The city of Seattle couldn't even do a monorail from downtown Seattle to the airport for 11 billion dollars . . . and the airport is only 14 miles away. The tax payers are still paying off that debacle.
Seattle, and Washington in general, is historically bad about getting things done for a decent price because WA is an initiative-governed state with no income tax. For whatever reason, the car tab fees are the first place politicians go when they want money, and every few years the citizens put up another initiative restricting the amount the government can charge for tabs. If the government would get a little creative with where it gets its funding (where "creative" does not mean "go get a bunch of junk bonds where the total interest paid will be 3-4 times the amount borrowed"), they could get stuff done. Unfortunately they only seem to find the revenue sources that are most likely to piss off the voters, and the voters aren't shy about shooting back with initiatives.
And even quoting Bott's highly controversial claims doesn't make the DRM FUD; it's there, and it does use cycles, and would be detrimental for a server kernel if it is using system resources uselessly.
The only cycles used by any DRM code is when you try to play back DRMed content. What are you doing playing video and audio on a server? Vista is to Win2k8 as Win2k Pro was to Win2k Server products, or Xp was to Win2k3. Win2k8 is not a desktop operating system.
As bad as Vista has been doing, this better be a huge upgrade, or 2008 server is setting itself up as a huge flop from the get go.
Vista and Server 2008 have very different target margets, so you can't really judge how Server will do based on Vista's current market performance.
Unless of course they assume that servers are run by professionals who don't need the "allow or deny" pop-ups, and don't watch HD videos with special DRM.
Again with the DRM FUD. I'll point you here rather than repeating myself and others over and over again.
If it has to run as admin then it does not fit my definition of windows compatible; it's only windows runnable and to me that's almost the same class as wine runnable where wine would be the more secure.
Fair enough, but that means the game was just as broken in XP and 2k, as the run-as-admin requirement is not new for Vista. The difference is that the older versions defaulted to always running as admin while Vista doesn't. IMHO, that's a good thing, even if it does expose bad software that was never "windows compatible" in the first place.
Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop?
Because I can? Because it works? Because the laptop runs it quite well and saves me money not having to buy a new laptop (probably in the cards for this year if I get any more dead pixels in the LCD or if my battery starts dying, though)? The laptop is not dual-core, though I did upgrade to 2GB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive (did that back with XP just as a general hardware refresh, not in prep for Vista). Functionality-wise, Aero Glass works perfectly and is properly accelerated on my x300 to keep load off of the CPU (Dell doesn't keep up with the Vista drivers for my laptop anymore, so I have to hack the latest drivers from ATI instead. Note that while the hack tool claims you need to turn off UAC in order to run it, you really only need to run the tool with admin privileges for it to work; yet another case of amateur software developers not "getting it"). The laptop sleeps and resumes properly with Vista like it never did with XP (always had to hibernate, or risk not coming out of sleep at all). I like to play around with writing gadgets for the Sidebar, which isn't available in XP. I would swear that I even get better battery life in Vista than in XP, being able to eek out nearly 3.5 hours of battery life on my 2.5 year old battery that should be hitting its half-life (my last laptop's battery took a nose-dive around year 2), where I was lucky to run for 3 hours in XP with the exact same battery. And I have all of the "expensive" things (Aero, indexing, system restore, etc) running without any impact to performance or battery life, though I don't really know how that's possible:). I even did an upgrade (not a clean install), which is typically a terrible thing to do! Sometimes I think I have a magic Vista installation, since my net experience has been extremely positive where everybody else seems to have a worse experience compared to XP. I get the feeling that my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9300 from 2005) was a popular model with the Windows developers, and may have gotten more focus than other makes and models. Otherwise I can't explain how such an old machine (albeit upgraded) could run Vista so perfectly when so many people claim so many problems with much newer hardware.
So, is it the novelty for you? or does it actually do something better than the OS you were presumably using before you switched?
To be honest, it started out as novelty but now that I've used it for a year and with SP1 on the horizon (next week?), I can't honestly see myself ever going back to XP. What few compatibility issues I've run into have been easily solved either with software updates or by using a different app (I admit that's not always possible, but so far it has been for me). Everything else as mentioned above has been better in Vista than XP, so why would I go back?
(For the record, I'm not a fanboy. I run Linux as well, just not on this machine. See my sig for proof.)
Which rather defeats the point of using an unprivileged user account...
Absolutely, which is why you don't go there unless you start having problems. Honestly, in the year I've been running Vista Soldat is the first game where I've had to run as admin to get it to play (and I only did that to debunk the article, I have no real interest in the game itself) and probably only the second or third time that I've had to use "run as admin" on any application at all (VS2k5 claims that it wants you to run as admin, but it will work perfectly well even if you don't).
Unfortunately, this is the type of behavior you often see from small/independent/FOSS developers who are not necessarily clear on the concept of Windows development best practices (Soldat is a perfect example, as it doesn't even default to the "standard" installation location of %programfiles%). What's annoying is that Soldat has had a year to fix the issue and still hasn't even though they had three releases since Vista shipped (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2). I guess the current work-around is "good enough", but this isn't really something you can blame on Microsoft and Vista -- Soldat would've failed just as spectacularly if you had tried to play it in XP with a low-privilege account. The only difference is that Vista makes it easy to use a low-privilege account day-to-day and XP didn't.
I couldn't play Icewind Dale II in Windows XP. There are issues with many laptop input drivers screwing with the keyboard in that game. I couldn't resolve the problem, so I switched to linux, copied the Icewind Dale II directory, which was patched and had a no-CD crack, and it runs swimmingly. The only issue is that my linux cursor still shows on top of the game, but I rarely notice it.
I never got into the Windy Dale games, but the Baldur's Gate games work just fine on my Vista-running laptop (and in XP before I installed Vista). Windy Dale II still uses the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate (though obviously updated), so I'm surprised it doesn't work for you.
I also remember trying to play Escape From Monkey Island(tm) in Windows XP, but there was this one part of the game that you couldn't get past (rowing up to Pegnose Pete's swamp shack). When playing The Curse of Monkey Island(tm), the cut-scenes would blaze past in seconds. I had to install Windows 98 to play the games. Compatibility mode didn't cut it. Other games that won't work in XP are Myst and Riven.
