It surprises me after all these years, audio formats don't provide recording information about the dynamics of the waveform.
Cameras write EXIF information into JPEG files, why can't we have something similar for audio so we don't have to adjust the volume all the time?
You don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate good audio. I have a custom amp next to my computer into which I've plugged headphones. Find anyone with a pair of headphones, and you'll find an amp, too. Either that, or a deaf person who's been tortured by a bad Flash file.
You can't assume that the original owner of a product is aware that the item was stolen from them, either, so you can't grill people asking why they didn't cancel their stolen tickets.
Try using a template engine with built-in caching. Give it code and let it do the conversion for you. A smart engine knows how to get rid of the redundancy. Heck, if you're desperate, even a roll-your-own solution isn't that hard to make.
Of course, as an avid PHP programmer, I've found there's not much out there that qualifies as "smart" in the PHP world.
I mean, when you think about it - what if that crack WAS dodgy? What if it had a time bomb in it that wiped out your hard drive after a certain date?
Is that much different than any 3rd party piece of software, such as a licensed library?
Just goes to show that even closed source can be open source in the hands of a competent person. Too bad the guy who decided to use the crack was anything but competent, and with any resolution will likely cost his [former] employee a buttload of cash.
18 second boot time, no randomly disappearing files, no BSOD for two years, no re-install for 6 years, no malware, no pop-ups, no CPU-sucking background tasks, no hd corruption, no weird things showing up with my pre-Microsoft SysInternals tools, no IE toolbars or plugins...
Not every Windows user is an idiot. Of course, I repair computers all the time, so I'm very familiar with what viruses and malware does to a Windows computer, and I know how it gets there, too. Namely, idiot Windows users.
So, why have I been using Windows for 12 years with no antivirus, and have never gotten a virus? At one time I had a DSL connection at work with no NAT and didn't have any problems there, either.
SVG? It wasn't until version 3 that Firefox finally introduced filtering to scaled bitmap images, and it only does it very, very poorly. What's the incentive to use Javascript to animate images when the final result will look like total crap compared to fully anti-aliased Flash content?
Firefox also wants APNG instead of MNG. If the browser is open source, why not support both? Is it really that hard without adding a ton of bloat, or are there that many political reasons for not supporting certain technologies in an open source browser?
It amazes me that Chrysler is in business at all. I never see any of their cars on the road, except for that awful Neon, and that car is no longer in production. I had a Neon as a rental, once, and it amazed me it even drove in a straight line given how much play there was in the steering -- and that was the good news.
I use electric machines every day, and trust me, swapping batteries is no picnic. There's a lot of opportunity for cars to get damaged, let alone scratched.
How differently would they have to engineer the cars to make the batteries pop or slide out? Rollers? Retention plates? How much weight would that add to an already chunky battery? How much play would there be, if you don't want the batteries slopping around? What happens in an accident?
What about battery types? Every car is going to use the same battery for sure, no matter how large or small the vehicle is.
Let's not even go near the economic and liability issues. I don't want my neighbor's battery, regardless of whether it's OK, cracked, has some bubble gum stuck to it...
Frankly, it's arrogant to say that one license is truly free, and another is not, when they both allow you to share your code with the public.
I don't know why people have to choose one or the other. I use the MIT license for core components so people who like the BSD license can use my code just like the GPL people. My actual projects use GPL. Anyone can use a template engine, but the actual templates will be a bit more specific to that actual project, so contributions to the code will probably have more impact on the actual product itself.
That's why I like lesser licenses. You can always upgrade them later. Pardon my language, but GPL people tend to be a bit bitchy about freedom. I grew up on the Amiga, and everything was public domain back then. It didn't stifle the community one bit -- certainly not as much as Commodore did for their own computers. It took a long, long time for the concept of open source to make its way into other computer markets, even for other 80's computers where everything was new, and enthusiastic, budding hackers were everywhere.
Really, the only reason I use the GPL at all is so I can get other people to help me out. Lots of people won't even touch a project licensed under MIT, no matter how cool it is, so finding contributors is very difficult. People just don't want to let go of code for free, even though they are perfectly capable of releasing it under the GPL later.
