I don't know where you got the idea the the Apple II had good sound support. It didn't, it had a 1-bit output port, with no hardware to keep the sound going. Code had to use timing loops to make it work. There were sound cards made for it, but it wasn't until the IIgs that an actual sound chip was put in.
And Commodore did pretty good for having such slow, expensive, crappy floppy drives. Probably because after the US video game crash of '84 (and even helping cause it), they had what was for many people essentially a video game machine that ran stuff from floppy disk.
It was during the creation of the Macintosh that Steve Jobs got the idea of the computer as an appliance. Specifically, the word "Cuisinart" was bandied about. It took a while to get to the Mac II and get slots back, then after Jobs came back, they slowly disappeared as USB and other modern serial interfaces became usable enough to replace the need for slots.
The Apple II really was the most expandable "consumer" computer (until IBM PC clones caught on) with its built-in slots (S-100 and SS-50 systems faded in the early '80s as "business" computers). Commodore was the worst, with its horribly slow serial bus for printers and disk drives, Atari not much better, and TRS-80 in the middle.
Seamonkey is pretty good, like FF back in the 3.x days, but it was suffering for a months-delayed release (partly due to a bunch of FF security crap hitting in a short time) that finally dropped this week. And they're still a few Gecko versions behind FF. It's good to have auto-fill passwords working again.
Really, if you think about it, what made Star Trek great wasn't anything specific about the story's universe so much as it was that they actually made an attempt at continuity, and an attempt at internal consistency within that continuity, including coming up with a lot of back story before filming the first episode. Before Star Trek, what passed for science fiction on TV was space opera stuff that would make up a bunch of shit every episode that was unlikely to be used again.
Yes, lousy developers exists, but its management that puts these people on projects they're unqualified to work on.
And part of the problem is that they throw the problem at HR, who is even less qualified to know what the fuck to look for. (Where do you think all the liberal arts majors go after they graduate from their 4-year party?)
Not to mention how hard it is to do source code control (svn, git, etc.) on CASE specifications, especially when (like LabView) they're in binary files. Sure, you can build a toy in a few days, but you can't maintain a large project with that shit because there's no way to track changes.
Visual LEGOid drag-a-block gooey editors are flashy and give PHBs boners, but change management is un-sexy and gets ignored by the people pushing that crap. (Once they've sold it to your PHB, their job is done!)
Well, to be fair, at some point I RTFA and they currently use and will still be using a system based on GEO sats. But it's still not true in general that "satellite" inherently means geosynchronous orbit delays.
The point is I don't know where people keep getting the idea that the point of cable was "no ads". The point of cable was "no antenna", because it was often a pain in the ass to get good reception. Then satellite channels received via 3-meter dishes happened in the early '80s, and they all (or almost all) had ads. And cable companies added them. The only exceptions I've seen are pay movie channels and public service channels (CSPAN, local public access channel, etc.)
In the early days, you weren't paying at all for the content, just for the cable TV company to build out equipment and give you decent reception. When cable-only channels happened, they weren't ever being paid enough to go ad-free, aside from the premium movie channels. Now if you paid extra for say, NFL Network, and still got commercial breaks for beer advertisements during a game, then yeah, I'd say that's a bit of a scam.
It's not "firmware updates" that's the problem, it's unauthorized firmware updates, as in not signed by the manufacturer, etc. So your carrier won't upgrade you past Jelly Bean, fuck you, no CyanogenMod. Although it seems the FCC is primarily going after routers with 5GHz WiFi right now, so no DD-WRT or Tomato to replace the manufacturer firmware, no matter how many security holes it had.
Um, that's the problem here. The FCC wants the non-RF side of things to be "baked in" now, too. Or at least protected by the secure bootloader type shit that you see in cell phones. If it's got 5GHz, too bad, they can't have you installing custom firmware, even when the radio itself has sufficient protections.
That is a dedicated link to minimize latency by going literally "as the crow flies". They are not trying to do Facebook and Netflix and BitTorrent over that connection. In other words, it's pretty much the exact opposite of you want in a home internet connection.
Mine is free though I do have to do various sorts of maintenance on it. It's nice to be able to go in with SQL queries to see what is in those 4.5TB or so of OTA ATSC rips, fix bad descriptions that came from the guide information, and fill in episode information for the stuff I want to keep around. (FYI it takes around 6GB/hour for full HD but more like 1GB/hour for an SD sub-channel.)
Why do you automatically assume that "satellite" means latency? Only GEO has the latency problem. They could be using a LEO satellite constellation, in exchange for allowing the use of fixed antennas. Even Iridium is going that way, as they replace their whole constellation over the next few years with stuff that can do high-speed digital. (Iridium-classic is basically analog-voice-only.)
