Also, the compiler doesn't always take advantage of instructions that it could use.
Yah sorry about that.:)
Part of the problem is that compilers have to support a variety of instruction sets, and if the majority of the customers are using an 8 year old revision of an instruction set, even if the newest revision offers Super Awesome Cool features that make code run a lot faster, well you end up with a chicken and egg problem where it makes sense for the compiler team to focus on the old architecture since that is what everyone is using, and no one wants to move to the new architecture since the compiler doesn't take full advantage of it.
Sure, not being able to select progressive can be a problem with the connector, but I see no reason that the Wii would disable 16:9 mode. But then I'm in the North American region, which has no SCART. What error message do you get, or is it just grayed out? Can you switch inside Brawl? Or do you mean narrow black bars on the sides? I see that on Tetris Party and Dr. Mario, and it just means that the game isn't drawing anything outside the safe area
In US, can't remember what sort of connector is being used. I do remember being pissed that it wasn't HDMI though,:P. Pretty sure it is component though.
Anyway, I set it to Widescreen, but everything is still in 4:3.
Maybe next time I am over there I will play with the TV settings, but everything else (DVD, Cable) is in 16:9.
Reading up online about it, it seems like some TVs you do have to press a button, and just switching the reciever over to the Wii is complicated enough for my parents, and neither of them have mentioned the letter boxing yet.
XBLA and PSN require a Username and PW, and then a credit card # for purchases. WiiWare makes it even easier, just a CC# is needed.
Compare this to a PC which requires everything from driver installations to security updates to anti-virus and anti-spyware updates to, worst case, managing conflicting library dependencies.
Plenty of Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3 games require the player to update the firmware before playing. Granted, console games tend to have fuller test coverage of the common hardware combinations simply because there are fewer combinations.
It is fully automated for all 3 consoles. You start up the game, the game connects to the Internet and downloads needed updates. Compare this to a PC where you may have to hunt around online to find the right magic driver version that works for you.
Or Linux where you may get the joy of recompiling your kernel to get some piece of hardware working. Admittedly I was impressed with how simple the process was, but NOT something I want my grandmother doing!
Multiple editions of Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3. But again, I will grant that every model of a given console has the same video card, and you don't have bulldung like new PCs still being sold with nothing more than a Voodoo3-class Intel GMA.
The only variable in terms of compatibility is the Xbox 360 and if the user has a HD or not. IIRC MS requires games to work W/O a HD anyway, but the user will be limited in what they can download from the online store (obviously!) to whatever fits on the rather dinky memory card that comes with the base Xbox 360 model.
But again, IIRC, all commercial games work A-OK. No worrying about RAM, VRAM, CPU speed, # of cores, background apps hogging CPU, or any of that other crud.
I've only had a problem with that on my 9" ASUS netbook, where the windows of games in Ubuntu universe get cut off at the bottom. Anything bigger has at least 1024x768, and every PC game can drop down that low if not lower. And even console games have resolution problems: witness text in Capcom's Dead Rising becoming unreadable when displayed on an SDTV
This was a more serious problem when wide screen monitors first came out. Lots of games would die a horrible death (or at least look all funky) if run on a wide screen monitor or sometimes even if the desktop was just set to a wide screen resolution.
My parents Wii actually still has issues with Wide Screen, namely it refuses to run in wide screen mode and all games have black bars on the sides. It may be due to the connector used to plugged into the TV, but I am too lazy to rehook up their entire AV system just to appease Nintendo's cost cutting measures.
Another large difference is that with consoles you have a known lifecycle for each console in which you know you can buy the console and all games for the next 5+ years are going to work with that console. Compare to PCs where to play the latest and greatest games you will need to be dropping at least $200 in upgrades in that same 5 year span, and quite likely a lot more than that.
That said, a gaming PC is a thing of beauty, I truly do love PC gaming, but I would never try to claim that console's are not a good deal simplier to use. Playing a game on a console consists of inserting the game disc and sitting back on one's couch. Once a PC is properly setup, sure, it is almost that easy, but getting it to that point is an art form, albeit an art form that many of us enjoy indulging in.:)
My reasoning is that the point of algebra is to learn algebra, not arithmetic.
