Many BD players will transcode on-the-fly to output to older audio formats -- it's actually one of the handy features of BD, as most people don't have HDMI-input, 7.1-channel audio processors. If you ever buy another one you might look for such a feature.
The menu system is a lot nicer. And there are fancier things the unit can do, like play two video streams at once for PiP commentaries and whatnot. But generally speaking if you don't need the quality there's not much benefit.
They really think having regex functions that aren't binary safe is a bad idea -- besides the obviously disastrous results when used for input validation it also means that ereg cannot support unicode. Plus it's just extra code that there's little reason to continue patching and porting a decade after it has been superseded by faster, safer functions.
Are you seriously telling someone who wrote an intentionally offensive post to not swear because you find the specific word offensive? You're aware that the post would still be inflammatory even without the particular word to which you object, right? So isn't intentionally misspelling that word akin to putting lipstick on a pig?
I guess you're welcome to try to make communities you participate in less offensive by whatever standards you personally hold -- I think whining about swearing a bad idea, and find the whining much more disruptive than the original use of "motherfucker" -- but you should at least pick battles where the outcome has a pragmatic effect.
Tell me why there aren't nuclear power plants in every township in the United States? That is easy to see, right? People fear for their health and safety.
Right. It's based on rational fears for health and safety, not the blind panic leftover from the cold war and a fundamental misunderstanding of radiation. There might be perfectly valid health and safety issues related to nuclear power generation, but that is most definitely not why people are afraid of them.
You know, I can't buy the old school hydrochlorofluorocarbon [wikipedia.org] to use as a refrigerant in my new car. The new stuff doesn't work as well (it's close) but it's a lot better for the environment. Small things like this can be important to entities like the EPA.
R-134a is actually not very efficient compared to R-11/R-12, and overall it may be *worse* for the environment. Don't confuse "doing something" with "doing the right thing" -- banning CFCs and HCFCs in cooling systems was not necessarily the best choice. Among other things, cooling systems were not a huge contributer to atmospheric CFCs (particularly modern, low-pressure chillers which cannot leak), and the ozone hole is actually not nearly as bad as we imagined when we started banning things. But now, 25 year later, greenhouse gasses are a much larger concern, and you know what the CFC/HCFC ban did without question -- raise energy usage in cooling systems by lowering efficiency.
You see, in our rush to do something to "save the environment" (i.e. generate political capital) we just rushed out and banned the first thing we could find that had a potential negative environmental impact and didn't have a strong lobby to protect it. We could have done something useful like reducing sulphur levels in diesel (we put that off for another 20 years), but instead we did something that is, at best, a wash for the environment, and quite possibly detrimental. Can we please not make the same mistake twice in a row?
Obviously the GP is just an Apple shill, not someone trying to demonstrate a particular behavior by comparing it to that of a popular and widely-used device.
And since that's the case I guess you're an S60 shill, and I should point out that the S60 was also not the first device to use last-character-clear masking in password fields either. It's been the fairly standard in limited-input-interface devices for a decades time, and may well have been used in other circumstances before that.
Neither cups nor mL are terribly useful for cooking. Mass would be the most useful, but since balances are a lot of work and since most people have a relatively constant gravitational acceleration over the span of their kitchen and the duration of their meal preparation weight is generally a reasonable proxy for mass.
Hence I'd suggest pounds or kilograms-force for most cooking applications. I know volumetric measurements are traditional, and I'm sure they made sense in 1687, but a reasonably accurate solid-state electric kitchen scale costs $15 and takes up less space and a set of measuring cups and spoons.
On a related note, I think the lack of conversion to weights for cooking is an interesting analog for the SI vs. US-customary argument, where tradition is clearly more important than almost any other factor. Weight-based cooking measurements would demonstrably improve cooking, at least in cases where the particular proportions of ingredients was critical, and doesn't require any big investment in new equipment or techniques. But no one is more than passingly interested in such a conversion for domestic cooks, because there's far too much tradition involved in the old measuring methods, even if there are real benefits to the new methods.
This is an example people always pull out, and while true, I don't think it's very meaningful.
In most practical situations we just pick a single base unit and stick with it. No one switches from kilometers to megameters when they get over 1,000 -- even if the conversion is easy enough to do in your head it's not worth the effort.