I had no problem with Escape From Monkey Island under XP (haven't gone back to play it under Vista), no compatibility switches required. For older Monkey Islands, ScummVM is the way to go. Grim Fandango (EFMI updated the Lua engine from GF) worked great in XP as well, though I did suffer an occasional crash.
Like you, I'm using a laptop (mine from Dell), and aside from having to hack official video drivers in order to get the latest updates I've had no problems with drivers.
Start explorer, go to soldat directory, open soldat.exe properties. Set compatibility to Windows XP/SP2, disable Aero for this program, run as admin.
You may have gone a bit overboard here. You should try just right-clicking and running as admin first before you change compatibility settings. That works for me on my 32-bit Vista installation, but perhaps you need the compatibility switches for x64. Still, I'd always try "run as admin" as the first troubleshooting step before going for appcompat switches.
This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.
Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?
Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.
That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.
For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.
Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.
I hate to play the tinfoil hat card here, but it's never been explicitly proven that these guys really did try and mount an offense. Seems a lot of the material pertaining to that situation was not released in it's entirety.
Does it matter? Whether or not the passengers on United 93 fought back, any future hijacking attempt will meet with passenger resistance. That's the point the OP was trying to make, with United 93 being just a perhaps less-than-successful example.
What is this bizarre obsession with screen pixel dimensions? Non-scalable interfaces are so 2002, and the misuse of "VGA" makes baby Jeebus cry.
In the mobile market, the only scalable interface is the iPhone (by virtue of being OS X, and thus using DisplayPDF for everything). Everything else is bitmap-based, and thus it's very important to keep track of all of the different pixel dimensions in order to have a useful, useable, good-looking interface. Does it suck? Sure, it'd be great if everything used a vector-based, scalable UI that was resolution-independent, but that's not life as we know it today.
Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.
On the other hand, allowing for multiple interfaces dramatically increases your test matrix. There are some de facto standards in the world of mobile computing (screen sizes, soft buttons, numerical keypads, etc) and if you can work out the minimal number of interfaces you need to support for those you'll be in a much better place. Display-wise, most phone displays are either quarter-VGA (320x240 or 240x320) or full-VGA (640x480 or 480x640), with only a few oddballs to deal with (the iPhone is 480x320, Palm OS-based devices are generally 320x320, and the Blackberry Pearl is a strange 240x260). For the interface, non-touch models typically have two "soft" buttons and at least a numeric keypad (qwerty keypads still include numeric functions), so you can rely on those as common-denominator. Touch models generally use a stylus except for the iPhone, though if you design your interface right you might allow for some finger-based navigation (while the address bar and navigation buttons could be big enough to allow for finger access, you'll still need a stylus for page-internal items like hyperlinks if the phone is not able to accurately resolve a finger press like the iPhone).
The way I see it, they're probably going to need three interfaces:
Non-touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Standard, Symbian, Blackberry, and Linux devices. Designing for quarter-VGA would be sufficient, as quarter-VGA can easily scale to full VGA.
Touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices (are there any Symbian, Blackberry, or Linux devices with touch screens?). The touch interface could probably just copy the non-touch interface, though it would be nice to have a targetted interface for touch interactions.
Touch 480x320 for iPhone, due to the awkward resolution (neither quarter-VGA or VGA) and the extra functionality available through the iPhone touch interface (multi-touch, gestures, etc)
All interfaces would need to work in both landscape and portrait mode, for devices that can switch (iPhone, HTC Tilt, etc). Considering that the interface will almost certainly just be XUL in any case, I'm sure you'll still have enough leeway to hack it yourself as you feel appropriate. At that point you're modifying at your own risk and your personal changes don't have to fit into the official test matrices.
Yeah, but the Dalai Lama does, in fact, make moral pronouncements. And people disagree with the Dalai Lama. But they seem to do it in ways that aren't so viscious, eh?
The Dalai Lama's "moral pronouncements" generally take the tone of him explaining a personal belief (for example, a pronouncement against the death penalty effectively says he "believes" that the death penalty is immoral, and says nothing more about whether or not you should believe the same). Contrast that with papal declarations and I think you can reason out why people viciously attack the Pope and not the Dalai Lama.
If the Pope had said, "I believe that human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and artificial insemination are wrong," that would be one thing. Instead, he essentially said that any "man of good will" must believe that those things are an "affront to human dignity". Maybe it's all a matter of semantics and style, but if that's the case then the Pope really needs some lessons in public speaking.
Note: I'm neither Catholic nor Buddhist. I'm simply showing why it's silly to claim that the Pope is the same as the Dalai Lama.
Lets try a thought experiment: pretent that the Dalai Lama had spoken the Pope's words. Are those words more or less palatible based on who says them?
Red herring. The Dalai Lama would never say anything like that, because Buddhism as a "religion" is not about telling people what's good or bad ("religion" in quotes because buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion). The Pope believes he has some moral authority, given by God, to guide his "flock" (that is, Catholics). It's his job to make moral pronouncements like this, regardless of how stupid or ignorant they may be.
You don't even need to be religious to see that the commodization of human life, to say nothing of unfettered transhumanism, are not, on their face, good things.
On the other hand, if stem cell research (embryonic or otherwise) can lead to cures for diseases, help the paralyzed walk, etc, how is that a bad thing? Nobody's saying that we should be cloning half-human, half-pony monsters or anything like that, but if splicing some human genes into a mouse will help us better understand how diseases affect humans so that we can prevent or cure the diseases, then I say go for it!
A final thought: if there was the slightest chance that, by a snap of the fingers, I could remove all the harm to others attributed to the Roman Catholic Church, I'd do it - and I'm Catholic. Unfortunately, none of the evils attributed to Catholicism in particular or religion in general would disappear. So the cause must be elsewhere.
Catholicism is just one of many religions, so of course "curing" Catholicism of all of its ills wouldn't rid the world of the problems of religion. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems with the Catholic church, just that there are problems with pretty much every other religion as well (although the Catholic church is by far the most pedophilic religious institution around, stemming from its insane rules preventing priests from marrying -- getting rid of the church wouldn't get rid of pedophilia, but it would remove one of the most institutionalized sources of the problem).
