I'll reply to this one, instead of your other one if you don't mind -
I totally see your point - but I don't think you see mine. The point of the original parent was that if they reduced the cost of CDs and Movies, they would become more "impulse" driven.
What I did was refute your argument that it was the same cost - if a person is willing to accept an "improper" insert (I certainly am - I could care less about most of that junk), then there is not only a difference in "user experience", but in cost. Target/Sam Goody/etc suck. You are limited to what they have on hand for one, and for two they tend to require large time investments. iTunes is fast and easy. Online stores are fast and easy, but there is a long delay before the media arrives.
DRM is pointless - nobody outside of the/. community even really cares. Media decay is similarly pointless - if I think I'll be listening to something in 5+ years (the shelf life of a CD-R), I probably would want the nice foldouts and info. If I cared about the cover art, I'd buy a record. I can barely even see the art on the little CDs. Therefore, with few exceptions, iTunes/Napster/Yahoo et al are a perfect choice for the common impulse purchase. Quality? If you care about quality you probably would buy a hi-def CD in the first place - even regular CDs are only so-so. Most downloadable music is certainly worthy of listening to on any system that costs less than $200. If you care enough to use a power conditioner or high-end audio cables you certainly care enough to get good media.
See? And that is a reasonable argument. It's the same reason I buy Santana and a few others on CD. If it sounds like crap on iTunes (and some stuff *really* sucks on there) then it is worth the money. Same reason they make the high-def CDs and records... some stuff is really important.
Or, if I know it will be part of a collection of some sort. (Rush, for example - I own them all).
Ummm - no. I print it on plain old normal paper ($4 per 500 sheets, so $0.008) with ink that only costs about $13 per 100+ sheets ($0.13). It goes into a media folder that holds 400 CDs (so 200 with art) and cost $30 ($0.15 per CD with media). I cut it out with a pair of scissors. I burn on fairly normal Fry's media at about $15 per 100 ($0.15). That brings my total cost (obviously not factoring in my computer or printer, which I would need anyway) to a grand total of $10.428. We'll call it $10.43.
So - let's compare that, for a new release that I just bought last night when I had an urge to hear Death Cab for Cutie (Transatlanticism) to a trip to my closest store (which is about 5 miles - it being a Target). The album on iTunes cost me $9.99 ($10.43 adjusted) and about 5 minutes of time while I was playing WoW.
According to the Target website it is currently $12.96. Assuming I drive, it will take me at least 10 minutes to drive there. I could conceivably be home with it in hand within 30 minutes - assuming they have it. It would cost me fuel (20 mpg/$3.35/g so $1.675)
The album now cost me $13.932 with tax. With gas, we're looking at an adjusted price of $15.607 ($15.61). That, and I would have had to stop playing WoW, get dressed, go to Target at 22:35 last night... and oops. They close at 21:00.
So - basically, to make a long story short - you're just plain wrong. The only point you have is DRM, and honestly I could care less. It's not like I can't pull the music back in with only minor signal loss (AAC -> AIF) and have DRM-free tunes.
Is it down to 12 euros? When I was in France in december of 2001 I saw Quake (3?) going for about 45 euros (though it was in francs - the exchange was frozen at that point).
Heck, I buy games (used, mostly) at that price point all the time from Game Crazy, Game Stop, etc. I hardly ever go over $30 for a game. iTunes hit it right at $9.99 for me - I went from buying a CD every few weeks to an "album" from iTunes at least once a week. Sometimes 2 or 3 a week. I burn them to CD, print the nice covers, and I'm good to go.
That's cool - I didn't know it was on the rise. It would make sense, since it seems more fuel efficient.
I was thinking of cargo - but you're right about the passenger stuff. Hardly anyone rides anymore. I tried to take the train (Amtrak) a few times but it is *slooooooow*. Nothing like waiting 30 minutes for some other train to pass the switch!
Hardly any T-A in my room in school. Mainly this really huge 4 layer mobo printout, a dimensioned view of a hamburger. Well, and some really geeky stuff.
I know how you feel - it killed me when DEC was sold off. One of the best and brightest, IMHO.
