How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats? I bet they keep this sh!t up until the next video format wars. Asshats.
If they don't compete with themselves, then some other alliance of companies comes in to produce high capacity discs.
Maybe you don't really use the word properly. Maybe what you mean is, independent and competitive. Is that bad too?
No no - their stance on Java is really messed up.
They've made promises, but never get around to porting/updating/creating up to date JRE's.
Older versions of OSX that were promised Java 1.6 are still on Java 1.5 or earlier.
For years Sun did nothing to get Java to work well on the Mac.
Back in the PPC days? Sun wanted to port it as soon as x86 was an option. They ported it to Linux - an arguably smaller marketshare - and they did a good job. If Apple had let them, we'd have a better Java situation on OSX than we do today.
I love coding in Java - it's fast enough that I usually don't have to go deeper. I don't have an iPhone, because I'm not too fond of Objective C.:P
Apple doesn't actually own trademarks on i[Everything], and they don't have a right to i[Everything]. Whatever they use first is theirs, but nothing more than that.
Hell, there's a VOIP software company called iCall. That's a name I'm sure they'd love to have snatched up.
Ahh, but this is compile-once, right!? That makes it so much better!...but Java already had this. Sure, you have to detect the platform and adjust accordingly - but it's been happening for a huge part of Java's existence.
In all honesty, you pulling it off in C/C++ makes you a "good" programmer, because your code doesn't actively make the codebase harder to maintain or port. If your code retains the possibility of targeting different architectures and devices, you're doing it right - at least for games.
Apparently Steam finally fixed Offline Mode sometimes not working!
Looks like next month they're also fixing Offline Mode sometimes not working!:P
But in all seriousness... Steam has amazing prices and convenience. It's a great platform. It's also where most of the great indy titles end up. Some of the best older games also end up there (and on GOG) as do strange retro or creative games.
Why would Java need public: and private: from C++ (not C)?
Sorry - usually I write "C/C++". I was being sloppy.:P
It'd just be cleaner. If you want to declare a dozen or so members in a class or interface or whatever, a single public: or private: at the top looks so much cleaner than retyping it on every line. (or every few lines)
This would introduce a bug in your application, since Calendar.getInstance() always returns a new instance, containing the current time at the moment it is created. Storing it in a static variable and reusing it would return the same time forever.
That's not a bug - that's a feature!
But in all seriousness - I wrote an app for myself to keep track of reminders, which works similar to anacron. It's about 5 years old now, and still working. I used setTimeInMillis periodically rather than constantly creating new Calendar objects every time a method is called. (which could be thousands of times within a second very occasionally, or no times per second)
Moreover, Calendar is not thread-safe and is mutable, so storing it in a shared static variable is a really bad idea.
In the case of my reminder app, it's single-threaded, so who cares?
Read the bloody docs before you use a class.;) That's advice everyone should follow.
Once you've read Date, Calendar, GregorianCalendar, and TimeZone, you're probably ready to use those classes.
Eventually, I expect we'll move toward even more abstract languages, where we just need to specify what we want, and the compiler (or something) will figure out the steps needed to reach that goal. It'll be an automatic software engineer, just as compilers are automatic replacements for the grad students who used to translate programs into machine code.
Here's to the future, where I, too, will be obsolete.
And if Adobe's new image and video manipulation in CS5 are any indication, it'll do it 1500x faster than a human can.
Good thing most programmers like being employed, and aren't working on projects like that.:P
if I can do something in n characters in C but it takes me 10n characters to do it in some newer and supposedly better language, I'm hard-pressed to consider that an improvement.
Careful mate - there's languages that'll do stuff in 1/50th the lines it takes to do it in C. Lines is a very bad measure of whether a language is superior.
My opinion is that better languages are more concise, have code flow that can almost be read, and cut down on unnecessary symbols when the compiler could figure out what you wanted it to do. (if it were coded to do so)
My opinion is it's better to code in languages with "smarter" compilers, which do more of the low-level thinking for you, allowing you to focus on the code flow and avoiding logic errors.
I think Java would be pretty good if it adopted public: and private: from C - also var from javascript, for declarations where you don't want to type out ArrayList<SomeObject> myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();. Just a few tweaks here and there would make Java so much more legible, and cut down on the typing a lot.