Re:My top annoyance with Vista? It ain't in the OS
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Windows Vista Annoyances
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· Score: 2, Informative
It took them +-5 years to rewrite the whole OS and it's only an incremental advance over the last release?
The notion that Vista took ~5 years is a fallacy. During those first few years, much of the Windows team was focused on the security push and XP SP2. What few teams were left on Longhorn (as it was called at the time) were mostly without direction. Once XP SP2 shipped and teams started focusing back on Longhorn, it was clear that things had gotten out of hand and they implemented the famous Longhorn Reset. That brought the codebase back to Windows Server 2003 as the base and essentially started Vista over from scratch. That was in mid-2004, which means Vista actually only took 2.5-3 years to write and was definitely not a complete rewrite of the whole OS (though portions did get a full rewrite, like the driver model).
I've never worked at a software company where something like that wouldn't get a few teams fired.
You don't think they didn't? It's been argued that Jim Allchin's departure from Microsoft was a direct consequence of the Vista debacle. Otherwise, the firing or re-purposing of lower level employees isn't something that really makes the news. From the external point of view, of course it looks like everything's the same.
But they're writing a new version of Windows for the next release too (MinWin or WinMin or whatever their codename for the kernel is
I really don't think you understand what MinWin is. The ability to strip down the OS to its bare essentials has been available in various forms at least since Windows XP Embedded (if not earlier), and I'd be very surprised if MinWin is not working from that base. It's not a rewrite so much as it's a re-restructuring of the Windows architecture to facilitate more modular uses of the core platform.
personally I don't know why they don't just call it DarWin and be honest for once about who they've been copying on-and-off for the past 20 years).
And Apple's copied just as much from Microsoft. Many of the features in OS X were directly lifted from early plans and betas of Vista/Longhorn. The only difference was that Apple was able to execute quickly and ship product while Microsoft floundered. Only time will tell if the same will happen with Windows 7, but I think Microsoft may have learned its lesson the hard way this time around and will really surprise everybody with Win7.
While that's useful to know, you have to know what provider your contacts are using rather than just knowing their phone number. If your friends change providers (this happens more than you'd expect, especially since number portability became possible a few years back), you have to keep track of that. Even then, when the message sent through the gateway always comes from the same phone number. Depending on how your phone shows incoming messages, it may not be clear who the message is from. It's impossible to directly call the person sending you a message through the gateway (you'll have to dig through your contacts to find the person with the associated name/email address in the SMS body), which at least for me is an important feature to have.
At least for me, SMS is used exactly as it sounds -- short messages, not long conversations, usually along the lines of "Let's meet up <somewhere>" with a short acknowledgement sent in reply (if at all). An average SMS session for me consists of 2-6 messages, depending on whether or not several replies are needed. Anything more than that and I'd rather send an email or physically call the person. I realize that I'm probably not a typical SMS user, but even so I'd much rather have cheap SMS available than always going through an email-to-SMS gateway.
I expect that the iPhone is actually being "sold" a bit at a time over the course of the mandatory 2-year contract
Just FYI, the iPhone does not have a mandatory 2-year contract. While it's true that if you're a new AT&T subscriber you need to sign up for a 2-year contract for an iPhone (other phones have 1-year contract options if you're willing to pay more for the handset), if you're already a customer with a voice plan that is out of contract you don't have to lock yourself into another 2 years unless you change plans. The data plan piggybacks on your existing voice plan for $20/mo with no contract term required. I know this first-hand, because I'm a 6.5-year Cingular/AT&T customer who purchased an iPhone a couple months ago without having to roll a brand new contract. I'm still month-to-month on my no-longer-available-for-new-subscribers plan, as I have been for the last 4.5 years.
Yes, Apple does get some bit of my monthly payment, but that's money out of AT&T's pocket and I'm not contractually obligated to stay with AT&T for any longer than I desire. The iPhone itself is a pretty compelling reason to stick around, coupled with the fact that AT&T is the best GSM provider in my area, but if for some reason I wanted or needed to change I could do so tomorrow without any repurcussions.
Wow, you've completely missed the point. In an academic setting, especially for undergrad courses where the students are still learning, yes, you should absolutely reinvent the wheel 1000 times (at least once per student), because by reinventing the wheel they learn how and why the wheel works. Once you know how and why a data structure works, feel free to use a library implementation instead of writing your own. However if you're taking a class about data structures, using a library implementation of a list or dictionary only teaches you how to use that library's implementation. It doesn't teach you why list access time is linear, or why appending/prepending is constant, or anything about the data structure itself. Sure, you can talk about theory all you like, but most students won't "get it" until you make them put that theory into actual code.
In the professional world, you're correct. I absolutely want someone who is willing to reuse code from others rather than reinventing the wheel. At the same time, I want someone who understands data structures, when to use different structures, and why. I obviously wouldn't want my programmers spending all of their time writing lists and trees, but I want them to understand when to use them, and you're just not going to get that level of knowledge by using collection libraries without ever writing the data structures yourself at least once.
Seriously, the "Watch Instantly" selection sucks. I have 24hr/mo and I think I've used maybe 24 hours since I signed up for the service 6 months ago.
I'm in a similar situation to you. I've watched a few streaming videos from Netflix (BBC's The Office, Super Size Me, Maxed Out, and a few others), but most of the items in my queue are not available for streaming. Even when they are, it's not a comfortable way for me to watch videos. I'm in the minority of folks with a Windows Media Center PC connected to my TV, and most of the time when I want to watch videos on a PC I either watch them through Media Center or stream them to my Xbox 360. In either case, I get a nice full-screen display on my TV with standard media functionality (FF/Rew/Pause/etc) via remote control. To stream a Netflix movie, I have to dig out my PC's keyboard and mouse and watch from a browser. While I can still play the movie full-screen, I can't fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or start with a remote control, and that sucks. I realize LG is planning a set top box specifically for Netflix, but I really don't want yet another box in my media cabinet.
Any building in Redmond. Microsoft puts programmers in offices so they have a chance at concentrating.
They also put one or two (I've even heard of three or four) other people in there with you when you're new (sometimes even when you've got a lot of seniority, depending on the team and the building). An office with three developers may or may not be worse than a cubicle all to yourself (though a cubicle with a cube-mate is the worst of all).
When I came through Java was still pretty new, but I did take a java course, and found it reminded me a more of Pascal than C/C++; I'd say its a good starter language.
