Non-standard? Case-sensitive HFS+ has been part of Mac OS X since 10.3 and has been available in the GUI for end users since 10.5 (or 10.4 in server). It may not be the way Apple ships machines, but it is hardly nonstandard. In fact, it's rather common to find this in use among web developers (one of Photoshop's major target markets) because 99% of the web servers out there are case sensitive and it's dangerous to deploy on a case-sensitive server when all your development and testing is done on a case-insensitive computer.
The fact of the matter is that I've only found two apps in the entire time I've been using case-sensitive HFS+ (two years) that didn't work correctly, and of those two, only Photoshop took more than a couple of hours to get working, largely due to their utterly craptastic copy protection. Far more annoying than the problem, though, is Adobe's response to it. Instead of spending a few hours of developer time to fix this, they instead deliberately hacked up their installer to prevent installation at all on case-sensitive volumes, and proceeded to ship it that way for three more releases. That's not just ignoring a problem. That's deliberately going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for me to use their software. I say screw them.
The ironic thing is that the cracked warez versions would probably have been better than the paid versions because at least I wouldn't have accidentally triggered copy protection authorization failures every time I turned around while getting the d**n thing working.
Patent attacks are launched at the weakest target to establish a precedent; anyone wanting to fight over VP8 would go for the implementer with the least/cheapest lawyers.
Depends on who is filing the suit. Patent suits filed by small businesses and individuals usually go after the deep pockets because they barely have enough money to sue one company and they have to make the first lawsuit pay for itself. Lawsuits made by larger businesses typically go after the weakest company to set precedent and give them leverage in patent negotiations with the other (bigger) companies.
Depends on the phone. Smartphones (e.g. iPhone) typically use GPUs and/or CPUs for decoding. Ditto for computers. Set-top boxes are pretty much irrelevant, as I've never seen one that had a usable web browser anyway. That leaves cheap phones. Although many of them support H.264 (often with dedicated hardware codec chips), they often support a very small subset of the standard with limited data rates, low complexity, etc. In short, you can safely assume that any standard you choose will be a poor choice for such devices and that you'll have to provide a separate version for them anyway.
If we were talking about adding a new standard to a Blu-Ray player, dedicated codec silicon would be an issue, but we're talking about web browsers....
Dedicated DSP chips are common, but they are common in things like camcorders, Blu-Ray players, DirecTV receivers, cable set-top boxes, TiVos, TV tuner cards, etc. Such devices generally don't provide general-purpose web browsers.
Most devices capable of web browsing have a full scale GPU. Even portable devices like the iPhone family or netbooks have GPUs to some degree. They don't generally use specialized single-codec decoder silicon.
Not so much where I live... a couple lights on my commute are like this... and traffic coming the other direction is in the intersection before it turns green either direction. A red-light camera would probably help there...
I'd be willing to bet that this is an impossible standard to force people to adhere to. You're backed up behind somebody stopping to turn right (or in Australia and other LH-drive countries, to turn left). They turn, but you enter the light at 5 MPH (~8 KPH). The light is green as you enter, but turns yellow. Long story short, you'd have to cram your foot all the way to the floor to make it out in time....
Not every one. But I don't pull into the intersection until I know I can make my turn. Gridlock sucks, and I refuse to contribute to it.
But you actually may be contributing to it if you do what you're describing.
There's a good reason they teach you to pull into the intersection for unprotected left hand turns. It's more efficient. If you pull partially into the intersection, you are guaranteed that you can get at least one car out safely when the light turns red. There's no possibility that doing so can increase gridlock (unless the road you're turning onto is backed up, of course) because it takes a moment for the cars in the cross direction to get moving anyway, during which time you should have cleared the intersection.
By staying out of the intersection until you know you can get all the way through it on a left turn, you significantly increase the chances of getting zero cars out per light cycle instead of one. Somewhere behind you, there is now a car that is farther back by one car length than before. This may well result in gridlock even by the most pedantic definitions. Even if it doesn't, it contributes to traffic backups (which some people describe rather loosely as gridlock).
30 MPH in those conditions may be perfectly safe. For one thing, there are unlikely to be many pedestrians out in the rain. For another, most towns have crosswalks in places well outside of shopping districts where you typically find lots of pedestrians. There are crosswalks in my home town back in TN that have lots of people at noon and 1 (around lunch hour) but are otherwise unused for most of the rest of the day. And so on.
That said, this argument should be moot because you would cross that 50 foot distance in a second or so, and then you should be able to get out of the intersection before the light turns red. If you are unable to do so, the yellow was too short, plain and simple.
