They can fit a full length movie in HD now on a double layer DVD if they use mpeg4. What is the point?
Probably that not all DVD players now can decode mpeg4 or output true HD resolution. The biggest reason I am sure of is it is another way to make more money.
now, who is to say what volume of email is too much?
Now I don't know exactly how they will do this either but I would guess they would have some limit, say 10,000 per day and if a subscriber goes above that amount they would be contacted that unless they can explain why they are sending out that much e-mail (a large company) that their service will be shut off. I think a system such as that could work since most spammers send out millions (or billions?) of e-mails everyday so they would have multiple accounts to not be noticed. It would also help stop all the home users whose computers have been exploited to send out spam. I think this would be great if it is done right.
I understand wanting to have lots of permanent storage, but I don't think the average Joe has a use for this.
I think this would be an excellent format to record HD video onto. Once the price of the components to create a HD camcorder come down then this seems like an ideal media for the camera to use (as long as it can write to the disc fast enough which the article doesn't specify). The only thing they would HAVE to make sure to get right that they didn't accomplish with most camcorders today that record on mini DVD's is make the software that does the disc processing of excellent quality. The software in most cams today is horrible, has absolutely no error recovery, and I would be ashamed to have created it. I can't tell you how many people I know who have had problems with the camera's not being able to finalize the discs and other problems. If they can make sure those type of issues are minimized then having portable 300GB discs would be awesome to use with a HD camcorder.
It is ridiculous to suggest that something is unusable as soon as it becomes officially unsupported by a company. Just because a system might be out of warranty doesn't mean you can't still get it fixed or use it on a day to day basis.
Okay, I may not have made myself clear. The "tech" I was referring to was the actual software. I saw previously in this thread someone mentioning that with each new OS Apple released a lot of software that worked on the previous OS no longer worked. Here is the quote:
"We (our family) have moved away from Macs because every major OS release broke half of our software. You end up paying for the new OS plus buying half of your software again. And you can't stick with the old OS because of some new software you need. For all of Windows problems, it has been doing a better job with older software." -- Scruffy
I have no idea if this is the case since I have never owned a Mac, I was just making a point that if it is true that that would really piss me off. I don't think that OS's should be backwards compatible for software written more than 10 years before it was released, BUT it should still allow most software written in that previous period to work. At least try and be compatible with the last version of the OS's software. It's all about the benjamin's, either they don't want to spend the time/money to make things compatible or they just want to get everyone to buy the newest versions for the software that no longer works.
Today you can buya 3.5" usb floppy drive from Apple, but Apple machines don't need the floppy drive to function unlike windows(try installing Sata drivers without one).
That is because SATA wasn't around (at least not widespread and lots of drivers released) for the most part when Windows XP was released in 2001. Are you seriously saying you have a problem with Microsoft not putting the drivers on the installation discs when they didn't even exist yet? I do not have a floppy drive in my Windows box at home and all I did was make a slipstream installation disc that included the drivers, although you could also just throw the drivers on a USB thumb drive if your BIOS supports it.
As for Apple providing a short time frame before dropping old tech that is rediculous to do if it is true. I for damn sure want hardware/software I buy to last more than 3-5 years, or at least let me have the option to use it. Sounds like a scam to get more money in my opinion.
I agree that developing ONLY for directX 10 would be a bad idea and probably won't happen, but to get all of the special eye candy available you will need to have directX 10. So the games will be developed to be playable on both, but will just look better on the directX 10 version.
In addition to that logic, what compelling reason do we have to upgrade immediately?
The biggest reason I can think of is games. I am in no hurry to upgrade anytime soon but there will be games that come out that will only run on Vista if you want the "Full Experience" since DirectX 10 will be Vista only: From the Microsoft website "Note Direct3D 10 support is only available on Windows Vista" http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/sdk/
I believe THAT will be what drives the most people to upgrade and then the rest will get upgraded when they purchase a new PC (although some people might be forced to upgrade their PC no matter what anyway).