Java is also a lousy "beginners" language, because its reliance on standard libraries leads beginners to look for pre-packaged solutions rather than writing their own. That was one of the main arguments against Java in the paper, and it was a problem even a decade ago when my school was transitioning beginners classes to Java (I was ahead of the change by a semester or two in each class, so I got to start from Scheme, learn data structures in C++, learn AI in Lisp, etc). Yes, in the "real world" you don't want everybody reimplimenting their own linked list or hashtable. However a beginner must learn the concepts behind those data structures in order to advance, and Java just makes it too easy to use the standard set of classes.
That's not to say that Java is all bad. With a good teacher and a good curriculum, it's absolutely possible to teach core concepts in Java (or any language, really). You have to be merciless about banning standard library usage such as collections, and teach your students the theory behind those data structures. People understand theory best when they can actually see it in practice, so you have to have your students implement their own linked lists, doubly linked lists, trees, etc. With Java it's an uphill battle getting people to ignore the standard libraries for "academic" purposes, but it's possible to do.
Personally, I'm thankful that my first real programming language (not counting BASIC in its various forms) was Scheme, and that I was exposed to a number of languages through my college career (the afore-mentioned Scheme, C/C++, and Lisp, as well as ML, Java, and MIPS assembly) even though my current day job consists of C# and SQL. Because of my background, I can easily pick up pretty much any language (and have done so several times), which gives me an advantage over those "programmers" churned out of today's Java-mill universities.
I remember seeing something like that at the Illinois State Fair probably 15+ years ago. They were focusing on biodegradable plastic bags made from corn, but it's the same concept. Unfortunately nothing much really came from that, and I doubt much will come from this. For now, it's a novelty material used for products purchased by the hyper-environmentally conscious. Plastic bags and wraps are a far cry from a hard disk able to withstand the rotational forces in play with Blu-Ray drives. Maybe they'll get there, maybe they won't, but I'm not going to hold my breath hoping that Sony et al will use this when traditional disks are currently so cheap. Maybe if oil ran out it would be a concern, but there are much larger issues to deal with first beyond plastic materials (such as how you're going to power your Blu-Ray player and TV, for example:). Besides, even with biodegradable material, there's still waste (how long does it take the material to fully degrade?), while with online downloads there's just bits on the wire and on a hard drive.
I think online DVD purchasing is not really viable at the moment since most people don't have a fast enough internet connection to make it work. There's a user friendliness issue too - people would presumably need to install special software to handle the download and enforce the DRM. And PCs are much too hackable for this sort of application because it only takes one person with a bit of reverse engineering experience and any DRM can be cracked. Plus most people don't like watching movies on their PCs. Certainly my parents generation would never do so, even though they're quite happy with a DVD player. They're not interested in watching movies more than once too.
A set-top box would be the way to go, like the announced Netflix box, AppleTV, the Xbox 360, or even a Tivo. That gives you the comfortable living room TV aspect as well as keeping the content away from a hackable device like a PC. The problem will be one of standardization. Nobody wants to have three or four boxes in order to play movies from different sources. Cable and satellite operators will probably "win" this one, with on demand content sent to boxes the customer already has. In fact they're already doing this today (at least in the US). Personally, I like my Xbox 360 since I can play games, purchase TV shows and movies, or stream my own content from my network (the PS3 can do two of those three right now), but I don't expect the Xbox 360 to appeal to non-gamers. Instead, I could absolutely see Microsoft shipping a low-cost hardware solution based on the Xbox 360 but with only media functionality (Video Marketplace and network streaming). If you could buy something like that for $100-200, put it in your parents' living room (the 360 works great with media remote controls, either those specifically for the Xbox 360 or for Media Center PCs), and hook it up to a home server with all of their DVDs ripped to disk, that's probably the best of all options. If that same box could also receive your TV (via IPTV over FIOS, for example), even better. Obviously they'd need broadband in order to purchase content online, but broadband availability and adoption is increasing rapidly.
I can vaguely imagine it working with cell phones though, provided bandwidth was cheap enough. You could stream the video too, so the handsets stay affordable. Cell phones are much harder to crack than PCs. And at least in Asia people are used to watching video on their cell phones. Admittedly that's broadcast TV and mostly because it is free. And cell phones don't really seem like a good platform for watching movies.
I used my iPhone on a flight recently to watch a couple TV show episodes, and while it was convenient I absolutely would not replace my 50" big screen TV with an iPhone any time soon. I wouldn't want to tie a m
Second, downloads will not compete with blu-ray in this country. Sadly, there isn't going to be a great adoption of high speed internet for many years even if everything goes perfectly, which it will not. People with 1080p sets will want pictures that are enormous. 10gb minimum. The average home cannot download a movie of that quality very quickly, and the netflix model of distributing movies is much more efficient. Anyway, every expert in this industry is desperate to sell movies in HD capacities. Toshiba, Sony, and many others have spent billions. You think they are all wrong, but I haven't seen any reasons that justify your ideas. You really think every studio will make their entire library open online? And that enough people will download online to pay the kind of money we're talking about? And what about the royalties that the WGA is demanding? I think the studios worry their pie is smaller, and their cut is also smaller, with online distro.
You don't say what country you're referring to in regards to broadband adoption, so I'll just assume you're talking about the US. Here in the States, there's a disconnect between urban/suburban and rural areas with respect to broadband, but that gap is slowly closing with DSL technologies working farther and farther away from COs, long-distance wireless, and fiber rollouts (I grew up in a rural area, and even my parents have broadband now thanks to long-distance wireless from the town 5 miles away). That combined with the fact that much of the population is in urban/suburban areas where broadband is available means that most of the market can get movies online if they were available.
On distribution speed, nothing's ever going to beat the convenience of driving to your local Blockbuster (assuming you have a local movie rental place, anyway) and picking up a disk. That said, I can download a ~5GB 720p movie off of Xbox Live in about a day on my 6mpbs cable line, while Netflix takes two days to get me a new movie (even with a local distribution center, it takes a day to get there and a day to get back), so I can definitely see online distribution taking over the Netflix/Blockbuster Online model. Sure, I'm "only" getting a 720p copy off of Xbox Live, but my TV is 720p and most HD disk material is natively 720p as well so it's not like I'm losing anything. That means it's a race between 1080p as a distribution standard and bandwidth increases allowing me to still download movies in about a day.
