film, the screen must go blank and play tunes only?
Well, the scientist is a huge Stanley Kubrick fan and used 2001 for his research exclusively. And since he also has a monkey fetish, the first part delivered for him on the action and sex accounts as well.
>...and using the simple interop with native code...
Aha, there's the rub. If you assume a pure.NET world, then performance is certainly adequate. But most of the world and much of the component libraries and legacy code currently in use are still mainly COM. Which means that for quite some time yet we will be living with Mr. interop.dll lurking around, along with the very considerable drop in performance that entails. I assume Microsoft is providing a native.NET version of DirectX, because otherwise you would be pining for the blazing performance of IDispatch in the good old days.
That being said, I can't say I will miss COM too much. I think.NET offers many more benefits than downsides, but let's just kill legacy COM code ASAP if we're really going all out.NET.
> I was trying to use the wheel by instinct on mice that were > wheel-less. My solution was to disable support for scrolling
I guess the first thing you do after buying a new car is to disable ABS, power steering and braking, and the A/C. Because after all, you don't want to get used to features that might not be available in another car that you might drive someday. Sheesh...
> So, get that Dremel out and cut detents between the existing ones...
Uh, NO! The scroll wheel turns a rotary encoder, either optical or mechanical, which, depending on design, can be almost impossible to modify to add more transitions per revolution. The physical detents that click the wheel into place have nothing to do with the actual electrical state transitions. Adding more detents will simply make your wheel click two or more times for each logical state transition.
> you would see why the DTIVO (series 1's) still sell > for more then RETAIL on EBAY cause they are GOLD
That's funny, because I can pick one up for $199 at several places. The price of gold must be dropping. Or eBay shoppers must be getting even more clueless.
The Tivo zealots will be after you for slamming Tivo. You're supposed to ooh and aah over the features and NEVER question their motivation and pricing. Remember, they used Linux and can do no wrong!
I think so. These units do everything TiVo does, plus DVD recording. Sony just announced one, though only for Japan so far, and the price is still a bit high. Regarding thumbs up/down, bah, I've had my TiVo for almost three years and I still find the unit highly useful without ever using that feature. Let's face it, if you like Wings or whatever, it's not like TiVo is going to surprise you with that OTHER Wings-like show that you never knew about. I know exactly which shows I like, and what other shows like them there are out there, and I have season passes for all of them.
> because there's no real demand for it in the US market
That's what I said. And there's no demand because there's no awareness. Most people that I make aware of SVCD burning and how easy it is to make CDs of your home movies, TV shows etc, that can be played back in many (most?) DVD players get very excited about it.
> I won't even go into the low end stuff like Samsung
Your insight is astounding. Those "low end" brands were the pioneers of (S)VCD, offering support way before the namebrand vendors were even aware of the market. Even today most of the high-end gear that's older than a few months doesn't support it.
> Then how come all major European carriers plan to migrate to GSM-Over-CDMA?
As part of the current standard, or as part of UMTS?
> But the rural US is no place for GSM
It's no place for any sort of cell phones. Most rural areas in TN have attrocious coverage. Besides, the technical differences between CDMA and GSM don't in practice make one more suitable than the other for the US or Europe. If anything, one could argue that the higher population densities in most European cities would require the higher bandwidth of CDMA.
> In that same respect, Microsoft is king and nothing will change that for a long time
And your point is? Frankly, without Microsoft and Windows the commercial software market would be a fraction of what it is today. Remember the 80s when there were tons of hardware platforms and little software available for each? Or look at the KDE/Gnome mess, or even at the incompatible progressive versions of KDE where each new version required all apps to be recompiled. Microsoft might be despicable for many reasons, but they've done a great job of maintaining application compatibility over several OS generations and pretty radical technical changes.
Besides, a better analogy would be Token Ring vs. Ethernet, or VHS vs. Beta, because in both cases the arguably inferior technology won and in the end it didn't make any difference at all--the benefits of a widespread standard far outweight the disadvantages of the particular technological shortcomings.