The most common case where the above isn't true is when you're comparing two things from different contexts -- like paper clips and jumbo jets -- and in that case SI has the same trouble as US customary units: people don't know the conversion factors. While the arithmetic of conversion from Volt-Amp-seconds to Joules is trivial most people don't have the dimensional analysis memorized and would not be able to do the conversion without aid. To a lesser degree this applies even to conversions within the same base SI unit; many people are not sure how many cubic centimeters are in a liter, or how many micrograms are in a kilogram, and would still need to consult a conversion table even though the arithmetic is simple.
I agree, there is some benefit to SI units. They are (except for mass) defined in a reproducible manner that allows accurate, remote calibrations. And they are internally consistent which can reduce the number and complexity of coefficients needed when you're cranking through a physics calculation. But most people will do those sorts of things infrequently if at all, so there's no practical benefit to most people. Add to that the enormous conversion cost, the complexity of the measurements of legacy real-world objects (i.e. studs that are 406.4 mm on-center instead of 16"), and at least a couple of generations of society that can't agree on how big things are and the case for SI-only become pretty difficult to make except in specialized contexts.
But you're not eliminating the possibility of screwing up the conversion, you're just shuffling it around -- if the physical parts are 6" wide, someone still has to convert that 6" to 152.4 mm and write the new number in the spec. It might make the spec more useful to the rest of the world, but I don't see how it makes the fundamental error any less likely to occur.
You're assuming Steve told Apple and gave them permission to tell others. Regardless of SEC rules, he's under no obligation to expose his HIPAA-protected data, nor are Apple, it shareholders, or the SEC is in a position to ask. Moreover, even if someone at Apple knew of his actual condition they can't legally reveal it to others without his consent.
Use as an audio device. If we're going to allow radios I don't see why we couldn't allow use of TVs as audio devices.
And as the GP mentioned (and you conveniently ignored) there may be passengers in the vehicle who could make legitimate use of the TV while the driver completely ignores it.
First, I'm not sure it helps at all. I think it might actual hurt, because people will spend more time fighting with their TV rather than just turning it on. And it certainly imposes restrictions on perfectly safe use that the device cannot distinguish from unsafe use because of its limited sensors and safety algorithm.
Second, it's about allocation of resources. There are only so many things we can do to improve driving safety. If we waste our resources doing 10,000 nearly useless things we'll have no time/money/etc. left for doing the things that might actually work.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that it's false either, but I don't see any particular reason to believe there's a causal link between "number of stupid things you can do" and "number of stupid things actually done". There are certainly *new* ways to be stupid invented all the time, but at the same time old ways to be stupid fall out-of-fashion. And even if those rates are not coordinated, there's a limit to the number of stupid things any one person can do at any given time.
I'd honestly be interested to know if there's any reasonable study on the subject.
But more directly to my original point -- if someone does not taking driving seriously enough to avoid obvious distractions I think they'll find a way to be distracted no matter what technological hurdles we put in their way. All they have to do is stop paying attention, and there's no amount of warnings or lockout systems that can force them to give their full attention to driving.
I don think your analogy holds much value -- you're adding to the total destructive power available to the participants. Unless this new TV is loaded with explosives it does not make your vehicle inherently more destructive.
A better analogy might be the different between a slowly burning room with a TV and without. They're both dangerous, and yes, someone could get distracted by the TV and stuck in the burning room, but if they're stupid enough to do that it's unlikely that removing the TV would solve the problem.
Use as an audio device. We seem to have accepted radio usage while driving, and there's no reason a TV couldn't be used in the same way simply by not looking at the screen.
Or entertaining the passengers. Particularly if they are young, you may reduce the overall level of driver distraction by providing some passenger distraction.
Because if only we could prevent this one particular stupid thing people can do while driving we will eliminate all driving-related injuries and deaths.
Seriously, there is an endless supply of stupid, distracting things people can do while driving, with out without GPS, a cell phone, TV, children, or any of the other things they might have in their car. If someone is stupid enough to be distracted by TV while they're driving they'll likely be able to find something similarly stupid to do even if you ban every bit of technology you can name from the dashboard. Like DRM, the only thing you'll accomplish by adding silly technologically restrictions like this is annoyance for people who have legitimate uses.
You know all those custom/small-market apps that require people to still run Windows, even if they could otherwise use another OS? The ones that don't run in Wine? Those are the same apps that require admin rights to run. The same apps that must be installed locally instead of on a network drive. The same apps that require letter-mapped drives instead of real path names.
I'm glad you don't have to use any such apps, but they haven't gone away, and likely won't, at least not in the foreseeable future.