And finally, I don't think studios are going to be too concerned over their cut, since online movie distribution generally follows a rental pattern. You pay $5, and you can keep the movie for 2 weeks (some work needs to be done on the current licensing, as Xbox Live has a lame "2 weeks or 24 hours after first play" restriction that is too limiting -- bump the "after first play restriction" to 3 days or even drop it entirely and people will be much happier). Maybe I'm atypical, but I'm not a big movie purchaser. Once I've seen a movie once, that's enough for me. I own maybe a dozen DVDs of movies or TV series that I actually cared to keep, but the vast majority is a one-time-only deal. Given the prevalence of movie rentals, I suspect I'm not alone.
As far as Sony losing in online distribution, I think that's also a bit silly. Sony knows how to sell songs and movies. And it just doesn't take a lot of awesome technology, beyond sheer server strength, to distribute content. If the PS3 continues to outsell the 360, they are going to do fine selling movies online.
I was referring more to the interface and availability rather than raw capacity. As a marketplace, Xbox Live is very appealing because it presents everything to you in a logical way. PSN is more haphazard, acting as a simple web page in the PS3 browser. Unless you're using a mouse and keyboard on your PS3 (which you can, though it's a bit annoying to do so from a couch), the Xbox Live interface is much easier to navigate and
E.g. Netflix could send out disks which would become unplayable at the end of the rental period so you wouldn't need to return them. As far as I can tell the costs of producing a disk is negligable for DVD and CD and will probably become so for BlueRay and HDVD. So most of the cost is essentially an IP rights license. That implies that you could sell limited duration licenses to people for less than the perpetual one they normally get with a pressed disk.
First, there is no "rental period" with Netflix, and if they ever implemented such a thing they'd lose a large number of subscribers. The beauty of Netflix is that you can keep a disk as long as you like with no real repurcussions (sure, you can't get the next disk in your queue until you return the current one, but with a 3-, 4-, or 5-out plan that's not a huge deal and is sure better than outrageous late fees).
Second, what are you going to do with all of those now-useless disks? As far as I know we don't have a reliable, biodegradable material out of which to make these disks, which means we're just going to fill up landfills with these. That was a huge component of the DIVX backlash, and any future scheme must have a solution for that up front or it's doomed to fail.
But why worry about it? If there is market for time limited movies then you're free to ignore them. And if there isn't a market for them it isn't an issue. And it's odd that the same people who complain that 'the MAFIAA' should be innovating new delivery models rather than litigating tend to complain about things like DIVX, which is an example of them doing exactly that.
DIVX already proved there's no market for this, and trying it again isn't really all that productive. People who want the MPAA/RIAA to innovate want actual innovation, not rehashes of already-failed schemes. Cable on-demand programs, time limited DRMed online purchases, Xbox Live Video Marketplace, etc are all examples of viable approaches of innovating in content delivery. DIVX is a horrible, horrible failure.
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Seattle, and Washington in general, is historically bad about getting things done for a decent price because WA is an initiative-governed state with no income tax. For whatever reason, the car tab fees are the first place politicians go when they want money, and every few years the citizens put up another initiative restricting the amount the government can charge for tabs. If the government would get a little creative with where it gets its funding (where "creative" does not mean "go get a bunch of junk bonds where the total interest paid will be 3-4 times the amount borrowed"), they could get stuff done. Unfortunately they only seem to find the revenue sources that are most likely to piss off the voters, and the voters aren't shy about shooting back with initiatives.
The only cycles used by any DRM code is when you try to play back DRMed content. What are you doing playing video and audio on a server? Vista is to Win2k8 as Win2k Pro was to Win2k Server products, or Xp was to Win2k3. Win2k8 is not a desktop operating system.
Vista and Server 2008 have very different target margets, so you can't really judge how Server will do based on Vista's current market performance.
Again with the DRM FUD. I'll point you here rather than repeating myself and others over and over again.
Fair enough, but that means the game was just as broken in XP and 2k, as the run-as-admin requirement is not new for Vista. The difference is that the older versions defaulted to always running as admin while Vista doesn't. IMHO, that's a good thing, even if it does expose bad software that was never "windows compatible" in the first place.
Because I can? Because it works? Because the laptop runs it quite well and saves me money not having to buy a new laptop (probably in the cards for this year if I get any more dead pixels in the LCD or if my battery starts dying, though)? The laptop is not dual-core, though I did upgrade to 2GB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive (did that back with XP just as a general hardware refresh, not in prep for Vista). Functionality-wise, Aero Glass works perfectly and is properly accelerated on my x300 to keep load off of the CPU (Dell doesn't keep up with the Vista drivers for my laptop anymore, so I have to hack the latest drivers from ATI instead. Note that while the hack tool claims you need to turn off UAC in order to run it, you really only need to run the tool with admin privileges for it to work; yet another case of amateur software developers not "getting it"). The laptop sleeps and resumes properly with Vista like it never did with XP (always had to hibernate, or risk not coming out of sleep at all). I like to play around with writing gadgets for the Sidebar, which isn't available in XP. I would swear that I even get better battery life in Vista than in XP, being able to eek out nearly 3.5 hours of battery life on my 2.5 year old battery that should be hitting its half-life (my last laptop's battery took a nose-dive around year 2), where I was lucky to run for 3 hours in XP with the exact same battery. And I have all of the "expensive" things (Aero, indexing, system restore, etc) running without any impact to performance or battery life, though I don't really know how that's possible :). I even did an upgrade (not a clean install), which is typically a terrible thing to do! Sometimes I think I have a magic Vista installation, since my net experience has been extremely positive where everybody else seems to have a worse experience compared to XP. I get the feeling that my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9300 from 2005) was a popular model with the Windows developers, and may have gotten more focus than other makes and models. Otherwise I can't explain how such an old machine (albeit upgraded) could run Vista so perfectly when so many people claim so many problems with much newer hardware.
To be honest, it started out as novelty but now that I've used it for a year and with SP1 on the horizon (next week?), I can't honestly see myself ever going back to XP. What few compatibility issues I've run into have been easily solved either with software updates or by using a different app (I admit that's not always possible, but so far it has been for me). Everything else as mentioned above has been better in Vista than XP, so why would I go back?
