The whole point of XML is to be human readable and editable with a simple text editor. It seems that if you try to edit Excel worksheets by hand then Excel will refuse to load them.
It's like editing a cpp file, and putting lots of "10 LET A = 20: GOTO 10" lines in there.
Sure, you can do it. It's human readable. But don't expect GCC to compile it. The post you linked to is written by someone who clearly doesn't understand that sometimes data crosslinks to data, and when you update it in one place, you need to update the dependency.
For another programming example, it'd be like changing the name of a function in a class header, and not changing the function name in the CPP and where it's used in the rest of your program.
The examples he gives are easy to fix. If, like, you've read the spec and are actually following it and not just trying to put together strawman arguments (which is what he's doing).
I only wish that the Java runtime specs back in the 1.0 days had gotten this much attention. Having to implement UI controls three different ways for Netscape's JVM vs. the Sun JVM vs. the Microsoft JVM was a painful experience.
I also wish that Stephane didn't have such an obvious chip on his shoulder. Its completely destroying his credibility, and making him come to some incredibly sloppy conclusions.
I took at look at his examples. "The calc chain doesn't work if you modify the data". Oh wow. You mean, there are two references to data in the file, this is all in the spec, and you update one without updating the other and it complains? Criminy! How could that happen?
The only thing I can think of is it is attempting some sort of audio fingerprinting while playing. What else could possibly cause that much drop in performance?
Badly written drivers with too many spinlocks on roughly the same IRQL?
When I used vista I didn't see a slow down in network speeds, but at the time I was reorganising media on my hard disk, I started at 10gigabyte file transfer, vista stopped, completely stopped literrally, its like i was running vista on a 66mhz processor, it was not funny, 1hour later when I had reinstalled XP it was much better.
I think this is actually a chipset bug - I see this on intel chipsets all the time now. My quadcore machine at work, my Toshiba M200 laptop; they both have IDE throughput issues, and drag the rest of the system to a halt.
No idea why. The latest drivers did help somewhat though - it doesn't stall nearly as much.
You might want to check your drivers on www.driveragent.com and see if there are newer chipset drivers out which fix the problem.
Of course, this is all anecdotal; it might still just be a problem on the Vista end.
But back to the topic: These laws do not prevent children from playing or owning these games. They just prevent those of a certain age from being able to purchase them without an adult. Again, what is wrong with that?
I've got no problem with it, to be perfectly honest. Frankly, I'd also like to get rid of the "M" rating and merge it with the "AO" rating - if just so that Walmart et al would not put blanket bans on AO games.
Some kids are old enough at 14 to handle adult content. Some aren't. They shouldn't be making the decisions themselves.
Have you ever seen two ten-year-olds perform wrestling moves on each-other that they saw watching WWF (or WWE, whatever)? How many kids were injured because they tried to repeat the stunts they saw on Jackass?
None of which showed people getting hurt, per se.
There have been plenty of studies - mainly on suicide rates - which show that people have a very strong fiction vs. reality filter. Fiction does not affect you. Reality can make some people want to mimic it - it gives them permission.
WWF and Jackass blur the lines. WWF = Sports = Reality. Jackass = Reality TV.
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
I'd love to. I've got an issue with their TV service... They constantly claim to be better than satellite (no rain dropouts!). Well, I had DirecTV for 5 years in Seattle, and guess what? I only had a "rain dropout" once, and that's 'cos an electrical storm was taking down trees near the house.
Not to mention that even with their service, I get dropouts. Data errors causing decompression glitches. DVR boxes that crash, glitch and ignore user input (the recent update has made things much better, but compared to Tivo, that's nothing).
However, although the BBC can't fund them with our taxes, they don't have to licence BBC programmes, as they are a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC. Am I making sense?
Sure, I get ya.
Thing is - according to the people I talked to at BBC America - they hace to license the BBC programs, the same way that the SciFi channel or PBS might. They don't get any special consideration, or special rates on the programming.
The BBC owns channels in much of the english speaking world, so it doesn't need to sell the rights, it just lets BBC America (for example) broadcast BBC made programmes when it wants. How much comes from the rest of the world, I don't know.
I talked to the guys at BBC America over email shortly after they first started up.
They have to run as an independent business entity. The only thing they really share in common with the BBC is the name branding, and a certain amount of culture. But they have to buy licenses to show programming, sell advertising, etc, just like every other cable channel.
(They're part of BBC Enterprises, which is the BBC's Commercial arm, which does not - and legally cannot - take funding from the BBC's license-fee driven departments).