The core of Java is mature - so now we an opportunity to simplify the syntax without losing any capabilities.
public boolean isAM() { return (Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.AM_PM) == Calendar.AM); }
... then the performance impact is negligible. I wonder if newer versions of Hotspot completely filter the wrapper method out. They seem to in -server mode, but I haven't tested regular desktop mode in recent months.
Oh - bonus points if you store the Calendar instance in a static variable, and never require the getInstance() call again.
They had working prototypes months before Apple patented it.
unfortunately, they didn't patent it first.
But why would they patent it?
1) It's a lot of work for a little guy. 2) It's extra cost, for a little guy. 3) It prevents innovation.
If nobody can look at your device and design their own better one from scratch... that's wrong.
And if Apple gets this patent, that's what'll happen.
From talking with craigix, I gather he has a rather jaded opinion on software patents. I think much of slashdot agrees with his views. But you are correct that it might be smart to patent hardware designs, if your intent is to rake in cash rather than allowing innovation.
Personally, I'm more of a fan of letting the next generation build upon the work of the last, rather than forcing them to come up with a totally new way of doing something.
AMD had a bad stretch just before the 3000's. Horrible drivers around then. If he happened to hit that generation, and had to fight with 5 different crashing drivers over several months, that might explain his stance.
Right now nVidia is having a similar thing going on - a few driver versions were overheating their cards. If you bought a card and those were the drivers on the CD(impossible - they were only distributed via download), you might think poorly of constantly-BSOD'ing Windows.:P
I haven't had a driver related crash in quite some time. Before finding my stable overclock limits, I was crashing a lot, but now I'm good. The one exception is this game, which relies on Microsoft's XNA framework. The demo BSOD's my PC every time. (nv4_disp.dll crash) I'm going to blame any company but nVidia, since my current driver works in 150+ other games.
Why can't the OS manufacturers pressure the hard drive companies to market their sizes correctly? =(
Have you looked up how bits are stored on HDDs? This isn't flash memory.
"Correct" is hard to define, since the typical way we use HDDs is very "digital", but everything is actually stored analog. There's no 1's and 0's when it comes to magnatism, and no way to store the perfect amount of bits on a rotating circular platter.
I'm surprised at the example you chose. I've long since lost the ability to calculate how much space will be available once an HDD has a filesystem. When I formatted my 1.5TB HDD for my NAS, something like 30GB of space was in use. I suppose once Ubuntu flips to SI, it'll be 33GB of space in use - but at least it'll say 1500GB total capacity instead of 1375.3GB
I was once arguing just like you are, but then an engineer argued me into a corner, when he asked me to prove a byte is always 8 bits. Turns out in the past, Microcontrollers really weren't that standard. 8 bits to a byte is now accepted as a constant, but technically it isn't one.
You are correct that RAM, cache sizes, etc. should remain in KiB/GiB measurements. (we should correct the prefix, though)
CPU/GPU speed should obviously remain SI and base-10.
After looking up how HDDs work and store bits, I feel that HDDs should be using SI KB.
After looking up how SSDs work and store data, I feel that SSDs should be using KiB.
Banking would be more secure if passwords could be anything.
The odds of someone hacking my slashdot account are less than the odds of them hacking my bank account. Probably billions of times less likely.
Because after all, a 6-8 character password beginning with a Capital letter that has at least 2 lowercase letters and 2 numbers only has so many possible combinations. Slashdot, on the other hand, has ridiculously long allowable passwords, and you can splatter any amount of numbers and symbols in there with other stuff.
I remember back in kindergarten, I was playing around with paint and colours. I was making these "groups of dots", and figuring out how many dots there would be if I had all the dots in one group. I think I had 2 red dots, 6 yellow dots, and then 12 orange dots.
The teacher put me in the corner for not painting sunflowers, and for mixing the red and yellow paint.
I think it was grade 3 when I was finally taught what multiplication was. By grade 4 I was able to do a page full of questions in those mad minutes, in maybe 30 seconds - mostly limited by the speed that I wrote. It was funny waiting minutes for other people to finish. All the bullies I had to deal with in grade 3 finally stopped picking on me.
I do wonder where we'd be as a society if we didn't cater to the lowest common denominator.
If he had twittered something, then it'd be different - but this is about as white hat as it gets.
It's very similar to someone walking around turning doorknobs until he finds a house with an unlocked door, then leaving a note that your door was unlocked and he could've stolen everything.
