I put lossless content on my iPod sometimes. The main problem is battery life.
Yeah, lossless content can be compressed, but it's not compressed as well as it would be with lossy compression. So, on my iPod, the hard drive spends a lot more time working when I listen to lossless content. The result is a significantly lowered battery life. Go ahead and test this yourself if you have an iPod, or other drive-based MP3 player.
It's not as bad as it is with completely uncompressed content, but it's a good deal worse than it is with AAC and MP3 content.
IMO, lossless is the right choice for media centers and other applications that are able to draw power externally, and lossy is the right choice for battery-powered playback.
I bought precisely two decks of cards, so that if nobody I knew bought a deck, I'd still be able to play. That's it -- I don't anticipate buying any more.
If you don't want to play the card game, don't buy any cards. If you buy them in order to get the in-game rewards, you are going to be disappointed. Period. Don't do that. Buy them to play the card game, not for any other reason.
Moving around in circles to gather energy, what a neat idea! Um, where do we get the energy to run around in circles?
There are potential answers, I'm just not really sure they're a good idea.
Imagine if the answer is: siphoning off the energy stored in the Earth's magnetic field. As you keep doing this the field gets weaker, until the planet has been degaussed, the magnetic field drops, compasses stop working, the Van Allen radiation belt kisses the surface of the world, and we're all attacked by radioactive mutants.
Or: siphoning off the rotational energy of Earth. So, every day gets a little bit longer, until eventually the world is tidally locked. One side has the barren, scalding desert of Neo-Atlantis, where lead pools like water. The other has the Cryo-Morlocks of the Hawaiian Ice Empire.
Yeast is a natural source of bioavailable B12, and it isn't a meat product.
If you are a vegetarian, it's a good idea to develop a taste for marmite or vegemite. They're purely vegan products and they're rich sources of B12 vitamins.
Note: I'm not a vegetarian. I just studied biochemistry a lot. I also happen to like vegemite, despite being American.
The main think I want is a tournament ladder, for parties.
I mean, we've got two controllers tops, right? What if six people want to play against each other?
Yeah, people can mill about and yell out "I have winsies" and stuff, but IMHO it would be nice if the game could say "okay, the next match will be Kevin against Milicent", and keep track of scores and so forth, and end up telling you who won.
Red Hat purchased another opensource project/product a while ago called CCVS( Credit Card Verification System ) and converted it to their proprietary license before later killing the product couple years later.
Heh, that's not exactly how it went.
The original product implemented communications protocols that were owned by financial institutions.
These protocols were under heavy NDA. As a result, there was never a release of CCVS under any open soruce license. Red Hat wanted to open up the whole thing, but that would have been a violation of our contracts with those financial institutions.
In addition, there was a rigorous certificaiton process required for any software that did this stuff -- if anyone did modify the software we distributed, it would have been in violation of the finanical institutions rules to actually use it without going through a rigorous and time-consuming certification process for basically every single change to a line of code.
How do I know? Basically, I'm the guy who wrote it.
(There was more than one of us, but I designed the whole thing, and wrote the infrastructure parts, all of the telecom modules, and some of the protocol modules and language adapters. Other people wrote some protocol modules that plugged into my code, some of our language adapters, and one guy wrote our database layer.)
Some CCVS trivia:
I ported it to PalmOS over a three day weekend once, so we'd be able to actually show it while walking around at trade shows.
On the floor of a trade show (ALS '98?), at our booth, I ported it to the Corel Netwinder in about 15 minutes. (Yes, that was trickier than typing "make" -- if I can ever open up the source code, I can show you why.)
Our first customer ever, and I think the only one to use the original "1.0" release of the software, was LinuxMall. Remember them? If you ordered stuff from them over the web in the mid-to-late 90s, odds are your credit card number went through my code.
It wasn't strictly a Linux product. We had it running on SunOS, SCO, AIX, DigitalUnix, you name it. Internally, we even had it running on NeXTstep, and on Apple's "prelude to rhapsody", and on beta versions of MacOS X. If Red Hat had taken slightly longer to cancel it, we might have owned the (tiny) MacOS point-of-sale market. But it never ran on Windows.