T-mobile could just send your voicemail as a frigging email attachment or multi-media text message -- those work just like "visual voicemail", and on a whole slew of phones to boot. Heck, they could probably even ding you for the text message deliveru and make an extra $0.10/message in the process.
I love it when people trot out the "break the phone subsidy contract" bit, to try an look smart, and then apply it incorrectly.
First, so long as I don't cancel my contract, I don't see why my original provider has any interest in whether or not I can also use that phone on a second carrier, or sell it to a third party, which is all locking prevents. Even if at some point in the future I decided to drop the original carrier, I'd still have to pay a cancelation fee, so they'd be out none of their precious subsidy no matter what I did with the phone in the mean time.
Second, no one lets you start service without a 12-24 month contract that includes a cancelation fee EVEN IF YOU BRING YOUR OWN EQUIPMENT. There's no phone subsidy involved when I bring my own phone, but I've yet to find post-paid voice + data service from a national provider who did not require a year+ contract with a cancelation penalty. What exactly is the purpose of the cancelation fee in those circumstances -- am I supposed to believe they suffer hundreds of dollars in administrative costs just to activate a single line of service?
Those are all great things. But A) they won't actually stop people from bringing viruses into the office. They might *help*, but you'll still need an A/V client from time to time and B) those things are not going to happen reliably someplace that doesn't even have a full-time IT guy.
The only reason I can see is to reduce liquidity in the secondary phone market, so they can sell more new phones. Even if they don't make a lot of money on the phone directly, new phone sales allow them to get people into new long-term contracts, which are very profitable and help reduce turnover.
I just wish I wasn't required to enter a long-term contract even when I *do* provide my own phone. I know/. is full of apologists who rail about recovering the cost of hardware subsidies, but I have yet to encounter a provider who will sell me standard, post-paid wireless voice and data services on a single line without a 12-24 month contract and the related cancelation fees, even when I provide my own equipment.
Did you miss the abstraction layer linux already has for file systems -- VFS? The layer that lets all file-related system calls like be unified among all file systems, so that a file system is only responsible for actually talking to the disk? The same sort of system used by BSD and Windows? Doesn't that essentially make new file systems as minimal as possible while still allowing "tuning"?
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Many BD players will transcode on-the-fly to output to older audio formats -- it's actually one of the handy features of BD, as most people don't have HDMI-input, 7.1-channel audio processors. If you ever buy another one you might look for such a feature.
The menu system is a lot nicer. And there are fancier things the unit can do, like play two video streams at once for PiP commentaries and whatnot. But generally speaking if you don't need the quality there's not much benefit.
They really think having regex functions that aren't binary safe is a bad idea -- besides the obviously disastrous results when used for input validation it also means that ereg cannot support unicode. Plus it's just extra code that there's little reason to continue patching and porting a decade after it has been superseded by faster, safer functions.
Are you seriously telling someone who wrote an intentionally offensive post to not swear because you find the specific word offensive? You're aware that the post would still be inflammatory even without the particular word to which you object, right? So isn't intentionally misspelling that word akin to putting lipstick on a pig? I guess you're welcome to try to make communities you participate in less offensive by whatever standards you personally hold -- I think whining about swearing a bad idea, and find the whining much more disruptive than the original use of "motherfucker" -- but you should at least pick battles where the outcome has a pragmatic effect.
Tell me why there aren't nuclear power plants in every township in the United States? That is easy to see, right? People fear for their health and safety.
Right. It's based on rational fears for health and safety, not the blind panic leftover from the cold war and a fundamental misunderstanding of radiation. There might be perfectly valid health and safety issues related to nuclear power generation, but that is most definitely not why people are afraid of them.
You know, I can't buy the old school hydrochlorofluorocarbon [wikipedia.org] to use as a refrigerant in my new car. The new stuff doesn't work as well (it's close) but it's a lot better for the environment. Small things like this can be important to entities like the EPA.
R-134a is actually not very efficient compared to R-11/R-12, and overall it may be *worse* for the environment. Don't confuse "doing something" with "doing the right thing" -- banning CFCs and HCFCs in cooling systems was not necessarily the best choice. Among other things, cooling systems were not a huge contributer to atmospheric CFCs (particularly modern, low-pressure chillers which cannot leak), and the ozone hole is actually not nearly as bad as we imagined when we started banning things. But now, 25 year later, greenhouse gasses are a much larger concern, and you know what the CFC/HCFC ban did without question -- raise energy usage in cooling systems by lowering efficiency.