It's not accurate to call a security question a "lock". Most sites have mandatory security questions - stuff like your first pet, mother's maiden name, or first school. In this day and age, all that info will be listed on the first page of Google, so unless you make your answer GHS75Y237HERDSNS94 or something, it's not a "lock".
The parts cost on an HDD and SSD is pretty close, though. Including two drives would be a premium feature in larger laptops.
I also disagree with whoever said 40GB is enough. 40GB isn't enough - not if you have a modern OS, anyway. Even my parents use more than 40GB, and they don't play any games or do any video work. Just photos from their camera, and documents, and programs. Mind you, it did take them 2 years to fill it.
To overtake HDDs, SSDs also have to beat them in price - not just match them. They're not going to match them in space (and consumers love big numbers), so it has to come down to price. Right now a low end 160GB drive probably costs OEMs about $30 or less per unit. While I could see an OEM replacing that drive with an SSD, I doubt they'll do it if it adds a lot to the cost, pushing it into the premium laptop/netbook range. Assuming $80 OEM pricing on an SSD... $50 is a big difference. Would you buy a $350 netbook if a $299 netbook was right next to it? Add to that that 40GB isn't enough space for a "Premium" model, and you have a "Pass" from OEMs, for at least one more generation.
But when Intel can provide 60GB/80GB SSDs to OEMs for ~$0.80/GB, that'll be the flipping point.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats? I bet they keep this sh!t up until the next video format wars. Asshats.
If they don't compete with themselves, then some other alliance of companies comes in to produce high capacity discs.
Screwed if they do, screwed if they don't.
There was a little spinning thing that didn't seem to fit. It looked like a toy - when I saw it, I thought it'd look better if it were levitating.
Typewriters are fine, though. Maybe that's his communications panel. ;)
Maybe you don't really use the word properly. Maybe what you mean is, independent and competitive. Is that bad too?
No no - their stance on Java is really messed up.
They've made promises, but never get around to porting/updating/creating up to date JRE's.
Older versions of OSX that were promised Java 1.6 are still on Java 1.5 or earlier.
For years Sun did nothing to get Java to work well on the Mac.
Back in the PPC days? Sun wanted to port it as soon as x86 was an option. They ported it to Linux - an arguably smaller marketshare - and they did a good job. If Apple had let them, we'd have a better Java situation on OSX than we do today.
I love coding in Java - it's fast enough that I usually don't have to go deeper. I don't have an iPhone, because I'm not too fond of Objective C. :P
Apple doesn't actually own trademarks on i[Everything], and they don't have a right to i[Everything]. Whatever they use first is theirs, but nothing more than that.
Hell, there's a VOIP software company called iCall. That's a name I'm sure they'd love to have snatched up.
Ahh, but this is compile-once, right!? That makes it so much better! ...but Java already had this. Sure, you have to detect the platform and adjust accordingly - but it's been happening for a huge part of Java's existence.
In all honesty, you pulling it off in C/C++ makes you a "good" programmer, because your code doesn't actively make the codebase harder to maintain or port. If your code retains the possibility of targeting different architectures and devices, you're doing it right - at least for games.
Apparently Steam finally fixed Offline Mode sometimes not working!
Looks like next month they're also fixing Offline Mode sometimes not working! :P
But in all seriousness... Steam has amazing prices and convenience. It's a great platform. It's also where most of the great indy titles end up. Some of the best older games also end up there (and on GOG) as do strange retro or creative games.
Some of my favourites:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/22000/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/18500/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/35700/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/41800/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/3590/
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/1662/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/44200/
There's plenty more. I've bought around a hundred games now off Steam. Most were worth buying.
Why would Java need public: and private: from C++ (not C)?
Sorry - usually I write "C/C++". I was being sloppy. :P
It'd just be cleaner. If you want to declare a dozen or so members in a class or interface or whatever, a single public: or private: at the top looks so much cleaner than retyping it on every line. (or every few lines)
This would introduce a bug in your application, since Calendar.getInstance() always returns a new instance, containing the current time at the moment it is created. Storing it in a static variable and reusing it would return the same time forever.
That's not a bug - that's a feature!