We made our APIs available for: C, TCL, Perl, PHP, Python, and Java. Yes, we were commercially supporting financial transaction processing APIs for all of those languages back in the 90s.
(You'll have to pardon me for going on like that. I'm kinda proud of what our little company managed to accomplish.)
Which reminds me: anyone from Red Hat (or with contacts at Red Hat) reading this? I'd love to get that source code back!
I believe I know how to make it open source today, and I'd like to take a stab at it -- and at porting it directly to today's 2.5G and 3G cell phones.
But, legally, Red Hat owns that source code, and I do not have the legal right to try to open it up without their say-so. I have been able to get responses from the folks at Main Street Softworks, but they don't have the CCVS source code or rights to it either.
Not paranoid enough, by my standards. I don't think they mentioned one single person using any tools other than web tools. The one who looked stuff up via Yahoo was a start, but just a start.
Whenever I have the least suspicion of any web site, I start probing DNS and whois. I try to make sure information I get via non-compuer channels matches what the computer tells me, and so forth.
I wonder if I'd fall for any of the sites they used. I like to think I wouldn't, but the moment I'm sure I wouldn't, I'm pretty sure that'd put me into a state of mind that'd ensure that I would.
Nobody on the internet should ever feel safe.
(Just like real life! Why, yes, I did grow up in NYC, why do you ask?)
New iBook's, MacBooks's, Mac Mini's or iMacs will be underwhelming as a 30th Anniversary release as they will only be configuration tweaks, not all out redesigns.
I'm not sure you're right about this.
Either the "MacBook Consumer" (whatever the new x86 iBook will be called) or the "MacBook Pro 12 inch" could be a big deal. A very high performance ultralight notebook that could multiboot Linux and Windows at need... the possibility of this is the only reason I don't have a MacBook Pro right now. If I could get almost as much processing power in something smaller and lighter, I'd be all over it. (I have co-workers who think I'm crazy, and who are waiting with equal eagerness with regard to a 17" MacBook Pro. The difference is that I as a person don't multitask, and do compute everywhere.)
I'll have a new Apple laptop with an x86 CPU by the end of April. By Monday I should know whether it'll be 15" or 12", and I hope it'll be 12".
Actually, I want Solaris/x86 in there too if possible. We use Solaris on SPARCs at work. Being able to bring it up on my laptop would make some sorts of development easier while on the road. Gimmie quad-boot OSX/XP/Linux/Solaris!
The term "FLA" should not be used because it is not itself a "FLA" -- "FLA" is merely a "TLA". The term you're looking for is "ETLA", or "extended three letter acronym".
World of Warcraft is far too involved, compared to the game of golf. In golf, you can sit back, take the game at your pace, your parties pace.
Ever been on a Molten Core raid? Often, people spend half the time AFK, and when they're not, half of them can get away with just hitting a few keys over and over. (This is not true of the front-line melee types, and for a few boss fights it's not true of some other classes either -- eg. hunters vs. Magmadar.)
And that's a high-end raid.
Exploring the countryside, hunting relatively weak beasts, these things just don't require much attention and are not that fast-paced. Now, an on-target 5-man instance run is another matter, but presumably if you were connecting with someone in order to chat, you'd do something like... explore the Barrens.
Having mono alone doesn't mean much, just like having a JVM alone doesn't mean much for java. This is exactly what I meant by "in theory". I don't think you'd find many enterprise.Net developers with practical experience who'd consider it a realistic option, for precisely the same sorts of reasons that most Java developers can't consider things like Kaffe a realistic option.
Also, I was speaking in the abstract as well -- I do not use Linux, so what Red Hat and SUSE do is not of much use to me. I also don't use Windows.
By all accounts, C# is a good language. The worst things anyone has ever said about it are (1) that giving you the "easy out" of unsafe code is going to encourage bad coding practices; and (2) that it's derivative of Java.
First, I want to say that I agree that from what I've seen, C# appears to be a good language. But I think you're being unfair when you say those are the worst things anyone has ever said about it.