Not quite true. The point of algebra excercises is to do so many problem that one's ability to perform pattern recognition of algebraic rules is built up.
I reget ever using a calculator in school, all the way up to and through college. Where as I had to constantly refer to my textbooks to look up various identity rules, my friends who had never touched a calculator for any of their math courses (including calculus) could do almost any problem in their head.
As much as I hated doing them, I must admit that large problem sets do have a purpose. Just as writing down one's letters dozens of times each builds up one's handwriting skills, solving mathematical problems over and over again builds up one's mathematical skills.
If the (government-owned, government-operated) public schools actually taught logic, argumentation, and critical thinking, thoroughly and exhaustively, it would remove a lot of individuals and interests from power.
Those of us who actually paid attention in school DID learn those skills. Can't say the same for students who had their heads up their asses thinking they were better than everyone else though...
Having worked at a company that used file shares to store documents, and where people would download a document to their local machine, edit it, go on vacation, and others had to wait until that person came back from vacation to get the latest revision, well, Sharepoint is an improvment.:)
Then we got south of i90 to head directly to Mission. Suddenly, he's got full bar EDGE signal (through iwireless, I think). I don't think I had more than 2 bars the entire trip, yet he was able to sync with his Exchange server and a bunch of other nice things (for all intents and purposes) unavailable on other providers.
Was he roaming on AT&Ts network? That occurs to me when I am away from big cities and using T-Mobile.
The delay in reaching full brightness irks me to no end with CFLs.
Stop buying dirt cheap CFLs.
I have seen cheap CFLs that take a 3+ minutes to reach full brightness. Then there are the ones I am using that take all of 10 seconds or so. Maybe less, since they are so bright to start off with, unless you are paying really close attention you can't really notice the difference.
Then there's the Hg content.
*sigh*
Wikipedia has some very well cited numbers showing that CFLs result in less mercury emissions than incandescent.
If you recycle your CFLs properly (and there are many CFL recycling programs around, your local power companies web page may have a listing, if it doesn't yell at them to make one!) they may very well end up emitting next to or no mercury at all.
Congress can't find the political will to balance the budget but they can tell me what kind of light bulbs I can buy? WTF?
Balancing the budget is a bit harder than "plz use more efficient lighting kthxbye". Other things the very same government advises: Avoid child toys containing lead. Contaminated meat is bad. Asbestos is not good for your lungs.
See, figuring out what to deny us is easy, figuring out what to deny themselves is a bit harder.;)
That might have been the old (really old) "emulator" that actually just linked to x86 versions of the libraries and ran the OS in a mini window. That is rather ancient. x86 code is different enough other platforms that you can get better results compiling to ARM code directly and running it.
the Pocket PC emulator on Windows works by recompiling the same source to x86 instead of ARM code and linking to a different set of libraries.
To be clear about this, Microsoft Device Emulator is a bog standards dynamic recompilation emulator for the ARM instrution set.
Applications are compiled as ARM code and linked to the ARM compiled Windows Mobile or Windows CE versions of libraries which are loaded by the Windows Mobile OS which is ARM code running fully emulated within Device Emulator.
When writing code for mobile devices, please keep power usage in mind at all times (please please please don't auto wake a thread on a timer....) as well as screen size and usability. Although (IIRC) WinCE can support USB mice, they aren't exactly common for that user segment.:)
In Outlook 2007, you still can't select an entire mail folder (where message count exceeds something like 300 messages) and expect to move that mail to another folder. Outlook complains that it is out of memory. This bug has been in Outlook forever. This is a joke-- a freshman CS student should know how to solve that one.
I have moved thousands upon thousands of messages from one folder to another.
It took for freaken ever, but it worked. Definently not the best supported scenario though.
Moving messages from one PST to another, now THAT is painful! Functional but painful.
