Are you going to tell me that no one can open a restaurant near a McDonalds? It's the same deal.
We're talking name recognition here. And as it happens, you picked the
perfect example of that issue: when was the last time you saw a
restaurant, other than McDonalds, that had "Mc" or "Mac" in its name?
McDonalds claims that any such operation is "potentially confusing"
with theirs. You might claim that they're abusing the law, and if you
did I'd agree with you. But the fact remains that nobody finds it
worthwhile to defy them on this point.
They same principle applies to domain names. So don't start a web site
that has anything to do with the restaurant business called
"McDanolds.com" — you'll get a cease-and-desist letter faster
than you can say, "your french fries suck".
Re:As an unemployed bugle player
on
Gadgets for the Lazy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I suspect this is part of a cultural shift in the military. Traditionally, ordinary soldiers have had a lot of time on their hands, because their jobs mostly consisted of practicing their shooting and waiting for the next war. That's why military life is so full of complicated rituals — it used to be difficult to keep all the grunts busy. Bugle playing is not only a good adjunct to rituals, it gives the bugle players something to do. Of course, bugles used to be valuable battlefield communication tools, but that hasn't been the case for almost a century.
As time goes by, though, soldiers are less and less ignorant cannon fodder and more and more skilled technicians. Learning all the stuff they need to learn is pretty time consuming. So it no longer makes sense for the miltary to maintain time-wasting rituals, like potato peeling and bugle classes.
The world is not black and white. These choices on/.
are annoying.
True, and true.
Sun is a good company, not a great one
Now that is just the kind of oversimplification you're
complaining about. Companies are not good or bad, great or trivial.
They're profitable or unprofitable, well managed or not, have good
products or don't, etc. Sun has done well sometimes in some of
these measures, has done badly sometimes in some (often the
same) measures, etc. And they've screwed up a lot lately.
but giving an either/or question with disconnected
answers is fallacious.
In this case, the answers are
not disconnected. The issue is whether McNeely has just been fucking
up lately, or he's always been fucking up, and (like a lot of 90s
fuckups) was able to make money despite his own ineptitude.
Oh, you're talking about parsing. I thought we were talking about reading. But you're still wrong. If you're parsing anything, you should be using well-tested parsing libraries, not rolling your own crap using libc functions. The problem with re-inventing the wheel is that homemade wheels are not very solid.
It's absurd to call that kind of garbling "degrading gracefully" just because it's sort of readable. And the UTF-16 version will be perfectly readable, if the sender remembers to add the correct character type header to the message, as the sender of this UTF-8 message should have. No matter what character set you use, you should always provide the metadata your receiver needs to interpret it correctly. There are many good reasons to favor UTF-8 over UTF-16 — but the fact that it exacts smaller penalties for sloppiness is not one of them.
In fact, Java --- and Windows --- got it so catastrophically wrong (using 16-bit values for characters, instead of 32-bit value) that it was found easier to change the Unicode specification to prohibit most characters that wouldn't fit in a 16-bit value!
Please. Both Java and Windows simply implemented Unicode. The decision to try to do every character set on the planet in 16 bits was Unicode comittee's decision, not Sun's or Microsoft's. And it's a mistake they've been able to work around.
Your best bet is simply to do everything in UTF-8. It degrades nicely into ASCII, which means that all your old friends like strcpy() and strtok() will Just Work in the vast majority of cases that you'd be interested in.
So UTF-16 is uncool because it doesn't degrade gracefully for 32-bit characters, while UTF-8 is great even though it doesn't degrade gracefully for 8-bit characters? That's absurd. If all you care about is the 7-bit characters that UTF-8 supports, why not just use ASCII? And if all you care about is supporting a large body of Western users, why not just use Windows 1252? After all, it will work correctly on 90% of the computers on the planet!
When I said that the early class libraries for Java were screwed up, I wasn't talking about their choice of Unicode. I was talking about the authors of the libraries who made exactly the kind of bytes-are-characters mistakes that you're making. Whether you use UTF-8 or UTF-16, you need to get away from that.
As it says somewhere in the FAQs, Slashdot is a U.S. web site and assumes its readers know stuff that U.S. readers know. And yes, most residential users in the U.S. don't pay per-minute charges for local calls.
