You don't need a Microsoft-powered 'phone to do that. I've been synching my contacts and calendar from Outlook to my phone(s) for years.
FusionOne used to offer a free service to give you synch across many devices (including many mobile 'phone types).
If you want free stuff and have a Nokia, you can get software from their web site which lets you do this. Other manufacturers also have synch software these days too.
All you need is an IR-port (USB ones are sub-$20) or a data cable for your phone (which will probably be more than that).
I want someone to realise that I always carry around my wallet, my keys and my phone.
Why is it, therefore, that we don't see a combination smartphone/pda/wallet? An average wallet is large enough to put a decent-sized LCD screen and a keypad in (after all, many wallets are quite similar in design to a clamshell-type 'phone).
This would be a kick-ass device because it'd have a big screen *and* reduce the amount of space everything takes up in my pockets. Surely it's the obvious thing to do?
Hang on - given it's obvious, I'll just off and patent it...
All the people who say "I don't get spam, why do you?" will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Well, first after the damned spammers, anyway.
You can get the system to deliver all mail with a precedence: bulk header (mailing lists) to people automagically, but a fair bit of spam (I reckon about 5% of it) has that header on it too.:(
You can prove the correctness of a bit of code, but it's very hard, takes a long time and is highly skilled work. It becomes especially hard if you're trying to do it with a grammar for any real-world programming language and the code is anything approaching complex. For most real world cases it's simply imppossible.
Mathematical proof of a program's correctness is simply too hard and costs too much money to be applicable in the real world.
If you did a real CompSci course, such as the one I did at Cambridge University, you'll discover that "CS people" are very very far from being "code nerds". I was supervised by a couple of mathematicians for some courses who could code no Java, C++ or Perl (although one of them knew much ML). Proper Computer Science folk are seriously academic and embrace the mathematical side of the field. You can't write an optimising compiler without doing so, to name but one thing.
People don't "ignore this issue" - it's just virtually inapplicable to real world problems. Exteme programming is not "management rubbish". If you'd ever actually read a book about it and tried some of the methodology you'd appreciate that. You forget that the driving force for commerical products is pretty much how much it costs, against the feature set and speed. Provided it doesn't crash very often, that's Good Enough. Unless you're the sort of type who doesn't pay for Windows, I'd suspect most people would rather have a version for $100 that crashes once a month than a version for $1000 that crashes only once a year.
Get down off your pretentious high horse and get a clue.
Congratulations. This is the most self-evidently false comment I've seen on here in a long while...
"Decompiling" to ASM is a simple matter of replacing machine codes with mnemonics. It's trivial. Of course, you lose the comments your ASM coder (hopefully) put in the source code, which makes things difficult to understand on some level.
"Decompiling" to C code is trivial. You lose the names of variables, function names, etc, but that's about it. You get a slightly different set of (equivalent) logic, too, given the compiler will probably have optimised things a fair bit. A good C coder (heck, a moderately reasonable C coder) should be able to pretty much see what assembly the C code he writes is going to generate, though. It's difficult to write efficient code otherwise.
"Decompiling" to C++, I wouldn't even know where to start. The suggestion you make of "recognising patterns" should ring alarm bells even if you don't know anything about the subject. Recognising patterns is about the hardest thing you can ask a computer to do. I'd say that this is probably more difficult that attempting face-recognition, for example. At least with that there's established research and various biometrics you can use.
Of course, some languages like Java compile to intermediate byte code which doesn't lose quite so much information, making it easier to "decompile". This is one reason why C# will have issues penetrating the desktop app market - it's too easy to nick other people's code.
Note that I put "decompile" in quotes. That's because there's really no such thing.
As another poster points out, you really should do a course in optimising compiler construction. If you did you'd realise just how silly you sound.:)
Re:Another bad Slashdot analogy
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I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
This is all well and good, but some of us have e-mail addresses hanging about from before spam was a problem. Once you're on a list, you stay there, and your address propogates to lots of other lists too. I for one don't want to change my e-mail address - too many people know it and it has too much inherent value.
I'm currently using an active automatic whitelisting program (ASK) which seems to have stopped the vast flood in its tracks. You really need your own mailserver to run it, though (although you can do this on your Linux DSL/cable firewall box).