That sounds great except the custom player part and having to be online. I would like it better if it was not restricted to a custom player since I really like all the features that my current player has and I know how to use it and don't feel the need to learn how to use another player. I also don't like the idea of custom players since it could lead to having to have a separate player for all of the different places I download video from.
I also don't like that the video is encrypted, but that would not be so bad if I only had to connect to the internet once to grab the key and then it was stored locally (which maybe is what you guys do). If it is required to connect to the internet EVERYTIME I start up the video I would not be very happy. What happens if I am on a 20 hour flight and feel like watching one of the videos? The credit exchange program is interesting too, I will have to check it out sometime.
What you say is so true. I would gladly pay $10-20 if I could conveniently and instantly download any movie (full resolution and let me choose sound format) I want to watch. Sending me a copy of the DVD in the mail is nice, but I would just prefer the file I download not be hindered in such away that it prevents me from creating a DVD from it. This way I could download the movie, burn it to DVD, watch it wherever I want and they don't have to waste manpower going through the process of making the DVDs and mailing them out. If I am going to receive a DVD anyway then what loss is it to them if I just have to ability make it myself? They would still make a TON of money and by getting rid of the overhead of having to create all of the DVDs and mail them out they would save money. What would be so wrong with a system like that?
I agree with you. Having local copies (if reasonably sized) of all the code you are developing is very desirable. It is definitely required to have all of the code kept on some type of RAID setup using source control, but having the code local is faster and also acts as "another backup". This is how we have things setup at my work and we also regularly backup our RAID drives to external HD's (and less often an offsite backup) which we then put into a fireproof safe. If we were to loose EVERYTHING in the office we would still be in decent shape and the maximum amount of work lost would be a few days. Having things setup this way allows you to know exactly what you have changed, yet also allows you to work (usually) should the RAID backup be down or if there are network problems. Sure, if you are stupid and work for over a few days or even a week without checking anything in a problem could arise if something happens to your local hard disk, but otherwise I believe working in this fashion is more desirable. As long as you check things in often then it is highly unlikely much work could be loss due to any hard disk failures.
%90k is not highly lucrative. You must be comparing your salary to that of your brothers/sisters and parents.
Unless you live in NYC or out in California that is very lucrative in most other regions of the US. The guy said he lived in St. Louis, so if you do happen to be from a high cost of living area then you should convert that 90K from what it is worth in his area to your area before you spout off your mouth sounding like a complete snob.
Where can i start with a CIS degree for 17.50 an hour?
I live in the Chicago area and started at my current job a little over a year ago (fresh out of college and no professional development experience) and started out well over that amount. Maybe I just got lucky, it did take me about 8 months before I finally found a job I was willing to accept but the jobs do exist.
Reread the guy who responded to you. Yes, a highly fragmented file on a flash chip won't have the reading slowdown compared to the same file being highly fragmented on a hard disk due to the flash drive not having any moving parts. However, there is a cost if the memory blocks are shared between files since the disk could be better utilized keeping all files contents within the minimum amount of blocks necessary/possible. The advantage to defragmenting a flash drive that does share blocks between files is not faster reading speed, but better memory utilization. Who here doesn't have a need/want to have as much free space available as possible?
Neither of them will grasp the Windows message loop yet
Neither programmer should even have a REASON to have that in a program they are writing yet. I think an IDE is great to have, but I strongly believe that beginner programs need to stay as simple as possible too. A GUI should never be part of a beginner program, stick to a command line interface and programs that strictly consist of a main and once they understand how variables work move them on to functions and structures/classes. GUI wizards or any other type of wizard for that matter should not be used. An IDE to help with syntax issues and a decent debugger should be more than enough to start out with.
Oh and one more thing I forgot to mention is have everything written as a command line interface program, starting out with GUI's can be way to confusing and is absolutely not necessary. K.I.S.S.
I agree that Java wouldn't necessarily turn some people off to programming if it is the first language used but I don't think it is a good starting language. My first language I was taught was VB and next was Java, and I have to admit they gave me NO clue about what was going on behind the scenes which is pretty important. It was not until I started classes in C/C++ that I really started to undertand basic programming and OO concepts as well as memory management.