I've found that people who argue against MIT are similar to those who argue against open source in general. They don't want to make it [b]that[/b] open, or else they might lose control. Well, gee... concerning a core code base or tool, that might very well happen, but if a whole project gets forked and then starts to overtake the original project, I'd say there's something fundamentally wrong with the design and implementation of the original project, and not with the license. I don't think a well designed project should use a single monolithic license for everything.
Not to be too pessimistic (as usual), but... should we really be happy that 8 million people immediately ran out and got a brand new version release on the first day? A bugfix I can understand, but, a new version?
Open Source or not, a massive, sudden adaptation of a new version without a shakedown period is generally not a good thing. I, for one, will be waiting at least a few weeks before upgrading, as I always do when new software is released.
I fail to see the advantage of shiny reflections when the scenery is made out of huge, chunky polygons. Brown and gritty doesn't look any better when it's raytraced.
I would think that good art direction and creative use of processing power would have a greater impact on graphics quality than trying to get every pixel to use every effect all at once. That's why I can look at games on the 360/PS3 running at sub-HD resolutions, running at 30FPS, and I think to myself, "it really doesn't look that good -- AND it's slow". It's a game. Stop messing up my framerates by either running too slow, or in the case of the PC, even too fast for my monitor to handle.
Stop trying to use bump mapping on every blade of grass, and maybe you can model more blades of grass, instead. I don't want to see real-time NURBS around every corner when a good compressor can crunch a pre-tessellated model into a reasonable amount of memory.
Of course, there's no hardware marketing model for "good art direction".
PHP is badly organized, has a long history of importing third party components for what should be included in the base, and is completely inconsistent with itself in many ways...
PHP started life as a template engine. Of course it isn't taken seriously as a language.
I use PHP all the time because it's easy to make redistributable projects that will work on cheap or free hosts, and it doesn't give you the CHMOD headaches that Perl does. But, I'd switch to something else in a heartbeat, if there were anything else more widely available on shared hosts.
What really busts me up is how many templates engines there are for PHP, and how much they have to undo all of the language's mistakes. Now that's a real slap in the face!
I find it interesting that some lightweight Linux distros are still cloning the Win95 look and feel, sometimes to pixel precision. I remember when Red Hat was practically a copy of the Windows interface.
I'd like to see an 8GB flash drive piggybacked onto a 5400 RPM hard drive. Performance is hardly relevant for the 60GB of videos you have on your hard drive, and it would be especially nice if you could partition the flash and hard drive separately. That would really offer a cheaper, quieter, smaller solution for a laptop without skimping on space.
Are there any OSes that natively prioritize frequently-used files on fast partitions? I understand that mixing fast and slow memory on a motherboard isn't cheap due to requiring multiple memory controllers, but mixing slow and fast hard drives makes a heck of a lot of sense to me compared to spending tons of cash on striped RAID.
It's nice when a project gets recognition for doing something well, but when Firefox started getting more popular, largely due to the loud self-congratulation of the open source community, it started getting slower and buggier. I've been toggling between Firefox and Opera within the last year, largely due to the horribly sluggish performance when using multiple windows. If it weren't for the excellent Web Developer extension, I'd use Opera all the time.
The plug-ins are nice, but most of the ones I use are not for clever hacks, like stripping out ads, but for getting functionality that really should be in the browser in the first place, like the ability to easily edit cookies. How come I can't switch between quirks mode and strict mode on the fly? Why can't I resume stopped downloads, instead of having to re-download them from the beginning? How can a browser get so bloated when blocking web sites from setting cookies requires you to type in the URLs, instead of just clicking a button that says "block"? I still like Firefox more than IE, but I can't say the design of the browser really stacks up well against other browsers unless you add a lot of 3rd-party software. Can you really praise the browser in that case?
Don't even get me started about stability. Update Firefox, and the browser might refuse to start. I have to dig around in my profile folder to delete plug-ins one at a time to get the browser just to get a window open. Just re-installing the browser doesn't fix plug-in issues. Doesn't Firefox keep a log, so it knows when it tries to start and a plug-in doesn't work? That's a must when you depend on 3rd-party software so heavily.
I'm almost hoping that Opera doesn't get too popular. That will keep it fast, lightweight, and low on bugs.