The thing is, Qualcomm's CDMA won't have a chance because its market penetration is currently much lower. GSM will be incrementally upgraded and improved and will eventually subsume the temporary advantages that CDMA has at the moment. In fact, while the UMTS deployment so far has been a total mess and horribly expensive, it is finally getting over its teething problems and starting to become available.
> Some Asian carriers especially South Korea seem to have gone for CDMA in a big way.
Qualcomm CDMA, or some sort of code division scheme in general? I would be surprised if they deployed systems that were technically and in terms of accounting compatible with the US--i.e. take your Sprint phone to Korea and use it there.
I'm not sure if you've been outside the US to get a feeling for the level of penetration of GSM. In most parts of the world, there's GSM and nothing else. While they're now trying imode in Europe, I doubt they'll be very successful. Building out a continent-covering network is much more difficult than coming out with new tech. And once it becomes second nature for you to travel to London, pull out your German cell phone and for the thing to just work, it's hard to go back to traveling with a coverage map in your pocket.
> the emerging 3G and 4G standards look a lot like a souped-up version of CDMA.
Well yes, that's because code division is currently the most efficient scheme known. It's not like they were lacking that insight back in the 80s, you simply didn't have cheap and powerful enough silicon to do the code division signal processing back then. As GSM evolves, it assimilates new technologies along the way. It's like saying that a space elevator is the most efficient way of getting to space, why are we bothering with rockets. Until you can produce nanotube material in commercial quantities, that's a purely theoretical consideration.
> I'd like to be able to use the phone I have now and just get subscription or roaming
Keep hoping, because CDMA networks are not set up for GMS-style portable accounts, and they don't use SIM cards. Yes, CDMA2000 has some more features (though it's NOT broadband, even though they like calling it 3G it's really only 2.5G like GPRS), but it bloody well should, considering how much newer it is. You can do a lot more signal processing in cheap silicon nowadays than back when GSM was designed in the 80s, and CDMA does require a lot more horsepower. If GSM were being designed today, it would most likely end up very similar to CDMA. What is fascinating is how well GSM has really kept up. They were years ahead of CDMA with GPRS and packet-based billing.
The most important thing though is that GSM has become a global standard, a truly world-wide cell phone system. Your argument reminds me of the Token Ring vs. Ethernet wars, which in many respects are very similar to the CDMA vs. GSM "war" (it's no war really, since Qualcomm's CDMA hasn't got a prayer outside the US). Token Ring might have been superior at the time, but it was Ethernet that everyone was buying. A network's or cell phone's usefulness is directly proportional to the number of machines or people it connects you to. In that respect GSM is king and nothing will change that for a long time.
> why the hell shouldn't American companies make some money
Uh, because American companies ARE making money already, you knob! You still don't see how things work, do you? The US is not one single big pocket. It consists of one very large pocket called the government, and many smaller pockets called companies. The objective of the game is to shovel as much money as possible from the parge pocket into as few as possible of the small pockets. Let's call some of the small pockets Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, GE, maybe even Halliburton. As you can see, you really don't care how empty the large pocket gets, because after four years (or sometimes eight), that's someone else's problem. Just last night I talked to one of my friends at Raytheon who used to work on the Tomahawk, and he says the hundreds of units they're shooting in Iraq at the moment are depleting the inventory of previous generation units quite nicely. At $1.4M a unit, they're quite the gold mine. So if the war costs $100B, who cares, you just tack it onto the deficit. These guys are making money no matter who ends up footing the bill--provided there IS a war.