For me, the worst feature of C# is that it's so tied to Microsoft platforms. Yes, you can use mono in theory. Yes, there are appservers that let you get a CLR running on Linux boxes. Realistically, those are closer to edge cases than to common reality.
How many mobile phones ship with JVMs? How many ship with.Net CLRs? How many PDAs can get JVMs? How many PDAs can get.Net CLRs? For Windows, how many competing industrial strength C# app servers are there? Now, how about for Linux? For Solaris? For HP-UX?
Yes, you can use mono in theory, but you've got to realize that this is not the same sort of thing as choosing between Sun's, IBM's, and BEA's Java app servers. In reality, C# is tied to Microsoft platforms to an extremely high degree when contrasted with other languages. For me, this is the worst thing about it by far. It's a pretty bad thing!
But once again, if Java disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, I would probably become a C# developer. Though I will give Ruby on Rails a look. (Python is right out -- I am unwilling to consider it.)
I'm dreaming I know, but here's what I'd want in it:
1) PAM module to authenticate against GMail's account database.
2) The backing store for GMail is made available via WebDAV, much like Apple does with DotMac.
3a) When you log by booting a Goobuntu Live CD, your WebDAV folder is mounted as your home directory.
3b) When you log on to a system that's installed on a hard drive, it syncs it with a local disk image instead. When you log out, the synced disk image is encrypted immediately, and deleted after enough time without use.
4) I want a browser interface for some of the stuff in there, for when I can't get to a Goobuntu box. Much of this is already covered (bookmarks, mail), but I'd like more (contact list, documents).
Then, I could have a desktop machine at home, a laptop, and a Live CD. I could log in to any of them and have the same environment, with all my content ultimately stored on (and indexed by, sure) Google's servers. A buddy could come over and just use it. I could go to a buddy's house and just use his system. And so on. And if I'm at a kiosk at a conference, I can still just bring up a web interface and get some things done.
(b) Sits down with end users (secretaries, etc.) for a while, every day, staying out of their way but watching them work, and asking the occasional question;
I think this is the single most important thing a software designer can do, and almost nobody does it.
I'm not saying that Python is the ultimate language, but I think everyone has to agree that it's a better choice than Java for programming courses in universities.
Nope. I won't agree to that, for one simple reason -- whitespace has meaning in Python.
A university cannot make a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students. Python does so.
For programming courses in universities, maybe Ruby is a better choice than Java. Maybe Perl even is. But Python is not, because of this one simple feature that completely rules the language out, in my book, regardless of how good the language is otherwise.
The Blu-Ray spec requires a fully functional Java interpreter to be embedded in every media player. You know the scripting language that DVDs use to control menus and stuff like that? On a Blu-Ray system, this is a full Java implementation with access to a TCP stack and everything.
(I saw some sessions about this at JavaOne this year.)
How could Microsoft get behind something like that?
I have been led to believe that their client does not support file transfer at this time.
I don't use their client. I use iChat.
Using iChat, logging into their jabber network, I can't transfer files to people using Google's client. But I can transfer them to people using Adium. I've done it.
Their server supports file transfer with no problem, they just have to add it to their client. In the meantime, just use another client. (I'd gladly give up voice/video to get file transfer -- I use IM file transfer to get my job done, while for me voice/video is just a fun toy.)
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I put lossless content on my iPod sometimes. The main problem is battery life.
Yeah, lossless content can be compressed, but it's not compressed as well as it would be with lossy compression. So, on my iPod, the hard drive spends a lot more time working when I listen to lossless content. The result is a significantly lowered battery life. Go ahead and test this yourself if you have an iPod, or other drive-based MP3 player.
It's not as bad as it is with completely uncompressed content, but it's a good deal worse than it is with AAC and MP3 content.
IMO, lossless is the right choice for media centers and other applications that are able to draw power externally, and lossy is the right choice for battery-powered playback.
"Build a man a fire, and you'll keep him warm for one night. Set a man on fire, and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life!"
I bought precisely two decks of cards, so that if nobody I knew bought a deck, I'd still be able to play. That's it -- I don't anticipate buying any more.