Yes, I know I sound angry given that I get the software for free, but Firefox gets just a bit too much praise. Firefox is what got Microsoft in line and fixing some longstanding problems with IE, but it's easy to hate Microsoft. I'd hate to see Firefox continue getting praise because 3rd-party developers have the ability to patch the browser's design issues.
Ah, so it's a lot like the old MacOS. You have hundreds of extensions running with full permissions, which don't all actually need full permissions to run, and if one blows up, it takes the whole OS... excuse me, browser, with it.
I've had multiple instances where if I updated Firefox, nothing happened when I tried to start it. No window, and no error message. If I opened up the Firefox folder and manually deleted extensions one at a time, I eventually found out which extension was causing the crash and could get rid of it. I recall doing that, to much frustration, on the university Macs over 10 years ago, while the people in the UNIX lab laughed. That doesn't sound like progress, considering that even Apple conceded that they couldn't write an OS and just used UNIX. When will web... excuse me, content browsers grow up? 2020?
Not like IE is any better, but for such a loud group of open source developers, I kind of expected more forethought with regards to reliability and security. Web browsers are not just document viewers, anymore. They are platforms. I'd expect them to be designed to handle flaws or security exceptions, or even API changes. Most Windows drivers are supported longer than Firefox extensions.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it is necessary, especially in an age where, at least at the consumer level, operating systems are becoming less relevant and XML is creeping its way into application UIs. Maybe if Firefox had more built-in tools for checking syntax... excuse me, reporting syntax errors, I wouldn't need so many extensions in the first place to develop web sites.
Not to sound terribly dumb or inexperienced, but should we really expect extensions to cause crashes, memory leaks, and pretty much any other problem we might experience with Firefox?
Don't extensions run on some kind of VM or something? People yell at Windows for all of its stability problems, and practically everything in a modern web browser behaves like it's single-threaded?
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Intent. There's a reason why people "master" recordings.
It surprises me after all these years, audio formats don't provide recording information about the dynamics of the waveform.
Cameras write EXIF information into JPEG files, why can't we have something similar for audio so we don't have to adjust the volume all the time?
You don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate good audio. I have a custom amp next to my computer into which I've plugged headphones. Find anyone with a pair of headphones, and you'll find an amp, too. Either that, or a deaf person who's been tortured by a bad Flash file.
The seller? Only if they weren't stolen.
You can't assume that the original owner of a product is aware that the item was stolen from them, either, so you can't grill people asking why they didn't cancel their stolen tickets.
Try using a template engine with built-in caching. Give it code and let it do the conversion for you. A smart engine knows how to get rid of the redundancy. Heck, if you're desperate, even a roll-your-own solution isn't that hard to make.
Of course, as an avid PHP programmer, I've found there's not much out there that qualifies as "smart" in the PHP world.
I mean, when you think about it - what if that crack WAS dodgy? What if it had a time bomb in it that wiped out your hard drive after a certain date?
Is that much different than any 3rd party piece of software, such as a licensed library?
Just goes to show that even closed source can be open source in the hands of a competent person. Too bad the guy who decided to use the crack was anything but competent, and with any resolution will likely cost his [former] employee a buttload of cash.
18 second boot time, no randomly disappearing files, no BSOD for two years, no re-install for 6 years, no malware, no pop-ups, no CPU-sucking background tasks, no hd corruption, no weird things showing up with my pre-Microsoft SysInternals tools, no IE toolbars or plugins...
Not every Windows user is an idiot. Of course, I repair computers all the time, so I'm very familiar with what viruses and malware does to a Windows computer, and I know how it gets there, too. Namely, idiot Windows users.
So, why have I been using Windows for 12 years with no antivirus, and have never gotten a virus? At one time I had a DSL connection at work with no NAT and didn't have any problems there, either.
SVG? It wasn't until version 3 that Firefox finally introduced filtering to scaled bitmap images, and it only does it very, very poorly. What's the incentive to use Javascript to animate images when the final result will look like total crap compared to fully anti-aliased Flash content?
Firefox also wants APNG instead of MNG. If the browser is open source, why not support both? Is it really that hard without adding a ton of bloat, or are there that many political reasons for not supporting certain technologies in an open source browser?
Doesn't the government already do that?
