So I'd say teach the students how to use a debugger from the beginning. Unless you intend the course to be one that "weeds out" any student who isn't 100% dedicated to earning a CS degree...
I disagree. Most of the intro class program assignments don't require an IDE or debugger to finish. I think at the beginning it was beneficial to have to debug compiler errors on my own and if I had a problem I couldn't solve on my own I could ask the instructer or TA. IMHO it made me the above average software developer I am today. Being able to step through your code is a great ability to have, but for simple programs I think it's more beneficial to have to solve and think why your program is not working without the assistance of a debugger. Debuggers are definately timesavers, but I am glad I didn't get to use them from the start of my university level education.
You can also thank them for making an awesome IDE.
I agree. After I left school I had almost no experience programming for windows (not a bad thing). But it was VERY nice to have VS since my first job was programming windows apps. I had used UltraEdit all through school and (while UE is awesome) it was nice to have a built in debugger as well as all the other goodies VS has. It is seriously the 2nd MS app I am happy to use (the other not being an app but Windows XP Pro is pretty damn good too IMHO).
But the Senate is just about to fix that - once English is declared our One True Language
Do you have something against that? It was the language the USA was founded on for Christ sakes. Making sure immigrants have a basic understanding of English is a good thing. If I decided I was going to immigrate to Spain I would make sure to get a good grasp on Spanish before I left, it's a logical thing to do. I support having English as the national language, it's about time.
it should be much more efficient that C/C++ libraries. On top of that, since none of it's statically linked, each nontrivial Java app placed on the laptop should be smaller than the equivalent C/C++ app
I beg to differ, while the actual Java app may be smaller you still need to have the libraries available (and be the right version etc). Being dynamically linked can be great since resources can be shared between different apps, but for some situations having the ability to statically link is a good idea to "make sure" things will run. What happens if your java app needs something that is dynamically linked yet the library is too old? (I am curious since I have some Java experience from university but most of my professional experience is C/C++) Either way the actual apps might be smaller for Java but extra disk space still needs to be utilized (along with the real issue, that the libraries available are compatible).
It's gratis. It's not free. If it were free I could fork it...
Uhh free is a SYNONYM for gratis ie they both mean "without charge". They have the same meaning (explaining what a synonym is to you since you obviously don't know). Opera is free, but it is not open source is what you are attempting to say. There is a big difference between that and not free, closed source, software.
of course, it's not free, so you can't fork it anyhow.
Opera is still free, you only have to pay if you want support which I think is fair. They even took out the little box that used to show Ads all the time in previous version. I have been a happy Opera user for the last 4 years or so, nothing else compares to how stable and quick it is in my experience. Firefox is alright, I used Moz for a while, but I don't need the ability to add on a whole bunch of extensions and I am happy with the ones Opera provides (although I do agree they are starting to add a few things not needed like the bit torrent client). Opera is hands down the best browser available IMHO.
Number of crashes on all of my Macs over the last 6 years: 0. Number of crashes from Windows: 1-4 per day.
Well if you are going to talk about old microsoft software (since XP does NOT crash 1-4 times per day, in fact my install has crashed maybe 5 times in the last 4 years and it was either because of bad RAM or after installing new video drivers) then how about in the last 5 years when I was forced to use a Mac while at university it made me never want to use one again because of the stupid ONE BUTTONED MOUSE compared to never being extremely annoyed when using any of the windows lab machines (which all had at least 2 mouse buttons and usually a scroll button as well). Another thing I will mention is when using the Macs is they DID freeze up at least as often as the lab windows boxes. I will take a crash prone Windows box that I don't have to remember a bazillion keyboard shortcuts for and can just use the right mouse button to see some options over the Mac anyday. All I usually used the computers for was web browsing (which is why the scroll wheel was important), programming, and word processing.
Present day I prefer Windows XP Pro over Mac OSX but I at least can stand to use a Mac now (enjoy it actually). Both have made a lot of improvements in areas they needed to and its nice that Apple is finally starting to get out of the proprietary hardware market. I prefer to have 100% choice as to what to put into my computers and not have the prices jacked up.
If your backup requires that you use 10 tapes and you lose 1 tape, you lose 1/10th of your data. If your backup used 1 tape and you lose 1 tape. You have then lost ALL of your data.
If you are stupid enough to only have 1 tape for a backup then you deserve to lose all of your data. Data backups are supposed to be REDUNDANT and preferably have at least one offsite backup as well in case the building burns down.