But in all seriousness - I wrote an app for myself to keep track of reminders, which works similar to anacron. It's about 5 years old now, and still working. I used setTimeInMillis periodically rather than constantly creating new Calendar objects every time a method is called. (which could be thousands of times within a second very occasionally, or no times per second)
Moreover, Calendar is not thread-safe and is mutable, so storing it in a shared static variable is a really bad idea.
In the case of my reminder app, it's single-threaded, so who cares?
Read the bloody docs before you use a class. ;) That's advice everyone should follow.
Once you've read Date, Calendar, GregorianCalendar, and TimeZone, you're probably ready to use those classes.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Calendar.html
Eventually, I expect we'll move toward even more abstract languages, where we just need to specify what we want, and the compiler (or something) will figure out the steps needed to reach that goal. It'll be an automatic software engineer, just as compilers are automatic replacements for the grad students who used to translate programs into machine code.
Here's to the future, where I, too, will be obsolete.
And if Adobe's new image and video manipulation in CS5 are any indication, it'll do it 1500x faster than a human can.
Good thing most programmers like being employed, and aren't working on projects like that. :P
if I can do something in n characters in C but it takes me 10n characters to do it in some newer and supposedly better language, I'm hard-pressed to consider that an improvement.
Careful mate - there's languages that'll do stuff in 1/50th the lines it takes to do it in C. Lines is a very bad measure of whether a language is superior.
My opinion is that better languages are more concise, have code flow that can almost be read, and cut down on unnecessary symbols when the compiler could figure out what you wanted it to do. (if it were coded to do so)
My opinion is it's better to code in languages with "smarter" compilers, which do more of the low-level thinking for you, allowing you to focus on the code flow and avoiding logic errors.
I think Java would be pretty good if it adopted public: and private: from C - also var from javascript, for declarations where you don't want to type out ArrayList<SomeObject> myList = new ArrayList<SomeObject>();. Just a few tweaks here and there would make Java so much more legible, and cut down on the typing a lot.
The core of Java is mature - so now we an opportunity to simplify the syntax without losing any capabilities.
Wrapper objects. If you write them like this...
public boolean isAM()
{
return (Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.AM_PM) == Calendar.AM);
}
Oh - bonus points if you store the Calendar instance in a static variable, and never require the getInstance() call again.
They had working prototypes months before Apple patented it.
unfortunately, they didn't patent it first.
But why would they patent it?
1) It's a lot of work for a little guy.
2) It's extra cost, for a little guy.
3) It prevents innovation.
If nobody can look at your device and design their own better one from scratch... that's wrong.
And if Apple gets this patent, that's what'll happen.
From talking with craigix, I gather he has a rather jaded opinion on software patents. I think much of slashdot agrees with his views. But you are correct that it might be smart to patent hardware designs, if your intent is to rake in cash rather than allowing innovation.
Personally, I'm more of a fan of letting the next generation build upon the work of the last, rather than forcing them to come up with a totally new way of doing something.
Hey, you missed some!
-Fermi excels at Tessellation (which isn't used in any current games)
-Fermi is great for GPGPU computing!
They did say this generation was going to focus more on scientists... about 5 months ago.
AMD had a bad stretch just before the 3000's. Horrible drivers around then. If he happened to hit that generation, and had to fight with 5 different crashing drivers over several months, that might explain his stance.
Right now nVidia is having a similar thing going on - a few driver versions were overheating their cards. If you bought a card and those were the drivers on the CD(impossible - they were only distributed via download), you might think poorly of constantly-BSOD'ing Windows. :P
I haven't had a driver related crash in quite some time. Before finding my stable overclock limits, I was crashing a lot, but now I'm good. The one exception is this game, which relies on Microsoft's XNA framework. The demo BSOD's my PC every time. (nv4_disp.dll crash) I'm going to blame any company but nVidia, since my current driver works in 150+ other games.
I'd rather have a well supported proprietary driver than a crap supported open source driver.
Why? Because I'm a user. I don't compile my own kernel or drivers. I rely on other people to do that.
Why can't the OS manufacturers pressure the hard drive companies to market their sizes correctly? =(
Have you looked up how bits are stored on HDDs? This isn't flash memory.
"Correct" is hard to define, since the typical way we use HDDs is very "digital", but everything is actually stored analog. There's no 1's and 0's when it comes to magnatism, and no way to store the perfect amount of bits on a rotating circular platter.
