REALLY?!?! Then my good man please explain to me why temps actually dropped during the CO2 explosion casued by our industrial revolution.
The standard explanation (attested to by modelling) is that particulate aerosols (due to acid-rain causing sulfur emissions especially) reflected some of the Sun's energy away before it hit the ground. When those aerosols were cleaned up to avoid the acid-rain effects, that brake on the CO2 effect was lost, and as the CO2 levels continued to increase, the planet's temperature reflected the added heat capture.
Stop looking at just one source of info (The Guilt Ridden Global Warming Groups) Don't believe the hype. There is no consensus on the human cause of global warming.
When you say 'The Guilt Ridden Global Warming Groups', does it bother you not one bit that those groups happen to strongly overlap with climatologists working in this field of study?
I get the idea that you'd prefer we stop looking at any source of info that you don't agree with on this issue.
The computer models they use for these gloom and doom predictions are nothing we should be looking at for reliable info. They are built on flawed and incomplete data sets. Think about it. We can't even reliably predict the weather for a week yet we are supposed to beleive they can predict the weather decades or centuries into the future? Get real. Our climate systems are incredibly complex. We do not understand all the dynamics at work here.
True enough, but it is actually easier to predict climate than it is to predict short term weather, just as it is easier to predict the average level of the tides (months in advance) but effectively impossible to predict much in advance the precise level of the water as waves lap up and down on the shore.
More relatedly, we can be pretty damn confident that it will tend to be cooler in the winter than in the summer, that it will tend to be wetter in the rainy season than in the dry, and etc.
Many people seem to ignore one of the biggest drivers of our world climate. That big lovable fireball in the sky we affectionately call "The Sun." There is evidence that shows the other planets in our solar system are heating up and going through their own climate changes. You can't seriously tell me this is also due to our love of fossile fules... Fact is we haven't been here long enough to know what's really going on. We only started recording temps at the end of our last small ice age. Kinda makes sense if we are coming out of a big freeze that we'd be going into a warming trend for a while.
Who do you imagine is ignoring this driver of our world climate?
The professional climatologists?
Really?
You should know that the evidence for warming in the rest of the solar system is not nearly as strong as you seem to believe. It appears that Mars' warming is more of the 'moving from winter to summer' type than it is of the increased solar flux type, for instance, and even that evidence is not as strong as we have for earthly warming.
Further, you should know the Earth will react differently to increased solar flux than it would to increased CO2 trapping of atmospheric heat. The heating would effect different regions of the atmospher differently.
Would it surprise you that the actual observed heating trends cohere with the physics of CO2 heat trapping and not with the physics of increased solar flux?
Would it surprise you that you might not know what you're talking about here?
Just because developers are using the extra space doesn't mean that they had to use the extra space or that it was a good idea to use the space.
Sure.. but, c'mon, it's nonsensical to argue that 9 gigs is some magic number, and that there will never be a benefit from using more than that in any console game that comes out over the next 5 years.
Blu-Ray gives PS3 games the ability to ship with up to 50 gigs of data on board. That's going to make some new things possible, and I look forward to seeing what folks do with it.
Imagine a WoW type game that can have that much greater detail in a large game world, for instance.
Reports coming out of the PS3 launch developers indicate that they actually are using the extra space available, above and beyond the 9 gigs that a DVD gets you, to store high resolution textures, more sound effects, etc.
That PS3 is bringing a never-before-seen storage capability to console games does not mean that that extra space will never get used.
Of course we all remember that PGP verification only means that the download was signed off on by the person or persons in possession of the corresponding PGP private key, not that that person is necessarily competent or trustworthy.
PGP/GPG signing is great, and necessary, but not sufficient for trust.
And just imagine how friendly consumers will be to the experience of not being able to fast forward through commercials when they watch their show a second time. Suppose I'm watching a program as my Tivo is recording it, and I fall asleep. I wake up later, and want to watch the part of the show that I missed.. and I have to re-watch all the ads that I already saw! That'll make me love ABC.
Of course, the original article here doesn't say that they want to turn off fast forwarding through commercials alone.. just that they want to turn off fast forward. So I can't fast forward at all? That'll make me love ABC.
