For me, it depends where they put it. And to be honest, there is nowhere (unless it is for something like a sports game) where it would not be distracting or annoying.
And for those that say "but what about TV, Cinema, the web, DVDs" -- I don't like them there too. If I am watching a film on TV (or any other program for that matter), I don't want it to be interrupted by adverts. For Cinema, the film trailers are ok (seeing trailers for films that I might want to see), but the adverts? On the web I find adverts extremely annoying and distracting. Even with adblock, the places where adverts are disrupts the content. And DVDs -- why do most DVD players prevent you from skipping the adverts.
It is the year 2312. The Earth has come out of a nuclear war. You are one of the few survivors. Looking around at the debris, you see a perfectly clean billboard that says "Get the new Double Cheeseburger from MacDonalds, now only..."
What is not clear is whether the real world testing is on the 25,000 square miles of road.
They mention having the funding to test a single 12ft by 12ft panel. The next step would be to test a small stretch of road (say 300 yards) in extensive usage (or expected usage for the roads that are being replaced) in different conditions (dry, wet, snow, heavy rain, night, thunder/lightning, earthquakes, dirty). And not just the road, but the side of the road as well (what happens to the water when it drains off to the side -- are there going to form a channel on either side due to erosion and insufficient drainage?).
What about people walking on the roads? And the visibility/glare of the LED "paint"?
This should definitely be tested and researched.
Another thing: if these roads are going to be warm and free of snow during winter, what is going to prevent animals from living on them?
The potential is there, and there are benefits, but I wonder how much practical testing has been/will be done in real-world conditions before full scale adoption.
So the roads are giving off heat...
1/ Is this enough heat to melt the rubber on vehicle tires?
2/ Can it burn the skin?
3/ What about chewing gum and other pieces of crap that will get onto the roads?
Will the glass get dirty? (yes) How will this affect efficiency? How easy will it be to clean?
Will the paint needed for the road markings stick to the glass? If not, will coloured LEDs work? And if so, how much power will they use? Are they always guaranteed to work? How visible are they? Will they distract drivers?
I'm not saying that this can be a good thing, but at least test it before committing to using it on a large-scale section of road. Lay out a reasonable stretch of road and have extensive usage in different conditions in a safe manner.
Or split out the element retrieval into a function that returns either a reference, pointer or iterator to the element, depending on how you are implementing the multi-dimensional array. You still need to check if an element was found, though (so pointer or iterator is better than a reference, otherwise you are looking at using something like a std::pair or tuple and then the interface gets messy again; exceptions are also a possibility, but are too heavyweight for this, especially in high-level physics or 3d geometry where performance is critical).
In reality, how many people are actually going to have a single application that will need 3GB of memory. You need to be doing something like movie editing or sound recording to hit that limit.
Not just that, but the Cinematics are breathtaking, the story is well constructed and interesting, and the unit voices/quotes are funny. With each release, they improve and refine the mechanics (e.g. being able to queue actions in StarCraft compared to WarCraft II). I for one am looking forward to StarCraft II.
I also help out editing every now and then. One thing I've found -- text-to-speech software helps pick up a lot of errors (even for documents that have had several editors look at it).
That is not to say that the author is illiterate or incompetent, or that the editors are hopeless. Far from it. Reading and writing text (especially on a computer screen, or if you have a tendency to speed read), your brain fills in some blanks (e.g. missing words). I've had a line of text above and below, with the corrected one below it, and I've had a hard time spotting the error (especially if it is something like s/ on / an/); I took 3-4 readings of a line to see it.
Text-to-speech (TTS) avoids the eye which is more fuzzy in its interpretation of what it processes (think of all the optical illusions available).
TTS does not help with typographical grammar errors (missing quotes in speech, for example), though. If you have software that will highlight the words being spoken, you can spot these better. It also does not help much if you have sections of code in the text, or include foreign language text.