If you don't want to play the card game, don't buy any cards. If you buy them in order to get the in-game rewards, you are going to be disappointed. Period. Don't do that. Buy them to play the card game, not for any other reason.
Imagine if the answer is: siphoning off the energy stored in the Earth's magnetic field. As you keep doing this the field gets weaker, until the planet has been degaussed, the magnetic field drops, compasses stop working, the Van Allen radiation belt kisses the surface of the world, and we're all attacked by radioactive mutants.
Or: siphoning off the rotational energy of Earth. So, every day gets a little bit longer, until eventually the world is tidally locked. One side has the barren, scalding desert of Neo-Atlantis, where lead pools like water. The other has the Cryo-Morlocks of the Hawaiian Ice Empire.
Yeast is a natural source of bioavailable B12, and it isn't a meat product.
If you are a vegetarian, it's a good idea to develop a taste for marmite or vegemite. They're purely vegan products and they're rich sources of B12 vitamins.
Note: I'm not a vegetarian. I just studied biochemistry a lot. I also happen to like vegemite, despite being American.
I forgot to mention the other thing I want.
I want to be able to plug in this alongside of this, using both in the same game.
And it'd be real nice if you could also use this, and set it up as a bank of effects pedals, with one of 'em kicking off "rock out" mode.
It might just be better for all concerned if they leave this peripheral out for now, though.
The main think I want is a tournament ladder, for parties.
I mean, we've got two controllers tops, right? What if six people want to play against each other?
Yeah, people can mill about and yell out "I have winsies" and stuff, but IMHO it would be nice if the game could say "okay, the next match will be Kevin against Milicent", and keep track of scores and so forth, and end up telling you who won.
The original product implemented communications protocols that were owned by financial institutions.
These protocols were under heavy NDA. As a result, there was never a release of CCVS under any open soruce license. Red Hat wanted to open up the whole thing, but that would have been a violation of our contracts with those financial institutions.
In addition, there was a rigorous certificaiton process required for any software that did this stuff -- if anyone did modify the software we distributed, it would have been in violation of the finanical institutions rules to actually use it without going through a rigorous and time-consuming certification process for basically every single change to a line of code.
How do I know? Basically, I'm the guy who wrote it.
(There was more than one of us, but I designed the whole thing, and wrote the infrastructure parts, all of the telecom modules, and some of the protocol modules and language adapters. Other people wrote some protocol modules that plugged into my code, some of our language adapters, and one guy wrote our database layer.)
Some CCVS trivia:
(You'll have to pardon me for going on like that. I'm kinda proud of what our little company managed to accomplish.)
Which reminds me: anyone from Red Hat (or with contacts at Red Hat) reading this? I'd love to get that source code back!
I believe I know how to make it open source today, and I'd like to take a stab at it -- and at porting it directly to today's 2.5G and 3G cell phones.
But, legally, Red Hat owns that source code, and I do not have the legal right to try to open it up without their say-so. I have been able to get responses from the folks at Main Street Softworks, but they don't have the CCVS source code or rights to it either.
Whenever I have the least suspicion of any web site, I start probing DNS and whois. I try to make sure information I get via non-compuer channels matches what the computer tells me, and so forth.
I wonder if I'd fall for any of the sites they used. I like to think I wouldn't, but the moment I'm sure I wouldn't, I'm pretty sure that'd put me into a state of mind that'd ensure that I would.
Nobody on the internet should ever feel safe.
(Just like real life! Why, yes, I did grow up in NYC, why do you ask?)
Either the "MacBook Consumer" (whatever the new x86 iBook will be called) or the "MacBook Pro 12 inch" could be a big deal. A very high performance ultralight notebook that could multiboot Linux and Windows at need... the possibility of this is the only reason I don't have a MacBook Pro right now. If I could get almost as much processing power in something smaller and lighter, I'd be all over it. (I have co-workers who think I'm crazy, and who are waiting with equal eagerness with regard to a 17" MacBook Pro. The difference is that I as a person don't multitask, and do compute everywhere.)
I'll have a new Apple laptop with an x86 CPU by the end of April. By Monday I should know whether it'll be 15" or 12", and I hope it'll be 12".