I think having to allocate and deallocate memory takes away the "magical" appearance that variables have in the first 2 langauges I learned, and it also forces you to understand how the computer works and most importantly how to write clean, memory leak free code. Personally, I believe having a garbage collector from the get go is a bad idea. It does make coding less of a hassle as there is less to worry about but learning how to manage memory is not a very hard concept to grasp and I wish I had started off learning about it from the very start.
I think the best way to start programmers off is: 1) Simple programs that only have a main function so they can play around and learn how/what variables are and how to interact with them. 2) Teach them what arrays are and make them use them. 3) Move on to simple functions. 4) Let them create some structs. 5) Have them create some simple classes and make sure they understand constructors/destructors. 6) Teach them about basic pointer concepts and how to allocate/deallocate memory and have them create some classes that allocate memory and then check to deallocate it in the destructor.
Thats how I wish I had started out, I think it would have made learning a lot of programming concepts easier for me.
yes, that is very true too. I only used the images for testing purposes and did not distribute any of them so was not too worried about copyright issues, but you are right that many images can be found that are "free as in beer". If you have a need to use images Flickr is a great resouce for them.
flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.
Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks or that a single wrong pixel in a lcd is acceptable. It is offcourse. If your stupid.
While I do not doubt that does happen I do have to mention my experience with Dell has been VERY good. My first experience with them was when I was in college and was in charge of a computer lab that had all Dell's. One of the machines started acting erratically and I suspected it was bad RAM so I called up Dell and they had someone there the next day who swapped in some new RAM and everything was fine.
My next experience with them was last year when I ordered a home theatre projector (Infocus SP4805, one of the best investments I have made) from them and I noticed that there was ONE pixel that was always off. I was not about to accept that since I spent quite a bit of money on it and after talking to someone at Dell they arranged to have a new projector sent to me and it arrived in 2 days. From there all I had to do was take the new projector out and put the defective one in the box and then stick on the shipping label that was already in the box and drop it off at UPS.
Maybe I just got lucky with the people I happened to deal with when I contacted Dell but I have been very impressed with the service I have received myself. I have heard some other peoples horror stories but based on my experiences I have recommended Dell to family/friends when they have been looking for a new computer (and I don't have the time/don't want to build them a box myself).
I laughed when I saw this story posted...
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
Because last night I got the sudden urge to play some original Zelda so I got out my dreamcast and also my NES emulation disc with like 1,000 games and played Zelda all night long. Those old games are still a lot of fun today and bring me back to when I was 7-8 and would play all night long with my friends trying to beat games. Good times!
Video-on-demand would have killed it anyway, tho'...
I am not so sure about that. You need some type of connection for video on demand to work. So what about people who don't have cable/satellite at their primary residence? What about people who are on vacation and are not staying at a place with cable (my parents spend all summer long up in Minnesota at a lake and just have an antennae and DVD player). There are many other examples too. What I see happening is both will still exist but as VOD becomes more popular/widespread it will go down in cost and in turn rental prices will go down as well so that it will still be cheaper to rent rather than order VOD. So there is one more reason, people who just want to get the cheapest price.
I have the Infocus Screenplay 4805 http://www.infocus.com/Products/Projectors/SP4805. aspx and I really love it. When I was looking at buying a projector last March I was comparing the 4805 to the X3 which has a higher native resolution but it also has 4:3 native aspect ratio instead of the 16:9 the 4805 has. The 4805 also has component input which the X3 does not. Because of my preferences I went with the 4805 and I LOVE it. The picture looks flawless and I am VERY happy with my purchase. Infocus is great at making projectors and I highly recommend them. FYI I ordered mine through Dell and they have been great about service. The first 4805 I received had one pixel that would always stay black and it was very easy to notice once I realized where it was. I called Dell and in 2 days had a new projector which I unpacked and put the old one into the box and sent it off with no problem at all.
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Is it April fools anywhere in the world yet?
It is if your clock is set to GMT 1. By the way this pink is driving me nuts.
They can fit a full length movie in HD now on a double layer DVD if they use mpeg4. What is the point?
