Considering that even MS sometimes has problems interpreting their own binary formats from way back when, I could see it just being a move on their part to eliminate that problem in the future.
That said, I don't believe the GPL incompatibility was intentional; I believe it to be a side-effect of what MS thought was an appropriate way to make sure that their patents and patent issues were appropriately labeled in software using their schema.
Deposits enforce disposal/recycling, which is really what I'm interested in. If recycling is a better option, than the recycling companies will charge the corporations required to handle the products less than the disposal companies. Either way, we have a reasonable assurance that most computer waste will be handled properly and disposed properly; recycling would be bonus, but is not key to my mind.
And I'd rather have the direct burden of disposal placed on corporations than on consumers (even though the indirect burden comes back to us), as it becomes easier to enforce.
I got a real world 8 hours at first with my 3G; this included skipping and UI interaction, although UI interaction was more or less just skip-skip-skip-back "I like this song". Now it's probably down to 2 or 3 hours, after 2 years.
The thing you're not thinking about is - even if they had added that extra space, right now you'd be getting 80 or 90 minutes instead of 75. The decline isn't some fixed amount of capacity per unit time; the decline is percentage of total capacity per unit time.
Actually, the deposit idea isn't bad. Michigan charges a 10c deposit on most bottles and cans of drinkable liquids; it's helped a lot with roadside trash issues. Hell, even if *I* don't care enough about 10c not to throw that can of Coke out my car window, odds are some homeless guy somewhere will eke out enough cash to get a burger or a place to sleep by collecting cans.
Are homeless people rummaging in the garbage sad? Yes. But they do it in Illinois, which doesn't have a deposit; might as well give them a small reward for it.
The suit isn't about whether or not lithium ion batteries decay; no one is arguing that they don't.
The suit's merit lies solely in the assertion that Apple, in its original product documentation, did not strongly enough explain that fact, and in fact glossed over it to the detriment of the consumer. If you say "Plays 8 hours", the suit argues, it damn well better play 8 hours... now, and later. Car makers don't represent that the car won't require maintenance; the suit argues that Apple represented the iPod as being something that would operate in the same fashion across its usable life.
Whether you think this is a valid suit or not, stop whining that "Batteries decay!", because that isn't the argument.
I don't mind LCDs for some things. They're fine for office work, and for engineering work; for some things, they're even better; our mechanicals love them when they're stuck doing hours of Pro/E. But for tasks that require color accuracy, and for things that really ought to have true black (read: movies, games) LCDs aren't as good. Sharpness of a pixel means nothing if the pixel is on (even if its on only a small amount) when it ought to be off.
Of course there are differences, but they use the same general materials (minus the change in phosphor composition, which should, IIRC, be easily handled - we're not talking new equipment to manufacture the phosphors, just changes in the settings of the production line) and same general assembly processes. CRTs are unlikely to become an item so infrequently used that only a few specialists bother making them, was more my point - a Chinese company that makes cheap TVs isn't going to have a major problem respeccing one line to provide CRTs to be rebadged, and the cost to do so is going to be minimally different from what it is now; the economies of scale for a CRT only factory and a CRT-TV factory are roughly the same; the only question is will the manufacturers take advantage of a low-demand low-supply situation; here, though, I don't think there's enough price elasticity. As long as CRTs are cheap and better in some ways, people will buy them; if CRTs, even when they're better, become significantly more expensive (note: I'm talking factor of 10 more expensive, not the likely minimal price rise I do expect), especially as alternatives advance, then yes, people would switch. I don't expect to see that.
But, note that the patent and copyright provisions in the license for the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas require you to include a notice of attribution in your program.
I'm just guessing that the GPL's noted incompatibility with an advertising clause is what breaks compatibility here. MS being MS, they could well have done it intentionally; that said, an advertising clause might also have simply been seen as appropriate. Who knows.