Sorry, but a machine with AGP isn't what I'd consider "budget". I don't have ANY PC's with AGP in them. I need a regular ol' PCI card. That's "budget".
That's not budget, thats living in the computer stone age. Exactly how old are the computers you are using? I know that my Gateway computer I bought in 1999 when I went away to college had an AGP 2X slot in it. If you have any interest in playing the latest games then you usually need to get a new mobo/processor/RAM at least about every 3 years. I bet you could find someone giving away some computers nowadays that have AGP slots in them, go get one of those if you really are too cheap to upgrade the whole thing and spend some cash to get a decent gameplaying experience.
It will not be long until cameras are small enough and ubiquitous enough (probably mobile, too) that you can be photographed and identified in any public area (and probably many private ones, too) by face recognition software with access to the population's vital statistics.
Face recognition software is not even CLOSE to being this good. Unless you walk around looking exactly the same every day and never wear hats, glasses, sunglasses, etc then the technology to do this is way far off. I also wonder where the "access to the populations vital statistics" will come from. Come on, how many people will volunteer to become a part of that? Camera recognition software might have greater range but compared to RFID it rates a 1, maybe 2 to 100% (if they make the tags somehow unclonable) with RFID for the general public. Having one RFID for everything will never happen until it is possible to prevent 100% the possibity of someone cloning your RFID "number". This technology will not be totally useful/safe for quite some time. Dream on.
Am I the only one that believes there is no future for VOIP how it is currently implemented? If EVERYONE were to suddenly switch over to using it would it completely clog up our internet connections? I admit I know very little about the technology, so I am just curious about it. Unless the service is provided by the companies who own the cables making up the internet then whats to stop them from filtering all VOIP traffic except their own? If it were to cause so much traffic they have to provide the bandwidth for then I think they should be able to only allow people who pay for that extra bandwidth to be allowed to use it on their lines. I don't think it uses very much bandwidth per person but if you get a whole city using VOIP I wonder what the implications would be.
I also don't see how we can ever get completely away from landline phones just for the reliability they provide. I have had my internet service interrupted WAY more often than my phone service and if I need to call 911 I really don't want to have to rely on my internet service provider. In fact I can only remember my phone service being out a maximum of maybe 5 times in my whole life (I am 25), that is not even comparable to how many times I have lost internet service. The same rational goes for businesses. Most businesses rely on phonelines to communicate with customers/coworkers/etc and major problems would occur (such as pissed off customers,lost sales,lost productivity) if there were temporary service losses, even if it is only for a few minutes.
What solutions do they have or are they working on for these issues? Once they have those fixed then I will worry about security of using it.
Fuck them, 19 dollars a cd for one song? Thats a dollar a song.
I agree although where I live (Chicago) CD's aren't quite that high priced this reminds me of the iTunes music stores 99 cent price per song. I also don't want to buy a whole CD since usually I only want a couple songs on the disc but I also don't think almost 1 dollar per song is a fair price either. By selling on the internet you get rid of a lot of costs associated with distributing a CD such as actually pressing them and then shipping them across the world and the internet also makes it much easy to market a band. If the RIAA really wants to stay in business (which I don't see happening) they need to spend more time adapting to these new changes. Instead of being greedy bastards they need to get the price down to at least 25 cents per song before I will even consider purchasing any MP3's.
The RIAA is just scared because their easy access to the cookie jar of money and exploiting artists is running out. Before the internet it was a lot harder and more expensive to market a band so it was worth it for a band to basically sell their souls to a record company since it was damn near impossible to become big without them because of the costs associated. This ended up creating the situation where records/cassettes/CD's would be sold and the recording studios would become rich off of those profits while the artists would recieve a VERY small percentage of that revenue. Back then it kind of made sense because a recording studio would have to risk a decent amount of money on a band with no guarantee of payback. It's not so much that way anymore.
Here is how I think it could work now. Get rid of the recording studios current system, it's not needed. Musicians/Bands should instead go purchase studio time once they are ready to create an album that they will then distribute online. Obviously they should wait until they get a decent amount of people coming to their shows. Before they go to purchase studio time they can still do some home recording, the equipment to do so and have a decent result suitable for web distribution is not that high. The band can then use the web to "get their music out there" as well as put on local shows to get people talking about them. Having a player at their website so people can listen to their music is a must have feature and then having the ability to download the actual songs as high quality MP3's (along with other popular formats) at 10-25 cents per song would be needed. At that price it would be worth the money since I would know I would be getting a good copy and wouldn't have to spend any time going around locating songs I want and spending time downloading them and listening to them to see if they are crap. I would also "feel good" knowing I had legal copies and was helping support the band (where with most CD's it is more about supporting the RIAA). Sure, maybe not as much revenue would be made off the sale of music (per album) but musicians should make the majority of their money off of public performances anyway. Once they get a fan following they can also sell other merchandise as another way to make money. Anything wrong with this situation?