Ok - time for a bit of a sad old-timer rant (feel free to skip if you think computers always came with Windows)
<rant> I really miss the magic that was there in some of those old companies - DEC, SGI, H-P... back when IBM was the big enemy and the biggest thrill I had was reading some new press release and thinking of ways to really do something cool with it. I remember looking at the camera on the old SGI screens and wondering if Jetson style video-phones were right around the corner. I remember running a lab of Indy workstations and feeling like I had the monopoly on "cool". Back when Windows still needed Trumpet WinSock and I was playing MUDs halfway across the country on an AlphaStation. I've never seen a documentation system as nice as "help" before or since. Compilers that took *any* major language and optimized it really well. A database (RDB) that ran so well that when we ported it to Sun it took 5 times the hardware dollars to make it work. Oracle doesn't hold a candle to it... How about real clustering? How about a software company that makes defacto standards so effective EVERYONE uses them (like OpenGL or GLUT?) Why is it that things like "external processors", "clustering", and "grid computing", keep getting touted as though they were new? Do any of these self-proclaimed Unix gurus even *know* why tty is called that? For all the people who think Microsoft invented BASIC - for people who don't know that edit/tpu is the answer to the question of "vi or emacs" - and for those who have never had a RACF account; I pity you. You missed out on some of the really cool parts of the computer age. Heck, I bet a lot of the younger people on here never even coded stuff for GLIDE... and that was a *PC* level tech (and a nice one!).
I am saddened by the demise of the "science" part of computer science. In this era is there still room for wonder? As much as I delight in the cross compatibility and functionality of the new computers, I am saddened more by the lack of people who truly appreciate how we got them. It's probably the same feeling that the last steam train engineers felt as diesel engines took over - or perhaps the feeling modern diesel engineers feel at the trucks and planes that have largely replaced them.
Oh well. We've all had this discussion before, and I guess I'm just getting too old. At least one benefit of all that is having two VNC sessions open to WinXP and 5 terminals open to my Sun servers on my MBP with the full OpenGL desktop.
They had the RS/6000, the OS/360 - OS/390, the AS/400 etc. You have to be intimately familiar with IBM to know what a 3270 emulator is for... try finding one of those at your local Computer store:D
On the other had, Jaguar got away nicely with the XK series (which is the first thing I thought of when I saw your joke name:)
I gotta say, though, it probably is best to have a name that has something to do with your product (like MS SQL Server, GameBoy, JournalSpace, etc). Most likely easier to sell when it has a name that means something.
You are just repeating the same argument everyone else is hashing over. My tounge-in-cheek comment was that it used to be marketed as "IBM PC/AT/XT, Tandy, or 100% compatible" - and yes, DOS 6.2 back runs on anything that is 100% IBM PC/AT/XT compatible. So there - it could very well mean that DOS will eventually not run on a Dell.
Your definition means that my PDA (which is a personal computer) is a PC. It means that my old Sage and my TRS-80 are PCs as well as my TI-92. They are all computers, they are all for personal use.
I have a MacBook Pro which I use regularly. It is certainly a PC, as is my IBM T42. I'd agree that CPU has nothing to do with it (otherwise an XBOX would be a PC).
I would agree with Apple's team that PC currently means a Windows-based x86 machine, because when I just asked 4 people around the building what a PC was this morning, that's what they all said.
If a machine can run OS/2, DOS 3 - DOS 6.x etc it is IBM compatible. Things like a Tandy, for example:D If you can't boot DOS, it isn't a 100% IBM compatible.
I just tried, and I can't boot DOS directly with boot camp. Even with a USB floppy heh.
The man you're thinking of is probably Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC). As you may or may not know, DEC created VMS in 77/78.
He brought things like the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the finely grained (non-unix style) security, etc. Windows is still far ahead of the default Sun/Linux type file security.
Unix until fairly recently contained only a pretty rudimentary security - rwx. It has some gaping flaws ( like setuid ), and still doesn't have the security that DEC had in the early 80s. Most of the "security features" in modern OSs come from a continual hardening process, and tend to be based on reactions to environment and co-evolution more than borrowing from a specific progenitor.