I'm surprised at the example you chose. I've long since lost the ability to calculate how much space will be available once an HDD has a filesystem. When I formatted my 1.5TB HDD for my NAS, something like 30GB of space was in use. I suppose once Ubuntu flips to SI, it'll be 33GB of space in use - but at least it'll say 1500GB total capacity instead of 1375.3GB
It should display both with the correct prefixes. Sometimes you want to know GiB. Other times you want to know GB.
Personally, I'd want to know SI GB for calculating how long uploading 1500 pictures will take. Most other times, I'd want to know GiB
But I accept that we slipped into a bad practice, and need to replace "GB" with "GiB" everywhere that it's used. Less ambiguity is good.
We don't have 10 bits in a byte
Except for SATA controllers! ;)
I was once arguing just like you are, but then an engineer argued me into a corner, when he asked me to prove a byte is always 8 bits. Turns out in the past, Microcontrollers really weren't that standard. 8 bits to a byte is now accepted as a constant, but technically it isn't one.
You are correct that RAM, cache sizes, etc. should remain in KiB/GiB measurements. (we should correct the prefix, though)
CPU/GPU speed should obviously remain SI and base-10.
After looking up how HDDs work and store bits, I feel that HDDs should be using SI KB.
After looking up how SSDs work and store data, I feel that SSDs should be using KiB.
Well crap. :P Maybe we should just display both.
Banking would be more secure if passwords could be anything.
The odds of someone hacking my slashdot account are less than the odds of them hacking my bank account. Probably billions of times less likely.
Because after all, a 6-8 character password beginning with a Capital letter that has at least 2 lowercase letters and 2 numbers only has so many possible combinations. Slashdot, on the other hand, has ridiculously long allowable passwords, and you can splatter any amount of numbers and symbols in there with other stuff.
4 digit PIN numbers are an even bigger laugh.
I remember back in kindergarten, I was playing around with paint and colours. I was making these "groups of dots", and figuring out how many dots there would be if I had all the dots in one group. I think I had 2 red dots, 6 yellow dots, and then 12 orange dots.
The teacher put me in the corner for not painting sunflowers, and for mixing the red and yellow paint.
I think it was grade 3 when I was finally taught what multiplication was. By grade 4 I was able to do a page full of questions in those mad minutes, in maybe 30 seconds - mostly limited by the speed that I wrote. It was funny waiting minutes for other people to finish. All the bullies I had to deal with in grade 3 finally stopped picking on me.
I do wonder where we'd be as a society if we didn't cater to the lowest common denominator.
No, he's right in this case.
If he had twittered something, then it'd be different - but this is about as white hat as it gets.
It's very similar to someone walking around turning doorknobs until he finds a house with an unlocked door, then leaving a note that your door was unlocked and he could've stolen everything.
It's not accurate to call a security question a "lock". Most sites have mandatory security questions - stuff like your first pet, mother's maiden name, or first school. In this day and age, all that info will be listed on the first page of Google, so unless you make your answer GHS75Y237HERDSNS94 or something, it's not a "lock".
The parts cost on an HDD and SSD is pretty close, though. Including two drives would be a premium feature in larger laptops.
I also disagree with whoever said 40GB is enough. 40GB isn't enough - not if you have a modern OS, anyway. Even my parents use more than 40GB, and they don't play any games or do any video work. Just photos from their camera, and documents, and programs. Mind you, it did take them 2 years to fill it.
To overtake HDDs, SSDs also have to beat them in price - not just match them. They're not going to match them in space (and consumers love big numbers), so it has to come down to price. Right now a low end 160GB drive probably costs OEMs about $30 or less per unit. While I could see an OEM replacing that drive with an SSD, I doubt they'll do it if it adds a lot to the cost, pushing it into the premium laptop/netbook range. Assuming $80 OEM pricing on an SSD... $50 is a big difference. Would you buy a $350 netbook if a $299 netbook was right next to it? Add to that that 40GB isn't enough space for a "Premium" model, and you have a "Pass" from OEMs, for at least one more generation.
But when Intel can provide 60GB/80GB SSDs to OEMs for ~$0.80/GB, that'll be the flipping point.
I got a 1.5TB WD Green drive for $99 CAD.
At the time that was about $90 USD. You're right - they're quite affordable, as long as you only need a couple dozen terabytes or less.
Seems pretty good to me.
If true.