(I have in excess of 30GB of PST files total, I may have hit almost every single limitation in the PST format so far, including Outlook 2k7's 20GB PST limit)
Having the OS deal with large network delays is not a trivial issue to solve.
If a mobile app waits too long to tell the user "oops connection failed" the app risks looking unresponsive. I have one mobile app that retries for a good 4 or 5 minutes before popping up an error dialog, the entire time the app is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs when it is obvious to me that it needs to restart the entire connection process over again.
On the other hand, if apps don't wait long enough, they risk resetting a connection when in fact the bytes being waited for are on their way.
Given how cellular network latency can vary so much, there isn't really a "right" solution. Is 30 seconds too long or too short? I have seen network latencies of that length before...
Typically on board video reserves a fixed amount of RAM, newer systems can grow that amount dynmically (I think...) which might be what you are talking about.
1/2 a gig is so little though, I have seen flash games eat up more than that! Heck a few AJAX web sites open in FF and 1/2 a gig will be gone.
Win7 has a fair number of new features, but let me ask you a question,
What is more important: Coding shiny new Gee Wiz features or making dramatic improvements to the underlying engineering of a system? Which would you rather support, mounds of eye candy or a thousand small improvements that make a system more responsive and more stable?
If you read the Engineering Windows 7 blog you can read out about dozens of changes that have gone into Windows 7 from the kernel on up. Some of them are directly noticable by end users, but a lot of other ones are not so immediately visible.
For example, I have a USB gaming headset. I plug it into the front USB port on my machine and I have good quality headphones + mic. In XP and Vista I had to exit out of whatever apps I was using and restart them to switch them over to the USB headset. Win7 can switch apps over between audio end points and inputs (basically sound cards) dynamically.
It is awesome, it is cool, but it sure isn't gee wiz shiny. Still though, it is something I appreciate, much more so then I likely would appreciate new eye candy.
What I am trying to say here is, just because Win7 doesn't have brand new seizure inducing GFX doesn't mean nothing has changed. It just means the changes are more subtle, and more focused on the overall under the covers quality of the OS.
Actually I have begun to unconsciously appreciate the visual cues of window depth that Aero Glass gives me. I definitely have a bit of a mental hiccup when I go back to XP, or when I go to a PC where someone has turned off glass for "performance" reasons. (dude, you're not using that video card for anything else, its happening in GPU, it isn't a perf hit!)
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If you purposefully disable security features, you become more vulnerable to security exploits!
Duh.
x86 isn't the only game in town. :)
Also, larger binaries can be problematic on platforms that don't ship on hundred gigabyte+ hds.
Yah sorry about that. :)
Part of the problem is that compilers have to support a variety of instruction sets, and if the majority of the customers are using an 8 year old revision of an instruction set, even if the newest revision offers Super Awesome Cool features that make code run a lot faster, well you end up with a chicken and egg problem where it makes sense for the compiler team to focus on the old architecture since that is what everyone is using, and no one wants to move to the new architecture since the compiler doesn't take full advantage of it.
/.'d, to say the least. Wow.
Great lecture so far, 2 minute pauses every 20 seconds make it kind of hard to listen to though!
In US, can't remember what sort of connector is being used. I do remember being pissed that it wasn't HDMI though, :P. Pretty sure it is component though.
Anyway, I set it to Widescreen, but everything is still in 4:3.
Maybe next time I am over there I will play with the TV settings, but everything else (DVD, Cable) is in 16:9.
Reading up online about it, it seems like some TVs you do have to press a button, and just switching the reciever over to the Wii is complicated enough for my parents, and neither of them have mentioned the letter boxing yet.
Damn the Wii is a cut rate piece of hardware...
XBLA and PSN require a Username and PW, and then a credit card # for purchases. WiiWare makes it even easier, just a CC# is needed.
Compare this to a PC which requires everything from driver installations to security updates to anti-virus and anti-spyware updates to, worst case, managing conflicting library dependencies.