That's interesting. I severely doubt it, as you're an AC, and there's no way that would work (can you say change in pixel aspect ratio? Do you know what pixel aspect ratio is?) But simply put, an LCD will look good only at its native resolution, and resolutions that are integer divisions of native. Scaling can be acceptable in some circumstances, but put challenging graphics on the screen and it fails miserably.
Yep. I checked it just now, just in case someone had bothered to mess with it. It's exactly what I set it to after I changed it away from "I think I want to punch you in the face."
I have. I am quite sensitive to black level, and I can note a difference in fairly bright lighting, especially when working with shadow detail in a photograph. Also, I generally work in relatively dim conditions when I care about color accuracy, with only indirect light.
So, yes, if you have fluoros shining directly at the screen, it doesn't much matter. Then again, if you have fluoros shining directly at the screen, you're not the sort of person likely to care about black level or color calibration.
Yep, and thats one of those niche markets that will stay CRT. The portion of the market that works color calibrated is well below 1%. I expect that over the next 5 years you'll begin to see the price of those "good" CRT's climb, as CRT's replace LCD's as the high end "niche" solution.
Probably. I work color-calibrated at home, since I don't like going to have my photos printed and going "No, this isn't right." Working color-calibrated, if I hand them a calibrated image, I know what I'm getting; since I only use printers who understand what calibration means, I have no real issues with color purity when I print things to be sold. (Yes, I sell photos. Yes, I make some money at it. No, it isn't how I support myself.) The resolution issue is less important than a lot of people think, although in corporate environments where you get old folks who want easy-to-read resolutions, it matters a little. However, as OSes gradually implement truly scalable/vectorized systems, it becomes less of an issue. And I agree, I expect CRT prices to rise as they become niche, although not much, as cheap TVs are likely to remain CRT-based until some point in the future, allowing a very similar process to computer CRTs to remain a relatively high volume manufacturing item. I anticipate this future point to be contiguous with the death of both the CRT and LCD. I fully expect both CRTs and LCDs to be annihilated by one of the newer display technologies; OLEDs, for example, if they can ever get them right, shouldn't suffer from CRT's weight issues, nor do they suffer from the color/black level issues LCDs have.
Basically, I expect them both to die, probably right around the same time. The LCD is improved over the CRT, in some ways, but they both have significant failings. The CRT's failings are, essentially, size and weight. The LCD's failings are in image quality (and yes, I have worked with top of the line LCDs - they still don't compare to a really good CRT). I'm waiting for something better than either before I go about saying either one is dead.
Nope. Apple Cinema Display, while it is improved over crappy LCDs, still has black level problems. They are *inherent* to how LCDs work (transmissive display technology) as compared to how CRTs, plasma, OLEDs, etc. work (emissive display).
Basically, LCDs are not perfect insulators of light, so even a "black" pixel allows some backlight to leak through.
That's a seperate piece of hardware from the base FPGA.
And yes, they are. Since many signal processing apps can be handled quite well in fixed point, those FPGAs aren't half bad. We often just prototype algorithms on DSP and then do the ASIC without bothering with the FPGA intermediary step, but it's nice to have the option.
Kernel panic every time. During install. If I disable/install/reenable, during boot. Every single time. Try disabling the HPT360 if you're not using it, it was the only way I could get my install to run. Again, I know the HPT controllers are junk, but so is software that kernel panics on probing them.
I've seen *tons* of problems with Windows, I didn't mean to imply I hadn't. As we speak, my Windows game box is BSODing on boot. However, I have rarely seen install problems, and I have *never* seen a problem with a monitor on install. That was what I meant to convey.
The basic FPGA only supports gate-level operations. When you pick a "core", you're talking about picking an ALU implementation, which really has nothing to do with the on-chip hardware. Some cores implement fixed-point (generally the simpler ones). Some cores implement float. But an FPGA in and of itself implements truth-table operations and block interconnects; it's way below the level of math operations.
(embedded systems designer in a current life, including doing FPGA and ASIC design)
No, Windows installs fine on the same hardware. And the monitor bit is ridiculous; I've been running Windows machines since 3.0, admining them for college labs, parents, myself, and everything in between, and I have *never* seen Windows fail to detect a monitor on install; the only failure I've seen is when the user incorrectly sets the display to a value outside the usable range, and the more recent Windows' inclusion of a 15 second revert have pretty much eliminated that problem.