Depends on the school - my kids went to one like that, but I pulled them out. The district mandated this miserable hell of a computer that never even worked. The IT was the worst ever - teachers couldn't even unlock students, 1st graders had to remember these crazy user IDs (like U238A_BBA76 - something to do with class number and student ID)
The school they are in now is much different. It's a mix of Macs, Windows, and Linux with no lockdown at all. No real net connection, but the research machines in the library have them. Ironically, even though the Windows machines are fully loaded with MS Software and games all the kids are clamoring to use the aging Mac G3s and the one old G4. I find it amusing, my self.
Ok - so I think both of us made our respective points. Mine was that proper naming of variables is critical. I think yours was too - we just disagree on the point of whether or not the addition of a character or two from the old much-maligned Hungarian notation is valuable or not. I'm certainly not arguing for the full, classic form (which was horrid). I just hate seeing things like $a, $b, $c and the ever-present $i being used as global random data variables. They are not bad for naming in little sub-scripts, but they never scale to huge scripts without a support headache.
It matters because in financial or ballistics applications (for example) there are very precise parameters for what happens to numbers. 1.0001 is not the same thing as 1, and when you have to perform operations that touch very large numbers millions of times, the difference is staggering.
As to the example? I would assume you don't understand how to reference arrays. Most languages allow you to use an index pointer to jump to a particular value in an array. What if @temp[3] were the 3rd item in a list of items? Suppose @temp was the result of this operation nested inside a stats file read (or DB query) @tmp = split(/;/, $line );
So for example at this point @temp could contain "ice cream", "candy", "chocolate", "watermelon" or some such. People could be simply the name of the people refenced by that particular group in that statistic.
The output would read: "I find that ice-cream is shared by 100% of people named Cedric" or whatever. Still a silly example, but certainly not as bad as you would make it out to be.
Dude - that's the frikin point. It's one thing to cast (which is dangerous enough), but to have no clue what a value is can be dangerous. What if I want to treat a float like an int? A decent language won't even let you. If I create an API that takes chars and returns chars, I want it to stay that way. I don't want it to randomly change. If I'm using a var as something, I don't want to have to guess what data type it is holding. Take this example: (we'll use perl, since it is loosely typed, so crazy crap like this happens) my $people; #no notation, no clue what it is supposed to be - it could be string, int, etc. my $likes; #again, no idea what this is supposed to be. my @tmp; #this is being created as an array
#Now, we'll assume that I ran some stuff, got some data in here, and 100 lines later, you have this: if( $likes == $people ){
push( @tmp, $people );
printf( "I find that $tmp[$likes] is shared by 100% of people named $people\n" ); }
Never mind that it may not make sense - I see stuff like that all the time. The problem that I come across (and the reason that non-strongly typed languages bug me) is that Perl allows me to use "==", "+" etc on strings AND numbers. The problem is that a string comparison is done with "eq" and "ne", not "==" and "!=". Therefore if I do that, I can have two different operators that behave in what can appear to be a random fashion. I use things like iVariable to remind myself (and the people who read my code years later) that they should be able to count on it being an integer of some sort. The only other choice is to constantly check what the value is against what you think it should be.
The only obvious exception to this that I can think of at the moment is Java, where sometimes you want to have some sort of array/hash/etc containing tons of random objects. You might want to store them using their base object class for ease in retrieval. I tend to prefer storing custom objects in things like that, so I can retrieve the more complex data in a predictable fashion.
I use it a bit - I don't think anyone uses the "full" form. I do thinks like i for int, a for array, and s for string etc. It makes it easier to tell when something needs to be accessed. This is especially true with Perl where EVERYTHING can be some wacky variable. Perl is hard enough to read without making the names too confusing.
Ok - seeing that link and realizing that they once ran a "Love Hotel" the name now makes much more sense:D
Seriously though - what is up with that name? Wii? How is that an international name (as they profess it to be). That's just plain stupid sounding. I was determined to buy one, but if the color schemes and games follow the name, there is no way I'll own one.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. I vote for 1!
-WS
I'll reply to this one, instead of your other one if you don't mind -
/. community even really cares. Media decay is similarly pointless - if I think I'll be listening to something in 5+ years (the shelf life of a CD-R), I probably would want the nice foldouts and info. If I cared about the cover art, I'd buy a record. I can barely even see the art on the little CDs. Therefore, with few exceptions, iTunes/Napster/Yahoo et al are a perfect choice for the common impulse purchase.