The problem is that there is scarecely a competitive market for IP service. The telcos have seen off any obligation to allow
ISPs to use their better-than-dialup lines, so there are no more competitive ISPs there, and the cable companies (when not owned
by the telcos) want just as much to be able to exert control over who I communicate with, regardless of what I pay them.
Actually, the ability of RMI to depend on a common code execution on either side of an RMI link (at least when using JRMP, the original wire-level protocol for Java-to-Java RMI) means you can do a good number of tricks that you can't easily do with CORBA. You can pass classes (not just objects) from JVM to JVM. You can operate with distributed garbage collection and multithreading out of the box. You never have to worry about whether your native Double class has the same representation and semantics as the equivalent class on the far side of the RMI link. You can pass any arbitrary object to the other side of the link and know that it will be reconstituted properly, without having to re-do parts of your design in IDL.
RMI is tragically flawed by its limitation to the Java environment, but within that environment, it is a superb solution, providing simple and flexible support for distributed object systems. Want security? Wrap your RMI communications in SSL and turn on cryptographically random ID codes for your distributed objects. Want the ability to penetrate firewalls? Encapsulate your RMI calls in HTTP. Want to have your software automatically bounce from system to system? Java's ability to transparently pass serialized remote object references makes it a snap.
As the article says, CORBA was crippled from birth by its creators' insane idea to deliver a set of castle-in-the-sky specs without testing them out with actual implementations. CORBA 1.0 couldn't even speak from ORB to ORB over the Internet, for pete's sake.
When people assert that there's no "missing link", we mean that there's no gap in the fossil record that is improbably out of step with the general spottiness of the fossil record. It's extremely unlikely for a fossil to be created, after all.. it's only the immensity of geologic time that has allowed so many to be recorded in the strata, that themselves undergo convulsions and deformations and plate subduction and assault by glaciers and drowning under changing sea levels. There's no guarantee that we'll find so much as a single fossil record of one species in a thousand over the ages.
So when we find a fossil that appears, from its chronological sorting in the geologic column, from its radiological dating markers, and from its morphology to give us more information about what a certain part of the animal tree looked like at a time we knew relatively little about, we celebrate because we get that much more insight into the path evolution took in producing a given species.
It's not that the fossil is a 'missing link'.. technically speaking, unless you can dig up and examine the bones of your dead ancestors going back 80 generations, you've got a 'missing link' in there, and no one seems particularly concerned about that, aside from obsessive genealogists. People worry about 'missing links' when evolution denialists cite them as a reason to cast the whole edifice of evidence for evolutionary theory away without providing a theory which better fits the facts.
Finally, these fossils are probably not the ancestors of modern birds, but they are certainly cousins of the ancestors who were living at that time, and the hope and assumption is that the family resemblance is close enough to tell us something about the history of the species we're interested in today.
Good old "make" is to Ant what Emacs is to Eclipse, and people should learn how to use it first for the same reasons.
Not really. Make is actually quite terrible for doing Java builds, since it has no cognizance of the structure of the Java build process. Make was built for an environment in which there is a two step compile and link process, but Java doesn't work like that. Java is built to do simultaneous compilation.. any time you have classes that mutually reference one another, they need to be compiled together so that all the symbols can be resolved.
Ant knows how to do this for Java code, Make does not.
In addition, for the purposes of this question, Ant is more portable than Make, inasmuch as Ant runs wherever Java runs, and if you're dealing with a platform that Java doesn't run on, you're not going to be having much luck in this gentleman's class in any event. Ant runs great on Windows, specifically, whereas with Make you'd either have to install Cygwin in order to get all the Unix bits, or you'd need to deal with a variant Make which might not work the same.
For the Python portion of the class, something like Make shouldn't be necessary, as you can just run the source code directly with the interpreter.
Newer equipment is always better than older equipment, even if you still go with a traditional color wheel and bulb. for example, from the HL-P series to the HL-R, Samsung added more color sections to the wheel and made it spin faster, thus significantly reducing the possibility of rainbow effect for most people. The morale of the story is to know what model you want to buy (usually the newest, not last year's model), and make sure that's the one you're actually buying (big box stores like Best Buy are notorious for selling sets from two model years ago at current model prices).