It's definitely the HPT372 taking down Linux; that said, it still takes down every Linux distro I've tried *every* time unless I disable it in BIOS. Not the mark of robust software, if you ask me.
Really? The last time I tried Ubuntu (and Mandrake too, for that matter), it went more like:
1) Put in CD. 2) Kernel panic.
(It's not memory, I memtest just fine, it's not a bad CD burn, I've tested on multiple burns. It's some interaction between my quasi-RAID hardware and Linux, and its annoying as hell. Given up on Linux for now as a result. Try again next computer.)
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your code?
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McVoy Strikes Back
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Considering the embedded board is a test system for a chip my group designed, and is basically only useful for doing functional verification of an IC used exclusively in automotive systems, I can safely say no one else would be interested, because:
a) The only reason to do this is to verify a specific one of our ICs. If you want a verified IC, just buy one of ours. Seriously. It would cost you less to buy 1,000 of them than it would to manufacture a single test board. b) There are sufficient patent encumbrances on the IC that you can't make your own anyway.
Besides which, the point isn't that I *couldn't* release it; the point is that that kind of software is nearly always a bespoke effort, and as such open source's benefits basically don't apply.
You give them shoes? We put their offices on one side of the floor, then lay down a strip of sharp things (tacks, nails, caltrops, hair from anime characters - whatever we have on hand, really) to seperate them from the engineering department. Without shoes, they only come over when we use the magnets to lift the spiky things out of the way.
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Considering that even MS sometimes has problems interpreting their own binary formats from way back when, I could see it just being a move on their part to eliminate that problem in the future.
That said, I don't believe the GPL incompatibility was intentional; I believe it to be a side-effect of what MS thought was an appropriate way to make sure that their patents and patent issues were appropriately labeled in software using their schema.
Deposits enforce disposal/recycling, which is really what I'm interested in. If recycling is a better option, than the recycling companies will charge the corporations required to handle the products less than the disposal companies. Either way, we have a reasonable assurance that most computer waste will be handled properly and disposed properly; recycling would be bonus, but is not key to my mind.
And I'd rather have the direct burden of disposal placed on corporations than on consumers (even though the indirect burden comes back to us), as it becomes easier to enforce.
I got a real world 8 hours at first with my 3G; this included skipping and UI interaction, although UI interaction was more or less just skip-skip-skip-back "I like this song". Now it's probably down to 2 or 3 hours, after 2 years.
The thing you're not thinking about is - even if they had added that extra space, right now you'd be getting 80 or 90 minutes instead of 75. The decline isn't some fixed amount of capacity per unit time; the decline is percentage of total capacity per unit time.
Actually, the deposit idea isn't bad. Michigan charges a 10c deposit on most bottles and cans of drinkable liquids; it's helped a lot with roadside trash issues. Hell, even if *I* don't care enough about 10c not to throw that can of Coke out my car window, odds are some homeless guy somewhere will eke out enough cash to get a burger or a place to sleep by collecting cans.
Are homeless people rummaging in the garbage sad? Yes. But they do it in Illinois, which doesn't have a deposit; might as well give them a small reward for it.
The suit isn't about whether or not lithium ion batteries decay; no one is arguing that they don't.
The suit's merit lies solely in the assertion that Apple, in its original product documentation, did not strongly enough explain that fact, and in fact glossed over it to the detriment of the consumer. If you say "Plays 8 hours", the suit argues, it damn well better play 8 hours... now, and later. Car makers don't represent that the car won't require maintenance; the suit argues that Apple represented the iPod as being something that would operate in the same fashion across its usable life.
Whether you think this is a valid suit or not, stop whining that "Batteries decay!", because that isn't the argument.