Also, use the default 170 words per minute -- it is slower, but it is easier for your brain to process -- and a voice that you can easily comprehend. The eSpeak voice is good for comprehension, even if it does sound robotic, and is free.
They probably dropped Win95 support because the later versions of Visual Studio (which Mozilla are using to build FF on Windows) has dropped support for it.
Also, there are APIs that Microsoft add to each version of Windows, which means you either can't use the newer features or have to do some form of detection/fallback. This can complicate the code in some/most cases. Not to mention that although the existing API does not change (much), the underlying implementation does -- just look at the difference in the results on the Wine test page for the Windows API (http://test.winehq.org/data/), some of which is differences in configuration, but there are differences in behaviour between versions of Windows, and service packs.
What they mean is CSS2 (and possibly ARIA, but CSS2 is the one they mean) compliant. And in this regard, they are.
But then there are other standards -- mature ones like SVG and MathML, and emerging/evolving ones like HTML5 and CSS3. The draft standards I can understand, but there are a lot of mature standards that are better than the standards/specs that MS are pushing (OOXML has its own version of MathML, and WPF has a subset of HTML/SVG functionality and comes with its own completely confusing styling mechanism, instead of CSS).
for (int i = 1; i 10; ++i) {
File file("hello.txt"); }
C++ world -- happy (destructor closes file) Garbage collected world -- file still locked on second iteration as garbage collector hasn't cleaned up the file object (and you still need to explicitly close the file)
Not saying that C++ is perfect, but garbage collection isn't the answer people think it is. Not to say about memory usage, and performance when the garbage collector is invoked.
The point is that it's not really about what big companies can afford to adopt (e.g. through h.264 licensing). The point is that the format is available for everyone - including anyone who wants to post videos they created to their own website or blog and that anyone, on any device (within reason) and on any operating system (including all Linux variants, the BSDs and OpenSolaris) can view the video without doing anything special. It is also meant to make the web developer's life easier (like they can do with images) so they don't have to mess around with getting or tags correct, and ensuring they work on all platforms.
I can see the SoC/hardware implementation of video codecs being an issue, but I don't see why they can't become programmable like has been done with shaders/effects on the graphics chips. It should be possible to provide DTC, Huffman encoding, wavelet transform and other algorithms on the chip so they can be combined by the encoder/decoder pipeline.
So at the end of the day, you have the big companies dictating which formats to use (h.264), which means that the average user will not be able to publish their own content as they don't have a license for it. That, and what happens when the licensing changes?
And then there is support for it in graphical applications such as Inkspace, OpenOffice, Adobe products, CorelDraw and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vector_graphics_editors).
It means that if you are wanting to process html (e.g. convert it to text, or transform it's markup to something else), xhtml is far easier as you can take any of the gazillion xml parsers that are available and use either SAX, DOM or XSLT to do what you want.
With non-xml html content, you need to have your own html parser to read the html content and understand it. This means either running it through htmltidy, embedding htmltidy into your application or using another (possibly hand-written) html parser.
If you are dynamically generating html content, doing so programatically via string manipulation is more error prone than either generating the html from DOM manipulation, or (better yet) generating xml via DOM -- expressing the data that you are using -- and then using an XSLT file to transform it to html.
* compact 'save as' dialog -- check; * expand/collapse arrows on treeviews without any grid lines -- check; * buttons as folders for directory navigation as the default for and alternative to the address bar -- check; * user prompted for password when doing admin stuff -- check; * an XML-based GUI markup -- check.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know in advance that a game has advertising or not? Also, what if the advertising is in the multi-player part only?
The most amusing thing about the "cinema experience" campaign is that you see it... at the cinema! Likewise for the "don't pirate DVDs" campaign.
For me, it depends where they put it. And to be honest, there is nowhere (unless it is for something like a sports game) where it would not be distracting or annoying.