When it comes to rebuilding, the US tend to be big on words and small on deeds. See Afghanistan, see Gulf War I. Methinks for the moment there is a lot of posturing going on about what all we'll be doing in Iraq since "we'll be paying anyway", but eventually, after suitable redirection of the public attention to other things ("look, a shiny object!"), the US is going to work out things with the Europeans by "allowing" them to contribute to rebuilding to get "friendly" with them again, and the Europeans are going to oblige to get on the good side of the US again. Then the US will be enjoying the great PR of rebuilding Iraq, while someone else is footing the bill. Given the state of the budget, I really don't see us pouring billions into Iraq.
While you have a point, you also have to realize that Germany is damned if they do, and damned if they don't. If they hadn't introduced any of these special restrictions dealing with the Nazi past, they would have been accused of not really having changed. But they did pass special legislation, so now they're accused of not really being democratic. The thing is that the importance of these restrictions diminishes with time, and no doubt there will come a day when they will be lifted entirely.
Being a German that has lived for 11 years in the US, I personally feel more concerned about the radical elements in the US society than those in the German society. German faschism is a well-known element that has been experienced first-hand, and while it probably never will vanish entirely (in any society, it seems), it can be controlled quite effectively. The US OTOH have had no similarly catastrophic experience with radicalism, so the tendency is to disregard the danger that it poses as insignificant within this society. That's why you're much more likely to read articles about the resurging Neo-Nazi movement in Germany than about the loss of civil liberties in this country. All things being equal, I'm a lot more concerned about the mixing of political and religious conservativism that is gripping this country than about Germany rearming and conquering Europe again. Left unchecked, people like Ashcroft would like nothing more than to give us a society in which you can be arrested for doing your lover doggie-style or for not praying before your meal.
> on the other hand it actually promotes the game itself
The restricted list is not meant to kill sales of the games, just to make them unavailable to minors. So what if minors can get them anyway through other sources? Does that mean that we should also stop restricting sales of cigarettes and alcohol to minors, because they can get them anyway if they only want to? A law is only the first step towards shaping reality, it doesn't in itself guarantee the desired outcome.
It always kills me when people use "liberal" as a dirty word. It's derived from the word "free" and freedom is something your kind likes to blare about stridently given any occasion. By contrast, conservative means to "keep the same" and implies a fear of change. Personally, I like the sound of the former much more than the latter.
> Just because you have the freedom of speech doesn't give > you the right to have a monopoly on stupidity...
> our Canadian neighbors/cousins aren't helping us out any.
Well, they might not be helping YOU and all the other attachments of W's derriere, but they're certainly helping the rest of those Americans that stay as far as possible from said derriere.
No, but we need their money. They paid most of the costs of the first war, and I seriously doubt W has allocated the necessary budget resources for the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq. He's having a hard enough time conjuring up his tax cuts. That's really the only reason he played along with the UN so far, hoping to defray the costs if everyone gave a thumbs up.
Given what's at stake, both in terms of international credibility and cost justification back home, and given the recent doctoring of facts in front of the UN by both the UK and the US, it sadly wouldn't be such a difficult thing to believe anymore.
> I don't think that anyone is pissed enough to go to war.
Well, we're working on rectifying that.
> Socialist and communist politics are morally bankrupt.
Someone forgot to tell Jesus that his ideas could be considered socialist. Then again, American fundamentalist Christianity is hard a work crafting a market-friendly Jesus.
> Right, they aren't prisoners of war. > Frankly, they're lucky they weren't just lined up and shot.
Well, the second statement sums it up nicely. Let me understand this correctly: do the US grant human rights to their population because that is a reflection of their deeply held beliefs, or do they do so only because they're forced to by their constitution and various other legal constructs? You'd hope that is was the former, but lately it seems the US are looking for any excuse to exclude certain human beings from their treatment as such. That seems to be a very disturbing departure from the intent of the founding fathers.
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> So for 8% of the film, the screen must go blank and play tunes only?
Well, the scientist is a huge Stanley Kubrick fan and used 2001 for his research exclusively. And since he also has a monkey fetish, the first part delivered for him on the action and sex accounts as well.