It is fully automated for all 3 consoles. You start up the game, the game connects to the Internet and downloads needed updates. Compare this to a PC where you may have to hunt around online to find the right magic driver version that works for you.
Or Linux where you may get the joy of recompiling your kernel to get some piece of hardware working. Admittedly I was impressed with how simple the process was, but NOT something I want my grandmother doing!
The only variable in terms of compatibility is the Xbox 360 and if the user has a HD or not. IIRC MS requires games to work W/O a HD anyway, but the user will be limited in what they can download from the online store (obviously!) to whatever fits on the rather dinky memory card that comes with the base Xbox 360 model.
But again, IIRC, all commercial games work A-OK. No worrying about RAM, VRAM, CPU speed, # of cores, background apps hogging CPU, or any of that other crud.
This was a more serious problem when wide screen monitors first came out. Lots of games would die a horrible death (or at least look all funky) if run on a wide screen monitor or sometimes even if the desktop was just set to a wide screen resolution.
My parents Wii actually still has issues with Wide Screen, namely it refuses to run in wide screen mode and all games have black bars on the sides. It may be due to the connector used to plugged into the TV, but I am too lazy to rehook up their entire AV system just to appease Nintendo's cost cutting measures.
Another large difference is that with consoles you have a known lifecycle for each console in which you know you can buy the console and all games for the next 5+ years are going to work with that console. Compare to PCs where to play the latest and greatest games you will need to be dropping at least $200 in upgrades in that same 5 year span, and quite likely a lot more than that.
That said, a gaming PC is a thing of beauty, I truly do love PC gaming, but I would never try to claim that console's are not a good deal simplier to use. Playing a game on a console consists of inserting the game disc and sitting back on one's couch. Once a PC is properly setup, sure, it is almost that easy, but getting it to that point is an art form, albeit an art form that many of us enjoy indulging in. :)
Not quite true. The point of algebra excercises is to do so many problem that one's ability to perform pattern recognition of algebraic rules is built up.
I reget ever using a calculator in school, all the way up to and through college. Where as I had to constantly refer to my textbooks to look up various identity rules, my friends who had never touched a calculator for any of their math courses (including calculus) could do almost any problem in their head.
As much as I hated doing them, I must admit that large problem sets do have a purpose. Just as writing down one's letters dozens of times each builds up one's handwriting skills, solving mathematical problems over and over again builds up one's mathematical skills.
The admins have to read something.
Besides, how else are they going to keep informed of important IT news, if not for /.? :)
Those of us who actually paid attention in school DID learn those skills. Can't say the same for students who had their heads up their asses thinking they were better than everyone else though...
Having worked at a company that used file shares to store documents, and where people would download a document to their local machine, edit it, go on vacation, and others had to wait until that person came back from vacation to get the latest revision, well, Sharepoint is an improvment. :)
Really?
Vizio 720p 32" $350
Heck the 32" Panasonic is $399.
I would hardly call a 32" TV "small" by any means.
Under 30" the price drops to well under $300.
Was he roaming on AT&Ts network? That occurs to me when I am away from big cities and using T-Mobile.
Like for instance Comcast! That huge nation wide cable modem ISP! How dare they not support IPv6!
Your IP is 2001:1af8:1:f006::6
--- http://ipv6.whatismyipv6.net.ipv4.sixxs.org/
Oh wait...
Stop buying dirt cheap CFLs.
I have seen cheap CFLs that take a 3+ minutes to reach full brightness. Then there are the ones I am using that take all of 10 seconds or so. Maybe less, since they are so bright to start off with, unless you are paying really close attention you can't really notice the difference.
*sigh*
Wikipedia has some very well cited numbers showing that CFLs result in less mercury emissions than incandescent.
If you recycle your CFLs properly (and there are many CFL recycling programs around, your local power companies web page may have a listing, if it doesn't yell at them to make one!) they may very well end up emitting next to or no mercury at all.
Balancing the budget is a bit harder than "plz use more efficient lighting kthxbye". Other things the very same government advises: Avoid child toys containing lead. Contaminated meat is bad. Asbestos is not good for your lungs.