If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
You really don't want to do it this way anyway: Those are the roofs. Added up, they might add up to Arizona. Not likely though. Now imagine that you wanted to cover up Arizona with big pieces of paper, the whole state. I want you to imagine the scale of a project like that with just paper. Now I want you to reflect on the difficulty inherent with replacing all of that paper with silicon semiconductors that currently require clean rooms for manufacture.
Much better solutions are coming online. Like hydrogen-producing algae beds. Which solves half of the problem - how to produce a basic energy source. It's distributable too - plants are much better at this whole photosynthesis thing than any solar cell we've come up with, and it'd work in some pretty dark and gloomy conditions (Washington state).
The other half of the problem is how to move energy around without it being wasted so much, and how to store it. Electricity is the obvious mechanism for moving it around - we've got the infrastructure there. But how to store it?
Carbon nanotube batteries/ultra capacitors are the way to go here. If the technology comes along as expected, it could mean a revolution in the way we use energy. Forget generators, or gas tanks, or anything like that - just put these puppies everywhere. In cars. In your house. Your car needs filling up? Go to the "gas" station and charge it up right there in seconds. Or have a mechanical arm that just swaps the battery out for a fresh one.
The reason I like this plan?
The algae beds are a great way to produce hydrogen. Which is a great way to fuel fusion reactors or other kinds of engines. You don't need to ship the hydrogen anywhere to use it - you can produce it at the site it's going to be used. You don't need to worry about making vehicles that burn the hydrogen as fuels or the safety concerns related to that - all of your energy gets stored in the carbon nanotube batteries.
If I had a big chunk o' money to bet with, I'd be putting all my money on this right now as being the most likely eventual energy solution.
Or traffic wind generators? That one takes the cake. If someone can't grasp why traffic wind generators are a moronic idea, that person can't handle the real world. Transferring energy from wind to turn generators will slow the air. If the air is slowed, it makes the cars work harder to maintain speed. If the cars are working harder, they burn more fuel. See where this is headed?
Traffic wind generators aren't a bad idea. The vehicles are going to displace air anyway - whether you're taking energy from it or not. If the generators are far enough away from the vehicles, the vehicles are still doing as much work as they were before, but the disturbance they're creating won't just bleed off - it'll be usable.
My hunch would be (I've not done the math, and frankly fluid dynamics gives me the heebie jeebies - damn you, Navier Stokes) that if a lane of traffic is 4m wide, a 16m wide semicircular "capture" zone of fans will grab the wind without affecting the pressure that the vehicle in the middle is working against too much. It'll be like a soliton wave around the car.
An alternative, probably better idea though, is to use something similar to supercavitation on the vehicles to minimize their drag instead of trying to reclaim the energy from it. I can't remember the name used to describe the process in air, but it involves creating vortices at the leading edge of the vehicle to reduce the drag on it. Some experiments on semi trucks and planes were showing great promise at one point, but I can't dig up any references right now.
The universe has three sections: the part between the plates, the part to the left of the left plate, and the part to the right of the right plate. All three parts of the universe are undergoing adiabatic expansion and are thus applying pressure to their boundaries.
Uhh... that's not how it works. It's a purely statistical approach based on the virtual particles. Strictly speaking, between the plates there is less chance of finding a particle than outside them (because the wave length of the particle is on average too large to fit between them), so the number of particles you find there is lower than the number outside, so the random motion of the virtual particles on average acts like pressure on the outside of the plates, with nothing to balance it from the inside.
Expansion of the universe doesn't come into it - certainly not on those scales. Especially as if it were, the attractive force would decrease over time.
Actually, the cat will freeze in midair suspended on its side, because in that case, the direction of spin that requires the least work to get the cat/toast to the correct position are in opposite directions with an equal magnitude. So, sadly, it will hit static equilibrium, so you'll just have a crazy floating cat, not a crazy floating power-generating cat.
Nah, you'll have a crazy cat lying on the ground, not a floating one. The forces will be in equilibrium (and parallel to the floor), which means there's nothing to cancel out the gravity, and the whole thing will crash to the ground.
Of course, it'll be perfectly on its side with respect to the gravitational force, so we could use this to measure local variation or something.
I wish perpetual motion machines would work. Then again, even if they did, so far this has been a completely classical system. Once you take into account quantum mechanics you're screwed anyway - half the time even looking at the cat will kill it, destroying your generator.
The future of the PS3 itself seems to have changes coming too: a television tuner and DVR functionality looks to be in the offing for the console. Microsoft announced similar plans earlier this year, but there are no firm dates for either company's use of the console
Microsoft's one doesn't look like a DVR - but is instead IPTV - it remains to be seen what recording features it will have, but presumably it can work in the background over the network the way that Live downloads work now; as it's multicast, there's probably enough bandwidth for it to come in over your regular network connection without really affecting your transfer rates for other data. Sony's looks like it plans to use an over the air tuner, and even weirder, looks like it's set to be used for Freeview (there's also a NZ equivalent).