Are you one of the MythTV developers? No? Then who cares how you feel about it?
I care how I feel about it.
That might be nice, but it certainly isn't mandatory. No shit sherlock, I know it isn't mandatory, I hate that people keep stating the obvious. I just hope both sides get some benefit and not just OpenMedia.
Are you going to just never do anything constructive and interesting because someone else might copy it and make money with it?
No, I don't have any projects of my own right now but I have worked on a few open source projects and if I do come up with a project that I think other people could use then I wouldn't mind putting it out into the open source community. I also never said I was against them using it, it just made me think about what is going on more. They effectively put together a computer with a TV card and then slapped in someone elses software, which makes the WHOLE project work and are charging ~900USD+ for it. It is a cool product and if I didn't already have almost the same thing already setup (that cost me maybe 400 bucks and is superior) then I would consider getting one. If the price wasn't so freakin high I would consider getting one for my parents, but damn, not for that much, get it down to $300 bucks and it would storm the market (as long as its legal). This is the first major consumer hardware that I can think of that is founded solely on an open source project and it will be interesting to see what happens.
If everyone did that, a lot of stuff would never be made. This is very true, but if you are a software developer and you never make any money off of some things that you create then it is pretty hard to put food on the table.
It really pisses me off you can even have a patent on those two things. Having a patent on how you implement the two things I can see but give me a break. I think I am going to go patent "Recording TV to any device that stores binary data except a HD"...
It should be interesting to see if Tivo ever goes after them.
I think this is why it is only for sale in New Zealand right now. You can bet your ass that if they try to enter the US market or anywhere else Tivo has jurisdiction that Tivo will go after them tooth and nail. This will be interesting to see develop.
On another note, I am not exactly sure how I feel about a for profit business using MythTV like this. It is one thing to sell a service/device that takes advantage of a couple Open Source tools just to use as tools but this is basically letting ALL of the software work be done by someone else and then profiting on it. I would hope they would at least donate some proceeds to MythTV (which I don't think is even easily done as I don't see any information how to donate at the MythTV website).
why go to school for 4 years for a (somewhat) difficult degree to make much less money?... all of the good jobs have just disappeared
Maybe because I like this field and enjoy it? I graduated about two years ago with a CS degree and it did take a while, but after six months I finally found a great job as a developer working on interesting forensic and consumer applications that deal with optical and flash media.
I don't know where you live but there is no way in hell I would have accepted a developing position for $18k-22k, bare minimum for me was $40k. I ended up starting at $45k here and after one year I am over $50k counting benefits. For reference I live in the suburbs of Chicago, its not the cheapest place to live but nothing like NYC or the Silicon Valley.
There are good, well paying jobs available as long as you are good at what you do. I can't believe the amount fellow students who had NO idea what was going on in the classes, so I believe the people who say that a majority of the CS graduates are crap. Myself, I had no previous work experience related to software development but I was able to get across that I can do the job and do it well, although I would need some guidance. I have made newbie mistakes at my first job but based on the fact that I am still here and even got a raise I must be doing pretty well.
The jobs that require skill are going nowhere soon, so if you didn't get into this field for the money and are also talented you should not have a problem finding any jobs at decent pay.
last i checked, you didn't need 4 years of college to become a programmer.
You can say this about almost ANY job. If a person is highly intelligent and can pick up concepts very quickly by themself, then yes, they probably don't need 4 years of college to become a decent programmer. For the majority of the population however having that 4 years of education (and actually learning what you are taught, not copying assignments etc) will make a HUGE difference in the quality of code they will write. Writing code is something any monkey can be taught to do, but any monkey cannot be taught to write quality code. Maybe quality is something you don't care about? Any monkey can also be taught to play around with CAD and make basic designs, would you want one of them to design the jet engines on the next plane you get on?
So if the code you need written is not very important and just needs to be good enough to get the job done some of the time, stick with your average monkey doing the programming. If you want something that will do the job correctly, is less error prone, and easier to maintain then I think the average CS graduate would be a better choice than the average code monkey who has no degree.
