A pixel on the OLPC screen can be (at most) a shade of red, OR a shade of green, OR a shade of blue. (This is in transflective mode -- chroma isn't discernible in reflective-only mode.)
Howeer, given how dense the pixels are, any triad of adjacent R, G, and B pixels can be perceived as one larger full-color pixel. If those three "sub"pixels are aligned horizontally, you get an effective resolution of 400x900; aligned vertically, you have 1200x300. Have every 3x2 block of "sub"pixels represent 2 "regular" pixels, and you have 800x450.
Best of all, the developer doesn't have to think about any of this, unless he or she wants to. The display appears as a simple 1200x900x12bit framebuffer to software, and the display controller handles all the dirty work of turning it into something that will look pretty onscreen.
The OLPC is a freakn 1200 x 900 display. Not 800x600. It's the highest dot pitch display I've ever seen.
The OLPC's resolution is given in what would be termed "subpixels" on a traditional display. So in one sense, an 800x600 RGB-stripe LCD of the same size would actually have a higher resolution: 1.44 million fixed-chroma/variable-intensity picture elements, vs. 1.08 million for the OLPC screen.
People put up with crappy wireless phone service because that they don't remember (or are too young to know) what an old-fashioned fully-wired telephone conversation sounds like.
People put up with the current state of wireless phone service because it's CHEAPER and MORE CONVENIENT than old-fashioned fully-wired telephone service.
Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.
Unfortunately for you and me, we're outnumbered by ten million people who would rather get a locked-down phone for $10 with service agreement than pay $600 for a completely open phone platform.
Come to think of it, *I'd* rather get the $10 phone...
the original PCs were nothing special from a performance point of view.
Obviously not by modern standards, but in 1980, a desktop computer with a 16-bit 8086 CPU actually would have looked pretty impressive next to its 8-bit contemporaries -- Z80 or 6502 machines, mostly.
Musicians make a living by performing. Records give them exposure, which translates to better gigs with higher ticket prices.
An oversimplification, at best.
Consider a "band" like Steely Dan. They stopped touring in 1975, but the band remained "active" until 1981, and both principal songwriters were able to continue make a living off album royalties and other studio work (like production) for many years thereafter; it was more than a decade until they performed as a band again.
For some acts, live performances are most profitable; for others, studio work is. (For yet others, merchandising.) There's no formula that's universally applicable to all musicians.
But if I fire up a p2p client - I'm a criminal. WTF?
You're only "a criminal" if you share music with other people (aka "distribute copies") -- if you do nothing but leech ("receive copies"), you aren't violating copyright law.
You own one or more copies of "Bat Out Of Hell". That (to me at least) gives you the right to possess the content of that album in whatever format you like.
What it does not give you the right to do is give copies of the content to persons who may have never purchased the album legitimately even once.
Look at all those clueless top management at the Fed, the White House, the banks, etc., - everyone who went against the obvious - that at some point a mortgage is only worth as much as the earning power of the person who is paying it - and brought us yet another crisis.
The subprime mortgage crisis was actually caused by people who were acutely aware of that obvious knowledge. Lenders offered mortgages to homeowners without due diligence, and then -- this is the key -- SOLD that mortgage debt they held to other financial companies before it could come to light that the borrowers might not be able to pay it.
Using the standard Slashdot Car Analogy, the lenders were taking used cars for trade-in, then selling them to other customers as "certified pre-owned" vehicles without ever inspecting them to see if they were safe.
And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
It's been a decade and there's still nobody that can be TiVo at its own game. Not ReplayTV, not Windows Media Center, and as much as I like it, not even MythTV.
The tuner may turn your PS3 into a competent little PVR -- if you live in a place where DVB transmission is standard -- but I doubt it will be an EXCELLENT PVR like TiVo's.
A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
And I'm sure Wii homebrewers would be fine with that, considering that it IS the 21st century right now.
I think the point of this board that is that proprietary applications for Windows Mobile, which are compiled for ARM, tend to have less functionality than the corresponding proprietary apps for Windows XP, which are compiled for i686. People want full-size versions of familiar apps on a pocket-size device, and only a processor with the i686 instruction set can deliver this.
Riiiiiiiiiight.
It was very smart of Intel's engineers to design and implement the CABPWAPF (Clear 'Artificial Barrier to Proprietary Windows App Performance' Flag) instruction that's in the i686 instruction set.
Who fricking watches the keys while typing or gaming?!
I know a WHOLE LOT of hunt-and-peck typists. Doesn't everybody?
The idea of having a customizable display on each key is a sound one. A modern keyboard has five or six different shift keys, but at most two or three different glyphs on each keycap. A user can only discover other keyboard behaviors from cues provided away from the keyboard (looking at shortcut hints in menus, RTFM, etc.).
