It isn't even really that much juice. 2W? I know it adds up when you consider ALL of the devices out there, but lets be realistic here. It is less than a small incandescent light bulb running for one hour per day.
The DVD player with the 7 button remote would be the same way - instead of a single button press to accomplish something, you've got to open up a menu, navigate to what you want to do, then do it - all while the OSD is covering up what you are trying to watch. This is fine for rarely used items, but why should I have to do this for things like turning on the captions or skipping to the next disk? Why people think this is superior I have no idea.
For captions, dont' people usually know ahead of time if they want them on or off? Why not put that in a menu? And skipping to the next disk.. Do you have a multi-disk DVD player?? I've never even seen one. And if you have one, what is the problem bringing up an OSD and blocking the current movie to select the next DVD? Presumably you don't care about the current DVD if you are looking to switch. So what is the problem? While a 7 button DVD remote may be a littel sparse, the examples you give are just as well left in the OSD as far as I am concerned.
The only place I want *more* buttons is ON THE FRIEKIN DVD PLAYER.
IANAL. Don't diffs contain some of the original source? That is why it would violate the GPL. If you could somehow diff the GPL source without having any of the original source in the diff, i bet it would be compatible with the GPL. Similarly, as long as you don't include any of hte original movie soundrack in your riff, I can't see why it would violate copyright.
It doesn't sounds like Americans are being singled out though. Europeans got the same products, AFAIK. Also, it may not be that Americans (or Europeans) are too "stupid" to use the more complicated devices, maybe the Japanese just don't know how to make a complex interface that is intuitive for anyone but themselves.
PHP does not teach you bad coding habits, as there's more than one way to do something - sure, it does offer you "the easy way" quite often, but if you're the one to take it, then that's your problem.
That's just it, the "easy way" should, more often than not, be the right way. That is what pisses me off about PHP. It is so damn easy to write bad/insecure code. To do things right, you have to remember tons of rules and best practices. On the other hand, doing things the Right Way in Ruby on Rails, for example, is often the the easiest way. That is how a framework/language should be designed.
God, that is ugly. 4 lines just to prepare and excecute a simple INSERT query with a new line for every variable passed to it? No wonder the typical PHP app is full of security holes. Doing things the Right Way is so much work. Shouldn't a database abstraction make things easier?
No, you don't. If you're using Rails, for example, the majority of database queries are handled through ActiveRecord which escapes variables for you. And where you need to build custom queries or query part, you use constant strings like: ["SELECT * FROM table WHERE field = ?", params[:valuefromform]]
No need to run any silly escape functions as long as you use constant SQL strings and let the framework build your query strings.
It's because the mainstream scientific community can't think of any obvious mechanism that would work at a distance given our current understanding of physics, plus the lack of hard empirical evidence, that causes most reasonable people to think there is a very low probably of ESP claims being true.
I'm not talking about the mere disbelief in telepathy. Lack of solid evidence and no known mechanism is enough to make that a reasonable position. What I am talking about is the emotional reaction that otherwise reasonable people have to the very mention of telepathy. Personally, I can't say that I believe in telepathy, but I dont' rule it out either. It is interesting to look into... even if is only to determine why so many people seem to THINK telepathy is real. I've certainly had my fair share of inexplicable moments that would seem to indicate telepathy.
The fundamental law of nature that will not allow any communications without a physical channel is the theory of information [wikipedia.org]. If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, time would not be unidirectional.
Who said telepathy has (if it is exists) no physical channel and spends no energy?
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues? Obviously, you'd have to identify a mechanism for the communications. If telepathy exists, it isn't magic.
If you had told someone from 200 years ago that you could communicate with people across the globe in real-time, they'd probably think you were some kind of sorcerer. But since then we've discovered radio waves...
Instead of "desktop app wannabe, AJAX, JS UI pieces of crap" try substituting the phrase "thin client." For a LONG time people have been talking about thin clients as the future. With the extreme difficulty for the average user of keeping a machine virus/spyware free, there is an obvious huge benefit to moving most application remote.
In certain situations, yes. But for the majority of users, it is a great step back in functionality and usability.
You may not like the methodology of Writely, but I truly believe thin is in.
Apps like Writely are not thin at all. The amount of Javascript that runs on the client just to generate a basic UI widget is astonishing. The server does almost nothing but serve the code to the client. That isn't "thin." Might as well just package Writely as a ".exe" and run it from a URL and sandbox it somehow. Kinda like Java applets.
We have a large computer lab at the university, and we used to keep windows on the machines, but the machines kept going to shit. Because I'm a dick, I recently removed the hard drives, put an ubuntu CD in every machine, and required all the students to have flash drives (we sell 128M drives for $5.00 in the lab too). Works great, and best of all, we encourage the students to take the PC's home, and they do! (though I wish that they would tell us first). The machines run flawlessly, the students have web access to their email, and firefox, open office and a few other things built in. We use Terminal Services to allow the students to access the PC only apps that a few of them need. As more and more IT departments waste more and more time dealing with dumb consumers, I can see dumb terminals becoming a standard.