> ...and using the simple interop with native code...
.NET world, then performance is certainly adequate. But most of the world and much of the component libraries and legacy code currently in use are still mainly COM. Which means that for quite some time yet we will be living with Mr. interop.dll lurking around, along with the very considerable drop in performance that entails. I assume Microsoft is providing a native .NET version of DirectX, because otherwise you would be pining for the blazing performance of IDispatch in the good old days.
.NET offers many more benefits than downsides, but let's just kill legacy COM code ASAP if we're really going all out .NET.
Aha, there's the rub. If you assume a pure
That being said, I can't say I will miss COM too much. I think
Googling returns as one of the first hits http://www.palmpilotupgrade.com/prices.html.
> I was trying to use the wheel by instinct on mice that were
> wheel-less. My solution was to disable support for scrolling
I guess the first thing you do after buying a new car is to disable ABS, power steering and braking, and the A/C. Because after all, you don't want to get used to features that might not be available in another car that you might drive someday. Sheesh...
> So, get that Dremel out and cut detents between the existing ones...
Uh, NO! The scroll wheel turns a rotary encoder, either optical or mechanical, which, depending on design, can be almost impossible to modify to add more transitions per revolution. The physical detents that click the wheel into place have nothing to do with the actual electrical state transitions. Adding more detents will simply make your wheel click two or more times for each logical state transition.
> you would see why the DTIVO (series 1's) still sell
> for more then RETAIL on EBAY cause they are GOLD
That's funny, because I can pick one up for $199 at several places. The price of gold must be dropping. Or eBay shoppers must be getting even more clueless.
The Tivo zealots will be after you for slamming Tivo. You're supposed to ooh and aah over the features and NEVER question their motivation and pricing. Remember, they used Linux and can do no wrong!
> I don't think so.
I think so. These units do everything TiVo does, plus DVD recording. Sony just announced one, though only for Japan so far, and the price is still a bit high. Regarding thumbs up/down, bah, I've had my TiVo for almost three years and I still find the unit highly useful without ever using that feature. Let's face it, if you like Wings or whatever, it's not like TiVo is going to surprise you with that OTHER Wings-like show that you never knew about. I know exactly which shows I like, and what other shows like them there are out there, and I have season passes for all of them.
> because there's no real demand for it in the US market
That's what I said. And there's no demand because there's no awareness. Most people that I make aware of SVCD burning and how easy it is to make CDs of your home movies, TV shows etc, that can be played back in many (most?) DVD players get very excited about it.
> I won't even go into the low end stuff like Samsung
Your insight is astounding. Those "low end" brands were the pioneers of (S)VCD, offering support way before the namebrand vendors were even aware of the market. Even today most of the high-end gear that's older than a few months doesn't support it.
> because Kiss makes really crappy products anyway
You must be thinking of that other Target brand, KOSS.
> Then how come all major European carriers plan to migrate to GSM-Over-CDMA?
As part of the current standard, or as part of UMTS?
> But the rural US is no place for GSM
It's no place for any sort of cell phones. Most rural areas in TN have attrocious coverage. Besides, the technical differences between CDMA and GSM don't in practice make one more suitable than the other for the US or Europe. If anything, one could argue that the higher population densities in most European cities would require the higher bandwidth of CDMA.
> In that same respect, Microsoft is king and nothing will change that for a long time
And your point is? Frankly, without Microsoft and Windows the commercial software market would be a fraction of what it is today. Remember the 80s when there were tons of hardware platforms and little software available for each? Or look at the KDE/Gnome mess, or even at the incompatible progressive versions of KDE where each new version required all apps to be recompiled. Microsoft might be despicable for many reasons, but they've done a great job of maintaining application compatibility over several OS generations and pretty radical technical changes.
Besides, a better analogy would be Token Ring vs. Ethernet, or VHS vs. Beta, because in both cases the arguably inferior technology won and in the end it didn't make any difference at all--the benefits of a widespread standard far outweight the disadvantages of the particular technological shortcomings.