You're more right than you know. Really, every programmer should know
the basics of Internationalization these days. The problem is that
there are a lot of obsolete concepts floating around, as symbolized by
the fact that most people still think that "ASCII" and "text" are the
same thing. That's not been true for a long time, even if you're
writing software that doesn't need to be localized.
The inventors of Java had a the right idea: store all your characters
using Unicode, and translate them to the local character set when you
do I/O. If you implement this right, programs, are Internationalized
by default, even if the programmer doesn't know what
Internationalization is. Unfortunately, a lot of early Java class
libraries did not implement it right. Worse, a lot of early
documentation didn't make this internationalized-by-default
feature as clear as it should have. To this day, most Java
applications don't get Internationalization right on the first
release. And this on a platform that was designed to make it easy!
Oh, grow up. Computer technology is a big topic. I'm sure there's lots of stuff you don't know that would cause other peole to say, "and he think's a technerd (snicker)".
The OP is a rude, immature bozo, but he's still right. Using a low-voltage version of the Pentium requires special design skills that you don't need when you use an off-the-shelf PC motherboard.
Actually, ackthcp has a good point, as you'll see if you'll read my response to his post, and somebody else's correction of my response. He is guilty of stating things in a "boy, people are such assholes" style — but that kind of rhetorical excess is standard around here.
OK, you've convinced me — mainly because you would seem to have more experience with embedded systems than I do. Still, I suspect this (and a lot of other projects) get done a certain way simply because it's the way the people involved knew how to do it. There may be lots of engineers out there who can bang out a good Z80-based system — but there are a lot more (probably a hundred times more) engineers out there who don't know what a Z80 is, or who think that it went out of production when people stopped using CP/M-based systems.
In the 80s, everybody knew about 8-bit chips because everybody cut their teeth programming them. Those chips are still around, and still good for this kind of project. But nowadays, software engineers cut their teeth on Pentium-based systems, and mostly don't need to know as much about the underling hardware as 80s engineers did. So yeah, you're right, a certain kind of design is dying.
Yes, balancing usage is a Good Thing. It is, in fact, the whole point of this exercise. That still doesn't eliminate the problem of how you give people a discount for off-peak usage when there's no peak to be off!
The "we try harder" thing wasn't just a slogan — they actually ran the company that way. A long time ago I read a book called Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend, the guy who ran the company then. It's full of stuff that makes you say, "I wish my boss were that smart," but none of what Townsend did then would fly in today's business world. For example, he once refused to let the Directors give him a modest raise, because he felt the performance of the company didn't justify it. Imagine any current CEO doing anything like that!
Re:The Art of Design is truly dying
on
Store Your Own Juice
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
WTF happened to using small, simple processors which run on tiny amounts of power, rather than rely on something of this level of overkill? Oh, wait, they probably decided to program it in Microsoft.Net which requires a big processor, a fair chunk of memory and all the trappings. All this in your power saving device.
The problem is that Pentia and the software that runs on them is all commodity technology and thus cheaper to use. It may be ironic to use an energy-squandering chip in an energy-saving device. But the sad fact is that economics always wins out over ecology and conservation. That's how we got into this mess in the first place.
Wouldn't the mass adoption of this product just shift
the peak usage time - therefore negating some of the benefits of using
it?
But the peak time will shift gradually, because
it'll take time for enough of these to get installed to make a
difference. As the usage pattern changes, the discount periods will
shift too, and people will have to reprogram their gadgets. Perhaps
the utility will provide a SOAP service that the gadget can call and
find out what the cheap times are.
The real problem will come when all this load balancing succeeds, and
there are no peak times....
On the contrary, in today's crazy financial markets, 80% market share
is falling behind, when your market share used to be 95%. Of
course, the real reason they're talking about market share is they
don't want to talk about profits. Which were $12 billion last year,
and are $9 billion this year. That's still a lot of money, but not
acceptable to Wall Street, which expects certain kinds of investments
to grow consistently, no exceptions.
That's why they broke up Knight-Ridder, an extremely successful
newspaper chain with 20% annual profits. Huge profits or not, other
newspaper chains were doing even better. Sorry folks we need to see
30% profits or you're not doing your jobs.
First, I'm skeptical that you can design watermark technology that will survive the conversion to analog. Though I have to admit that I don't know enough information theory to have an opinion.
Second, you're talking about banning all DRM-free analog-to-digital hardware. This is extremely cheap and common technology. Maybe you could try banning it, but if it were possible to legislate that kind of thing, the 18th Amendment would never have been repealed!