I don't mind LCDs for some things. They're fine for office work, and for engineering work; for some things, they're even better; our mechanicals love them when they're stuck doing hours of Pro/E. But for tasks that require color accuracy, and for things that really ought to have true black (read: movies, games) LCDs aren't as good. Sharpness of a pixel means nothing if the pixel is on (even if its on only a small amount) when it ought to be off.
Of course there are differences, but they use the same general materials (minus the change in phosphor composition, which should, IIRC, be easily handled - we're not talking new equipment to manufacture the phosphors, just changes in the settings of the production line) and same general assembly processes. CRTs are unlikely to become an item so infrequently used that only a few specialists bother making them, was more my point - a Chinese company that makes cheap TVs isn't going to have a major problem respeccing one line to provide CRTs to be rebadged, and the cost to do so is going to be minimally different from what it is now; the economies of scale for a CRT only factory and a CRT-TV factory are roughly the same; the only question is will the manufacturers take advantage of a low-demand low-supply situation; here, though, I don't think there's enough price elasticity. As long as CRTs are cheap and better in some ways, people will buy them; if CRTs, even when they're better, become significantly more expensive (note: I'm talking factor of 10 more expensive, not the likely minimal price rise I do expect), especially as alternatives advance, then yes, people would switch. I don't expect to see that.
It breaks GPL, but only in the same way the old-style BSD license did.
From the website:
But, note that the patent and copyright provisions in the license for the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas require you to include a notice of attribution in your program.
I'm just guessing that the GPL's noted incompatibility with an advertising clause is what breaks compatibility here. MS being MS, they could well have done it intentionally; that said, an advertising clause might also have simply been seen as appropriate. Who knows.
That's interesting. I severely doubt it, as you're an AC, and there's no way that would work (can you say change in pixel aspect ratio? Do you know what pixel aspect ratio is?) But simply put, an LCD will look good only at its native resolution, and resolutions that are integer divisions of native. Scaling can be acceptable in some circumstances, but put challenging graphics on the screen and it fails miserably.
Yep. I checked it just now, just in case someone had bothered to mess with it. It's exactly what I set it to after I changed it away from "I think I want to punch you in the face."
I have. I am quite sensitive to black level, and I can note a difference in fairly bright lighting, especially when working with shadow detail in a photograph. Also, I generally work in relatively dim conditions when I care about color accuracy, with only indirect light.
So, yes, if you have fluoros shining directly at the screen, it doesn't much matter. Then again, if you have fluoros shining directly at the screen, you're not the sort of person likely to care about black level or color calibration.
Yep, and thats one of those niche markets that will stay CRT. The portion of the market that works color calibrated is well below 1%. I expect that over the next 5 years you'll begin to see the price of those "good" CRT's climb, as CRT's replace LCD's as the high end "niche" solution.
Probably. I work color-calibrated at home, since I don't like going to have my photos printed and going "No, this isn't right." Working color-calibrated, if I hand them a calibrated image, I know what I'm getting; since I only use printers who understand what calibration means, I have no real issues with color purity when I print things to be sold. (Yes, I sell photos. Yes, I make some money at it. No, it isn't how I support myself.) The resolution issue is less important than a lot of people think, although in corporate environments where you get old folks who want easy-to-read resolutions, it matters a little. However, as OSes gradually implement truly scalable/vectorized systems, it becomes less of an issue. And I agree, I expect CRT prices to rise as they become niche, although not much, as cheap TVs are likely to remain CRT-based until some point in the future, allowing a very similar process to computer CRTs to remain a relatively high volume manufacturing item. I anticipate this future point to be contiguous with the death of both the CRT and LCD. I fully expect both CRTs and LCDs to be annihilated by one of the newer display technologies; OLEDs, for example, if they can ever get them right, shouldn't suffer from CRT's weight issues, nor do they suffer from the color/black level issues LCDs have.
Basically, I expect them both to die, probably right around the same time. The LCD is improved over the CRT, in some ways, but they both have significant failings. The CRT's failings are, essentially, size and weight. The LCD's failings are in image quality (and yes, I have worked with top of the line LCDs - they still don't compare to a really good CRT). I'm waiting for something better than either before I go about saying either one is dead.