Yeah, the Samsung I brought home was the HL-R, so I was hoping that the increased colors on the color wheel would prevent any problems. I just seem to be particularly sensitive to it.. I developed pretty bad headaches from watching the set, so it just wasn't an option for me.
I assume you mean 1920x1080p, not 1280p. But anyway, I'm not sure now is the right time to go 1080p. The price of 1080p sets is still significantly higher than a 720p set, and you're going to have a hard time finding 1080p sources (assuming you buy a set that can actually accept 1080p signals...). If you're buying the TV to be a dedicated PC monitor, that'll work all right. Otherwise, any signal you're going to use will have to be upconverted by the TV, with the possibility of signal lag. At best, you'll still have to de-interlace 1080i signals. HD-DVD players, upconverting DVD players, OTA HD signals, cable boxes, the Xbox 360, and the orignal Xbox only do 720p and 1080i (the original Xbox requires a game to support that specific resolution, while the 360 will do digital-domain conversion to avoid any lag in your set's conversion routines). You'll have to wait for Blu-Ray players or the PS3 to get a real 1080p signal from anything other than a PC.
1080p, of course.
Sony's initial set of Grand Wega SXRD's don't support 1080p input sadly, though it deinterlaces/uprezes everything to 1080p internally. The 1080 resolution is great on OTA HDTV, and I expect that when I come around to getting a PS3, the quality should be just incredible, even if it does have to go through a de-interlacing step.
As with all things in this area, if you are willing to wait 6 months or a year, you'll have better options at lower prices.
I'd recommend emacs. You'd be giving them a tool powerful enough to let them get work done, but not yet a tool that would remove the burden of thinking from them. They'd have to spend time learning a couple of handfuls of command key sequences, but all in the service of competently manipulating the source text, not in the service of learning how a given IDE wants to frame the software development process for them. If you wanted to help them put their code together, you could give out handouts for Jakarta Ant.. that way they'd get to directly touch and view the construction process for their programs.
Emacs and Ant are also available on all platforms your students might conceivably be using, whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux.
I bought a Samsung DLP unit, but had to return it due to strobing rainbow effect. It was a really great image, though that was in part because Samsung was doing a very high level of algorithmic sharpening, which can cause halos around some images. But I really couldn't move my eyes across it without seeing the trailing rainbows.
I didn't see this effect in the store at all, but at home the awareness of it really did build up. If you are interested in DLP, you might look at the new units that use high speed LED arrays instead of a high intensity white light bulb to handle the color.. these new ones still flash the colors in sequence, but the sequencing is much faster, and it really and truly is supposed to be below the perceptual threshold for everybody.
I wound up getting a Sony SXRD LCoS set swapped out for the Samsung DLP.. the SXRD was more expensive, but the resolution was higher (true 1920x1280p), with more digital connectors, and better firmware. The SXRD sets are similar to DLP in that they are digital microdisplay projectors, but they use three LCoS color panels instead of a color wheel spinning in front of a micromirror array.
If you want a good place to read heated and informed opinions about the various choices on offer, check out http://www.avsforum.com/.
I like the way you're thinking, but you're not taking it far enough.
The real answer here is to say screw it to pri$ey consoles like the Wii and just
pick up a DS. Imagine how many DS (or GBA!) games you could afford to get with your
DS for the price of a Wii!
If I remember right, they're still using a red laser. Blue-ray uses a blue laser... hench, it's name. Seriously, if you haven't read up on this, there's no point in trying to flame someone else.
Now, it's not as short a wavelength as Blu-Ray.. HD-DVD is using 450nm, while Blu-Ray is using a more violet 405nm, but they are both Blue relative to CD or DVD.
I'm sorry, but you can't say Blue-Ray is better because it has *some* support from big movie studios. Because, so does HD-DVD, and HD-DVD has Microsoft and Intel. They're not exactly small no-bodies.