Slashdot Mirror
They same principle applies to domain names. So don't start a web site that has anything to do with the restaurant business called "McDanolds.com" — you'll get a cease-and-desist letter faster than you can say, "your french fries suck".
As time goes by, though, soldiers are less and less ignorant cannon fodder and more and more skilled technicians. Learning all the stuff they need to learn is pretty time consuming. So it no longer makes sense for the miltary to maintain time-wasting rituals, like potato peeling and bugle classes.
That might well be a factor. But it's also true that the cost of recycling old hardware is a big disincentive to upgrade.
In California, and many other places, it's now illegal to just throw old electronics in the trash. So Apple is actually supplying a valuable service.
It's absurd to call that kind of garbling "degrading gracefully" just because it's sort of readable. And the UTF-16 version will be perfectly readable, if the sender remembers to add the correct character type header to the message, as the sender of this UTF-8 message should have. No matter what character set you use, you should always provide the metadata your receiver needs to interpret it correctly. There are many good reasons to favor UTF-8 over UTF-16 — but the fact that it exacts smaller penalties for sloppiness is not one of them.
Every few days I get an email from libraryelf.com, reminding me of what books I have checked out from the public library. All their emails and web pages use UTF-8, which makes sense for the kind of material they're handling. However, they forgot to specify the character set in the email headers. So right now, I book I have out by Arturo Pérez-Reverte is listed as by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. So much for degrading gracefully!
When I said that the early class libraries for Java were screwed up, I wasn't talking about their choice of Unicode. I was talking about the authors of the libraries who made exactly the kind of bytes-are-characters mistakes that you're making. Whether you use UTF-8 or UTF-16, you need to get away from that.
As it says somewhere in the FAQs, Slashdot is a U.S. web site and assumes its readers know stuff that U.S. readers know. And yes, most residential users in the U.S. don't pay per-minute charges for local calls.
The inventors of Java had a the right idea: store all your characters using Unicode, and translate them to the local character set when you do I/O. If you implement this right, programs, are Internationalized by default, even if the programmer doesn't know what Internationalization is. Unfortunately, a lot of early Java class libraries did not implement it right. Worse, a lot of early documentation didn't make this internationalized-by-default feature as clear as it should have. To this day, most Java applications don't get Internationalization right on the first release. And this on a platform that was designed to make it easy!
IANAL, so I can't say authoritatively that this kind of clause will hold up under these circumstances. But stranger stuff has happened.
Oh, grow up. Computer technology is a big topic. I'm sure there's lots of stuff you don't know that would cause other peole to say, "and he think's a technerd (snicker)".
Did you say something?
We're talking about recording. And people do indeed still buy VCRs for that purpose.
The OP is a rude, immature bozo, but he's still right. Using a low-voltage version of the Pentium requires special design skills that you don't need when you use an off-the-shelf PC motherboard.
What's the point? It's not as if Microsoft — or Intel — is ever really penalized for being a monopoly.
I always put something pretentious in the first sentence so dweebs like you know to stop reading. I'd hate to tax your brain!
Actually, ackthcp has a good point, as you'll see if you'll read my response to his post, and somebody else's correction of my response. He is guilty of stating things in a "boy, people are such assholes" style — but that kind of rhetorical excess is standard around here.
In the 80s, everybody knew about 8-bit chips because everybody cut their teeth programming them. Those chips are still around, and still good for this kind of project. But nowadays, software engineers cut their teeth on Pentium-based systems, and mostly don't need to know as much about the underling hardware as 80s engineers did. So yeah, you're right, a certain kind of design is dying.
Yes, balancing usage is a Good Thing. It is, in fact, the whole point of this exercise. That still doesn't eliminate the problem of how you give people a discount for off-peak usage when there's no peak to be off!
The real problem will come when all this load balancing succeeds, and there are no peak times....
Eight track tapes went away because people stopped buying them. People aren't going to stop buying non-DRM hardware without a ban.
That's why they broke up Knight-Ridder, an extremely successful newspaper chain with 20% annual profits. Huge profits or not, other newspaper chains were doing even better. Sorry folks we need to see 30% profits or you're not doing your jobs.
Second, you're talking about banning all DRM-free analog-to-digital hardware. This is extremely cheap and common technology. Maybe you could try banning it, but if it were possible to legislate that kind of thing, the 18th Amendment would never have been repealed!