If you want a better argument, argue about the case where someone has to slow down for a vehicle in front of them that turns right, then enters the intersection on green traveling at 5-10 MPH. If the light turns yellow as you enter such an intersection, even in a fast sports car, it is almost always impossible to exit the intersection before the light turns red no matter how hard you mash the gas pedal.
The timing for a yellow light must be no shorter than the sum of the time it takes to cross an intersection from one side to the other at a speed of at least 10 MPH under the speed limit plus the time it takes to ascertain that you are going too fast to stop plus the time it takes the average person to notice that the light has changed plus the amount of time it takes for the vehicle to reach the edge of the intersection after the driver determines that he/she is going too fast to stop. Unfortunately, nearly every traffic light I have ever timed has a yellow that is several seconds too short, and in many cases, 5+ seconds shorter than is safe. Either way, in all cases, the law must make exceptions for any vehicle that entered the light on green at a low rate of speed and continued without stopping through the intersection, regardless of the speed involved.
The ones that really bug me are the left turn arrows that are too short. If I start into an intersection from a dead stop on a green arrow and it is red for two seconds before I can get out of the intersection while accelerating at a reasonable speed, the yellow is too short. Oh, and did I forget to mention that if you accelerate just a little slower than most people, someone could legitimately enter the intersection on a green light and potentially T-bone the turning traffic? Sunnyvale, CA, I'm looking at you. Pretty much every side street off of Sunnyvale Rd. has this problem....
The day you drop $350 of your own money to buy a current version of a piece of software that won't even install and don't complain about it, you'll be allowed to complain about my complaining. Until then, piss off.
No, they are far too lazy and incompetent to plan that far ahead. Steve Jobs nailed Adobe's corporate personality perfectly when he called them lazy. They just throw feces^H^H^H^H^H features at the wall and see what sticks, and if they break things in the process, they don't care. Heck, the entire Carbon API was put in almost entirely to placate Adobe because they were too lazy to port to Cocoa ten years ago. Now after giving them TEN YEARS to clean up their mess and move to new APIs, they're STILL whining that they have to rework their GUI to move to 64-bit. They've known that this was coming for a DECADE and still they whine that they're having to do actual work. AMAZING!
I spent several hundred dollars to buy CS3, only to find out after I bought it that they didn't support my machine (and didn't mention it in their specs). I had to spend three days hacking up their worthless software just to get it to install and launch on my case-sensitve HFS+ root volume.
I didn't buy the CS4 upgrade because I would have to go through the same hell. I won't be buying CS5 because I would have to go through the same hell. Until an Apple OS upgrade breaks CS3 in some show-stopper way, I won't be buying future versions of their suite. If I'm paying several hundred bucks for a piece of software, I expect it to work. If there are bugs, that's fine, but not even being able to install the piece of excrement crosses a line. I was sorely tempted to file a class action suit, but I'm just too busy to be bothered.
The worst part is that it would take Adobe less time to fix these problems than it took me to hack their piece of s**t app for myself. Yet two updates later, they STILL haven't bothered to spend two or three days of a single developer's time to fix them. Maybe it's because they don't have a single competent developer among them to do the work? After all, Apple even provided detailed directions.
Or maybe it's just because they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they own the market. They have no competition, so they have the right to make every user conform to their specifications with impunity. No matter how bad they make things for their users---no matter how many hoops we have to jump through---we'll still have to use their shovelware. Fortunately, there are alternatives. If Apple ever makes a change to the OS that breaks CS3, I'll just drag it to the trash rather than pay the crooks at Adobe hundreds of dollars for another update that won't install without hackery.
I hope for everyone's sake that HTML5 buries flash and Pixelmator buries Photoshop. The world would be a better place without companies like Adobe.
Yes. My favorite browser is actually telnet hostname 80. No pop-up ads, no slow-loading graphics. Bliss.:-D
*sigh* Only on Slashdot is a post modded to -1 redundant for being posted just a few seconds after another similar post (within the same minute). *sigh*
Well, that's not entirely true. Some plants' leaves also track the sun (heliotropism) on a daily basis, too, not just flowers. And there's also phototropism that gets more of the plant out from under the shadow cast by other plants, though this is a much slower process.
If I understand correctly, they act like a constant current source, so couldn't this problem solved by wiring the array of cells in parallel and limiting your current draw to the total current that all the cells provide put together? Or am I missing something?