Microsoft and Intel don't make movies, last I checked. I do appreciate the clarification on New Line and Universal, though. I think the odds of New Line and Universal coming out with Blu Ray is much higher than, oh, say, Columbia Studios coming out with HD-DVD, but we'll have to see. A lot will indeed depend on pricing and how well the PS3 are received.
At these prices, I don't think the market will support 2 formats for long. However, if the price comes down, I cannot see why it won't. Afterall, look at the video game players. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all on the market and they're all sharing it, which some claimed wouldn't happen. I can see a 3 way market for this as well.
I don't think the market will support 2 formats for long, at all. Certainly not as a mass market movie delivery system, anyway. If HD-DVD wins on the content, Blu Ray will still be used on PS3 for its lifetime. If Blu Ray wins, HD-DVD might stick around for a little while as a higher storage DVD-RW replacement, but without something like a PS3-level commitment from a company and studio to HD-DVD, I imagine HD-DVD will just fade out of systems in the absence of market domination.
Basically, the PS3 is going to kill off Bluray, and I'll tell you why.
Great, let's hear it.
Lets say you're a manufacture of equipment and are choosing which player to make. The HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper, while the Bluray player is more expensive but has more storage and possibly better quality video. Now, when you look at your bottom line you can sell an HD-DVD player for $500-$700 but your Bluray player will sell around $800-$1000.
What's your evidence that the HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper? Or that the Blu Ray player will around $800-$1000? I've heard credible arguments that the HD-DVD discs are cheaper to produce, but no one has given any evidence that the player will be, given that both HD-DVD and Blu Ray support precisely the same complement of codecs. What's your reasoning here?
Now, here comes Sony with their BluRay equipped $500-$600 PS3. You know that you'll be selling your Bluray player at a loss if you sell it any less than $800 and you know anyone that wants a Bluray player will just get a PS3 since it's cheaper. You also know you can't compete against it with Bluray but can easily compete with an HD-DVD player and even the XBOX 360 plus HD-DVD will be in that $500-$700 competitive range your player will be in.
The PS3 may have set a competitive ceiling for a single-disc Blu Ray player (let's say at $600, because you want the HDMI output), but there's still no evidence that you've got some cost of manufacturing floor which will force you to compete at that price range.
As a manufacture looking out for your Shareholders, what are you going to build?
The one that will have customers. HD-DVD and Blu Ray players are only equivalent products to the consumer if they have identical content on offer, and you know that they won't, because Blu Ray has greater support among the movie studios.
Basically, the PS3 will be the only Bluray player in the market because it will drive the market away from it and toward the cheaper HD-DVD. That is until Bluray drops in price, and by then, the format war will be over and HD-DVD will be the winner.
Except that there may be a few to ten million PS3 owners who are tipping the market towards production of Blu Ray content. Anyone who wants a PS3 on its own merits will have to be convinced to buy both the PS3 and a standalone HD-DVD player, and what exclusive content will there be from the studios to make it worth their while?
Unless you've got evidentiary support for your argument about the necessarily higher cost of producing a Blu Ray player vs. the cost of producing an HD-DVD player, it's not at all clear that the market will go in the way you suggest.
This allegation is really too bare to refute, but I will say that Java explicitly trades memory loading (and performance) for multi-threaded safety. The biggest single thing that causes Java to use more memory than C++ is that all Strings are immutable. This is essential for a multithreaded environment.. if a String is passed to another thread, that thread must be able to depend on the String not changing out from underneath it after it has done preliminary validation.
When in doubt, Java trades performance and memory for safety and programmer time. And don't forget that 'safety' does double duty by providing both correct behavior and reduced programmer time at debut time.
If you're not willing to pay the runtime costs for a language and library corps designed for pervasive multithreading and runtime error checking, you shouldn't be using Java.
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REALLY?!?! Then my good man please explain to me why temps actually dropped during the CO2 explosion casued by our industrial revolution.
The standard explanation (attested to by modelling) is that particulate aerosols (due to acid-rain causing sulfur emissions especially) reflected some of the Sun's energy away before it hit the ground. When those aerosols were cleaned up to avoid the acid-rain effects, that brake on the CO2 effect was lost, and as the CO2 levels continued to increase, the planet's temperature reflected the added heat capture.