But if the stuff printed on each key changed when you press the Ctrl key? The user will be exposed to so much more functionality! And that's not even mentioning Function keys, or modal software (like vi), or...
The decisions to use high-resolution full color OLEDs on each key, and require a external power source beyond USB's +5v, and cost twice as much as the computer it's hooked up to, and to make it suck at being a keyboard are all less defensible.
If they had made a keyboard that felt like a typical $20 OEM keyboard but had a 16x16 monochromatic LCD built into each key, and cost $100, I'd own one for each computer I use regularly.
Since the abbreviation is derived from "Wi-Fi", and before that "Hi-Fi", I take it that they all rhyme, therefore Gi-Fi would be pronounced "guy - fye".
This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.
Unless I'm running a server off my residential broadband connection -- something forbidden by the TOS of most residential ISPs -- or need to interact with some poorly-configured remote service that uses IP address for authentication, I don't need my home computer's IP address to be static. (And in the former case, I could always sign up for some dynamic DNS service.)
As long as my household gets a public IP from the ISP, I don't care whether it's static or dynamically-assigned. Browsing the web works pretty much the same with either.
I just hate the fact that some spoiled brat can make twice as much as me with half the effort and no college degree.
Are you at all heartened by the knowledge that for each "spoiled brat" who signs with a major label and makes twice as much as you, there are a hundred bands that signed, worked their asses off, and still ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt because the label couldn't make stars out of them like the A&R lackey promised?
I hate that there are sound technicians who took years out of their lives to learn how to use complex machines to make music sound better, when I can do the same damn thing with a $500 microphone, $1000 computer, and free/second-hand software that requires a week of spare time to master
If it weren't for the life work of some of those technicians, you wouldn't HAVE the ability to make a decent-sounding recording on a $1500 budget. Technical innovation trickles down from the obscenely expensive professional studios to the obscenely cheap home recording rigs.
Recording from radio and TV stations that are broadcasting over the air has always been allowed...
It's always been tolerated. "Allowed" is perhaps too strong a word, since there's nothing in copyright law that explicitly affirms one's "right" to create for personal use a permanent copy of a protected work that has been freely distributed.
The RIAA, and MPAA need to go after the big pirates...you know...the ones who are making hundreds of thousands of illegal copies of copyrighted movies and music, and selling them all over the world.
No doubt that large-scale commercial bootlegging is costing them more money than than when I rip a disc to my file server, but one of the primary arguments of the *AA's legal strategy (one which they have yet to provide sufficient proof of, at least to me) is that allowing a work to be freely copied via a P2P network IS large-scale bootlegging. It may only take one upload to permit 10,000 unlawful downloads to happen (again, the proof of this hasn't beens hown).
"Apps Hungarian", which adds semantic meaning (dx = width, rwAcross = across coord relative to window, usFoo = unsafe foo, etc) to the variable, not typing, is what is good and what he is advocating.
What is the justification for putting that semantic meaning into a variable name, instead of incorporating it into class definitions?
For example, if a string can be "safe" or "unsafe", why not have "SafeString" and "UnsafeString" classes that extend String, and use instances of those, instead of having instances of the base String class names 'sFoo' and 'usFoo'?
For example, data structures such as lists and arrays are used interchangeably without any idea of the pros and cons of each, and the right place to use them.
When the consequences of using a sub-optimal data structure are barely perceptible, what driving force is there to compel a developer to give data structures more careful consideration?
Parsing problem for pretty much everything is almost universally solved by regex...
1. You begin with a problem. 2. You apply a solution that uses regular expressions. 3. Now you have \d+ problems.
I love the power of PCRE, but it's a write-only language. As a pattern's complexity increases, its maintainability approaches zero. I'd rather leave complex data structures to a parser specifically designed to handle them.
I don't really care about the XML format. Personally, I'd be happier if it were stored in binary.
What kind of binary? 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, or 128-bit word size? Signed or unsigned? Big-, little-, or middle-endian?
Sure it's not the most efficient encoding, but there isn't a rational piece of data that can't be expressed somehow as a sequence of UTF-8 characters.
2) Attributes in XML have no obvious mapping to objects...so what do you do with them?
Attributes are object properties, just like object children. There's just additional context about the property implied by its attribute-ness.
Slashdot Mirror
OLPC's screen isn't chroma fixed.
A pixel on the OLPC screen can be (at most) a shade of red, OR a shade of green, OR a shade of blue. (This is in transflective mode -- chroma isn't discernible in reflective-only mode.)
Howeer, given how dense the pixels are, any triad of adjacent R, G, and B pixels can be perceived as one larger full-color pixel. If those three "sub"pixels are aligned horizontally, you get an effective resolution of 400x900; aligned vertically, you have 1200x300. Have every 3x2 block of "sub"pixels represent 2 "regular" pixels, and you have 800x450.