You see, in our rush to do something to "save the environment" (i.e. generate political capital) we just rushed out and banned the first thing we could find that had a potential negative environmental impact and didn't have a strong lobby to protect it. We could have done something useful like reducing sulphur levels in diesel (we put that off for another 20 years), but instead we did something that is, at best, a wash for the environment, and quite possibly detrimental. Can we please not make the same mistake twice in a row?
Obviously the GP is just an Apple shill, not someone trying to demonstrate a particular behavior by comparing it to that of a popular and widely-used device.
And since that's the case I guess you're an S60 shill, and I should point out that the S60 was also not the first device to use last-character-clear masking in password fields either. It's been the fairly standard in limited-input-interface devices for a decades time, and may well have been used in other circumstances before that.
Neither cups nor mL are terribly useful for cooking. Mass would be the most useful, but since balances are a lot of work and since most people have a relatively constant gravitational acceleration over the span of their kitchen and the duration of their meal preparation weight is generally a reasonable proxy for mass.
Hence I'd suggest pounds or kilograms-force for most cooking applications. I know volumetric measurements are traditional, and I'm sure they made sense in 1687, but a reasonably accurate solid-state electric kitchen scale costs $15 and takes up less space and a set of measuring cups and spoons.
On a related note, I think the lack of conversion to weights for cooking is an interesting analog for the SI vs. US-customary argument, where tradition is clearly more important than almost any other factor. Weight-based cooking measurements would demonstrably improve cooking, at least in cases where the particular proportions of ingredients was critical, and doesn't require any big investment in new equipment or techniques. But no one is more than passingly interested in such a conversion for domestic cooks, because there's far too much tradition involved in the old measuring methods, even if there are real benefits to the new methods.
This is an example people always pull out, and while true, I don't think it's very meaningful.
In most practical situations we just pick a single base unit and stick with it. No one switches from kilometers to megameters when they get over 1,000 -- even if the conversion is easy enough to do in your head it's not worth the effort.
The most common case where the above isn't true is when you're comparing two things from different contexts -- like paper clips and jumbo jets -- and in that case SI has the same trouble as US customary units: people don't know the conversion factors. While the arithmetic of conversion from Volt-Amp-seconds to Joules is trivial most people don't have the dimensional analysis memorized and would not be able to do the conversion without aid. To a lesser degree this applies even to conversions within the same base SI unit; many people are not sure how many cubic centimeters are in a liter, or how many micrograms are in a kilogram, and would still need to consult a conversion table even though the arithmetic is simple.
I agree, there is some benefit to SI units. They are (except for mass) defined in a reproducible manner that allows accurate, remote calibrations. And they are internally consistent which can reduce the number and complexity of coefficients needed when you're cranking through a physics calculation. But most people will do those sorts of things infrequently if at all, so there's no practical benefit to most people. Add to that the enormous conversion cost, the complexity of the measurements of legacy real-world objects (i.e. studs that are 406.4 mm on-center instead of 16"), and at least a couple of generations of society that can't agree on how big things are and the case for SI-only become pretty difficult to make except in specialized contexts.
But you're not eliminating the possibility of screwing up the conversion, you're just shuffling it around -- if the physical parts are 6" wide, someone still has to convert that 6" to 152.4 mm and write the new number in the spec. It might make the spec more useful to the rest of the world, but I don't see how it makes the fundamental error any less likely to occur.
You're assuming Steve told Apple and gave them permission to tell others. Regardless of SEC rules, he's under no obligation to expose his HIPAA-protected data, nor are Apple, it shareholders, or the SEC is in a position to ask. Moreover, even if someone at Apple knew of his actual condition they can't legally reveal it to others without his consent.
You're being too literal. By "ROI" he means "The point at which the ROI becomes positive/exceeds the investment threshold/etc."
Use as an audio device. If we're going to allow radios I don't see why we couldn't allow use of TVs as audio devices.
And as the GP mentioned (and you conveniently ignored) there may be passengers in the vehicle who could make legitimate use of the TV while the driver completely ignores it.
First, I'm not sure it helps at all. I think it might actual hurt, because people will spend more time fighting with their TV rather than just turning it on. And it certainly imposes restrictions on perfectly safe use that the device cannot distinguish from unsafe use because of its limited sensors and safety algorithm.
Second, it's about allocation of resources. There are only so many things we can do to improve driving safety. If we waste our resources doing 10,000 nearly useless things we'll have no time/money/etc. left for doing the things that might actually work.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that it's false either, but I don't see any particular reason to believe there's a causal link between "number of stupid things you can do" and "number of stupid things actually done". There are certainly *new* ways to be stupid invented all the time, but at the same time old ways to be stupid fall out-of-fashion. And even if those rates are not coordinated, there's a limit to the number of stupid things any one person can do at any given time.