Stop looking at just one source of info (The Guilt Ridden Global Warming Groups) Don't believe the hype. There is no consensus on the human cause of global warming.
When you say 'The Guilt Ridden Global Warming Groups', does it bother you not one bit that those groups happen to strongly overlap with climatologists working in this field of study?
I get the idea that you'd prefer we stop looking at any source of info that you don't agree with on this issue.
The computer models they use for these gloom and doom predictions are nothing we should be looking at for reliable info. They are built on flawed and incomplete data sets. Think about it. We can't even reliably predict the weather for a week yet we are supposed to beleive they can predict the weather decades or centuries into the future? Get real. Our climate systems are incredibly complex. We do not understand all the dynamics at work here.
True enough, but it is actually easier to predict climate than it is to predict short term weather, just as it is easier to predict the average level of the tides (months in advance) but effectively impossible to predict much in advance the precise level of the water as waves lap up and down on the shore.
More relatedly, we can be pretty damn confident that it will tend to be cooler in the winter than in the summer, that it will tend to be wetter in the rainy season than in the dry, and etc.
Many people seem to ignore one of the biggest drivers of our world climate. That big lovable fireball in the sky we affectionately call "The Sun." There is evidence that shows the other planets in our solar system are heating up and going through their own climate changes. You can't seriously tell me this is also due to our love of fossile fules... Fact is we haven't been here long enough to know what's really going on. We only started recording temps at the end of our last small ice age. Kinda makes sense if we are coming out of a big freeze that we'd be going into a warming trend for a while.
Who do you imagine is ignoring this driver of our world climate?
The professional climatologists?
Really?
You should know that the evidence for warming in the rest of the solar system is not nearly as strong as you seem to believe. It appears that Mars' warming is more of the 'moving from winter to summer' type than it is of the increased solar flux type, for instance, and even that evidence is not as strong as we have for earthly warming.
Further, you should know the Earth will react differently to increased solar flux than it would to increased CO2 trapping of atmospheric heat. The heating would effect different regions of the atmospher differently.
Would it surprise you that the actual observed heating trends cohere with the physics of CO2 heat trapping and not with the physics of increased solar flux?
Would it surprise you that you might not know what you're talking about here?
Just because developers are using the extra space doesn't mean that they had to use the extra space or that it was a good idea to use the space.
Sure.. but, c'mon, it's nonsensical to argue that 9 gigs is some magic number, and that there will never be a benefit from using more than that in any console game that comes out over the next 5 years. Blu-Ray gives PS3 games the ability to ship with up to 50 gigs of data on board. That's going to make some new things possible, and I look forward to seeing what folks do with it. Imagine a WoW type game that can have that much greater detail in a large game world, for instance.Reports coming out of the PS3 launch developers indicate that they actually are using the extra space available, above and beyond the 9 gigs that a DVD gets you, to store high resolution textures, more sound effects, etc.
That PS3 is bringing a never-before-seen storage capability to console games does not mean that that extra space will never get used.
I don't think the original article describes the PS3 effort as 'faltering' so much as 'really risky'.
Of course we all remember that PGP verification only means that the download was signed off on by the person or persons in possession of the corresponding PGP private key, not that that person is necessarily competent or trustworthy.
PGP/GPG signing is great, and necessary, but not sufficient for trust.
What? Linux gets along fine with trademark and copyright law.
Zonk, is it necessary to edit down what your submitters give you and take half of the post to include part of the referenced article?
And just imagine how friendly consumers will be to the experience of not being able to fast forward through commercials when they watch their show a second time. Suppose I'm watching a program as my Tivo is recording it, and I fall asleep. I wake up later, and want to watch the part of the show that I missed.. and I have to re-watch all the ads that I already saw! That'll make me love ABC.
Of course, the original article here doesn't say that they want to turn off fast forwarding through commercials alone.. just that they want to turn off fast forward. So I can't fast forward at all? That'll make me love ABC.
But does Microsoft make you pay for each copy?
What is their policy on virtualization licensing, anyway?