Best of all, the developer doesn't have to think about any of this, unless he or she wants to. The display appears as a simple 1200x900x12bit framebuffer to software, and the display controller handles all the dirty work of turning it into something that will look pretty onscreen.
The OLPC is a freakn 1200 x 900 display. Not 800x600. It's the highest dot pitch display I've ever seen.
The OLPC's resolution is given in what would be termed "subpixels" on a traditional display. So in one sense, an 800x600 RGB-stripe LCD of the same size would actually have a higher resolution: 1.44 million fixed-chroma/variable-intensity picture elements, vs. 1.08 million for the OLPC screen.
"Nine Inch Nails front man, Trent Reznor, released his band's new album"
You should have seen the faces of the band!
The bandmembers' names are Ghosts I - IV.
I also believe that it needs a removable battery so that I could keep a spare.
Sounds to me like what you want is the ability to use an auxiliary battery, not replace the internal one.
That stewardess just re-invented the bubble sort!
But it's a multi-threaded bubble sort implementation; each member of the set is concurrently evaluating itself against its neighbors...
People put up with crappy wireless phone service because that they don't remember (or are too young to know) what an old-fashioned fully-wired telephone conversation sounds like.
People put up with the current state of wireless phone service because it's CHEAPER and MORE CONVENIENT than old-fashioned fully-wired telephone service.
Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.
Unfortunately for you and me, we're outnumbered by ten million people who would rather get a locked-down phone for $10 with service agreement than pay $600 for a completely open phone platform.
Come to think of it, *I'd* rather get the $10 phone...
You don't see any racist jokes in south park or simpsons? What is Apu?
Besides the most visible, and most respectfully written, Hindu character in mainstream American television?
the original PCs were nothing special from a performance point of view.
Obviously not by modern standards, but in 1980, a desktop computer with a 16-bit 8086 CPU actually would have looked pretty impressive next to its 8-bit contemporaries -- Z80 or 6502 machines, mostly.
Musicians make a living by performing. Records give them exposure, which translates to better gigs with higher ticket prices.
An oversimplification, at best.
Consider a "band" like Steely Dan. They stopped touring in 1975, but the band remained "active" until 1981, and both principal songwriters were able to continue make a living off album royalties and other studio work (like production) for many years thereafter; it was more than a decade until they performed as a band again.
For some acts, live performances are most profitable; for others, studio work is. (For yet others, merchandising.) There's no formula that's universally applicable to all musicians.
But if I fire up a p2p client - I'm a criminal.
WTF?
You're only "a criminal" if you share music with other people (aka "distribute copies") -- if you do nothing but leech ("receive copies"), you aren't violating copyright law.
You own one or more copies of "Bat Out Of Hell". That (to me at least) gives you the right to possess the content of that album in whatever format you like.
What it does not give you the right to do is give copies of the content to persons who may have never purchased the album legitimately even once.
Look at all those clueless top management at the Fed, the White House, the banks, etc., - everyone who went against the obvious - that at some point a mortgage is only worth as much as the earning power of the person who is paying it - and brought us yet another crisis.
The subprime mortgage crisis was actually caused by people who were acutely aware of that obvious knowledge. Lenders offered mortgages to homeowners without due diligence, and then -- this is the key -- SOLD that mortgage debt they held to other financial companies before it could come to light that the borrowers might not be able to pay it.
Using the standard Slashdot Car Analogy, the lenders were taking used cars for trade-in, then selling them to other customers as "certified pre-owned" vehicles without ever inspecting them to see if they were safe.
And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
It's been a decade and there's still nobody that can be TiVo at its own game. Not ReplayTV, not Windows Media Center, and as much as I like it, not even MythTV.
The tuner may turn your PS3 into a competent little PVR -- if you live in a place where DVB transmission is standard -- but I doubt it will be an EXCELLENT PVR like TiVo's.
A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
And I'm sure Wii homebrewers would be fine with that, considering that it IS the 21st century right now.
I think the point of this board that is that proprietary applications for Windows Mobile, which are compiled for ARM, tend to have less functionality than the corresponding proprietary apps for Windows XP, which are compiled for i686. People want full-size versions of familiar apps on a pocket-size device, and only a processor with the i686 instruction set can deliver this.
Riiiiiiiiiight.
It was very smart of Intel's engineers to design and implement the CABPWAPF (Clear 'Artificial Barrier to Proprietary Windows App Performance' Flag) instruction that's in the i686 instruction set.
Who fricking watches the keys while typing or gaming?!
I know a WHOLE LOT of hunt-and-peck typists. Doesn't everybody?
The idea of having a customizable display on each key is a sound one. A modern keyboard has five or six different shift keys, but at most two or three different glyphs on each keycap. A user can only discover other keyboard behaviors from cues provided away from the keyboard (looking at shortcut hints in menus, RTFM, etc.).