And for those that say "but what about TV, Cinema, the web, DVDs" -- I don't like them there too. If I am watching a film on TV (or any other program for that matter), I don't want it to be interrupted by adverts. For Cinema, the film trailers are ok (seeing trailers for films that I might want to see), but the adverts? On the web I find adverts extremely annoying and distracting. Even with adblock, the places where adverts are disrupts the content. And DVDs -- why do most DVD players prevent you from skipping the adverts.
Next, there will be adverts in books.
It is the year 2312. The Earth has come out of a nuclear war. You are one of the few survivors. Looking around at the debris, you see a perfectly clean billboard that says "Get the new Double Cheeseburger from MacDonalds, now only ..."
What is not clear is whether the real world testing is on the 25,000 square miles of road.
They mention having the funding to test a single 12ft by 12ft panel. The next step would be to test a small stretch of road (say 300 yards) in extensive usage (or expected usage for the roads that are being replaced) in different conditions (dry, wet, snow, heavy rain, night, thunder/lightning, earthquakes, dirty). And not just the road, but the side of the road as well (what happens to the water when it drains off to the side -- are there going to form a channel on either side due to erosion and insufficient drainage?).
What about people walking on the roads? And the visibility/glare of the LED "paint"?
This should definitely be tested and researched.
Another thing: if these roads are going to be warm and free of snow during winter, what is going to prevent animals from living on them?
The potential is there, and there are benefits, but I wonder how much practical testing has been/will be done in real-world conditions before full scale adoption.
So this should not be used in areas that are susceptible to earthquakes then.
So the roads are giving off heat...
1/ Is this enough heat to melt the rubber on vehicle tires?
2/ Can it burn the skin?
3/ What about chewing gum and other pieces of crap that will get onto the roads?
Will the glass get dirty? (yes) How will this affect efficiency? How easy will it be to clean?
Will the paint needed for the road markings stick to the glass? If not, will coloured LEDs work? And if so, how much power will they use? Are they always guaranteed to work? How visible are they? Will they distract drivers?
I'm not saying that this can be a good thing, but at least test it before committing to using it on a large-scale section of road. Lay out a reasonable stretch of road and have extensive usage in different conditions in a safe manner.
Or split out the element retrieval into a function that returns either a reference, pointer or iterator to the element, depending on how you are implementing the multi-dimensional array. You still need to check if an element was found, though (so pointer or iterator is better than a reference, otherwise you are looking at using something like a std::pair or tuple and then the interface gets messy again; exceptions are also a possibility, but are too heavyweight for this, especially in high-level physics or 3d geometry where performance is critical).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
<p class="htmlnazi">The <code>htmlnazi</code> tag is not a valid HTML tag. I think you meant <code>xmltagsoupnazi<code>.</p>
In reality, how many people are actually going to have a single application that will need 3GB of memory. You need to be doing something like movie editing or sound recording to hit that limit.
Not just that, but the Cinematics are breathtaking, the story is well constructed and interesting, and the unit voices/quotes are funny. With each release, they improve and refine the mechanics (e.g. being able to queue actions in StarCraft compared to WarCraft II). I for one am looking forward to StarCraft II.
I also help out editing every now and then. One thing I've found -- text-to-speech software helps pick up a lot of errors (even for documents that have had several editors look at it).
That is not to say that the author is illiterate or incompetent, or that the editors are hopeless. Far from it. Reading and writing text (especially on a computer screen, or if you have a tendency to speed read), your brain fills in some blanks (e.g. missing words). I've had a line of text above and below, with the corrected one below it, and I've had a hard time spotting the error (especially if it is something like s/ on / an /); I took 3-4 readings of a line to see it.
Text-to-speech (TTS) avoids the eye which is more fuzzy in its interpretation of what it processes (think of all the optical illusions available).
TTS does not help with typographical grammar errors (missing quotes in speech, for example), though. If you have software that will highlight the words being spoken, you can spot these better. It also does not help much if you have sections of code in the text, or include foreign language text.
Also, use the default 170 words per minute -- it is slower, but it is easier for your brain to process -- and a voice that you can easily comprehend. The eSpeak voice is good for comprehension, even if it does sound robotic, and is free.