Wrong. We have open-source (GPL and LGPL) decoders for most formats and encoders for many formats inside ffmpeg (that used by MPlayer, vlc, xine and others).
Your information is obsolete by five years, if not more (when I started using MPlayer at ~2002, I already need not DLL crap for playing mpeg-{1,2,4} [and I need not other formats at that time; MPlayer/ffmpeg already supported [natively] many more even at that time, and support much more now, usually faster and/or better quality than commercial/closed/DLL crap]).
Yeah, but FFMpeg isn't the be all and end all. MPlayer also provides a buttload of other codecs - and that's where the copyright illegality comes in. Do a search for ".dll" on this page, and you can see the ones that are of highly questionable legality.
The codecs used in many Linux media players are literally just ripped off Windows codecs, with some wrappers to get the DLLs to work. Take a look through them with strings - you'll find all kinds of interesting stuff in there.
This isn't a patent problem. It's nothing to do with licensing. It's because people are redistributing non-free, copyrighted software in an effort to get support for decoding their media files. A laudable goal, but somewhat illegal.
Seriously, it's too bad you opened your mouth before checking your facts. I thought this might be an ideal thread to get traction on this issue with the community.
Probably better to post on the xboxlive.com forums to get any kind of traction, to be honest.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of XML is to be human readable and editable with a simple text editor. It seems that if you try to edit Excel worksheets by hand then Excel will refuse to load them.
It's like editing a cpp file, and putting lots of "10 LET A = 20: GOTO 10" lines in there.
Sure, you can do it. It's human readable. But don't expect GCC to compile it. The post you linked to is written by someone who clearly doesn't understand that sometimes data crosslinks to data, and when you update it in one place, you need to update the dependency.
For another programming example, it'd be like changing the name of a function in a class header, and not changing the function name in the CPP and where it's used in the rest of your program.
The examples he gives are easy to fix. If, like, you've read the spec and are actually following it and not just trying to put together strawman arguments (which is what he's doing).
I only wish that the Java runtime specs back in the 1.0 days had gotten this much attention. Having to implement UI controls three different ways for Netscape's JVM vs. the Sun JVM vs. the Microsoft JVM was a painful experience.
I also wish that Stephane didn't have such an obvious chip on his shoulder. Its completely destroying his credibility, and making him come to some incredibly sloppy conclusions.
I took at look at his examples. "The calc chain doesn't work if you modify the data". Oh wow. You mean, there are two references to data in the file, this is all in the spec, and you update one without updating the other and it complains? Criminy! How could that happen?
The only thing I can think of is it is attempting some sort of audio fingerprinting while playing. What else could possibly cause that much drop in performance?
Badly written drivers with too many spinlocks on roughly the same IRQL?
When I used vista I didn't see a slow down in network speeds, but at the time I was reorganising media on my hard disk, I started at 10gigabyte file transfer, vista stopped, completely stopped literrally, its like i was running vista on a 66mhz processor, it was not funny, 1hour later when I had reinstalled XP it was much better.
I think this is actually a chipset bug - I see this on intel chipsets all the time now. My quadcore machine at work, my Toshiba M200 laptop; they both have IDE throughput issues, and drag the rest of the system to a halt.
No idea why. The latest drivers did help somewhat though - it doesn't stall nearly as much.
You might want to check your drivers on www.driveragent.com and see if there are newer chipset drivers out which fix the problem.
Of course, this is all anecdotal; it might still just be a problem on the Vista end.
OS kooks obsessed with ridiculous ideals made the internet, web, pc, I.t. what they are today. all the rest were bureaucrats.
Some anarchists are creative. Not all creative people are anarchists.
And yes, I'm saying that OS kooks obsessed with religious^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiculous ideals are anarchists.
But back to the topic: These laws do not prevent children from playing or owning these games. They just prevent those of a certain age from being able to purchase them without an adult. Again, what is wrong with that?
I've got no problem with it, to be perfectly honest. Frankly, I'd also like to get rid of the "M" rating and merge it with the "AO" rating - if just so that Walmart et al would not put blanket bans on AO games.
Some kids are old enough at 14 to handle adult content. Some aren't. They shouldn't be making the decisions themselves.
Have you ever seen two ten-year-olds perform wrestling moves on each-other that they saw watching WWF (or WWE, whatever)? How many kids were injured because they tried to repeat the stunts they saw on Jackass?