But if the stuff printed on each key changed when you press the Ctrl key? The user will be exposed to so much more functionality! And that's not even mentioning Function keys, or modal software (like vi), or...
The decisions to use high-resolution full color OLEDs on each key, and require a external power source beyond USB's +5v, and cost twice as much as the computer it's hooked up to, and to make it suck at being a keyboard are all less defensible.
If they had made a keyboard that felt like a typical $20 OEM keyboard but had a 16x16 monochromatic LCD built into each key, and cost $100, I'd own one for each computer I use regularly.
We should create our own standard which does what we need and is not covered by existing patents.
I suggest we call this protocol PnGi.
I caught the GIF/PNG reference, but I'm afraid the new name you came up with for the new open source standard just does not sound silly enough.
How about "WuffoMax"?
How do you pronounce Gi-Fi?
Since the abbreviation is derived from "Wi-Fi", and before that "Hi-Fi", I take it that they all rhyme, therefore Gi-Fi would be pronounced "guy - fye".
And it is short for "guygabit fydelity".
This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.
Unless I'm running a server off my residential broadband connection -- something forbidden by the TOS of most residential ISPs -- or need to interact with some poorly-configured remote service that uses IP address for authentication, I don't need my home computer's IP address to be static. (And in the former case, I could always sign up for some dynamic DNS service.)
As long as my household gets a public IP from the ISP, I don't care whether it's static or dynamically-assigned. Browsing the web works pretty much the same with either.
What we need is a battery backed up hardware module that scrambles the RAM when the system loses power.
What if an attacker pries the battery off the scrambler hardware before cutting power to the system (with an insulated tool, obviously)?
I just hate the fact that some spoiled brat can make twice as much as me with half the effort and no college degree.
Are you at all heartened by the knowledge that for each "spoiled brat" who signs with a major label and makes twice as much as you, there are a hundred bands that signed, worked their asses off, and still ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt because the label couldn't make stars out of them like the A&R lackey promised?
I hate that there are sound technicians who took years out of their lives to learn how to use complex machines to make music sound better, when I can do the same damn thing with a $500 microphone, $1000 computer, and free/second-hand software that requires a week of spare time to master
If it weren't for the life work of some of those technicians, you wouldn't HAVE the ability to make a decent-sounding recording on a $1500 budget. Technical innovation trickles down from the obscenely expensive professional studios to the obscenely cheap home recording rigs.
Recording from radio and TV stations that are broadcasting over the air has always been allowed...
It's always been tolerated. "Allowed" is perhaps too strong a word, since there's nothing in copyright law that explicitly affirms one's "right" to create for personal use a permanent copy of a protected work that has been freely distributed.
The RIAA, and MPAA need to go after the big pirates...you know...the ones who are making hundreds of thousands of illegal copies of copyrighted movies and music, and selling them all over the world.
No doubt that large-scale commercial bootlegging is costing them more money than than when I rip a disc to my file server, but one of the primary arguments of the *AA's legal strategy (one which they have yet to provide sufficient proof of, at least to me) is that allowing a work to be freely copied via a P2P network IS large-scale bootlegging. It may only take one upload to permit 10,000 unlawful downloads to happen (again, the proof of this hasn't beens hown).
"Apps Hungarian", which adds semantic meaning (dx = width, rwAcross = across coord relative to window, usFoo = unsafe foo, etc) to the variable, not typing, is what is good and what he is advocating.
What is the justification for putting that semantic meaning into a variable name, instead of incorporating it into class definitions?
For example, if a string can be "safe" or "unsafe", why not have "SafeString" and "UnsafeString" classes that extend String, and use instances of those, instead of having instances of the base String class names 'sFoo' and 'usFoo'?
For example, data structures such as lists and arrays are used interchangeably without any idea of the pros and cons of each, and the right place to use them.
When the consequences of using a sub-optimal data structure are barely perceptible, what driving force is there to compel a developer to give data structures more careful consideration?
Parsing problem for pretty much everything is almost universally solved by regex...
1. You begin with a problem.
2. You apply a solution that uses regular expressions.
3. Now you have \d+ problems.
I love the power of PCRE, but it's a write-only language. As a pattern's complexity increases, its maintainability approaches zero. I'd rather leave complex data structures to a parser specifically designed to handle them.
I don't really care about the XML format. Personally, I'd be happier if it were stored in binary.
What kind of binary? 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, or 128-bit word size? Signed or unsigned? Big-, little-, or middle-endian?
Sure it's not the most efficient encoding, but there isn't a rational piece of data that can't be expressed somehow as a sequence of UTF-8 characters.
2) Attributes in XML have no obvious mapping to objects...so what do you do with them?
Attributes are object properties, just like object children. There's just additional context about the property implied by its attribute-ness.