You could also use solar power for ion engines, but that barely gets you to the asteroids before you run out of sunlight (Jupiter gets what, 4% the sunlight of Earth?), not to mention the amount of reaction mass needed. It would work great for the inner solar system, though.
...and the rocket that was supposed to get American astronauts back into space... now has unmanned planetary probes as its main missions. Score another one for ATK!
Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin
on
A Farewell To Flash
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks
Tell that to at least one of my local TV stations that does a multi-frame fade between one of their self-advertisements and the program being returned to. Yes, prime-time on a major US broadcast network. I don't have cable (antenna-only), and it's not the only channel that does a quick fade in and out of programs. The good news is that more often than not, there's usually at least one black key frame between commercials and program.
I don't trust my MythTV box's ability to detect commercials, but I've got pretty good at manually snipping them from the shows that I want to keep around. But I still let it run so that the little flag icon is there to remind me to remove them myself. (yes, it's shameful)
Re:I should also point out...
on
Windows 95 Turns 20
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, OS/2 was a great DOS multitasking environment, I also used it to run a Fidonet BBS back in the '90s, but IBM had an obsession with trying to make the 286 useful, which crippled it from the start. Back in the day, I thought 64K segments were the height of stupidity, which is why I've been primarily a Mac user since '85. Also, this would be the second time that IBM let Microsoft use it to further their (MS) own goals.
I'm not talking about in-line comments, I'm talking about blocks of comment-only lines and right-side comments. Sheesh.
And variables being declared in the scope where they are used is cleaner because it's better in terms of locality. Especially when you make functions way too long. Declaring "int temp1" at the top when it's used in a single if statement near the end of a long function is hardly "cleaner".
And I can't see why you're bringing function and parameter declarations into this.
Chromatic music keyboards are a whole other holy war. I never learned the piano keyboard, but I know enough that you have to learn different fingering for each variation of a chord because of the black keys. With a chromatic keyboard, the same finger position works all the time, but I guess your fingers have to be farther apart, and/or the keys narrower.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you got the idea the the Apple II had good sound support. It didn't, it had a 1-bit output port, with no hardware to keep the sound going. Code had to use timing loops to make it work. There were sound cards made for it, but it wasn't until the IIgs that an actual sound chip was put in.
And Commodore did pretty good for having such slow, expensive, crappy floppy drives. Probably because after the US video game crash of '84 (and even helping cause it), they had what was for many people essentially a video game machine that ran stuff from floppy disk.
It was during the creation of the Macintosh that Steve Jobs got the idea of the computer as an appliance. Specifically, the word "Cuisinart" was bandied about. It took a while to get to the Mac II and get slots back, then after Jobs came back, they slowly disappeared as USB and other modern serial interfaces became usable enough to replace the need for slots.
The Apple II really was the most expandable "consumer" computer (until IBM PC clones caught on) with its built-in slots (S-100 and SS-50 systems faded in the early '80s as "business" computers). Commodore was the worst, with its horribly slow serial bus for printers and disk drives, Atari not much better, and TRS-80 in the middle.
Seamonkey is pretty good, like FF back in the 3.x days, but it was suffering for a months-delayed release (partly due to a bunch of FF security crap hitting in a short time) that finally dropped this week. And they're still a few Gecko versions behind FF. It's good to have auto-fill passwords working again.
And that's terrible.
Really, if you think about it, what made Star Trek great wasn't anything specific about the story's universe so much as it was that they actually made an attempt at continuity, and an attempt at internal consistency within that continuity, including coming up with a lot of back story before filming the first episode. Before Star Trek, what passed for science fiction on TV was space opera stuff that would make up a bunch of shit every episode that was unlikely to be used again.
Yes, lousy developers exists, but its management that puts these people on projects they're unqualified to work on.
And part of the problem is that they throw the problem at HR, who is even less qualified to know what the fuck to look for. (Where do you think all the liberal arts majors go after they graduate from their 4-year party?)
Not to mention how hard it is to do source code control (svn, git, etc.) on CASE specifications, especially when (like LabView) they're in binary files. Sure, you can build a toy in a few days, but you can't maintain a large project with that shit because there's no way to track changes.
Visual LEGOid drag-a-block gooey editors are flashy and give PHBs boners, but change management is un-sexy and gets ignored by the people pushing that crap. (Once they've sold it to your PHB, their job is done!)
Well, to be fair, at some point I RTFA and they currently use and will still be using a system based on GEO sats. But it's still not true in general that "satellite" inherently means geosynchronous orbit delays.