I totally see your point - but I don't think you see mine. The point of the original parent was that if they reduced the cost of CDs and Movies, they would become more "impulse" driven.
What I did was refute your argument that it was the same cost - if a person is willing to accept an "improper" insert (I certainly am - I could care less about most of that junk), then there is not only a difference in "user experience", but in cost. Target/Sam Goody/etc suck. You are limited to what they have on hand for one, and for two they tend to require large time investments. iTunes is fast and easy. Online stores are fast and easy, but there is a long delay before the media arrives.
DRM is pointless - nobody outside of the
Quality? If you care about quality you probably would buy a hi-def CD in the first place - even regular CDs are only so-so. Most downloadable music is certainly worthy of listening to on any system that costs less than $200. If you care enough to use a power conditioner or high-end audio cables you certainly care enough to get good media.
-WS
See? And that is a reasonable argument. It's the same reason I buy Santana and a few others on CD. If it sounds like crap on iTunes (and some stuff *really* sucks on there) then it is worth the money. Same reason they make the high-def CDs and records... some stuff is really important.
Or, if I know it will be part of a collection of some sort. (Rush, for example - I own them all).
-WS
Ummm - no. I print it on plain old normal paper ($4 per 500 sheets, so $0.008) with ink that only costs about $13 per 100+ sheets ($0.13). It goes into a media folder that holds 400 CDs (so 200 with art) and cost $30 ($0.15 per CD with media). I cut it out with a pair of scissors. I burn on fairly normal Fry's media at about $15 per 100 ($0.15). That brings my total cost (obviously not factoring in my computer or printer, which I would need anyway) to a grand total of $10.428. We'll call it $10.43.
So - let's compare that, for a new release that I just bought last night when I had an urge to hear Death Cab for Cutie (Transatlanticism) to a trip to my closest store (which is about 5 miles - it being a Target).
The album on iTunes cost me $9.99 ($10.43 adjusted) and about 5 minutes of time while I was playing WoW.
According to the Target website it is currently $12.96. Assuming I drive, it will take me at least 10 minutes to drive there. I could conceivably be home with it in hand within 30 minutes - assuming they have it. It would cost me fuel (20 mpg/$3.35/g so $1.675)
The album now cost me $13.932 with tax. With gas, we're looking at an adjusted price of $15.607 ($15.61). That, and I would have had to stop playing WoW, get dressed, go to Target at 22:35 last night... and oops. They close at 21:00.
So - basically, to make a long story short - you're just plain wrong. The only point you have is DRM, and honestly I could care less. It's not like I can't pull the music back in with only minor signal loss (AAC -> AIF) and have DRM-free tunes.
-WS
Is it down to 12 euros? When I was in France in december of 2001 I saw Quake (3?) going for about 45 euros (though it was in francs - the exchange was frozen at that point).
Heck, I buy games (used, mostly) at that price point all the time from Game Crazy, Game Stop, etc. I hardly ever go over $30 for a game. iTunes hit it right at $9.99 for me - I went from buying a CD every few weeks to an "album" from iTunes at least once a week. Sometimes 2 or 3 a week. I burn them to CD, print the nice covers, and I'm good to go.
-WS
Hooray!
:D
Hey - it's his blog, we're just commentators
-WS
That's cool - I didn't know it was on the rise. It would make sense, since it seems more fuel efficient.
I was thinking of cargo - but you're right about the passenger stuff. Hardly anyone rides anymore. I tried to take the train (Amtrak) a few times but it is *slooooooow*. Nothing like waiting 30 minutes for some other train to pass the switch!
-WS
I had one of those Indy posters up for ages :D
Hardly any T-A in my room in school. Mainly this really huge 4 layer mobo printout, a dimensioned view of a hamburger. Well, and some really geeky stuff.
-WS
-WS
I know how you feel - it killed me when DEC was sold off. One of the best and brightest, IMHO.
Ok - time for a bit of a sad old-timer rant (feel free to skip if you think computers always came with Windows)
<rant>
I really miss the magic that was there in some of those old companies - DEC, SGI, H-P... back when IBM was the big enemy and the biggest thrill I had was reading some new press release and thinking of ways to really do something cool with it. I remember looking at the camera on the old SGI screens and wondering if Jetson style video-phones were right around the corner. I remember running a lab of Indy workstations and feeling like I had the monopoly on "cool". Back when Windows still needed Trumpet WinSock and I was playing MUDs halfway across the country on an AlphaStation.