The problem is that there is scarecely a competitive market for IP service. The telcos have seen off any obligation to allow ISPs to use their better-than-dialup lines, so there are no more competitive ISPs there, and the cable companies (when not owned by the telcos) want just as much to be able to exert control over who I communicate with, regardless of what I pay them.
Actually, the ability of RMI to depend on a common code execution on either side of an RMI link (at least when using JRMP, the original wire-level protocol for Java-to-Java RMI) means you can do a good number of tricks that you can't easily do with CORBA. You can pass classes (not just objects) from JVM to JVM. You can operate with distributed garbage collection and multithreading out of the box. You never have to worry about whether your native Double class has the same representation and semantics as the equivalent class on the far side of the RMI link. You can pass any arbitrary object to the other side of the link and know that it will be reconstituted properly, without having to re-do parts of your design in IDL.
RMI is tragically flawed by its limitation to the Java environment, but within that environment, it is a superb solution, providing simple and flexible support for distributed object systems. Want security? Wrap your RMI communications in SSL and turn on cryptographically random ID codes for your distributed objects. Want the ability to penetrate firewalls? Encapsulate your RMI calls in HTTP. Want to have your software automatically bounce from system to system? Java's ability to transparently pass serialized remote object references makes it a snap.
As the article says, CORBA was crippled from birth by its creators' insane idea to deliver a set of castle-in-the-sky specs without testing them out with actual implementations. CORBA 1.0 couldn't even speak from ORB to ORB over the Internet, for pete's sake.
When people assert that there's no "missing link", we mean that there's no gap in the fossil record that is improbably out of step with the general spottiness of the fossil record. It's extremely unlikely for a fossil to be created, after all.. it's only the immensity of geologic time that has allowed so many to be recorded in the strata, that themselves undergo convulsions and deformations and plate subduction and assault by glaciers and drowning under changing sea levels. There's no guarantee that we'll find so much as a single fossil record of one species in a thousand over the ages. So when we find a fossil that appears, from its chronological sorting in the geologic column, from its radiological dating markers, and from its morphology to give us more information about what a certain part of the animal tree looked like at a time we knew relatively little about, we celebrate because we get that much more insight into the path evolution took in producing a given species. It's not that the fossil is a 'missing link'.. technically speaking, unless you can dig up and examine the bones of your dead ancestors going back 80 generations, you've got a 'missing link' in there, and no one seems particularly concerned about that, aside from obsessive genealogists. People worry about 'missing links' when evolution denialists cite them as a reason to cast the whole edifice of evidence for evolutionary theory away without providing a theory which better fits the facts. Finally, these fossils are probably not the ancestors of modern birds, but they are certainly cousins of the ancestors who were living at that time, and the hope and assumption is that the family resemblance is close enough to tell us something about the history of the species we're interested in today.
Good old "make" is to Ant what Emacs is to Eclipse, and people should learn how to use it first for the same reasons.
Not really. Make is actually quite terrible for doing Java builds, since it has no cognizance of the structure of the Java build process. Make was built for an environment in which there is a two step compile and link process, but Java doesn't work like that. Java is built to do simultaneous compilation.. any time you have classes that mutually reference one another, they need to be compiled together so that all the symbols can be resolved.
Ant knows how to do this for Java code, Make does not.
In addition, for the purposes of this question, Ant is more portable than Make, inasmuch as Ant runs wherever Java runs, and if you're dealing with a platform that Java doesn't run on, you're not going to be having much luck in this gentleman's class in any event. Ant runs great on Windows, specifically, whereas with Make you'd either have to install Cygwin in order to get all the Unix bits, or you'd need to deal with a variant Make which might not work the same.
For the Python portion of the class, something like Make shouldn't be necessary, as you can just run the source code directly with the interpreter.
Newer equipment is always better than older equipment, even if you still go with a traditional color wheel and bulb. for example, from the HL-P series to the HL-R, Samsung added more color sections to the wheel and made it spin faster, thus significantly reducing the possibility of rainbow effect for most people. The morale of the story is to know what model you want to buy (usually the newest, not last year's model), and make sure that's the one you're actually buying (big box stores like Best Buy are notorious for selling sets from two model years ago at current model prices).