The point is I don't know where people keep getting the idea that the point of cable was "no ads". The point of cable was "no antenna", because it was often a pain in the ass to get good reception. Then satellite channels received via 3-meter dishes happened in the early '80s, and they all (or almost all) had ads. And cable companies added them. The only exceptions I've seen are pay movie channels and public service channels (CSPAN, local public access channel, etc.)
In the early days, you weren't paying at all for the content, just for the cable TV company to build out equipment and give you decent reception. When cable-only channels happened, they weren't ever being paid enough to go ad-free, aside from the premium movie channels. Now if you paid extra for say, NFL Network, and still got commercial breaks for beer advertisements during a game, then yeah, I'd say that's a bit of a scam.
I'm going to wait until I can build an autonomous vehicle that can flip itself over when I go home. It's such a pain to flip them manually.
It's not "firmware updates" that's the problem, it's unauthorized firmware updates, as in not signed by the manufacturer, etc. So your carrier won't upgrade you past Jelly Bean, fuck you, no CyanogenMod. Although it seems the FCC is primarily going after routers with 5GHz WiFi right now, so no DD-WRT or Tomato to replace the manufacturer firmware, no matter how many security holes it had.
Um, that's the problem here. The FCC wants the non-RF side of things to be "baked in" now, too. Or at least protected by the secure bootloader type shit that you see in cell phones. If it's got 5GHz, too bad, they can't have you installing custom firmware, even when the radio itself has sufficient protections.
That is a dedicated link to minimize latency by going literally "as the crow flies". They are not trying to do Facebook and Netflix and BitTorrent over that connection. In other words, it's pretty much the exact opposite of you want in a home internet connection.
Mine is free though I do have to do various sorts of maintenance on it. It's nice to be able to go in with SQL queries to see what is in those 4.5TB or so of OTA ATSC rips, fix bad descriptions that came from the guide information, and fill in episode information for the stuff I want to keep around. (FYI it takes around 6GB/hour for full HD but more like 1GB/hour for an SD sub-channel.)
I grew up in a household without cable
I thought the entire point of cable TV was to not see ads.
Such a sheltered life you led. So you never had to deal with antenna rotators to bring in weak signal stations?
Just show us some pictures of Xerox stuff that looked like the Mac, and I don't mean LOOK IT HAS WINDOWS AND BLACK ON WHITE TEXT tier stuff.
Why do you automatically assume that "satellite" means latency? Only GEO has the latency problem. They could be using a LEO satellite constellation, in exchange for allowing the use of fixed antennas. Even Iridium is going that way, as they replace their whole constellation over the next few years with stuff that can do high-speed digital. (Iridium-classic is basically analog-voice-only.)
You could also use solar power for ion engines, but that barely gets you to the asteroids before you run out of sunlight (Jupiter gets what, 4% the sunlight of Earth?), not to mention the amount of reaction mass needed. It would work great for the inner solar system, though.
...and the rocket that was supposed to get American astronauts back into space... now has unmanned planetary probes as its main missions. Score another one for ATK!
the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks
Tell that to at least one of my local TV stations that does a multi-frame fade between one of their self-advertisements and the program being returned to. Yes, prime-time on a major US broadcast network. I don't have cable (antenna-only), and it's not the only channel that does a quick fade in and out of programs. The good news is that more often than not, there's usually at least one black key frame between commercials and program.
I don't trust my MythTV box's ability to detect commercials, but I've got pretty good at manually snipping them from the shows that I want to keep around. But I still let it run so that the little flag icon is there to remind me to remove them myself. (yes, it's shameful)
Yes, OS/2 was a great DOS multitasking environment, I also used it to run a Fidonet BBS back in the '90s, but IBM had an obsession with trying to make the 286 useful, which crippled it from the start. Back in the day, I thought 64K segments were the height of stupidity, which is why I've been primarily a Mac user since '85. Also, this would be the second time that IBM let Microsoft use it to further their (MS) own goals.
I'm not talking about in-line comments, I'm talking about blocks of comment-only lines and right-side comments. Sheesh.
And variables being declared in the scope where they are used is cleaner because it's better in terms of locality. Especially when you make functions way too long. Declaring "int temp1" at the top when it's used in a single if statement near the end of a long function is hardly "cleaner".
And I can't see why you're bringing function and parameter declarations into this.
That's only on DOS/Windows, and I think Linux, too. The key works correctly on OS X.
That must make using cmd/ctrl ZXCV for editing really fun.
Chromatic music keyboards are a whole other holy war. I never learned the piano keyboard, but I know enough that you have to learn different fingering for each variation of a chord because of the black keys. With a chromatic keyboard, the same finger position works all the time, but I guess your fingers have to be farther apart, and/or the keys narrower.