Probably that not all DVD players now can decode mpeg4 or output true HD resolution. The biggest reason I am sure of is it is another way to make more money.
now, who is to say what volume of email is too much?
Now I don't know exactly how they will do this either but I would guess they would have some limit, say 10,000 per day and if a subscriber goes above that amount they would be contacted that unless they can explain why they are sending out that much e-mail (a large company) that their service will be shut off. I think a system such as that could work since most spammers send out millions (or billions?) of e-mails everyday so they would have multiple accounts to not be noticed. It would also help stop all the home users whose computers have been exploited to send out spam. I think this would be great if it is done right.
I understand wanting to have lots of permanent storage, but I don't think the average Joe has a use for this.
I think this would be an excellent format to record HD video onto. Once the price of the components to create a HD camcorder come down then this seems like an ideal media for the camera to use (as long as it can write to the disc fast enough which the article doesn't specify). The only thing they would HAVE to make sure to get right that they didn't accomplish with most camcorders today that record on mini DVD's is make the software that does the disc processing of excellent quality. The software in most cams today is horrible, has absolutely no error recovery, and I would be ashamed to have created it. I can't tell you how many people I know who have had problems with the camera's not being able to finalize the discs and other problems. If they can make sure those type of issues are minimized then having portable 300GB discs would be awesome to use with a HD camcorder.
It is ridiculous to suggest that something is unusable as soon as it becomes officially unsupported by a company. Just because a system might be out of warranty doesn't mean you can't still get it fixed or use it on a day to day basis.
Okay, I may not have made myself clear. The "tech" I was referring to was the actual software. I saw previously in this thread someone mentioning that with each new OS Apple released a lot of software that worked on the previous OS no longer worked. Here is the quote:
"We (our family) have moved away from Macs because every major OS release broke half of our software. You end up paying for the new OS plus buying half of your software again. And you can't stick with the old OS because of some new software you need. For all of Windows problems, it has been doing a better job with older software." -- Scruffy
I have no idea if this is the case since I have never owned a Mac, I was just making a point that if it is true that that would really piss me off. I don't think that OS's should be backwards compatible for software written more than 10 years before it was released, BUT it should still allow most software written in that previous period to work. At least try and be compatible with the last version of the OS's software. It's all about the benjamin's, either they don't want to spend the time/money to make things compatible or they just want to get everyone to buy the newest versions for the software that no longer works.
Today you can buya 3.5" usb floppy drive from Apple, but Apple machines don't need the floppy drive to function unlike windows(try installing Sata drivers without one).
That is because SATA wasn't around (at least not widespread and lots of drivers released) for the most part when Windows XP was released in 2001. Are you seriously saying you have a problem with Microsoft not putting the drivers on the installation discs when they didn't even exist yet? I do not have a floppy drive in my Windows box at home and all I did was make a slipstream installation disc that included the drivers, although you could also just throw the drivers on a USB thumb drive if your BIOS supports it.
As for Apple providing a short time frame before dropping old tech that is rediculous to do if it is true. I for damn sure want hardware/software I buy to last more than 3-5 years, or at least let me have the option to use it. Sounds like a scam to get more money in my opinion.
I agree that developing ONLY for directX 10 would be a bad idea and probably won't happen, but to get all of the special eye candy available you will need to have directX 10. So the games will be developed to be playable on both, but will just look better on the directX 10 version.
In addition to that logic, what compelling reason do we have to upgrade immediately?
The biggest reason I can think of is games. I am in no hurry to upgrade anytime soon but there will be games that come out that will only run on Vista if you want the "Full Experience" since DirectX 10 will be Vista only: From the Microsoft website "Note Direct3D 10 support is only available on Windows Vista" http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/sdk/
I believe THAT will be what drives the most people to upgrade and then the rest will get upgraded when they purchase a new PC (although some people might be forced to upgrade their PC no matter what anyway).
That sounds great except the custom player part and having to be online. I would like it better if it was not restricted to a custom player since I really like all the features that my current player has and I know how to use it and don't feel the need to learn how to use another player. I also don't like the idea of custom players since it could lead to having to have a separate player for all of the different places I download video from.