Yeah, the Samsung I brought home was the HL-R, so I was hoping that the increased colors on the color wheel would prevent any problems. I just seem to be particularly sensitive to it.. I developed pretty bad headaches from watching the set, so it just wasn't an option for me.
I assume you mean 1920x1080p, not 1280p. But anyway, I'm not sure now is the right time to go 1080p. The price of 1080p sets is still significantly higher than a 720p set, and you're going to have a hard time finding 1080p sources (assuming you buy a set that can actually accept 1080p signals ...). If you're buying the TV to be a dedicated PC monitor, that'll work all right. Otherwise, any signal you're going to use will have to be upconverted by the TV, with the possibility of signal lag. At best, you'll still have to de-interlace 1080i signals. HD-DVD players, upconverting DVD players, OTA HD signals, cable boxes, the Xbox 360, and the orignal Xbox only do 720p and 1080i (the original Xbox requires a game to support that specific resolution, while the 360 will do digital-domain conversion to avoid any lag in your set's conversion routines). You'll have to wait for Blu-Ray players or the PS3 to get a real 1080p signal from anything other than a PC.
1080p, of course.
Sony's initial set of Grand Wega SXRD's don't support 1080p input sadly, though it deinterlaces/uprezes everything to 1080p internally. The 1080 resolution is great on OTA HDTV, and I expect that when I come around to getting a PS3, the quality should be just incredible, even if it does have to go through a de-interlacing step.
As with all things in this area, if you are willing to wait 6 months or a year, you'll have better options at lower prices.
I'd recommend emacs. You'd be giving them a tool powerful enough to let them get work done, but not yet a tool that would remove the burden of thinking from them. They'd have to spend time learning a couple of handfuls of command key sequences, but all in the service of competently manipulating the source text, not in the service of learning how a given IDE wants to frame the software development process for them. If you wanted to help them put their code together, you could give out handouts for Jakarta Ant.. that way they'd get to directly touch and view the construction process for their programs.
Emacs and Ant are also available on all platforms your students might conceivably be using, whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux.
I bought a Samsung DLP unit, but had to return it due to strobing rainbow effect. It was a really great image, though that was in part because Samsung was doing a very high level of algorithmic sharpening, which can cause halos around some images. But I really couldn't move my eyes across it without seeing the trailing rainbows.
I didn't see this effect in the store at all, but at home the awareness of it really did build up. If you are interested in DLP, you might look at the new units that use high speed LED arrays instead of a high intensity white light bulb to handle the color.. these new ones still flash the colors in sequence, but the sequencing is much faster, and it really and truly is supposed to be below the perceptual threshold for everybody.
I wound up getting a Sony SXRD LCoS set swapped out for the Samsung DLP.. the SXRD was more expensive, but the resolution was higher (true 1920x1280p), with more digital connectors, and better firmware. The SXRD sets are similar to DLP in that they are digital microdisplay projectors, but they use three LCoS color panels instead of a color wheel spinning in front of a micromirror array.
If you want a good place to read heated and informed opinions about the various choices on offer, check out http://www.avsforum.com/.
Good luck!
I like the way you're thinking, but you're not taking it far enough.
The real answer here is to say screw it to pri$ey consoles like the Wii and just pick up a DS. Imagine how many DS (or GBA!) games you could afford to get with your DS for the price of a Wii!
Err, SpectreHiro is correct, both disc formats appear to use a 405nm blue laser. I misread the HD-DVD page.
If I remember right, they're still using a red laser. Blue-ray uses a blue laser... hench, it's name. Seriously, if you haven't read up on this, there's no point in trying to flame someone else.
I agree. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#The_blue_laser for Wikipedia on HD-DVD's use of a blue laser.
Now, it's not as short a wavelength as Blu-Ray.. HD-DVD is using 450nm, while Blu-Ray is using a more violet 405nm, but they are both Blue relative to CD or DVD.
I'm sorry, but you can't say Blue-Ray is better because it has *some* support from big movie studios. Because, so does HD-DVD, and HD-DVD has Microsoft and Intel. They're not exactly small no-bodies.