While I was in college I spent my breaks home working with an electrician and there was a competitor in town who had the same mindset you do except about doing electric work, "Any monkey can be taught to pull wire.". The work they did "got the job done" but they did it by cutting corners and putting absolutely no thought into the best way to go about the job (this is in an area that has no electrical inspector). If you went into a house wired by my company you would see we would run a separate feed to every room and also appliances that should have their own feeds, we properly and CLEARLY labeled all of the feeds in the breaker box, and we always used wire that could handle the expected loads for the areas they were servicing. After we finished we would go look over EVERYTHING and if we made a mistake, such as accidently running 14 gauge wire where 12 gauge should be we would tear it out and do it the right way. It cost more to have us do the job but in the end the extra money was worth it for the end result.
The only people I know who speak the line "any monkey can be taught to program" are either people who have no idea how to program, people who think they know how to program but really can't, or people who just don't care about the quality of code written. Which are you?
When I sample a movie at 720x480, I am not compressing, even though I threw away a few millions pixels that would have been visible on a huge screen.
You are a dumbass thinking you are sooo smart telling everyone that sampling is not compressing. While what you say in technical terminology is true if you observe what actually goes on then you will find you are wrong. How does lossy compression work? One way is by throwing away sounds/pixels that either are not able to be observed by humans or have less importance than other sounds/pixels. So when you sample a movie at 720x480 while you are not using an actual compression algorithm to pick what data to cut out you ARE throwing away information (that might not make a difference on smaller screens) and what is going on IS BASICALLY THE SAME THING AS COMPRESSING IT USING LOSSY COMPRESSION. You end up with a file that does not contain all of the data the original source contained (analog or digital) and since you could have sampled at a higher rate to record more information you end up with a similar result to what you would have had using compression.
Well they are Microsoft and of course use ActiveX which not all browsers support so its a cheap way for them to at least get some advertising. So either change how your browser identifies or *GASP* click the "next" button on that page and everything should work fine (it works fine in Opera identifying as Opera anyway).
I always thought that there was a legal right to be able to make a copy of a dvd for your own use
IANAL but I have heard that, yes, we do have this right in the US. The problem is it is legal for us to make a backup copy yet illegal to bypass the encryption of the DVD which of course is needed to be done first to make the legal backup copy. I prefer to make backups and then put the originals away in case something happens to the backup and it is a shame that it is illegal to do that. The only way I will stop making backups is if they come up with a way to make that impossible for me to do and/or if they work out a system that allows damaged discs to be returned for new working copies (which I highly doubt would ever happen). Trading in a damaged disc actually should be something they would agree with since we only buy a license for the content right? I would even be willing to pay a buck or two to cover the cost of making and shipping the disc, of course they would much rather have us repay the full price everytime we lose/damage the discs though which is insane if we aren't allowed to make backups.
Yes, actually users who like to play games will have to upgrade if they want to play games that use DX10. Seriously, other than that I can't think of anything else that would make me want to upgrade anyway, so you are close to right.
I have been using the Beta version of Vista at work to do some testing with the software my company makes and even on a pretty beefy machine which has an AMD Athlon 64, 1 GB RAM and decent video card (I know this is the bottleneck) it runs SLOW. I even disabled most of the eye candy and it still reminds me of working on machines that have been taken over by spyware/adaware.
I didn't look what else the basic version is missing besides Aero, but if that is all that it doesn't have then just the fact that it doesn't have Aero makes me want to get that version over versions that come with Aero. I don't need the eye candy (although I will admit that it does look good). I would rather have a snappy, responsive computer and not have to pay to completely upgrade the 1 year old machine I use as my main Windows box at home.
Use an abbreviation for 2 billion or other byte-saving tricks and you could compress it down even more.
Why the hell would you store it as actual characters and use 12 bytes? If you were going to store it that way at least use hex. I would just store it as 773594000 so that would get it down to 3 bytes if you eliminate the "x" since that is reduntant and you would only be multiplying by 0 or 1 so the first nibble (right to left) could be the multiplier and the remaining nibbles would be the multiplicand. Of course the best compression possible would only use 1 bit being 0.
Of course I will also patent a system that can measure the level of intoxication in order to the exact level of quality necessary to maintain a pleasant brewed beverage experience
Oh so you mean it stops you from getting total beer goggles yet still allows you to turn some bow into wow?
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So I'd say teach the students how to use a debugger from the beginning. Unless you intend the course to be one that "weeds out" any student who isn't 100% dedicated to earning a CS degree...