I also don't like that the video is encrypted, but that would not be so bad if I only had to connect to the internet once to grab the key and then it was stored locally (which maybe is what you guys do). If it is required to connect to the internet EVERYTIME I start up the video I would not be very happy. What happens if I am on a 20 hour flight and feel like watching one of the videos? The credit exchange program is interesting too, I will have to check it out sometime.
Their security feature was making it multiple gigabytes, which neatly stops most people from mailing it
The easy way around that is just split it up into multiple RAR files and mail it that way. Yes, it would be ugly, but it would still work.
What you say is so true. I would gladly pay $10-20 if I could conveniently and instantly download any movie (full resolution and let me choose sound format) I want to watch. Sending me a copy of the DVD in the mail is nice, but I would just prefer the file I download not be hindered in such away that it prevents me from creating a DVD from it. This way I could download the movie, burn it to DVD, watch it wherever I want and they don't have to waste manpower going through the process of making the DVDs and mailing them out. If I am going to receive a DVD anyway then what loss is it to them if I just have to ability make it myself? They would still make a TON of money and by getting rid of the overhead of having to create all of the DVDs and mail them out they would save money. What would be so wrong with a system like that?
I agree with you. Having local copies (if reasonably sized) of all the code you are developing is very desirable. It is definitely required to have all of the code kept on some type of RAID setup using source control, but having the code local is faster and also acts as "another backup". This is how we have things setup at my work and we also regularly backup our RAID drives to external HD's (and less often an offsite backup) which we then put into a fireproof safe. If we were to loose EVERYTHING in the office we would still be in decent shape and the maximum amount of work lost would be a few days. Having things setup this way allows you to know exactly what you have changed, yet also allows you to work (usually) should the RAID backup be down or if there are network problems. Sure, if you are stupid and work for over a few days or even a week without checking anything in a problem could arise if something happens to your local hard disk, but otherwise I believe working in this fashion is more desirable. As long as you check things in often then it is highly unlikely much work could be loss due to any hard disk failures.
%90k is not highly lucrative. You must be comparing your salary to that of your brothers/sisters and parents.
Unless you live in NYC or out in California that is very lucrative in most other regions of the US. The guy said he lived in St. Louis, so if you do happen to be from a high cost of living area then you should convert that 90K from what it is worth in his area to your area before you spout off your mouth sounding like a complete snob.
Where can i start with a CIS degree for 17.50 an hour?
I live in the Chicago area and started at my current job a little over a year ago (fresh out of college and no professional development experience) and started out well over that amount. Maybe I just got lucky, it did take me about 8 months before I finally found a job I was willing to accept but the jobs do exist.
Reread the guy who responded to you. Yes, a highly fragmented file on a flash chip won't have the reading slowdown compared to the same file being highly fragmented on a hard disk due to the flash drive not having any moving parts. However, there is a cost if the memory blocks are shared between files since the disk could be better utilized keeping all files contents within the minimum amount of blocks necessary/possible. The advantage to defragmenting a flash drive that does share blocks between files is not faster reading speed, but better memory utilization. Who here doesn't have a need/want to have as much free space available as possible?
Neither of them will grasp the Windows message loop yet
Neither programmer should even have a REASON to have that in a program they are writing yet. I think an IDE is great to have, but I strongly believe that beginner programs need to stay as simple as possible too. A GUI should never be part of a beginner program, stick to a command line interface and programs that strictly consist of a main and once they understand how variables work move them on to functions and structures/classes. GUI wizards or any other type of wizard for that matter should not be used. An IDE to help with syntax issues and a decent debugger should be more than enough to start out with.
Oh and one more thing I forgot to mention is have everything written as a command line interface program, starting out with GUI's can be way to confusing and is absolutely not necessary. K.I.S.S.
I agree that Java wouldn't necessarily turn some people off to programming if it is the first language used but I don't think it is a good starting language. My first language I was taught was VB and next was Java, and I have to admit they gave me NO clue about what was going on behind the scenes which is pretty important. It was not until I started classes in C/C++ that I really started to undertand basic programming and OO concepts as well as memory management.