None of which showed people getting hurt, per se.
There have been plenty of studies - mainly on suicide rates - which show that people have a very strong fiction vs. reality filter. Fiction does not affect you. Reality can make some people want to mimic it - it gives them permission.
WWF and Jackass blur the lines. WWF = Sports = Reality. Jackass = Reality TV.
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
I'd love to. I've got an issue with their TV service... They constantly claim to be better than satellite (no rain dropouts!). Well, I had DirecTV for 5 years in Seattle, and guess what? I only had a "rain dropout" once, and that's 'cos an electrical storm was taking down trees near the house.
Not to mention that even with their service, I get dropouts. Data errors causing decompression glitches. DVR boxes that crash, glitch and ignore user input (the recent update has made things much better, but compared to Tivo, that's nothing).
Gaaahhhhh!
I would venture to say that you're not one of the people who care...you Microsoft shareholders are like that, I suppose.
*rotfls*
Nope, sorry, don't hold any Microsoft stock. Don't actually hold any stock in any company at all. But hey, nice ad hominem attack there, buddy.
However, although the BBC can't fund them with our taxes, they don't have to licence BBC programmes, as they are a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC. Am I making sense?
Sure, I get ya.
Thing is - according to the people I talked to at BBC America - they hace to license the BBC programs, the same way that the SciFi channel or PBS might. They don't get any special consideration, or special rates on the programming.
Looking at the photos.. all of 15 people?
Seriously... who cares?
The BBC owns channels in much of the english speaking world, so it doesn't need to sell the rights, it just lets BBC America (for example) broadcast BBC made programmes when it wants. How much comes from the rest of the world, I don't know.
I talked to the guys at BBC America over email shortly after they first started up.
They have to run as an independent business entity. The only thing they really share in common with the BBC is the name branding, and a certain amount of culture. But they have to buy licenses to show programming, sell advertising, etc, just like every other cable channel.
(They're part of BBC Enterprises, which is the BBC's Commercial arm, which does not - and legally cannot - take funding from the BBC's license-fee driven departments).
Scratch that. Only works on the Start Page. Grr.
If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
:D
Right click on the tab. Select "Floating".
Si
yup, MS Silverlight is their planned attempt at killing off not only Adobe Flash but also all this AJAX stuff.
Didn't Microsoft pretty much invent all this AJAX stuff? (Wikipedia)
You really don't want to do it this way anyway:
Those are the roofs. Added up, they might add up to Arizona. Not likely though. Now imagine that you wanted to cover up Arizona with big pieces of paper, the whole state. I want you to imagine the scale of a project like that with just paper. Now I want you to reflect on the difficulty inherent with replacing all of that paper with silicon semiconductors that currently require clean rooms for manufacture.
Much better solutions are coming online. Like hydrogen-producing algae beds. Which solves half of the problem - how to produce a basic energy source. It's distributable too - plants are much better at this whole photosynthesis thing than any solar cell we've come up with, and it'd work in some pretty dark and gloomy conditions (Washington state).
The other half of the problem is how to move energy around without it being wasted so much, and how to store it. Electricity is the obvious mechanism for moving it around - we've got the infrastructure there. But how to store it?
Carbon nanotube batteries/ultra capacitors are the way to go here. If the technology comes along as expected, it could mean a revolution in the way we use energy. Forget generators, or gas tanks, or anything like that - just put these puppies everywhere. In cars. In your house. Your car needs filling up? Go to the "gas" station and charge it up right there in seconds. Or have a mechanical arm that just swaps the battery out for a fresh one.
The reason I like this plan?
The algae beds are a great way to produce hydrogen. Which is a great way to fuel fusion reactors or other kinds of engines. You don't need to ship the hydrogen anywhere to use it - you can produce it at the site it's going to be used. You don't need to worry about making vehicles that burn the hydrogen as fuels or the safety concerns related to that - all of your energy gets stored in the carbon nanotube batteries.
If I had a big chunk o' money to bet with, I'd be putting all my money on this right now as being the most likely eventual energy solution.
Or traffic wind generators? That one takes the cake. If someone can't grasp why traffic wind generators are a moronic idea, that person can't handle the real world. Transferring energy from wind to turn generators will slow the air. If the air is slowed, it makes the cars work harder to maintain speed. If the cars are working harder, they burn more fuel. See where this is headed?
Traffic wind generators aren't a bad idea. The vehicles are going to displace air anyway - whether you're taking energy from it or not. If the generators are far enough away from the vehicles, the vehicles are still doing as much work as they were before, but the disturbance they're creating won't just bleed off - it'll be usable.