I disagree. Most of the intro class program assignments don't require an IDE or debugger to finish. I think at the beginning it was beneficial to have to debug compiler errors on my own and if I had a problem I couldn't solve on my own I could ask the instructer or TA. IMHO it made me the above average software developer I am today. Being able to step through your code is a great ability to have, but for simple programs I think it's more beneficial to have to solve and think why your program is not working without the assistance of a debugger. Debuggers are definately timesavers, but I am glad I didn't get to use them from the start of my university level education.
You can also thank them for making an awesome IDE.
I agree. After I left school I had almost no experience programming for windows (not a bad thing). But it was VERY nice to have VS since my first job was programming windows apps. I had used UltraEdit all through school and (while UE is awesome) it was nice to have a built in debugger as well as all the other goodies VS has. It is seriously the 2nd MS app I am happy to use (the other not being an app but Windows XP Pro is pretty damn good too IMHO).
But the Senate is just about to fix that - once English is declared our One True Language
Do you have something against that? It was the language the USA was founded on for Christ sakes. Making sure immigrants have a basic understanding of English is a good thing. If I decided I was going to immigrate to Spain I would make sure to get a good grasp on Spanish before I left, it's a logical thing to do. I support having English as the national language, it's about time.
it should be much more efficient that C/C++ libraries. On top of that, since none of it's statically linked, each nontrivial Java app placed on the laptop should be smaller than the equivalent C/C++ app
I beg to differ, while the actual Java app may be smaller you still need to have the libraries available (and be the right version etc). Being dynamically linked can be great since resources can be shared between different apps, but for some situations having the ability to statically link is a good idea to "make sure" things will run. What happens if your java app needs something that is dynamically linked yet the library is too old? (I am curious since I have some Java experience from university but most of my professional experience is C/C++) Either way the actual apps might be smaller for Java but extra disk space still needs to be utilized (along with the real issue, that the libraries available are compatible).
It's gratis. It's not free. If it were free I could fork it...
Uhh free is a SYNONYM for gratis ie they both mean "without charge". They have the same meaning (explaining what a synonym is to you since you obviously don't know). Opera is free, but it is not open source is what you are attempting to say. There is a big difference between that and not free, closed source, software.
of course, it's not free, so you can't fork it anyhow.
Opera is still free, you only have to pay if you want support which I think is fair. They even took out the little box that used to show Ads all the time in previous version. I have been a happy Opera user for the last 4 years or so, nothing else compares to how stable and quick it is in my experience. Firefox is alright, I used Moz for a while, but I don't need the ability to add on a whole bunch of extensions and I am happy with the ones Opera provides (although I do agree they are starting to add a few things not needed like the bit torrent client). Opera is hands down the best browser available IMHO.
Number of crashes on all of my Macs over the last 6 years: 0. Number of crashes from Windows: 1-4 per day.
Well if you are going to talk about old microsoft software (since XP does NOT crash 1-4 times per day, in fact my install has crashed maybe 5 times in the last 4 years and it was either because of bad RAM or after installing new video drivers) then how about in the last 5 years when I was forced to use a Mac while at university it made me never want to use one again because of the stupid ONE BUTTONED MOUSE compared to never being extremely annoyed when using any of the windows lab machines (which all had at least 2 mouse buttons and usually a scroll button as well). Another thing I will mention is when using the Macs is they DID freeze up at least as often as the lab windows boxes. I will take a crash prone Windows box that I don't have to remember a bazillion keyboard shortcuts for and can just use the right mouse button to see some options over the Mac anyday. All I usually used the computers for was web browsing (which is why the scroll wheel was important), programming, and word processing.
Present day I prefer Windows XP Pro over Mac OSX but I at least can stand to use a Mac now (enjoy it actually). Both have made a lot of improvements in areas they needed to and its nice that Apple is finally starting to get out of the proprietary hardware market. I prefer to have 100% choice as to what to put into my computers and not have the prices jacked up.
If your backup requires that you use 10 tapes and you lose 1 tape, you lose 1/10th of your data. If your backup used 1 tape and you lose 1 tape. You have then lost ALL of your data.
If you are stupid enough to only have 1 tape for a backup then you deserve to lose all of your data. Data backups are supposed to be REDUNDANT and preferably have at least one offsite backup as well in case the building burns down.
Sorry, but a machine with AGP isn't what I'd consider "budget". I don't have ANY PC's with AGP in them. I need a regular ol' PCI card. That's "budget".