The thing is, Qualcomm's CDMA won't have a chance because its market penetration is currently much lower. GSM will be incrementally upgraded and improved and will eventually subsume the temporary advantages that CDMA has at the moment. In fact, while the UMTS deployment so far has been a total mess and horribly expensive, it is finally getting over its teething problems and starting to become available.
> Some Asian carriers especially South Korea seem to have gone for CDMA in a big way.
Qualcomm CDMA, or some sort of code division scheme in general? I would be surprised if they deployed systems that were technically and in terms of accounting compatible with the US--i.e. take your Sprint phone to Korea and use it there.
I'm not sure if you've been outside the US to get a feeling for the level of penetration of GSM. In most parts of the world, there's GSM and nothing else. While they're now trying imode in Europe, I doubt they'll be very successful. Building out a continent-covering network is much more difficult than coming out with new tech. And once it becomes second nature for you to travel to London, pull out your German cell phone and for the thing to just work, it's hard to go back to traveling with a coverage map in your pocket.
> the emerging 3G and 4G standards look a lot like a souped-up version of CDMA.
Well yes, that's because code division is currently the most efficient scheme known. It's not like they were lacking that insight back in the 80s, you simply didn't have cheap and powerful enough silicon to do the code division signal processing back then. As GSM evolves, it assimilates new technologies along the way. It's like saying that a space elevator is the most efficient way of getting to space, why are we bothering with rockets. Until you can produce nanotube material in commercial quantities, that's a purely theoretical consideration.
> I'd like to be able to use the phone I have now and just get subscription or roaming
Keep hoping, because CDMA networks are not set up for GMS-style portable accounts, and they don't use SIM cards. Yes, CDMA2000 has some more features (though it's NOT broadband, even though they like calling it 3G it's really only 2.5G like GPRS), but it bloody well should, considering how much newer it is. You can do a lot more signal processing in cheap silicon nowadays than back when GSM was designed in the 80s, and CDMA does require a lot more horsepower. If GSM were being designed today, it would most likely end up very similar to CDMA. What is fascinating is how well GSM has really kept up. They were years ahead of CDMA with GPRS and packet-based billing.
The most important thing though is that GSM has become a global standard, a truly world-wide cell phone system. Your argument reminds me of the Token Ring vs. Ethernet wars, which in many respects are very similar to the CDMA vs. GSM "war" (it's no war really, since Qualcomm's CDMA hasn't got a prayer outside the US). Token Ring might have been superior at the time, but it was Ethernet that everyone was buying. A network's or cell phone's usefulness is directly proportional to the number of machines or people it connects you to. In that respect GSM is king and nothing will change that for a long time.
> why the hell shouldn't American companies make some money
Uh, because American companies ARE making money already, you knob! You still don't see how things work, do you? The US is not one single big pocket. It consists of one very large pocket called the government, and many smaller pockets called companies. The objective of the game is to shovel as much money as possible from the parge pocket into as few as possible of the small pockets. Let's call some of the small pockets Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, GE, maybe even Halliburton. As you can see, you really don't care how empty the large pocket gets, because after four years (or sometimes eight), that's someone else's problem. Just last night I talked to one of my friends at Raytheon who used to work on the Tomahawk, and he says the hundreds of units they're shooting in Iraq at the moment are depleting the inventory of previous generation units quite nicely. At $1.4M a unit, they're quite the gold mine. So if the war costs $100B, who cares, you just tack it onto the deficit. These guys are making money no matter who ends up footing the bill--provided there IS a war.