Microsoft and Intel don't make movies, last I checked. I do appreciate the clarification on New Line and Universal, though. I think the odds of New Line and Universal coming out with Blu Ray is much higher than, oh, say, Columbia Studios coming out with HD-DVD, but we'll have to see. A lot will indeed depend on pricing and how well the PS3 are received.
At these prices, I don't think the market will support 2 formats for long. However, if the price comes down, I cannot see why it won't. Afterall, look at the video game players. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all on the market and they're all sharing it, which some claimed wouldn't happen. I can see a 3 way market for this as well.
I don't think the market will support 2 formats for long, at all. Certainly not as a mass market movie delivery system, anyway. If HD-DVD wins on the content, Blu Ray will still be used on PS3 for its lifetime. If Blu Ray wins, HD-DVD might stick around for a little while as a higher storage DVD-RW replacement, but without something like a PS3-level commitment from a company and studio to HD-DVD, I imagine HD-DVD will just fade out of systems in the absence of market domination.
Basically, the PS3 is going to kill off Bluray, and I'll tell you why.
Great, let's hear it.
Lets say you're a manufacture of equipment and are choosing which player to make. The HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper, while the Bluray player is more expensive but has more storage and possibly better quality video. Now, when you look at your bottom line you can sell an HD-DVD player for $500-$700 but your Bluray player will sell around $800-$1000.
What's your evidence that the HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper? Or that the Blu Ray player will around $800-$1000? I've heard credible arguments that the HD-DVD discs are cheaper to produce, but no one has given any evidence that the player will be, given that both HD-DVD and Blu Ray support precisely the same complement of codecs. What's your reasoning here?
Now, here comes Sony with their BluRay equipped $500-$600 PS3. You know that you'll be selling your Bluray player at a loss if you sell it any less than $800 and you know anyone that wants a Bluray player will just get a PS3 since it's cheaper. You also know you can't compete against it with Bluray but can easily compete with an HD-DVD player and even the XBOX 360 plus HD-DVD will be in that $500-$700 competitive range your player will be in.
The PS3 may have set a competitive ceiling for a single-disc Blu Ray player (let's say at $600, because you want the HDMI output), but there's still no evidence that you've got some cost of manufacturing floor which will force you to compete at that price range.
As a manufacture looking out for your Shareholders, what are you going to build?
The one that will have customers. HD-DVD and Blu Ray players are only equivalent products to the consumer if they have identical content on offer, and you know that they won't, because Blu Ray has greater support among the movie studios.
Basically, the PS3 will be the only Bluray player in the market because it will drive the market away from it and toward the cheaper HD-DVD. That is until Bluray drops in price, and by then, the format war will be over and HD-DVD will be the winner.
Except that there may be a few to ten million PS3 owners who are tipping the market towards production of Blu Ray content. Anyone who wants a PS3 on its own merits will have to be convinced to buy both the PS3 and a standalone HD-DVD player, and what exclusive content will there be from the studios to make it worth their while?
Unless you've got evidentiary support for your argument about the necessarily higher cost of producing a Blu Ray player vs. the cost of producing an HD-DVD player, it's not at all clear that the market will go in the way you suggest.
What sort of application are you seeing this memory difference on?
This allegation is really too bare to refute, but I will say that Java explicitly trades memory loading (and performance) for multi-threaded safety. The biggest single thing that causes Java to use more memory than C++ is that all Strings are immutable. This is essential for a multithreaded environment.. if a String is passed to another thread, that thread must be able to depend on the String not changing out from underneath it after it has done preliminary validation.
When in doubt, Java trades performance and memory for safety and programmer time. And don't forget that 'safety' does double duty by providing both correct behavior and reduced programmer time at debut time.
If you're not willing to pay the runtime costs for a language and library corps designed for pervasive multithreading and runtime error checking, you shouldn't be using Java.
Mod: +1, crazy
Thermal pollution is so far down in the noise in terms of environmental concerns that I think it can be safely overlooked.
Secondary radioactivity due to neutron bombardment from a working fusion plant is likely to be a bigger factor.
Because you may implement a framework of object functionality in Java, but then want to allow developers to write scripts to drive your framework.
QED