That's not budget, thats living in the computer stone age. Exactly how old are the computers you are using? I know that my Gateway computer I bought in 1999 when I went away to college had an AGP 2X slot in it. If you have any interest in playing the latest games then you usually need to get a new mobo/processor/RAM at least about every 3 years. I bet you could find someone giving away some computers nowadays that have AGP slots in them, go get one of those if you really are too cheap to upgrade the whole thing and spend some cash to get a decent gameplaying experience.
I see a market for some type of "RFID reader proof bag". I am sure this is possible, am I wrong?
It will not be long until cameras are small enough and ubiquitous enough (probably mobile, too) that you can be photographed and identified in any public area (and probably many private ones, too) by face recognition software with access to the population's vital statistics.
Face recognition software is not even CLOSE to being this good. Unless you walk around looking exactly the same every day and never wear hats, glasses, sunglasses, etc then the technology to do this is way far off. I also wonder where the "access to the populations vital statistics" will come from. Come on, how many people will volunteer to become a part of that? Camera recognition software might have greater range but compared to RFID it rates a 1, maybe 2 to 100% (if they make the tags somehow unclonable) with RFID for the general public. Having one RFID for everything will never happen until it is possible to prevent 100% the possibity of someone cloning your RFID "number". This technology will not be totally useful/safe for quite some time. Dream on.
Am I the only one that believes there is no future for VOIP how it is currently implemented? If EVERYONE were to suddenly switch over to using it would it completely clog up our internet connections? I admit I know very little about the technology, so I am just curious about it. Unless the service is provided by the companies who own the cables making up the internet then whats to stop them from filtering all VOIP traffic except their own? If it were to cause so much traffic they have to provide the bandwidth for then I think they should be able to only allow people who pay for that extra bandwidth to be allowed to use it on their lines. I don't think it uses very much bandwidth per person but if you get a whole city using VOIP I wonder what the implications would be.
I also don't see how we can ever get completely away from landline phones just for the reliability they provide. I have had my internet service interrupted WAY more often than my phone service and if I need to call 911 I really don't want to have to rely on my internet service provider. In fact I can only remember my phone service being out a maximum of maybe 5 times in my whole life (I am 25), that is not even comparable to how many times I have lost internet service. The same rational goes for businesses. Most businesses rely on phonelines to communicate with customers/coworkers/etc and major problems would occur (such as pissed off customers,lost sales,lost productivity) if there were temporary service losses, even if it is only for a few minutes.
What solutions do they have or are they working on for these issues? Once they have those fixed then I will worry about security of using it.
Fuck them, 19 dollars a cd for one song? Thats a dollar a song.
I agree although where I live (Chicago) CD's aren't quite that high priced this reminds me of the iTunes music stores 99 cent price per song. I also don't want to buy a whole CD since usually I only want a couple songs on the disc but I also don't think almost 1 dollar per song is a fair price either. By selling on the internet you get rid of a lot of costs associated with distributing a CD such as actually pressing them and then shipping them across the world and the internet also makes it much easy to market a band. If the RIAA really wants to stay in business (which I don't see happening) they need to spend more time adapting to these new changes. Instead of being greedy bastards they need to get the price down to at least 25 cents per song before I will even consider purchasing any MP3's.
The RIAA is just scared because their easy access to the cookie jar of money and exploiting artists is running out. Before the internet it was a lot harder and more expensive to market a band so it was worth it for a band to basically sell their souls to a record company since it was damn near impossible to become big without them because of the costs associated. This ended up creating the situation where records/cassettes/CD's would be sold and the recording studios would become rich off of those profits while the artists would recieve a VERY small percentage of that revenue. Back then it kind of made sense because a recording studio would have to risk a decent amount of money on a band with no guarantee of payback. It's not so much that way anymore.
Here is how I think it could work now. Get rid of the recording studios current system, it's not needed. Musicians/Bands should instead go purchase studio time once they are ready to create an album that they will then distribute online. Obviously they should wait until they get a decent amount of people coming to their shows. Before they go to purchase studio time they can still do some home recording, the equipment to do so and have a decent result suitable for web distribution is not that high. The band can then use the web to "get their music out there" as well as put on local shows to get people talking about them. Having a player at their website so people can listen to their music is a must have feature and then having the ability to download the actual songs as high quality MP3's (along with other popular formats) at 10-25 cents per song would be needed. At that price it would be worth the money since I would know I would be getting a good copy and wouldn't have to spend any time going around locating songs I want and spending time downloading them and listening to them to see if they are crap. I would also "feel good" knowing I had legal copies and was helping support the band (where with most CD's it is more about supporting the RIAA). Sure, maybe not as much revenue would be made off the sale of music (per album) but musicians should make the majority of their money off of public performances anyway. Once they get a fan following they can also sell other merchandise as another way to make money. Anything wrong with this situation?
too bad FAT32 doesn't allow files greater than 4GB. I used to love it, but not anymore now that I record TV shows and edit video.