See, figuring out what to deny us is easy, figuring out what to deny themselves is a bit harder. ;)
One time I wrote a Python program to generate assembly code. Combined the two in a way that I don't think they were supposed to be combined. :)
Windows Mobile does, has for years now, since Windows Mobile 5.0.
In contrast I cannot stand NOT having side buttons on my mouse. Back and Forward in my web browser, wait, why would I click buttons now?
I actually want a mouse like this for playing FPSs though. :) I'll see if any reviewers get their hand son it and evaluate it for that purpose.
That might have been the old (really old) "emulator" that actually just linked to x86 versions of the libraries and ran the OS in a mini window. That is rather ancient. x86 code is different enough other platforms that you can get better results compiling to ARM code directly and running it.
To be clear about this, Microsoft Device Emulator is a bog standards dynamic recompilation emulator for the ARM instrution set.
Applications are compiled as ARM code and linked to the ARM compiled Windows Mobile or Windows CE versions of libraries which are loaded by the Windows Mobile OS which is ARM code running fully emulated within Device Emulator.
When writing code for mobile devices, please keep power usage in mind at all times (please please please don't auto wake a thread on a timer....) as well as screen size and usability. Although (IIRC) WinCE can support USB mice, they aren't exactly common for that user segment. :)
I have moved thousands upon thousands of messages from one folder to another.
It took for freaken ever, but it worked. Definently not the best supported scenario though.
Moving messages from one PST to another, now THAT is painful! Functional but painful.
(I have in excess of 30GB of PST files total, I may have hit almost every single limitation in the PST format so far, including Outlook 2k7's 20GB PST limit)
Try upgrading to a version of Outlook that isn't so archaic. I have 10GB+ PSTs laying around.
Having the OS deal with large network delays is not a trivial issue to solve.
If a mobile app waits too long to tell the user "oops connection failed" the app risks looking unresponsive. I have one mobile app that retries for a good 4 or 5 minutes before popping up an error dialog, the entire time the app is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs when it is obvious to me that it needs to restart the entire connection process over again.
On the other hand, if apps don't wait long enough, they risk resetting a connection when in fact the bytes being waited for are on their way.
Given how cellular network latency can vary so much, there isn't really a "right" solution. Is 30 seconds too long or too short? I have seen network latencies of that length before...
Typically on board video reserves a fixed amount of RAM, newer systems can grow that amount dynmically (I think...) which might be what you are talking about.
1/2 a gig is so little though, I have seen flash games eat up more than that! Heck a few AJAX web sites open in FF and 1/2 a gig will be gone.
Win7 has a fair number of new features, but let me ask you a question,
What is more important: Coding shiny new Gee Wiz features or making dramatic improvements to the underlying engineering of a system? Which would you rather support, mounds of eye candy or a thousand small improvements that make a system more responsive and more stable?
If you read the Engineering Windows 7 blog you can read out about dozens of changes that have gone into Windows 7 from the kernel on up. Some of them are directly noticable by end users, but a lot of other ones are not so immediately visible.
For example, I have a USB gaming headset. I plug it into the front USB port on my machine and I have good quality headphones + mic. In XP and Vista I had to exit out of whatever apps I was using and restart them to switch them over to the USB headset. Win7 can switch apps over between audio end points and inputs (basically sound cards) dynamically.
It is awesome, it is cool, but it sure isn't gee wiz shiny. Still though, it is something I appreciate, much more so then I likely would appreciate new eye candy.
What I am trying to say here is, just because Win7 doesn't have brand new seizure inducing GFX doesn't mean nothing has changed. It just means the changes are more subtle, and more focused on the overall under the covers quality of the OS.
Actually I have begun to unconsciously appreciate the visual cues of window depth that Aero Glass gives me. I definitely have a bit of a mental hiccup when I go back to XP, or when I go to a PC where someone has turned off glass for "performance" reasons. (dude, you're not using that video card for anything else, its happening in GPU, it isn't a perf hit!)