Actually, I want Solaris/x86 in there too if possible. We use Solaris on SPARCs at work. Being able to bring it up on my laptop would make some sorts of development easier while on the road. Gimmie quad-boot OSX/XP/Linux/Solaris!
The term "FLA" should not be used because it is not itself a "FLA" -- "FLA" is merely a "TLA". The term you're looking for is "ETLA", or "extended three letter acronym".
By the way, if you want to read a good book that has some things in common with The Da Vinci Code, read Umberto Eco's "Focault's Pendulum".
Wait. I've read "HBHG". Did they say nonfiction?
And that's a high-end raid.
Exploring the countryside, hunting relatively weak beasts, these things just don't require much attention and are not that fast-paced. Now, an on-target 5-man instance run is another matter, but presumably if you were connecting with someone in order to chat, you'd do something like... explore the Barrens.
Having mono alone doesn't mean much, just like having a JVM alone doesn't mean much for java. This is exactly what I meant by "in theory". I don't think you'd find many enterprise .Net developers with practical experience who'd consider it a realistic option, for precisely the same sorts of reasons that most Java developers can't consider things like Kaffe a realistic option.
Also, I was speaking in the abstract as well -- I do not use Linux, so what Red Hat and SUSE do is not of much use to me. I also don't use Windows.
For me, the worst feature of C# is that it's so tied to Microsoft platforms. Yes, you can use mono in theory. Yes, there are appservers that let you get a CLR running on Linux boxes. Realistically, those are closer to edge cases than to common reality.
How many mobile phones ship with JVMs? How many ship with
Yes, you can use mono in theory, but you've got to realize that this is not the same sort of thing as choosing between Sun's, IBM's, and BEA's Java app servers. In reality, C# is tied to Microsoft platforms to an extremely high degree when contrasted with other languages. For me, this is the worst thing about it by far. It's a pretty bad thing!
But once again, if Java disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, I would probably become a C# developer. Though I will give Ruby on Rails a look. (Python is right out -- I am unwilling to consider it.)
I'm dreaming I know, but here's what I'd want in it:
1) PAM module to authenticate against GMail's account database.
2) The backing store for GMail is made available via WebDAV, much like Apple does with DotMac.
3a) When you log by booting a Goobuntu Live CD, your WebDAV folder is mounted as your home directory.
3b) When you log on to a system that's installed on a hard drive, it syncs it with a local disk image instead. When you log out, the synced disk image is encrypted immediately, and deleted after enough time without use.
4) I want a browser interface for some of the stuff in there, for when I can't get to a Goobuntu box. Much of this is already covered (bookmarks, mail), but I'd like more (contact list, documents).
Then, I could have a desktop machine at home, a laptop, and a Live CD. I could log in to any of them and have the same environment, with all my content ultimately stored on (and indexed by, sure) Google's servers. A buddy could come over and just use it. I could go to a buddy's house and just use his system. And so on. And if I'm at a kiosk at a conference, I can still just bring up a web interface and get some things done.
(While I'm at it, can I have SyncML too?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_science
A university cannot make a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students. Python does so.
For programming courses in universities, maybe Ruby is a better choice than Java. Maybe Perl even is. But Python is not, because of this one simple feature that completely rules the language out, in my book, regardless of how good the language is otherwise.
I have to work hard to be that incoherent. Even if I'm already drunk.
The Blu-Ray spec requires a fully functional Java interpreter to be embedded in every media player. You know the scripting language that DVDs use to control menus and stuff like that? On a Blu-Ray system, this is a full Java implementation with access to a TCP stack and everything.
(I saw some sessions about this at JavaOne this year.)
How could Microsoft get behind something like that?
There's their client, and there's their servers.
I have been led to believe that their client does not support file transfer at this time.
I don't use their client. I use iChat.
Using iChat, logging into their jabber network, I can't transfer files to people using Google's client. But I can transfer them to people using Adium. I've done it.
Their server supports file transfer with no problem, they just have to add it to their client. In the meantime, just use another client. (I'd gladly give up voice/video to get file transfer -- I use IM file transfer to get my job done, while for me voice/video is just a fun toy.)