Failing that, you're using a silicon substrate anyway; I'd think you could simply dope the back side of the silicon and put the controller on the same wafer... or are we talking about large capacitance requirements or something?
Remarkably, Slashdot translates it correctly from the raw Unicode character into the ampersand notation (⊂), but then strips it out going to HTML. It also fails to handle the named entity (⊂) and the hex version (⊂).
You do have a say when it comes to $BIGCORP by use of your wallet. You stop being their customer. You don't have that choice when it comes to government.
Guarantee that there are at least three or four ISPs in every town in America and we'll talk. As long as cable companies and ILECs have a natural monopoly due to the exorbitant cost of rolling out the infrastructure, we need government regulation to keep them in check. Voting with your dollar only works if you actually have more than one candidate to vote for, and given that it's rapidly becoming impossible to get and hold a job without having Internet access, voting for "none of the above" simply isn't a viable option.
By contrast, at least with government, you have the right to vote and the right to run for office.
With a corporation, customer dissatisfaction prevents that abuse because the corporation must continue making money by keeping customers happy.
That's a joke, right? I can count the number of times in my entire life that I've seen a corporation back down from abuse (without being sued) on one hand. I can count the number of times I've seen a corporation be abusive in the last week on one hand, too, but just barely. The only thing that ever really changes a corporation is being bankrupted or nearly bankrupted by a competitor that completely decimates them by doing a much, much better job. Unfortunately, when it comes to Internet service, the cost of bringing Internet service to an area is so high that this almost never happens.
There is one way to improve things---let the government build out the infrastructure and lease it to corporations that provide the service. This takes the high startup cost out of the equation, allowing significant competition, all the while keeping the actual traffic and service decisions in the hands of those now-competing corporations instead of the government (which is just leasing a piece of glass fiber in the ground).
If you don't like what $BIGCORP is doing, you're free to stop being a customer of $BIGCORP. $BIGCORP is allowed to do what it wants with the product or service it's putting out.
Where do you live that you have a choice in $BIGCORP? Most places only have one $BIGCORP, so if you want internet service, your choices are to agree to their demands or get the government to smack them down. There is no choice C in most of the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-standard? Case-sensitive HFS+ has been part of Mac OS X since 10.3 and has been available in the GUI for end users since 10.5 (or 10.4 in server). It may not be the way Apple ships machines, but it is hardly nonstandard. In fact, it's rather common to find this in use among web developers (one of Photoshop's major target markets) because 99% of the web servers out there are case sensitive and it's dangerous to deploy on a case-sensitive server when all your development and testing is done on a case-insensitive computer.
The fact of the matter is that I've only found two apps in the entire time I've been using case-sensitive HFS+ (two years) that didn't work correctly, and of those two, only Photoshop took more than a couple of hours to get working, largely due to their utterly craptastic copy protection. Far more annoying than the problem, though, is Adobe's response to it. Instead of spending a few hours of developer time to fix this, they instead deliberately hacked up their installer to prevent installation at all on case-sensitive volumes, and proceeded to ship it that way for three more releases. That's not just ignoring a problem. That's deliberately going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for me to use their software. I say screw them.
The ironic thing is that the cracked warez versions would probably have been better than the paid versions because at least I wouldn't have accidentally triggered copy protection authorization failures every time I turned around while getting the d**n thing working.
Depends on who is filing the suit. Patent suits filed by small businesses and individuals usually go after the deep pockets because they barely have enough money to sue one company and they have to make the first lawsuit pay for itself. Lawsuits made by larger businesses typically go after the weakest company to set precedent and give them leverage in patent negotiations with the other (bigger) companies.
Depends on the phone. Smartphones (e.g. iPhone) typically use GPUs and/or CPUs for decoding. Ditto for computers. Set-top boxes are pretty much irrelevant, as I've never seen one that had a usable web browser anyway. That leaves cheap phones. Although many of them support H.264 (often with dedicated hardware codec chips), they often support a very small subset of the standard with limited data rates, low complexity, etc. In short, you can safely assume that any standard you choose will be a poor choice for such devices and that you'll have to provide a separate version for them anyway.
If we were talking about adding a new standard to a Blu-Ray player, dedicated codec silicon would be an issue, but we're talking about web browsers....
Dedicated DSP chips are common, but they are common in things like camcorders, Blu-Ray players, DirecTV receivers, cable set-top boxes, TiVos, TV tuner cards, etc. Such devices generally don't provide general-purpose web browsers.
Most devices capable of web browsing have a full scale GPU. Even portable devices like the iPhone family or netbooks have GPUs to some degree. They don't generally use specialized single-codec decoder silicon.