(For the record, I'm not a fanboy. I run Linux as well, just not on this machine. See my sig for proof.)
Absolutely, which is why you don't go there unless you start having problems. Honestly, in the year I've been running Vista Soldat is the first game where I've had to run as admin to get it to play (and I only did that to debunk the article, I have no real interest in the game itself) and probably only the second or third time that I've had to use "run as admin" on any application at all (VS2k5 claims that it wants you to run as admin, but it will work perfectly well even if you don't).
Unfortunately, this is the type of behavior you often see from small/independent/FOSS developers who are not necessarily clear on the concept of Windows development best practices (Soldat is a perfect example, as it doesn't even default to the "standard" installation location of %programfiles%). What's annoying is that Soldat has had a year to fix the issue and still hasn't even though they had three releases since Vista shipped (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2). I guess the current work-around is "good enough", but this isn't really something you can blame on Microsoft and Vista -- Soldat would've failed just as spectacularly if you had tried to play it in XP with a low-privilege account. The only difference is that Vista makes it easy to use a low-privilege account day-to-day and XP didn't.
I never got into the Windy Dale games, but the Baldur's Gate games work just fine on my Vista-running laptop (and in XP before I installed Vista). Windy Dale II still uses the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate (though obviously updated), so I'm surprised it doesn't work for you.
I had no problem with Escape From Monkey Island under XP (haven't gone back to play it under Vista), no compatibility switches required. For older Monkey Islands, ScummVM is the way to go. Grim Fandango (EFMI updated the Lua engine from GF) worked great in XP as well, though I did suffer an occasional crash.
Like you, I'm using a laptop (mine from Dell), and aside from having to hack official video drivers in order to get the latest updates I've had no problems with drivers.
You may have gone a bit overboard here. You should try just right-clicking and running as admin first before you change compatibility settings. That works for me on my 32-bit Vista installation, but perhaps you need the compatibility switches for x64. Still, I'd always try "run as admin" as the first troubleshooting step before going for appcompat switches.
This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.
Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?
- Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
- I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
- I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
- I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.
That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.
Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.
Does it matter? Whether or not the passengers on United 93 fought back, any future hijacking attempt will meet with passenger resistance. That's the point the OP was trying to make, with United 93 being just a perhaps less-than-successful example.
In the mobile market, the only scalable interface is the iPhone (by virtue of being OS X, and thus using DisplayPDF for everything). Everything else is bitmap-based, and thus it's very important to keep track of all of the different pixel dimensions in order to have a useful, useable, good-looking interface. Does it suck? Sure, it'd be great if everything used a vector-based, scalable UI that was resolution-independent, but that's not life as we know it today.
On the other hand, allowing for multiple interfaces dramatically increases your test matrix. There are some de facto standards in the world of mobile computing (screen sizes, soft buttons, numerical keypads, etc) and if you can work out the minimal number of interfaces you need to support for those you'll be in a much better place. Display-wise, most phone displays are either quarter-VGA (320x240 or 240x320) or full-VGA (640x480 or 480x640), with only a few oddballs to deal with (the iPhone is 480x320, Palm OS-based devices are generally 320x320, and the Blackberry Pearl is a strange 240x260). For the interface, non-touch models typically have two "soft" buttons and at least a numeric keypad (qwerty keypads still include numeric functions), so you can rely on those as common-denominator. Touch models generally use a stylus except for the iPhone, though if you design your interface right you might allow for some finger-based navigation (while the address bar and navigation buttons could be big enough to allow for finger access, you'll still need a stylus for page-internal items like hyperlinks if the phone is not able to accurately resolve a finger press like the iPhone).
The way I see it, they're probably going to need three interfaces:
- Non-touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Standard, Symbian, Blackberry, and Linux devices. Designing for quarter-VGA would be sufficient, as quarter-VGA can easily scale to full VGA.
- Touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices (are there any Symbian, Blackberry, or Linux devices with touch screens?). The touch interface could probably just copy the non-touch interface, though it would be nice to have a targetted interface for touch interactions.
- Touch 480x320 for iPhone, due to the awkward resolution (neither quarter-VGA or VGA) and the extra functionality available through the iPhone touch interface (multi-touch, gestures, etc)
All interfaces would need to work in both landscape and portrait mode, for devices that can switch (iPhone, HTC Tilt, etc). Considering that the interface will almost certainly just be XUL in any case, I'm sure you'll still have enough leeway to hack it yourself as you feel appropriate. At that point you're modifying at your own risk and your personal changes don't have to fit into the official test matrices.The Dalai Lama's "moral pronouncements" generally take the tone of him explaining a personal belief (for example, a pronouncement against the death penalty effectively says he "believes" that the death penalty is immoral, and says nothing more about whether or not you should believe the same). Contrast that with papal declarations and I think you can reason out why people viciously attack the Pope and not the Dalai Lama.
If the Pope had said, "I believe that human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and artificial insemination are wrong," that would be one thing. Instead, he essentially said that any "man of good will" must believe that those things are an "affront to human dignity". Maybe it's all a matter of semantics and style, but if that's the case then the Pope really needs some lessons in public speaking.
Note: I'm neither Catholic nor Buddhist. I'm simply showing why it's silly to claim that the Pope is the same as the Dalai Lama.
Red herring. The Dalai Lama would never say anything like that, because Buddhism as a "religion" is not about telling people what's good or bad ("religion" in quotes because buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion). The Pope believes he has some moral authority, given by God, to guide his "flock" (that is, Catholics). It's his job to make moral pronouncements like this, regardless of how stupid or ignorant they may be.
On the other hand, if stem cell research (embryonic or otherwise) can lead to cures for diseases, help the paralyzed walk, etc, how is that a bad thing? Nobody's saying that we should be cloning half-human, half-pony monsters or anything like that, but if splicing some human genes into a mouse will help us better understand how diseases affect humans so that we can prevent or cure the diseases, then I say go for it!
Catholicism is just one of many religions, so of course "curing" Catholicism of all of its ills wouldn't rid the world of the problems of religion. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems with the Catholic church, just that there are problems with pretty much every other religion as well (although the Catholic church is by far the most pedophilic religious institution around, stemming from its insane rules preventing priests from marrying -- getting rid of the church wouldn't get rid of pedophilia, but it would remove one of the most institutionalized sources of the problem).