Are you one of the MythTV developers? No? Then who cares how you feel about it?
I care how I feel about it.
That might be nice, but it certainly isn't mandatory.
No shit sherlock, I know it isn't mandatory, I hate that people keep stating the obvious. I just hope both sides get some benefit and not just OpenMedia.
Are you going to just never do anything constructive and interesting because someone else might copy it and make money with it?
No, I don't have any projects of my own right now but I have worked on a few open source projects and if I do come up with a project that I think other people could use then I wouldn't mind putting it out into the open source community. I also never said I was against them using it, it just made me think about what is going on more. They effectively put together a computer with a TV card and then slapped in someone elses software, which makes the WHOLE project work and are charging ~900USD+ for it. It is a cool product and if I didn't already have almost the same thing already setup (that cost me maybe 400 bucks and is superior) then I would consider getting one. If the price wasn't so freakin high I would consider getting one for my parents, but damn, not for that much, get it down to $300 bucks and it would storm the market (as long as its legal). This is the first major consumer hardware that I can think of that is founded solely on an open source project and it will be interesting to see what happens.
If everyone did that, a lot of stuff would never be made.
This is very true, but if you are a software developer and you never make any money off of some things that you create then it is pretty hard to put food on the table.
"pausing live TV" and "recording to a HD"
It really pisses me off you can even have a patent on those two things. Having a patent on how you implement the two things I can see but give me a break. I think I am going to go patent "Recording TV to any device that stores binary data except a HD"...
It should be interesting to see if Tivo ever goes after them.
I think this is why it is only for sale in New Zealand right now. You can bet your ass that if they try to enter the US market or anywhere else Tivo has jurisdiction that Tivo will go after them tooth and nail. This will be interesting to see develop.
On another note, I am not exactly sure how I feel about a for profit business using MythTV like this. It is one thing to sell a service/device that takes advantage of a couple Open Source tools just to use as tools but this is basically letting ALL of the software work be done by someone else and then profiting on it. I would hope they would at least donate some proceeds to MythTV (which I don't think is even easily done as I don't see any information how to donate at the MythTV website).
why go to school for 4 years for a (somewhat) difficult degree to make much less money?... all of the good jobs have just disappeared
Maybe because I like this field and enjoy it? I graduated about two years ago with a CS degree and it did take a while, but after six months I finally found a great job as a developer working on interesting forensic and consumer applications that deal with optical and flash media.
I don't know where you live but there is no way in hell I would have accepted a developing position for $18k-22k, bare minimum for me was $40k. I ended up starting at $45k here and after one year I am over $50k counting benefits. For reference I live in the suburbs of Chicago, its not the cheapest place to live but nothing like NYC or the Silicon Valley.
There are good, well paying jobs available as long as you are good at what you do. I can't believe the amount fellow students who had NO idea what was going on in the classes, so I believe the people who say that a majority of the CS graduates are crap. Myself, I had no previous work experience related to software development but I was able to get across that I can do the job and do it well, although I would need some guidance. I have made newbie mistakes at my first job but based on the fact that I am still here and even got a raise I must be doing pretty well.
The jobs that require skill are going nowhere soon, so if you didn't get into this field for the money and are also talented you should not have a problem finding any jobs at decent pay.
last i checked, you didn't need 4 years of college to become a programmer.
You can say this about almost ANY job. If a person is highly intelligent and can pick up concepts very quickly by themself, then yes, they probably don't need 4 years of college to become a decent programmer. For the majority of the population however having that 4 years of education (and actually learning what you are taught, not copying assignments etc) will make a HUGE difference in the quality of code they will write. Writing code is something any monkey can be taught to do, but any monkey cannot be taught to write quality code. Maybe quality is something you don't care about? Any monkey can also be taught to play around with CAD and make basic designs, would you want one of them to design the jet engines on the next plane you get on?
So if the code you need written is not very important and just needs to be good enough to get the job done some of the time, stick with your average monkey doing the programming. If you want something that will do the job correctly, is less error prone, and easier to maintain then I think the average CS graduate would be a better choice than the average code monkey who has no degree.