Midtown Manhattan?
Depends on whether the yellow is too short. :-)
I'd be willing to bet that this is an impossible standard to force people to adhere to. You're backed up behind somebody stopping to turn right (or in Australia and other LH-drive countries, to turn left). They turn, but you enter the light at 5 MPH (~8 KPH). The light is green as you enter, but turns yellow. Long story short, you'd have to cram your foot all the way to the floor to make it out in time....
But you actually may be contributing to it if you do what you're describing.
There's a good reason they teach you to pull into the intersection for unprotected left hand turns. It's more efficient. If you pull partially into the intersection, you are guaranteed that you can get at least one car out safely when the light turns red. There's no possibility that doing so can increase gridlock (unless the road you're turning onto is backed up, of course) because it takes a moment for the cars in the cross direction to get moving anyway, during which time you should have cleared the intersection.
By staying out of the intersection until you know you can get all the way through it on a left turn, you significantly increase the chances of getting zero cars out per light cycle instead of one. Somewhere behind you, there is now a car that is farther back by one car length than before. This may well result in gridlock even by the most pedantic definitions. Even if it doesn't, it contributes to traffic backups (which some people describe rather loosely as gridlock).
30 MPH in those conditions may be perfectly safe. For one thing, there are unlikely to be many pedestrians out in the rain. For another, most towns have crosswalks in places well outside of shopping districts where you typically find lots of pedestrians. There are crosswalks in my home town back in TN that have lots of people at noon and 1 (around lunch hour) but are otherwise unused for most of the rest of the day. And so on.
That said, this argument should be moot because you would cross that 50 foot distance in a second or so, and then you should be able to get out of the intersection before the light turns red. If you are unable to do so, the yellow was too short, plain and simple.
If you want a better argument, argue about the case where someone has to slow down for a vehicle in front of them that turns right, then enters the intersection on green traveling at 5-10 MPH. If the light turns yellow as you enter such an intersection, even in a fast sports car, it is almost always impossible to exit the intersection before the light turns red no matter how hard you mash the gas pedal.
The timing for a yellow light must be no shorter than the sum of the time it takes to cross an intersection from one side to the other at a speed of at least 10 MPH under the speed limit plus the time it takes to ascertain that you are going too fast to stop plus the time it takes the average person to notice that the light has changed plus the amount of time it takes for the vehicle to reach the edge of the intersection after the driver determines that he/she is going too fast to stop. Unfortunately, nearly every traffic light I have ever timed has a yellow that is several seconds too short, and in many cases, 5+ seconds shorter than is safe. Either way, in all cases, the law must make exceptions for any vehicle that entered the light on green at a low rate of speed and continued without stopping through the intersection, regardless of the speed involved.
The ones that really bug me are the left turn arrows that are too short. If I start into an intersection from a dead stop on a green arrow and it is red for two seconds before I can get out of the intersection while accelerating at a reasonable speed, the yellow is too short. Oh, and did I forget to mention that if you accelerate just a little slower than most people, someone could legitimately enter the intersection on a green light and potentially T-bone the turning traffic? Sunnyvale, CA, I'm looking at you. Pretty much every side street off of Sunnyvale Rd. has this problem....
Transistors are cheaper, easier to get, and just as easily socketed.... Just saying.
Only if the person expects the same results. If he/she doesn't, they call it insanity.
The day you drop $350 of your own money to buy a current version of a piece of software that won't even install and don't complain about it, you'll be allowed to complain about my complaining. Until then, piss off.
I don't know about death, but it's certainly painful. :-D
No, they are far too lazy and incompetent to plan that far ahead. Steve Jobs nailed Adobe's corporate personality perfectly when he called them lazy. They just throw feces^H^H^H^H^H features at the wall and see what sticks, and if they break things in the process, they don't care. Heck, the entire Carbon API was put in almost entirely to placate Adobe because they were too lazy to port to Cocoa ten years ago. Now after giving them TEN YEARS to clean up their mess and move to new APIs, they're STILL whining that they have to rework their GUI to move to 64-bit. They've known that this was coming for a DECADE and still they whine that they're having to do actual work. AMAZING!
I spent several hundred dollars to buy CS3, only to find out after I bought it that they didn't support my machine (and didn't mention it in their specs). I had to spend three days hacking up their worthless software just to get it to install and launch on my case-sensitve HFS+ root volume.