My hunch would be (I've not done the math, and frankly fluid dynamics gives me the heebie jeebies - damn you, Navier Stokes) that if a lane of traffic is 4m wide, a 16m wide semicircular "capture" zone of fans will grab the wind without affecting the pressure that the vehicle in the middle is working against too much. It'll be like a soliton wave around the car.
An alternative, probably better idea though, is to use something similar to supercavitation on the vehicles to minimize their drag instead of trying to reclaim the energy from it. I can't remember the name used to describe the process in air, but it involves creating vortices at the leading edge of the vehicle to reduce the drag on it. Some experiments on semi trucks and planes were showing great promise at one point, but I can't dig up any references right now.
The universe has three sections: the part between the plates, the part to the left of the left plate, and the part to the right of the right plate. All three parts of the universe are undergoing adiabatic expansion and are thus applying pressure to their boundaries.
Uhh... that's not how it works. It's a purely statistical approach based on the virtual particles. Strictly speaking, between the plates there is less chance of finding a particle than outside them (because the wave length of the particle is on average too large to fit between them), so the number of particles you find there is lower than the number outside, so the random motion of the virtual particles on average acts like pressure on the outside of the plates, with nothing to balance it from the inside.
Expansion of the universe doesn't come into it - certainly not on those scales. Especially as if it were, the attractive force would decrease over time.
Actually, the cat will freeze in midair suspended on its side, because in that case, the direction of spin that requires the least work to get the cat/toast to the correct position are in opposite directions with an equal magnitude. So, sadly, it will hit static equilibrium, so you'll just have a crazy floating cat, not a crazy floating power-generating cat.
Nah, you'll have a crazy cat lying on the ground, not a floating one. The forces will be in equilibrium (and parallel to the floor), which means there's nothing to cancel out the gravity, and the whole thing will crash to the ground.
Of course, it'll be perfectly on its side with respect to the gravitational force, so we could use this to measure local variation or something.
I wish perpetual motion machines would work. Then again, even if they did, so far this has been a completely classical system. Once you take into account quantum mechanics you're screwed anyway - half the time even looking at the cat will kill it, destroying your generator.
The future of the PS3 itself seems to have changes coming too: a television tuner and DVR functionality looks to be in the offing for the console. Microsoft announced similar plans earlier this year, but there are no firm dates for either company's use of the console
Microsoft's one doesn't look like a DVR - but is instead IPTV - it remains to be seen what recording features it will have, but presumably it can work in the background over the network the way that Live downloads work now; as it's multicast, there's probably enough bandwidth for it to come in over your regular network connection without really affecting your transfer rates for other data. Sony's looks like it plans to use an over the air tuner, and even weirder, looks like it's set to be used for Freeview (there's also a NZ equivalent).
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral. No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.
Doesn't the LGPL fail that test? IIRC, you can only use LGPL code by linking to it via dynamic library.
Wrong. We have open-source (GPL and LGPL) decoders for most formats and encoders for many formats inside ffmpeg (that used by MPlayer, vlc, xine and others).
Your information is obsolete by five years, if not more (when I started using MPlayer at ~2002, I already need not DLL crap for playing mpeg-{1,2,4} [and I need not other formats at that time; MPlayer/ffmpeg already supported [natively] many more even at that time, and support much more now, usually faster and/or better quality than commercial/closed/DLL crap]).
Yeah, but FFMpeg isn't the be all and end all. MPlayer also provides a buttload of other codecs - and that's where the copyright illegality comes in. Do a search for ".dll" on this page, and you can see the ones that are of highly questionable legality.
MPlayer HQ codecs status page
Here's the problem:
The codecs used in many Linux media players are literally just ripped off Windows codecs, with some wrappers to get the DLLs to work. Take a look through them with strings - you'll find all kinds of interesting stuff in there.
This isn't a patent problem. It's nothing to do with licensing. It's because people are redistributing non-free, copyrighted software in an effort to get support for decoding their media files. A laudable goal, but somewhat illegal.
This is unbelievably huge, so much so that I'd be surprised to see this type of concession in the US anytime soon.
Read the EULA. It says that you can run it on one machine, and one "portable machine" that you take home. And has for years and years.
No worries, just tell yourself that it's ok that your arrogance and lack of patience made you lay a steaming pile of crap on slashdot.
Dude, lay off the testosterone. I made an honest mistake, let's leave it at that.
Seriously, it's too bad you opened your mouth before checking your facts. I thought this might be an ideal thread to get traction on this issue with the community.
Probably better to post on the xboxlive.com forums to get any kind of traction, to be honest.
Si