While I was in college I spent my breaks home working with an electrician and there was a competitor in town who had the same mindset you do except about doing electric work, "Any monkey can be taught to pull wire.". The work they did "got the job done" but they did it by cutting corners and putting absolutely no thought into the best way to go about the job (this is in an area that has no electrical inspector). If you went into a house wired by my company you would see we would run a separate feed to every room and also appliances that should have their own feeds, we properly and CLEARLY labeled all of the feeds in the breaker box, and we always used wire that could handle the expected loads for the areas they were servicing. After we finished we would go look over EVERYTHING and if we made a mistake, such as accidently running 14 gauge wire where 12 gauge should be we would tear it out and do it the right way. It cost more to have us do the job but in the end the extra money was worth it for the end result.
The only people I know who speak the line "any monkey can be taught to program" are either people who have no idea how to program, people who think they know how to program but really can't, or people who just don't care about the quality of code written. Which are you?
When I sample a movie at 720x480, I am not compressing, even though I threw away a few millions pixels that would have been visible on a huge screen.
You are a dumbass thinking you are sooo smart telling everyone that sampling is not compressing. While what you say in technical terminology is true if you observe what actually goes on then you will find you are wrong. How does lossy compression work? One way is by throwing away sounds/pixels that either are not able to be observed by humans or have less importance than other sounds/pixels. So when you sample a movie at 720x480 while you are not using an actual compression algorithm to pick what data to cut out you ARE throwing away information (that might not make a difference on smaller screens) and what is going on IS BASICALLY THE SAME THING AS COMPRESSING IT USING LOSSY COMPRESSION. You end up with a file that does not contain all of the data the original source contained (analog or digital) and since you could have sampled at a higher rate to record more information you end up with a similar result to what you would have had using compression.
Well they are Microsoft and of course use ActiveX which not all browsers support so its a cheap way for them to at least get some advertising. So either change how your browser identifies or *GASP* click the "next" button on that page and everything should work fine (it works fine in Opera identifying as Opera anyway).
I always thought that there was a legal right to be able to make a copy of a dvd for your own use
IANAL but I have heard that, yes, we do have this right in the US. The problem is it is legal for us to make a backup copy yet illegal to bypass the encryption of the DVD which of course is needed to be done first to make the legal backup copy. I prefer to make backups and then put the originals away in case something happens to the backup and it is a shame that it is illegal to do that. The only way I will stop making backups is if they come up with a way to make that impossible for me to do and/or if they work out a system that allows damaged discs to be returned for new working copies (which I highly doubt would ever happen). Trading in a damaged disc actually should be something they would agree with since we only buy a license for the content right? I would even be willing to pay a buck or two to cover the cost of making and shipping the disc, of course they would much rather have us repay the full price everytime we lose/damage the discs though which is insane if we aren't allowed to make backups.
MS admits users don't need to upgrade anymore
Yes, actually users who like to play games will have to upgrade if they want to play games that use DX10. Seriously, other than that I can't think of anything else that would make me want to upgrade anyway, so you are close to right.
I have been using the Beta version of Vista at work to do some testing with the software my company makes and even on a pretty beefy machine which has an AMD Athlon 64, 1 GB RAM and decent video card (I know this is the bottleneck) it runs SLOW. I even disabled most of the eye candy and it still reminds me of working on machines that have been taken over by spyware/adaware.
I didn't look what else the basic version is missing besides Aero, but if that is all that it doesn't have then just the fact that it doesn't have Aero makes me want to get that version over versions that come with Aero. I don't need the eye candy (although I will admit that it does look good). I would rather have a snappy, responsive computer and not have to pay to completely upgrade the 1 year old machine I use as my main Windows box at home.
You could store it in just: 2000000000x0
Use an abbreviation for 2 billion or other byte-saving tricks and you could compress it down even more.
Why the hell would you store it as actual characters and use 12 bytes? If you were going to store it that way at least use hex. I would just store it as 773594000 so that would get it down to 3 bytes if you eliminate the "x" since that is reduntant and you would only be multiplying by 0 or 1 so the first nibble (right to left) could be the multiplier and the remaining nibbles would be the multiplicand. Of course the best compression possible would only use 1 bit being 0.
Of course I will also patent a system that can measure the level of intoxication in order to the exact level of quality necessary to maintain a pleasant brewed beverage experience
Oh so you mean it stops you from getting total beer goggles yet still allows you to turn some bow into wow?