I've never seen a documentation system as nice as "help" before or since. Compilers that took *any* major language and optimized it really well. A database (RDB) that ran so well that when we ported it to Sun it took 5 times the hardware dollars to make it work. Oracle doesn't hold a candle to it...
How about real clustering? How about a software company that makes defacto standards so effective EVERYONE uses them (like OpenGL or GLUT?)
Why is it that things like "external processors", "clustering", and "grid computing", keep getting touted as though they were new? Do any of these self-proclaimed Unix gurus even *know* why tty is called that?
For all the people who think Microsoft invented BASIC - for people who don't know that edit/tpu is the answer to the question of "vi or emacs" - and for those who have never had a RACF account; I pity you. You missed out on some of the really cool parts of the computer age. Heck, I bet a lot of the younger people on here never even coded stuff for GLIDE... and that was a *PC* level tech (and a nice one!).
I am saddened by the demise of the "science" part of computer science. In this era is there still room for wonder? As much as I delight in the cross compatibility and functionality of the new computers, I am saddened more by the lack of people who truly appreciate how we got them. It's probably the same feeling that the last steam train engineers felt as diesel engines took over - or perhaps the feeling modern diesel engineers feel at the trucks and planes that have largely replaced them.
Oh well. We've all had this discussion before, and I guess I'm just getting too old. At least one benefit of all that is having two VNC sessions open to WinXP and 5 terminals open to my Sun servers on my MBP with the full OpenGL desktop.
</rant>
-WS
Well, it works for IBM!
:D
:)
They had the RS/6000, the OS/360 - OS/390, the AS/400 etc. You have to be intimately familiar with IBM to know what a 3270 emulator is for... try finding one of those at your local Computer store
On the other had, Jaguar got away nicely with the XK series (which is the first thing I thought of when I saw your joke name
I gotta say, though, it probably is best to have a name that has something to do with your product (like MS SQL Server, GameBoy, JournalSpace, etc). Most likely easier to sell when it has a name that means something.
-WS
You are just repeating the same argument everyone else is hashing over. My tounge-in-cheek comment was that it used to be marketed as "IBM PC/AT/XT, Tandy, or 100% compatible" - and yes, DOS 6.2 back runs on anything that is 100% IBM PC/AT/XT compatible. So there - it could very well mean that DOS will eventually not run on a Dell.
Your definition means that my PDA (which is a personal computer) is a PC. It means that my old Sage and my TRS-80 are PCs as well as my TI-92. They are all computers, they are all for personal use.
I have a MacBook Pro which I use regularly. It is certainly a PC, as is my IBM T42. I'd agree that CPU has nothing to do with it (otherwise an XBOX would be a PC).
I would agree with Apple's team that PC currently means a Windows-based x86 machine, because when I just asked 4 people around the building what a PC was this morning, that's what they all said.
-WS
lol - Great Real Genius ref!
:D
Man, that movie is one of my absolute favorites
-WS
Actually - think the distinct is simple -
:D
If a machine can run OS/2, DOS 3 - DOS 6.x etc it is IBM compatible. Things like a Tandy, for example
If you can't boot DOS, it isn't a 100% IBM compatible.
I just tried, and I can't boot DOS directly with boot camp. Even with a USB floppy heh.
-WS
He brought things like the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the finely grained (non-unix style) security, etc. Windows is still far ahead of the default Sun/Linux type file security.
Unix until fairly recently contained only a pretty rudimentary security - rwx. It has some gaping flaws ( like setuid ), and still doesn't have the security that DEC had in the early 80s. Most of the "security features" in modern OSs come from a continual hardening process, and tend to be based on reactions to environment and co-evolution more than borrowing from a specific progenitor.
-WS
lol - Yeah, I actually caught that after I hit submit. I meant option 2 there.
This must be a new low for grammar fascism on slashdot, however. heheh
-WS
lol - actually it's really really easy - but like I told my wife: "When the young padwan can bypass the filters, learned enough to see porn he can."