The notion that Vista took ~5 years is a fallacy. During those first few years, much of the Windows team was focused on the security push and XP SP2. What few teams were left on Longhorn (as it was called at the time) were mostly without direction. Once XP SP2 shipped and teams started focusing back on Longhorn, it was clear that things had gotten out of hand and they implemented the famous Longhorn Reset. That brought the codebase back to Windows Server 2003 as the base and essentially started Vista over from scratch. That was in mid-2004, which means Vista actually only took 2.5-3 years to write and was definitely not a complete rewrite of the whole OS (though portions did get a full rewrite, like the driver model).
You don't think they didn't? It's been argued that Jim Allchin's departure from Microsoft was a direct consequence of the Vista debacle. Otherwise, the firing or re-purposing of lower level employees isn't something that really makes the news. From the external point of view, of course it looks like everything's the same.
I really don't think you understand what MinWin is. The ability to strip down the OS to its bare essentials has been available in various forms at least since Windows XP Embedded (if not earlier), and I'd be very surprised if MinWin is not working from that base. It's not a rewrite so much as it's a re-restructuring of the Windows architecture to facilitate more modular uses of the core platform.
And Apple's copied just as much from Microsoft. Many of the features in OS X were directly lifted from early plans and betas of Vista/Longhorn. The only difference was that Apple was able to execute quickly and ship product while Microsoft floundered. Only time will tell if the same will happen with Windows 7, but I think Microsoft may have learned its lesson the hard way this time around and will really surprise everybody with Win7.
While that's useful to know, you have to know what provider your contacts are using rather than just knowing their phone number. If your friends change providers (this happens more than you'd expect, especially since number portability became possible a few years back), you have to keep track of that. Even then, when the message sent through the gateway always comes from the same phone number. Depending on how your phone shows incoming messages, it may not be clear who the message is from. It's impossible to directly call the person sending you a message through the gateway (you'll have to dig through your contacts to find the person with the associated name/email address in the SMS body), which at least for me is an important feature to have.
At least for me, SMS is used exactly as it sounds -- short messages, not long conversations, usually along the lines of "Let's meet up <somewhere>" with a short acknowledgement sent in reply (if at all). An average SMS session for me consists of 2-6 messages, depending on whether or not several replies are needed. Anything more than that and I'd rather send an email or physically call the person. I realize that I'm probably not a typical SMS user, but even so I'd much rather have cheap SMS available than always going through an email-to-SMS gateway.
Just FYI, the iPhone does not have a mandatory 2-year contract. While it's true that if you're a new AT&T subscriber you need to sign up for a 2-year contract for an iPhone (other phones have 1-year contract options if you're willing to pay more for the handset), if you're already a customer with a voice plan that is out of contract you don't have to lock yourself into another 2 years unless you change plans. The data plan piggybacks on your existing voice plan for $20/mo with no contract term required. I know this first-hand, because I'm a 6.5-year Cingular/AT&T customer who purchased an iPhone a couple months ago without having to roll a brand new contract. I'm still month-to-month on my no-longer-available-for-new-subscribers plan, as I have been for the last 4.5 years.
Yes, Apple does get some bit of my monthly payment, but that's money out of AT&T's pocket and I'm not contractually obligated to stay with AT&T for any longer than I desire. The iPhone itself is a pretty compelling reason to stick around, coupled with the fact that AT&T is the best GSM provider in my area, but if for some reason I wanted or needed to change I could do so tomorrow without any repurcussions.
You don't recall very well. The simulation was and is still a Java applet, not a Flash animation.
Wow, you've completely missed the point. In an academic setting, especially for undergrad courses where the students are still learning, yes, you should absolutely reinvent the wheel 1000 times (at least once per student), because by reinventing the wheel they learn how and why the wheel works. Once you know how and why a data structure works, feel free to use a library implementation instead of writing your own. However if you're taking a class about data structures, using a library implementation of a list or dictionary only teaches you how to use that library's implementation. It doesn't teach you why list access time is linear, or why appending/prepending is constant, or anything about the data structure itself. Sure, you can talk about theory all you like, but most students won't "get it" until you make them put that theory into actual code.
In the professional world, you're correct. I absolutely want someone who is willing to reuse code from others rather than reinventing the wheel. At the same time, I want someone who understands data structures, when to use different structures, and why. I obviously wouldn't want my programmers spending all of their time writing lists and trees, but I want them to understand when to use them, and you're just not going to get that level of knowledge by using collection libraries without ever writing the data structures yourself at least once.
I'm in a similar situation to you. I've watched a few streaming videos from Netflix (BBC's The Office, Super Size Me, Maxed Out, and a few others), but most of the items in my queue are not available for streaming. Even when they are, it's not a comfortable way for me to watch videos. I'm in the minority of folks with a Windows Media Center PC connected to my TV, and most of the time when I want to watch videos on a PC I either watch them through Media Center or stream them to my Xbox 360. In either case, I get a nice full-screen display on my TV with standard media functionality (FF/Rew/Pause/etc) via remote control. To stream a Netflix movie, I have to dig out my PC's keyboard and mouse and watch from a browser. While I can still play the movie full-screen, I can't fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or start with a remote control, and that sucks. I realize LG is planning a set top box specifically for Netflix, but I really don't want yet another box in my media cabinet.
They also put one or two (I've even heard of three or four) other people in there with you when you're new (sometimes even when you've got a lot of seniority, depending on the team and the building). An office with three developers may or may not be worse than a cubicle all to yourself (though a cubicle with a cube-mate is the worst of all).
Java is also a lousy "beginners" language, because its reliance on standard libraries leads beginners to look for pre-packaged solutions rather than writing their own. That was one of the main arguments against Java in the paper, and it was a problem even a decade ago when my school was transitioning beginners classes to Java (I was ahead of the change by a semester or two in each class, so I got to start from Scheme, learn data structures in C++, learn AI in Lisp, etc). Yes, in the "real world" you don't want everybody reimplimenting their own linked list or hashtable. However a beginner must learn the concepts behind those data structures in order to advance, and Java just makes it too easy to use the standard set of classes.