I've got no problem with "thin," in theory. What I have a problem with is the idea of a web browser being used as a thin client for applications that are not web oriented.
I have found Venkman to be pretty useful for Javascript debugging,
No venkman for Safari. Doesn't help with Safari specific Javascript quirks.
What that video reminds me of is e.g. a demoing a word processor or other document generator. Look, you open this template, fill out the fields in this wizard, and you've got a pretty, laid-out invoce you can print and send!
Great unless your business is unusual in some way they hadn't predicted -- that is to say if your business has a significant, novel differentiation that sets you apart from all other business. That is to say: if your business is sound.
Well, Rails is just a tad more flexible than a document wizard/template. The fact that they were inputting Ruby code into a text editor should have been a good indicator of that. Where did you think that Ruby code was coming from? Thin air? I'm sorry, but you have to be pretty dim witted to think that you could use Rails without learning something and writing some custom code of your own.
I have no problem learning a programming language, but "frameworks" just send up a red flag for me. I'm sure there are great ones..
And Rails is one of the great ones. There was nothing deceitful about the video you saw. It really is easy to throw together a blog-like site with Rails. But you still have too LEARN something. This is one of those "DUH!" moments my mother always told me about.
However, the video does make it look easy, with major catches - namely, learning the actual language, because one does not simply know from birth how to do everything he is doing to make his blog.
Why does this seem like such a "duh!" moment to me? Rails DOES make it easy to make things like blogs, but you'd have to be either extremely lazy or dimwitted to think that you could do it without learning something. I mean, you saw (in the video) that you actually had to input some Ruby code. Where did the grandparent poster think that code was coming from? Thin air?
Ok, so basically what you are saying is that we should only learn programming languages on a very academic level and never learn to apply them to specific problems because some day those problems will no longer be problems and all of our time learning to apply the language in will be wasted. Do I understand you correctly?
I can tell you this, if it weren't for Rails I would never have learned Ruby in the first place. Writing Rails applicaitons gives me a chance to learn a whole lot more than just the specific details of the framework. No only have I learned Ruby, but I've been introduced to test driven development and other good practices that were nowhere in the PHP world. It was actually the unstructured PHP world that I have found to be a waste of time.
-matthew
Re:I knew it!
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Are you being facetious? Or are you actually annoyed that you had to learn a programming language and a framework to do something useful with Rails? I can't tell.
I would invest time and money in Ruby on Rails, except that it is obviously a passing fad. This is because Rails is designed to solve a specific problem (serving web pages),
Doesn't this apply equally well to every other web framework out there? Browsers are designed to solve the specific problem of reading web pages? Are they just a fad too?
in which case, you're looking at, at the most, a little longer load times and nothing else.
Load times can seriously affect the playability of a game. If it takes too long to transition between levels (or areas or whatever) the game might not go over well. Many games load content on demand, constantly to prevent such transition delays. Rendering all the media from procedures would most likely put a serious dent in game performance compared to loading the media from DMA disk.
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It isn't even really that much juice. 2W? I know it adds up when you consider ALL of the devices out there, but lets be realistic here. It is less than a small incandescent light bulb running for one hour per day.
60W * 1h = 60Wh
2W * 24h = 48Wh
-matthew
Since when did Neanderthals start using the term "asshat?"
For captions, dont' people usually know ahead of time if they want them on or off? Why not put that in a menu? And skipping to the next disk.. Do you have a multi-disk DVD player?? I've never even seen one. And if you have one, what is the problem bringing up an OSD and blocking the current movie to select the next DVD? Presumably you don't care about the current DVD if you are looking to switch. So what is the problem? While a 7 button DVD remote may be a littel sparse, the examples you give are just as well left in the OSD as far as I am concerned.
The only place I want *more* buttons is ON THE FRIEKIN DVD PLAYER.
-matthew
IANAL. Don't diffs contain some of the original source? That is why it would violate the GPL. If you could somehow diff the GPL source without having any of the original source in the diff, i bet it would be compatible with the GPL. Similarly, as long as you don't include any of hte original movie soundrack in your riff, I can't see why it would violate copyright.
-matthew
It doesn't sounds like Americans are being singled out though. Europeans got the same products, AFAIK. Also, it may not be that Americans (or Europeans) are too "stupid" to use the more complicated devices, maybe the Japanese just don't know how to make a complex interface that is intuitive for anyone but themselves.
-matthew
Die? Are you suggesting that there is something inherently fatal in solving the battery problem? Or are you threatening us?