I'd honestly be interested to know if there's any reasonable study on the subject.
But more directly to my original point -- if someone does not taking driving seriously enough to avoid obvious distractions I think they'll find a way to be distracted no matter what technological hurdles we put in their way. All they have to do is stop paying attention, and there's no amount of warnings or lockout systems that can force them to give their full attention to driving.
I don think your analogy holds much value -- you're adding to the total destructive power available to the participants. Unless this new TV is loaded with explosives it does not make your vehicle inherently more destructive.
A better analogy might be the different between a slowly burning room with a TV and without. They're both dangerous, and yes, someone could get distracted by the TV and stuck in the burning room, but if they're stupid enough to do that it's unlikely that removing the TV would solve the problem.
Use as an audio device. We seem to have accepted radio usage while driving, and there's no reason a TV couldn't be used in the same way simply by not looking at the screen.
Or entertaining the passengers. Particularly if they are young, you may reduce the overall level of driver distraction by providing some passenger distraction.
Because if only we could prevent this one particular stupid thing people can do while driving we will eliminate all driving-related injuries and deaths.
Seriously, there is an endless supply of stupid, distracting things people can do while driving, with out without GPS, a cell phone, TV, children, or any of the other things they might have in their car. If someone is stupid enough to be distracted by TV while they're driving they'll likely be able to find something similarly stupid to do even if you ban every bit of technology you can name from the dashboard. Like DRM, the only thing you'll accomplish by adding silly technologically restrictions like this is annoyance for people who have legitimate uses.
You know all those custom/small-market apps that require people to still run Windows, even if they could otherwise use another OS? The ones that don't run in Wine? Those are the same apps that require admin rights to run. The same apps that must be installed locally instead of on a network drive. The same apps that require letter-mapped drives instead of real path names.
I'm glad you don't have to use any such apps, but they haven't gone away, and likely won't, at least not in the foreseeable future.
T-mobile could just send your voicemail as a frigging email attachment or multi-media text message -- those work just like "visual voicemail", and on a whole slew of phones to boot. Heck, they could probably even ding you for the text message deliveru and make an extra $0.10/message in the process.
I love it when people trot out the "break the phone subsidy contract" bit, to try an look smart, and then apply it incorrectly.
First, so long as I don't cancel my contract, I don't see why my original provider has any interest in whether or not I can also use that phone on a second carrier, or sell it to a third party, which is all locking prevents. Even if at some point in the future I decided to drop the original carrier, I'd still have to pay a cancelation fee, so they'd be out none of their precious subsidy no matter what I did with the phone in the mean time.
Second, no one lets you start service without a 12-24 month contract that includes a cancelation fee EVEN IF YOU BRING YOUR OWN EQUIPMENT. There's no phone subsidy involved when I bring my own phone, but I've yet to find post-paid voice + data service from a national provider who did not require a year+ contract with a cancelation penalty. What exactly is the purpose of the cancelation fee in those circumstances -- am I supposed to believe they suffer hundreds of dollars in administrative costs just to activate a single line of service?
I got that too, on two different machines.
But it worked fine when I fired off the updater manually -- if you select "Download Only" it will reveal the package in the Finder.
Those are all great things. But A) they won't actually stop people from bringing viruses into the office. They might *help*, but you'll still need an A/V client from time to time and B) those things are not going to happen reliably someplace that doesn't even have a full-time IT guy.
The only reason I can see is to reduce liquidity in the secondary phone market, so they can sell more new phones. Even if they don't make a lot of money on the phone directly, new phone sales allow them to get people into new long-term contracts, which are very profitable and help reduce turnover.
I just wish I wasn't required to enter a long-term contract even when I *do* provide my own phone. I know /. is full of apologists who rail about recovering the cost of hardware subsidies, but I have yet to encounter a provider who will sell me standard, post-paid wireless voice and data services on a single line without a 12-24 month contract and the related cancelation fees, even when I provide my own equipment.
Did you miss the abstraction layer linux already has for file systems -- VFS? The layer that lets all file-related system calls like be unified among all file systems, so that a file system is only responsible for actually talking to the disk? The same sort of system used by BSD and Windows? Doesn't that essentially make new file systems as minimal as possible while still allowing "tuning"?