It amazes me that Chrysler is in business at all. I never see any of their cars on the road, except for that awful Neon, and that car is no longer in production. I had a Neon as a rental, once, and it amazed me it even drove in a straight line given how much play there was in the steering -- and that was the good news.
I use electric machines every day, and trust me, swapping batteries is no picnic. There's a lot of opportunity for cars to get damaged, let alone scratched.
How differently would they have to engineer the cars to make the batteries pop or slide out? Rollers? Retention plates? How much weight would that add to an already chunky battery? How much play would there be, if you don't want the batteries slopping around? What happens in an accident?
What about battery types? Every car is going to use the same battery for sure, no matter how large or small the vehicle is.
Let's not even go near the economic and liability issues. I don't want my neighbor's battery, regardless of whether it's OK, cracked, has some bubble gum stuck to it...
Frankly, it's arrogant to say that one license is truly free, and another is not, when they both allow you to share your code with the public.
I don't know why people have to choose one or the other. I use the MIT license for core components so people who like the BSD license can use my code just like the GPL people. My actual projects use GPL. Anyone can use a template engine, but the actual templates will be a bit more specific to that actual project, so contributions to the code will probably have more impact on the actual product itself.
That's why I like lesser licenses. You can always upgrade them later. Pardon my language, but GPL people tend to be a bit bitchy about freedom. I grew up on the Amiga, and everything was public domain back then. It didn't stifle the community one bit -- certainly not as much as Commodore did for their own computers. It took a long, long time for the concept of open source to make its way into other computer markets, even for other 80's computers where everything was new, and enthusiastic, budding hackers were everywhere.
Really, the only reason I use the GPL at all is so I can get other people to help me out. Lots of people won't even touch a project licensed under MIT, no matter how cool it is, so finding contributors is very difficult. People just don't want to let go of code for free, even though they are perfectly capable of releasing it under the GPL later.
I've found that people who argue against MIT are similar to those who argue against open source in general. They don't want to make it [b]that[/b] open, or else they might lose control. Well, gee... concerning a core code base or tool, that might very well happen, but if a whole project gets forked and then starts to overtake the original project, I'd say there's something fundamentally wrong with the design and implementation of the original project, and not with the license. I don't think a well designed project should use a single monolithic license for everything.
Forget the Porsche Cayenne -- I'd be more afraid of the 2.5 ton wife.
Man does not fly. The machine does.
Facts, truths, half-truths... science is full of it all.
I would think that a decent IT guy would explain at least the basics of this logic to his/her users.
Nobody wants to be told, "because I said so."
How would this apply to OSes like Inferno that run everything in kernel mode, and use a VM for managing memory for all programs?
Not to be too pessimistic (as usual), but... should we really be happy that 8 million people immediately ran out and got a brand new version release on the first day? A bugfix I can understand, but, a new version?
Open Source or not, a massive, sudden adaptation of a new version without a shakedown period is generally not a good thing. I, for one, will be waiting at least a few weeks before upgrading, as I always do when new software is released.
I fail to see the advantage of shiny reflections when the scenery is made out of huge, chunky polygons. Brown and gritty doesn't look any better when it's raytraced.
I would think that good art direction and creative use of processing power would have a greater impact on graphics quality than trying to get every pixel to use every effect all at once. That's why I can look at games on the 360/PS3 running at sub-HD resolutions, running at 30FPS, and I think to myself, "it really doesn't look that good -- AND it's slow". It's a game. Stop messing up my framerates by either running too slow, or in the case of the PC, even too fast for my monitor to handle.
Stop trying to use bump mapping on every blade of grass, and maybe you can model more blades of grass, instead. I don't want to see real-time NURBS around every corner when a good compressor can crunch a pre-tessellated model into a reasonable amount of memory.
Of course, there's no hardware marketing model for "good art direction".
Seriously, do they grow bananas like the Irish used to grow potatoes?
PHP started life as a template engine. Of course it isn't taken seriously as a language.
I use PHP all the time because it's easy to make redistributable projects that will work on cheap or free hosts, and it doesn't give you the CHMOD headaches that Perl does. But, I'd switch to something else in a heartbeat, if there were anything else more widely available on shared hosts.