-matthew
That's just it, the "easy way" should, more often than not, be the right way. That is what pisses me off about PHP. It is so damn easy to write bad/insecure code. To do things right, you have to remember tons of rules and best practices. On the other hand, doing things the Right Way in Ruby on Rails, for example, is often the the easiest way. That is how a framework/language should be designed.
-matthew
I read something about Firefox dropping support for older versions of Windows. Maybe it was Firfox 3 though.
-matthew
God, that is ugly. 4 lines just to prepare and excecute a simple INSERT query with a new line for every variable passed to it? No wonder the typical PHP app is full of security holes. Doing things the Right Way is so much work. Shouldn't a database abstraction make things easier?
:value => value)
The equivielent in Rails:
Registry.create(:name => name,
I'm glad I gave up PHP for lent.
-matthew
-matthew
No, you don't. If you're using Rails, for example, the majority of database queries are handled through ActiveRecord which escapes variables for you. And where you need to build custom queries or query part, you use constant strings like: ["SELECT * FROM table WHERE field = ?", params[:valuefromform]]
No need to run any silly escape functions as long as you use constant SQL strings and let the framework build your query strings.
-matthew
I'm not talking about the mere disbelief in telepathy. Lack of solid evidence and no known mechanism is enough to make that a reasonable position. What I am talking about is the emotional reaction that otherwise reasonable people have to the very mention of telepathy. Personally, I can't say that I believe in telepathy, but I dont' rule it out either. It is interesting to look into... even if is only to determine why so many people seem to THINK telepathy is real. I've certainly had my fair share of inexplicable moments that would seem to indicate telepathy.
-matthew
Who said telepathy has (if it is exists) no physical channel and spends no energy?
-matthew
Because you can actually test for telepathy. You can't test for ID.
-matthew
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues? Obviously, you'd have to identify a mechanism for the communications. If telepathy exists, it isn't magic.
If you had told someone from 200 years ago that you could communicate with people across the globe in real-time, they'd probably think you were some kind of sorcerer. But since then we've discovered radio waves...
-matthew
If I had paid for the latest version of GSX, I'd be pretty annoyed.
-matthew
In certain situations, yes. But for the majority of users, it is a great step back in functionality and usability.
Apps like Writely are not thin at all. The amount of Javascript that runs on the client just to generate a basic UI widget is astonishing. The server does almost nothing but serve the code to the client. That isn't "thin." Might as well just package Writely as a ".exe" and run it from a URL and sandbox it somehow. Kinda like Java applets.
I've got no problem with "thin," in theory. What I have a problem with is the idea of a web browser being used as a thin client for applications that are not web oriented.
No venkman for Safari. Doesn't help with Safari specific Javascript quirks.
-matthew
Lots of laser beams vaporizing water droplets and flakes. It'll be like a Pink Floyd laser light show... you know, without the music.
-matthew
So what is the essential difference between Server and GSX? Why is Server just now coming out of beta?
Like a professional!
-matthew
Well, Rails is just a tad more flexible than a document wizard/template. The fact that they were inputting Ruby code into a text editor should have been a good indicator of that. Where did you think that Ruby code was coming from? Thin air? I'm sorry, but you have to be pretty dim witted to think that you could use Rails without learning something and writing some custom code of your own.
And Rails is one of the great ones. There was nothing deceitful about the video you saw. It really is easy to throw together a blog-like site with Rails. But you still have too LEARN something. This is one of those "DUH!" moments my mother always told me about.
-matthew
Why does this seem like such a "duh!" moment to me? Rails DOES make it easy to make things like blogs, but you'd have to be either extremely lazy or dimwitted to think that you could do it without learning something. I mean, you saw (in the video) that you actually had to input some Ruby code. Where did the grandparent poster think that code was coming from? Thin air?
-matthew
Ok, so basically what you are saying is that we should only learn programming languages on a very academic level and never learn to apply them to specific problems because some day those problems will no longer be problems and all of our time learning to apply the language in will be wasted. Do I understand you correctly?
I can tell you this, if it weren't for Rails I would never have learned Ruby in the first place. Writing Rails applicaitons gives me a chance to learn a whole lot more than just the specific details of the framework. No only have I learned Ruby, but I've been introduced to test driven development and other good practices that were nowhere in the PHP world. It was actually the unstructured PHP world that I have found to be a waste of time.
-matthew
Are you being facetious? Or are you actually annoyed that you had to learn a programming language and a framework to do something useful with Rails? I can't tell.
-matthew
Doesn't this apply equally well to every other web framework out there? Browsers are designed to solve the specific problem of reading web pages? Are they just a fad too?
-matthew
Load times can seriously affect the playability of a game. If it takes too long to transition between levels (or areas or whatever) the game might not go over well. Many games load content on demand, constantly to prevent such transition delays. Rendering all the media from procedures would most likely put a serious dent in game performance compared to loading the media from DMA disk.
-matthew