That's not to say that Java is all bad. With a good teacher and a good curriculum, it's absolutely possible to teach core concepts in Java (or any language, really). You have to be merciless about banning standard library usage such as collections, and teach your students the theory behind those data structures. People understand theory best when they can actually see it in practice, so you have to have your students implement their own linked lists, doubly linked lists, trees, etc. With Java it's an uphill battle getting people to ignore the standard libraries for "academic" purposes, but it's possible to do.
Personally, I'm thankful that my first real programming language (not counting BASIC in its various forms) was Scheme, and that I was exposed to a number of languages through my college career (the afore-mentioned Scheme, C/C++, and Lisp, as well as ML, Java, and MIPS assembly) even though my current day job consists of C# and SQL. Because of my background, I can easily pick up pretty much any language (and have done so several times), which gives me an advantage over those "programmers" churned out of today's Java-mill universities.
I remember seeing something like that at the Illinois State Fair probably 15+ years ago. They were focusing on biodegradable plastic bags made from corn, but it's the same concept. Unfortunately nothing much really came from that, and I doubt much will come from this. For now, it's a novelty material used for products purchased by the hyper-environmentally conscious. Plastic bags and wraps are a far cry from a hard disk able to withstand the rotational forces in play with Blu-Ray drives. Maybe they'll get there, maybe they won't, but I'm not going to hold my breath hoping that Sony et al will use this when traditional disks are currently so cheap. Maybe if oil ran out it would be a concern, but there are much larger issues to deal with first beyond plastic materials (such as how you're going to power your Blu-Ray player and TV, for example :). Besides, even with biodegradable material, there's still waste (how long does it take the material to fully degrade?), while with online downloads there's just bits on the wire and on a hard drive.
A set-top box would be the way to go, like the announced Netflix box, AppleTV, the Xbox 360, or even a Tivo. That gives you the comfortable living room TV aspect as well as keeping the content away from a hackable device like a PC. The problem will be one of standardization. Nobody wants to have three or four boxes in order to play movies from different sources. Cable and satellite operators will probably "win" this one, with on demand content sent to boxes the customer already has. In fact they're already doing this today (at least in the US). Personally, I like my Xbox 360 since I can play games, purchase TV shows and movies, or stream my own content from my network (the PS3 can do two of those three right now), but I don't expect the Xbox 360 to appeal to non-gamers. Instead, I could absolutely see Microsoft shipping a low-cost hardware solution based on the Xbox 360 but with only media functionality (Video Marketplace and network streaming). If you could buy something like that for $100-200, put it in your parents' living room (the 360 works great with media remote controls, either those specifically for the Xbox 360 or for Media Center PCs), and hook it up to a home server with all of their DVDs ripped to disk, that's probably the best of all options. If that same box could also receive your TV (via IPTV over FIOS, for example), even better. Obviously they'd need broadband in order to purchase content online, but broadband availability and adoption is increasing rapidly.
I used my iPhone on a flight recently to watch a couple TV show episodes, and while it was convenient I absolutely would not replace my 50" big screen TV with an iPhone any time soon. I wouldn't want to tie a m
You don't say what country you're referring to in regards to broadband adoption, so I'll just assume you're talking about the US. Here in the States, there's a disconnect between urban/suburban and rural areas with respect to broadband, but that gap is slowly closing with DSL technologies working farther and farther away from COs, long-distance wireless, and fiber rollouts (I grew up in a rural area, and even my parents have broadband now thanks to long-distance wireless from the town 5 miles away). That combined with the fact that much of the population is in urban/suburban areas where broadband is available means that most of the market can get movies online if they were available.
On distribution speed, nothing's ever going to beat the convenience of driving to your local Blockbuster (assuming you have a local movie rental place, anyway) and picking up a disk. That said, I can download a ~5GB 720p movie off of Xbox Live in about a day on my 6mpbs cable line, while Netflix takes two days to get me a new movie (even with a local distribution center, it takes a day to get there and a day to get back), so I can definitely see online distribution taking over the Netflix/Blockbuster Online model. Sure, I'm "only" getting a 720p copy off of Xbox Live, but my TV is 720p and most HD disk material is natively 720p as well so it's not like I'm losing anything. That means it's a race between 1080p as a distribution standard and bandwidth increases allowing me to still download movies in about a day.
And finally, I don't think studios are going to be too concerned over their cut, since online movie distribution generally follows a rental pattern. You pay $5, and you can keep the movie for 2 weeks (some work needs to be done on the current licensing, as Xbox Live has a lame "2 weeks or 24 hours after first play" restriction that is too limiting -- bump the "after first play restriction" to 3 days or even drop it entirely and people will be much happier). Maybe I'm atypical, but I'm not a big movie purchaser. Once I've seen a movie once, that's enough for me. I own maybe a dozen DVDs of movies or TV series that I actually cared to keep, but the vast majority is a one-time-only deal. Given the prevalence of movie rentals, I suspect I'm not alone.
I was referring more to the interface and availability rather than raw capacity. As a marketplace, Xbox Live is very appealing because it presents everything to you in a logical way. PSN is more haphazard, acting as a simple web page in the PS3 browser. Unless you're using a mouse and keyboard on your PS3 (which you can, though it's a bit annoying to do so from a couch), the Xbox Live interface is much easier to navigate and
First, there is no "rental period" with Netflix, and if they ever implemented such a thing they'd lose a large number of subscribers. The beauty of Netflix is that you can keep a disk as long as you like with no real repurcussions (sure, you can't get the next disk in your queue until you return the current one, but with a 3-, 4-, or 5-out plan that's not a huge deal and is sure better than outrageous late fees).
Second, what are you going to do with all of those now-useless disks? As far as I know we don't have a reliable, biodegradable material out of which to make these disks, which means we're just going to fill up landfills with these. That was a huge component of the DIVX backlash, and any future scheme must have a solution for that up front or it's doomed to fail.
DIVX already proved there's no market for this, and trying it again isn't really all that productive. People who want the MPAA/RIAA to innovate want actual innovation, not rehashes of already-failed schemes. Cable on-demand programs, time limited DRMed online purchases, Xbox Live Video Marketplace, etc are all examples of viable approaches of innovating in content delivery. DIVX is a horrible, horrible failure.