Nope. Apple Cinema Display, while it is improved over crappy LCDs, still has black level problems. They are *inherent* to how LCDs work (transmissive display technology) as compared to how CRTs, plasma, OLEDs, etc. work (emissive display).
Basically, LCDs are not perfect insulators of light, so even a "black" pixel allows some backlight to leak through.
Stop wearing contacts. Seriously. I get a lot less eyestrain working on computers while wearing glasses than I did when I wore contacts.
You know... there's a reason it looks fine at 800x600 and 1600x1200.
It's called integer ratios.
Try it at 1280x960, see how good it looks then.
(Also, your LCD's color purity sucks compared to a good CRT. Sorry. It does. Anyone who works color-calibrated will tell you this.)
That's a seperate piece of hardware from the base FPGA.
And yes, they are. Since many signal processing apps can be handled quite well in fixed point, those FPGAs aren't half bad. We often just prototype algorithms on DSP and then do the ASIC without bothering with the FPGA intermediary step, but it's nice to have the option.
Kernel panic every time. During install. If I disable/install/reenable, during boot. Every single time. Try disabling the HPT360 if you're not using it, it was the only way I could get my install to run. Again, I know the HPT controllers are junk, but so is software that kernel panics on probing them.
I've seen *tons* of problems with Windows, I didn't mean to imply I hadn't. As we speak, my Windows game box is BSODing on boot. However, I have rarely seen install problems, and I have *never* seen a problem with a monitor on install. That was what I meant to convey.
The basic FPGA only supports gate-level operations. When you pick a "core", you're talking about picking an ALU implementation, which really has nothing to do with the on-chip hardware. Some cores implement fixed-point (generally the simpler ones). Some cores implement float. But an FPGA in and of itself implements truth-table operations and block interconnects; it's way below the level of math operations.
(embedded systems designer in a current life, including doing FPGA and ASIC design)
No, Windows installs fine on the same hardware. And the monitor bit is ridiculous; I've been running Windows machines since 3.0, admining them for college labs, parents, myself, and everything in between, and I have *never* seen Windows fail to detect a monitor on install; the only failure I've seen is when the user incorrectly sets the display to a value outside the usable range, and the more recent Windows' inclusion of a 15 second revert have pretty much eliminated that problem.
It's definitely the HPT372 taking down Linux; that said, it still takes down every Linux distro I've tried *every* time unless I disable it in BIOS. Not the mark of robust software, if you ask me.
Really? The last time I tried Ubuntu (and Mandrake too, for that matter), it went more like:
1) Put in CD.
2) Kernel panic.
(It's not memory, I memtest just fine, it's not a bad CD burn, I've tested on multiple burns. It's some interaction between my quasi-RAID hardware and Linux, and its annoying as hell. Given up on Linux for now as a result. Try again next computer.)
Considering the embedded board is a test system for a chip my group designed, and is basically only useful for doing functional verification of an IC used exclusively in automotive systems, I can safely say no one else would be interested, because:
a) The only reason to do this is to verify a specific one of our ICs. If you want a verified IC, just buy one of ours. Seriously. It would cost you less to buy 1,000 of them than it would to manufacture a single test board.
b) There are sufficient patent encumbrances on the IC that you can't make your own anyway.
Besides which, the point isn't that I *couldn't* release it; the point is that that kind of software is nearly always a bespoke effort, and as such open source's benefits basically don't apply.
You give them shoes? We put their offices on one side of the floor, then lay down a strip of sharp things (tacks, nails, caltrops, hair from anime characters - whatever we have on hand, really) to seperate them from the engineering department. Without shoes, they only come over when we use the magnets to lift the spiky things out of the way.
Big freaking magnets.
Yes, but in order to teach relativity to your average MBA, you're going to need the holographic spinning bar graph.
As someone who works with chip designers for a living, this is what it comes down to:
NEVER trust the spec. It lies. It always lies.