I think having to allocate and deallocate memory takes away the "magical" appearance that variables have in the first 2 langauges I learned, and it also forces you to understand how the computer works and most importantly how to write clean, memory leak free code. Personally, I believe having a garbage collector from the get go is a bad idea. It does make coding less of a hassle as there is less to worry about but learning how to manage memory is not a very hard concept to grasp and I wish I had started off learning about it from the very start.
I think the best way to start programmers off is:
1) Simple programs that only have a main function so they can play around and learn how/what variables are and how to interact with them.
2) Teach them what arrays are and make them use them.
3) Move on to simple functions.
4) Let them create some structs.
5) Have them create some simple classes and make sure they understand constructors/destructors.
6) Teach them about basic pointer concepts and how to allocate/deallocate memory and have them create some classes that allocate memory and then check to deallocate it in the destructor.
Thats how I wish I had started out, I think it would have made learning a lot of programming concepts easier for me.
yes, that is very true too. I only used the images for testing purposes and did not distribute any of them so was not too worried about copyright issues, but you are right that many images can be found that are "free as in beer". If you have a need to use images Flickr is a great resouce for them.
flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.
Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks or that a single wrong pixel in a lcd is acceptable. It is offcourse. If your stupid.
While I do not doubt that does happen I do have to mention my experience with Dell has been VERY good. My first experience with them was when I was in college and was in charge of a computer lab that had all Dell's. One of the machines started acting erratically and I suspected it was bad RAM so I called up Dell and they had someone there the next day who swapped in some new RAM and everything was fine.
My next experience with them was last year when I ordered a home theatre projector (Infocus SP4805, one of the best investments I have made) from them and I noticed that there was ONE pixel that was always off. I was not about to accept that since I spent quite a bit of money on it and after talking to someone at Dell they arranged to have a new projector sent to me and it arrived in 2 days. From there all I had to do was take the new projector out and put the defective one in the box and then stick on the shipping label that was already in the box and drop it off at UPS.
Maybe I just got lucky with the people I happened to deal with when I contacted Dell but I have been very impressed with the service I have received myself. I have heard some other peoples horror stories but based on my experiences I have recommended Dell to family/friends when they have been looking for a new computer (and I don't have the time/don't want to build them a box myself).
Because last night I got the sudden urge to play some original Zelda so I got out my dreamcast and also my NES emulation disc with like 1,000 games and played Zelda all night long. Those old games are still a lot of fun today and bring me back to when I was 7-8 and would play all night long with my friends trying to beat games. Good times!
Video-on-demand would have killed it anyway, tho'...
I am not so sure about that. You need some type of connection for video on demand to work. So what about people who don't have cable/satellite at their primary residence? What about people who are on vacation and are not staying at a place with cable (my parents spend all summer long up in Minnesota at a lake and just have an antennae and DVD player). There are many other examples too. What I see happening is both will still exist but as VOD becomes more popular/widespread it will go down in cost and in turn rental prices will go down as well so that it will still be cheaper to rent rather than order VOD. So there is one more reason, people who just want to get the cheapest price.
I have the Infocus Screenplay 4805 http://www.infocus.com/Products/Projectors/SP4805. aspx and I really love it. When I was looking at buying a projector last March I was comparing the 4805 to the X3 which has a higher native resolution but it also has 4:3 native aspect ratio instead of the 16:9 the 4805 has. The 4805 also has component input which the X3 does not. Because of my preferences I went with the 4805 and I LOVE it. The picture looks flawless and I am VERY happy with my purchase. Infocus is great at making projectors and I highly recommend them. FYI I ordered mine through Dell and they have been great about service. The first 4805 I received had one pixel that would always stay black and it was very easy to notice once I realized where it was. I called Dell and in 2 days had a new projector which I unpacked and put the old one into the box and sent it off with no problem at all.
And people wonder why Linux has taken off on the desktop...
mplayer is available for windows too.