Harry Potter and the Windows 2008 Administrator?
They probably dropped Win95 support because the later versions of Visual Studio (which Mozilla are using to build FF on Windows) has dropped support for it.
Also, there are APIs that Microsoft add to each version of Windows, which means you either can't use the newer features or have to do some form of detection/fallback. This can complicate the code in some/most cases. Not to mention that although the existing API does not change (much), the underlying implementation does -- just look at the difference in the results on the Wine test page for the Windows API (http://test.winehq.org/data/), some of which is differences in configuration, but there are differences in behaviour between versions of Windows, and service packs.
What websites are you visiting? Are the sites using flash (e.g. youtube), or making heavy use of JavaScript (e.g. gmail)?
If you can, report the bug to the Mozilla team. If they don't know about it, they can't fix it.
What they mean is CSS2 (and possibly ARIA, but CSS2 is the one they mean) compliant. And in this regard, they are.
But then there are other standards -- mature ones like SVG and MathML, and emerging/evolving ones like HTML5 and CSS3. The draft standards I can understand, but there are a lot of mature standards that are better than the standards/specs that MS are pushing (OOXML has its own version of MathML, and WPF has a subset of HTML/SVG functionality and comes with its own completely confusing styling mechanism, instead of CSS).
A garbage collector won't help with:
for (int i = 1; i 10; ++i)
{
File file("hello.txt");
}
C++ world -- happy (destructor closes file)
Garbage collected world -- file still locked on second iteration as garbage collector hasn't cleaned up the file object (and you still need to explicitly close the file)
Not saying that C++ is perfect, but garbage collection isn't the answer people think it is. Not to say about memory usage, and performance when the garbage collector is invoked.
The point is that it's not really about what big companies can afford to adopt (e.g. through h.264 licensing). The point is that the format is available for everyone - including anyone who wants to post videos they created to their own website or blog and that anyone, on any device (within reason) and on any operating system (including all Linux variants, the BSDs and OpenSolaris) can view the video without doing anything special. It is also meant to make the web developer's life easier (like they can do with images) so they don't have to mess around with getting or tags correct, and ensuring they work on all platforms.
I can see the SoC/hardware implementation of video codecs being an issue, but I don't see why they can't become programmable like has been done with shaders/effects on the graphics chips. It should be possible to provide DTC, Huffman encoding, wavelet transform and other algorithms on the chip so they can be combined by the encoder/decoder pipeline.
So at the end of the day, you have the big companies dictating which formats to use (h.264), which means that the average user will not be able to publish their own content as they don't have a license for it. That, and what happens when the licensing changes?
Quite a lot of browsers support SVG: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(SVG) -- at least in later versions. The only ones that don't are Internet Explorer and iCab.
And then there is support for it in graphical applications such as Inkspace, OpenOffice, Adobe products, CorelDraw and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vector_graphics_editors).
It means that if you are wanting to process html (e.g. convert it to text, or transform it's markup to something else), xhtml is far easier as you can take any of the gazillion xml parsers that are available and use either SAX, DOM or XSLT to do what you want.
With non-xml html content, you need to have your own html parser to read the html content and understand it. This means either running it through htmltidy, embedding htmltidy into your application or using another (possibly hand-written) html parser.
If you are dynamically generating html content, doing so programatically via string manipulation is more error prone than either generating the html from DOM manipulation, or (better yet) generating xml via DOM -- expressing the data that you are using -- and then using an XSLT file to transform it to html.
http://gizmodo.com/373779/linux-last-man-standing-in-pwn-2-own-thunderdome
I want to run ray-traced Quake that is written in JavaScript on Firefox ;)!
Vista even looks like Gnome:
* compact 'save as' dialog -- check;
* expand/collapse arrows on treeviews without any grid lines -- check;
* buttons as folders for directory navigation as the default for and alternative to the address bar -- check;
* user prompted for password when doing admin stuff -- check;
* an XML-based GUI markup -- check.