-WS
Orange County, Ca, USA.
-WS
Depends on the school - my kids went to one like that, but I pulled them out. The district mandated this miserable hell of a computer that never even worked. The IT was the worst ever - teachers couldn't even unlock students, 1st graders had to remember these crazy user IDs (like U238A_BBA76 - something to do with class number and student ID)
The school they are in now is much different. It's a mix of Macs, Windows, and Linux with no lockdown at all. No real net connection, but the research machines in the library have them. Ironically, even though the Windows machines are fully loaded with MS Software and games all the kids are clamoring to use the aging Mac G3s and the one old G4. I find it amusing, my self.
-WS
lol - you have a point there! I concede that. :)
Ok - so I think both of us made our respective points. Mine was that proper naming of variables is critical. I think yours was too - we just disagree on the point of whether or not the addition of a character or two from the old much-maligned Hungarian notation is valuable or not. I'm certainly not arguing for the full, classic form (which was horrid). I just hate seeing things like $a, $b, $c and the ever-present $i being used as global random data variables. They are not bad for naming in little sub-scripts, but they never scale to huge scripts without a support headache.
-WS
It matters because in financial or ballistics applications (for example) there are very precise parameters for what happens to numbers. 1.0001 is not the same thing as 1, and when you have to perform operations that touch very large numbers millions of times, the difference is staggering.
/;/, $line );
As to the example? I would assume you don't understand how to reference arrays. Most languages allow you to use an index pointer to jump to a particular value in an array.
What if @temp[3] were the 3rd item in a list of items? Suppose @temp was the result of this operation nested inside a stats file read (or DB query)
@tmp = split(
So for example at this point @temp could contain "ice cream", "candy", "chocolate", "watermelon" or some such. People could be simply the name of the people refenced by that particular group in that statistic.
The output would read: "I find that ice-cream is shared by 100% of people named Cedric" or whatever. Still a silly example, but certainly not as bad as you would make it out to be.
-WS
Dude - that's the frikin point. It's one thing to cast (which is dangerous enough), but to have no clue what a value is can be dangerous. What if I want to treat a float like an int? A decent language won't even let you. If I create an API that takes chars and returns chars, I want it to stay that way. I don't want it to randomly change. If I'm using a var as something, I don't want to have to guess what data type it is holding. Take this example: (we'll use perl, since it is loosely typed, so crazy crap like this happens)
my $people; #no notation, no clue what it is supposed to be - it could be string, int, etc.
my $likes; #again, no idea what this is supposed to be.
my @tmp; #this is being created as an array
#Now, we'll assume that I ran some stuff, got some data in here, and 100 lines later, you have this:
if( $likes == $people ){
push( @tmp, $people );
printf( "I find that $tmp[$likes] is shared by 100% of people named $people\n" );
}
Never mind that it may not make sense - I see stuff like that all the time. The problem that I come across (and the reason that non-strongly typed languages bug me) is that Perl allows me to use "==", "+" etc on strings AND numbers. The problem is that a string comparison is done with "eq" and "ne", not "==" and "!=". Therefore if I do that, I can have two different operators that behave in what can appear to be a random fashion. I use things like iVariable to remind myself (and the people who read my code years later) that they should be able to count on it being an integer of some sort. The only other choice is to constantly check what the value is against what you think it should be.
The only obvious exception to this that I can think of at the moment is Java, where sometimes you want to have some sort of array/hash/etc containing tons of random objects. You might want to store them using their base object class for ease in retrieval. I tend to prefer storing custom objects in things like that, so I can retrieve the more complex data in a predictable fashion.
-WS
I use it a bit - I don't think anyone uses the "full" form. I do thinks like i for int, a for array, and s for string etc. It makes it easier to tell when something needs to be accessed. This is especially true with Perl where EVERYTHING can be some wacky variable. Perl is hard enough to read without making the names too confusing.
-WS
Here's a link
That'd be cool :D
-WS
Ok - seeing that link and realizing that they once ran a "Love Hotel" the name now makes much more sense :D
Seriously though - what is up with that name? Wii? How is that an international name (as they profess it to be). That's just plain stupid sounding. I was determined to buy one, but if the color schemes and games follow the name, there is no way I'll own one.
-WS