What really busts me up is how many templates engines there are for PHP, and how much they have to undo all of the language's mistakes. Now that's a real slap in the face!
I find it interesting that some lightweight Linux distros are still cloning the Win95 look and feel, sometimes to pixel precision. I remember when Red Hat was practically a copy of the Windows interface.
Popular? Arguable. A milestone? You bet.
I'd like to see an 8GB flash drive piggybacked onto a 5400 RPM hard drive. Performance is hardly relevant for the 60GB of videos you have on your hard drive, and it would be especially nice if you could partition the flash and hard drive separately. That would really offer a cheaper, quieter, smaller solution for a laptop without skimping on space.
Are there any OSes that natively prioritize frequently-used files on fast partitions? I understand that mixing fast and slow memory on a motherboard isn't cheap due to requiring multiple memory controllers, but mixing slow and fast hard drives makes a heck of a lot of sense to me compared to spending tons of cash on striped RAID.
It's nice when a project gets recognition for doing something well, but when Firefox started getting more popular, largely due to the loud self-congratulation of the open source community, it started getting slower and buggier. I've been toggling between Firefox and Opera within the last year, largely due to the horribly sluggish performance when using multiple windows. If it weren't for the excellent Web Developer extension, I'd use Opera all the time.
The plug-ins are nice, but most of the ones I use are not for clever hacks, like stripping out ads, but for getting functionality that really should be in the browser in the first place, like the ability to easily edit cookies. How come I can't switch between quirks mode and strict mode on the fly? Why can't I resume stopped downloads, instead of having to re-download them from the beginning? How can a browser get so bloated when blocking web sites from setting cookies requires you to type in the URLs, instead of just clicking a button that says "block"? I still like Firefox more than IE, but I can't say the design of the browser really stacks up well against other browsers unless you add a lot of 3rd-party software. Can you really praise the browser in that case?
Don't even get me started about stability. Update Firefox, and the browser might refuse to start. I have to dig around in my profile folder to delete plug-ins one at a time to get the browser just to get a window open. Just re-installing the browser doesn't fix plug-in issues. Doesn't Firefox keep a log, so it knows when it tries to start and a plug-in doesn't work? That's a must when you depend on 3rd-party software so heavily.
I'm almost hoping that Opera doesn't get too popular. That will keep it fast, lightweight, and low on bugs.
Yes, I know I sound angry given that I get the software for free, but Firefox gets just a bit too much praise. Firefox is what got Microsoft in line and fixing some longstanding problems with IE, but it's easy to hate Microsoft. I'd hate to see Firefox continue getting praise because 3rd-party developers have the ability to patch the browser's design issues.
Ah, so it's a lot like the old MacOS. You have hundreds of extensions running with full permissions, which don't all actually need full permissions to run, and if one blows up, it takes the whole OS... excuse me, browser, with it.
I've had multiple instances where if I updated Firefox, nothing happened when I tried to start it. No window, and no error message. If I opened up the Firefox folder and manually deleted extensions one at a time, I eventually found out which extension was causing the crash and could get rid of it. I recall doing that, to much frustration, on the university Macs over 10 years ago, while the people in the UNIX lab laughed. That doesn't sound like progress, considering that even Apple conceded that they couldn't write an OS and just used UNIX. When will web... excuse me, content browsers grow up? 2020?
Not like IE is any better, but for such a loud group of open source developers, I kind of expected more forethought with regards to reliability and security. Web browsers are not just document viewers, anymore. They are platforms. I'd expect them to be designed to handle flaws or security exceptions, or even API changes. Most Windows drivers are supported longer than Firefox extensions.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it is necessary, especially in an age where, at least at the consumer level, operating systems are becoming less relevant and XML is creeping its way into application UIs. Maybe if Firefox had more built-in tools for checking syntax... excuse me, reporting syntax errors, I wouldn't need so many extensions in the first place to develop web sites.
Not to sound terribly dumb or inexperienced, but should we really expect extensions to cause crashes, memory leaks, and pretty much any other problem we might experience with Firefox?
Don't extensions run on some kind of VM or something? People yell at Windows for all of its stability problems, and practically everything in a modern web browser behaves like it's single-threaded?
We do live in 2008, right?
You can skip ads on DVR but not on DVDs?