When it comes to rebuilding, the US tend to be big on words and small on deeds. See Afghanistan, see Gulf War I. Methinks for the moment there is a lot of posturing going on about what all we'll be doing in Iraq since "we'll be paying anyway", but eventually, after suitable redirection of the public attention to other things ("look, a shiny object!"), the US is going to work out things with the Europeans by "allowing" them to contribute to rebuilding to get "friendly" with them again, and the Europeans are going to oblige to get on the good side of the US again. Then the US will be enjoying the great PR of rebuilding Iraq, while someone else is footing the bill. Given the state of the budget, I really don't see us pouring billions into Iraq.
While you have a point, you also have to realize that Germany is damned if they do, and damned if they don't. If they hadn't introduced any of these special restrictions dealing with the Nazi past, they would have been accused of not really having changed. But they did pass special legislation, so now they're accused of not really being democratic. The thing is that the importance of these restrictions diminishes with time, and no doubt there will come a day when they will be lifted entirely.
Being a German that has lived for 11 years in the US, I personally feel more concerned about the radical elements in the US society than those in the German society. German faschism is a well-known element that has been experienced first-hand, and while it probably never will vanish entirely (in any society, it seems), it can be controlled quite effectively. The US OTOH have had no similarly catastrophic experience with radicalism, so the tendency is to disregard the danger that it poses as insignificant within this society. That's why you're much more likely to read articles about the resurging Neo-Nazi movement in Germany than about the loss of civil liberties in this country. All things being equal, I'm a lot more concerned about the mixing of political and religious conservativism that is gripping this country than about Germany rearming and conquering Europe again. Left unchecked, people like Ashcroft would like nothing more than to give us a society in which you can be arrested for doing your lover doggie-style or for not praying before your meal.
> on the other hand it actually promotes the game itself
The restricted list is not meant to kill sales of the games, just to make them unavailable to minors. So what if minors can get them anyway through other sources? Does that mean that we should also stop restricting sales of cigarettes and alcohol to minors, because they can get them anyway if they only want to? A law is only the first step towards shaping reality, it doesn't in itself guarantee the desired outcome.
> Ah, knee-jerk *liberalism* at its best
It always kills me when people use "liberal" as a dirty word. It's derived from the word "free" and freedom is something your kind likes to blare about stridently given any occasion. By contrast, conservative means to "keep the same" and implies a fear of change. Personally, I like the sound of the former much more than the latter.
> Just because you have the freedom of speech doesn't give
> you the right to have a monopoly on stupidity...
As you're so amply proving. Touche.
> our Canadian neighbors/cousins aren't helping us out any.
Well, they might not be helping YOU and all the other attachments of W's derriere, but they're certainly helping the rest of those Americans that stay as far as possible from said derriere.
> we don't need those countries' military support
No, but we need their money. They paid most of the costs of the first war, and I seriously doubt W has allocated the necessary budget resources for the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq. He's having a hard enough time conjuring up his tax cuts. That's really the only reason he played along with the UN so far, hoping to defray the costs if everyone gave a thumbs up.
> the U.S. will report finding W.O.M.D. in Iraq
Given what's at stake, both in terms of international credibility and cost justification back home, and given the recent doctoring of facts in front of the UN by both the UK and the US, it sadly wouldn't be such a difficult thing to believe anymore.
> I don't think that anyone is pissed enough to go to war.
Well, we're working on rectifying that.
> Socialist and communist politics are morally bankrupt.
Someone forgot to tell Jesus that his ideas could be considered socialist. Then again, American fundamentalist Christianity is hard a work crafting a market-friendly Jesus.
> No, we grant rights/powers to the government - not the other way around.
Nice theory.
> Right, they aren't prisoners of war.
> Frankly, they're lucky they weren't just lined up and shot.
Well, the second statement sums it up nicely. Let me understand this correctly: do the US grant human rights to their population because that is a reflection of their deeply held beliefs, or do they do so only because they're forced to by their constitution and various other legal constructs? You'd hope that is was the former, but lately it seems the US are looking for any excuse to exclude certain human beings from their treatment as such. That seems to be a very disturbing departure from the intent of the founding fathers.