I didn't buy the CS4 upgrade because I would have to go through the same hell. I won't be buying CS5 because I would have to go through the same hell. Until an Apple OS upgrade breaks CS3 in some show-stopper way, I won't be buying future versions of their suite. If I'm paying several hundred bucks for a piece of software, I expect it to work. If there are bugs, that's fine, but not even being able to install the piece of excrement crosses a line. I was sorely tempted to file a class action suit, but I'm just too busy to be bothered.
The worst part is that it would take Adobe less time to fix these problems than it took me to hack their piece of s**t app for myself. Yet two updates later, they STILL haven't bothered to spend two or three days of a single developer's time to fix them. Maybe it's because they don't have a single competent developer among them to do the work? After all, Apple even provided detailed directions.
Or maybe it's just because they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they own the market. They have no competition, so they have the right to make every user conform to their specifications with impunity. No matter how bad they make things for their users---no matter how many hoops we have to jump through---we'll still have to use their shovelware. Fortunately, there are alternatives. If Apple ever makes a change to the OS that breaks CS3, I'll just drag it to the trash rather than pay the crooks at Adobe hundreds of dollars for another update that won't install without hackery.
I hope for everyone's sake that HTML5 buries flash and Pixelmator buries Photoshop. The world would be a better place without companies like Adobe.
Yes. My favorite browser is actually telnet hostname 80. No pop-up ads, no slow-loading graphics. Bliss. :-D
*sigh* Only on Slashdot is a post modded to -1 redundant for being posted just a few seconds after another similar post (within the same minute). *sigh*
Or, if you're looking at it from the other side, the guy peeking between the blinds is a pervert.
Alternative formula
1. Write it as a shell script.
Really? I'm pretty sure my favorite browser is immune.
Well, that's not entirely true. Some plants' leaves also track the sun (heliotropism) on a daily basis, too, not just flowers. And there's also phototropism that gets more of the plant out from under the shadow cast by other plants, though this is a much slower process.
If I understand correctly, they act like a constant current source, so couldn't this problem solved by wiring the array of cells in parallel and limiting your current draw to the total current that all the cells provide put together? Or am I missing something?
Failing that, you're using a silicon substrate anyway; I'd think you could simply dope the back side of the silicon and put the controller on the same wafer... or are we talking about large capacitance requirements or something?
Remarkably, Slashdot translates it correctly from the raw Unicode character into the ampersand notation (⊂), but then strips it out going to HTML. It also fails to handle the named entity (⊂) and the hex version (⊂).
To decrease readability.
BTW, for those of you who didn't run it, this prints the words, "Spoken like someone who hasn't heard of Perl."
$string = "was born before 1986."; /; /;
$string =~ s/w/h/;
$string =~ s/ b/n'/;
$string =~ tr/or/t
$string =~ s/(?: (be)|9(\d+))/e$1$2/g;
$string =~ s/n/h/;
$string =~ s/n/h/;
$string =~ s/h/n/;
$string =~ s/h/n/;
$string =~ s/n/h/;
$string =~ s/beft/ard
$string =~ s/ e 1/of P/;
$string =~ s/[0-9][[:digit:]]/rl/;
print "Spoken like someone who ".$string."\n";
Guarantee that there are at least three or four ISPs in every town in America and we'll talk. As long as cable companies and ILECs have a natural monopoly due to the exorbitant cost of rolling out the infrastructure, we need government regulation to keep them in check. Voting with your dollar only works if you actually have more than one candidate to vote for, and given that it's rapidly becoming impossible to get and hold a job without having Internet access, voting for "none of the above" simply isn't a viable option.
By contrast, at least with government, you have the right to vote and the right to run for office.
That's a joke, right? I can count the number of times in my entire life that I've seen a corporation back down from abuse (without being sued) on one hand. I can count the number of times I've seen a corporation be abusive in the last week on one hand, too, but just barely. The only thing that ever really changes a corporation is being bankrupted or nearly bankrupted by a competitor that completely decimates them by doing a much, much better job. Unfortunately, when it comes to Internet service, the cost of bringing Internet service to an area is so high that this almost never happens.
There is one way to improve things---let the government build out the infrastructure and lease it to corporations that provide the service. This takes the high startup cost out of the equation, allowing significant competition, all the while keeping the actual traffic and service decisions in the hands of those now-competing corporations instead of the government (which is just leasing a piece of glass fiber in the ground).
Where do you live that you have a choice in $BIGCORP? Most places only have one $BIGCORP, so if you want internet service, your choices are to agree to their demands or get the government to smack them down. There is no choice C in most of the real world.