Mailing lists aren't a problem, because you can filter them out with other procmail filters, either on the basis of who it's sent to (bugtraq@your.domain.com), who it's from (many mailing lists rewrite headers) or what the subject is (many prefix things). Failing all else, you can process the headers for a particular mail server a mailing list always goes through (although this is barely ever necessary).
I subscribe to about 20 mailing lists. I don't have any problems.
Forget RBLs - active whitelisting is the future.
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Spam Blackhole Lists Redux
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's simple - when a mail comes in you send an e-mail back to the sender with a cookie in the subject line. That e-mail requests they send you a confirmation e-mail to get onto your whitelist, which also causes the original e-mail they sent you to be de-queued and delivered.
If you feed your inbox/archives into your whitelist, 99% of people who e-mail you won't even notice the system is running.
I used to get about 200 spams a day. I tried RBLs, I tried spamassassin. None of it worked reliably - RBLs were only catching about 20% of my spam and spammers now get around spamassassin by looking at the rules when they craft e-mails. False positives were also a problem - sure, it's quicker filtering suspected spam into a spam folder for batch-checking, but it's still a serious hassle with >80 dubious borderline spams a day, and tens slipping straight through the spamassassin/RBL net into your inbox.
Happily for those of you running your own mail servers (or sitting on a *nix box which delivers mail locally via procmail), you can get a program which will do this for you for free. It's called Active Spam Killer, it's written in Python, and you can get it here.
You can play back VP5 in software happily, but you can't encode in realtime. I doubt very much you can encode MPEG-2 in realtime, and that's a much simpler algorithm.
So you've laid out $10,000 for an encoder license then?
Shoutcast/icecast will stream VP3, not VP5. I think you've confused the two. You might like to check out On2's page on VP5 system requirements. You'll notice that the realtime VP5 encoder is still "coming soon". I suspect now VP6 is out, it'll stay that way.
Another poster pointed out that this codec isn't free, and is just as commercial and proprietry as Real and WMV. They're wrong - it's actually much worse than those in terms of cost and lock-in.
Now, I don't know what the terms are for VP6, but our company investigated implementing VP5 a while back. To encode in realtime, you needed dedicated hardware ($15,000 per license). To encode offline, you need software at $10,000 per license. This is licensed on a rolling annual basis - i.e. $10,000 a year. You then additionally need to license the TrueCast on-demand server to distribute content, which is similarly priced.
I'd expect VP6 to be similarly priced to VP5. You'd better be encoding an awful lot of video and saving an awful lot of bandwidth to make it worth your while.
OTOH, the quality of VP5 was extremely good for a given bandwidth (much better than xvid).
Hmmm... it's the wrong question to ask. A much more interesting one is "will there even *be* any major games for PCs in one/two/five years' time?". After all, it's much cheaper developing for xbox, ps2, etc. as you don't have to test on thirty-five different graphics cards, etc. What's more, consoles are steadily increasing in power, and with the advent of consoles with VGA ports and/or HDTV, the last remaining reasons to use a PC for games (higher resolution and a mouse) will go away. Combine that with the cheapness of consoles these days (xbox is now only £130 in the UK, the price of a mid range graphics card for a PC) and what's the point of developing for PC, which has a smaller market and lower returns?
After all, if I didn't buy stuff from all the e-mails I received, I wouldn't have this pair of 36DD breasts! I just love kicking around in my cheaply-re-mortgaged home not having a clue what to do with my 24" penis...
You should use FTP if you answer yes to any of the following questions:
Do you have bandwidth issues? If you are serving files to many people, FTP servers allow maximum concurrent users, which can be useful. I know you can do this with HTTP, but it's difficult to segment the downloading >1Mb files traffic from the normal site traffic. A separate service also allows you to use all the Quality of Service stuff in the 2.4 kernel nicely.
Do you have a large array of files that the user might want to download, such that using an FTP client to ctrl+select multiple files is the right answer compared to having your users click on twenty links and have to cope with twenty dialog boxes?
Do your users need to be able to upload files to you? This can be done with HTTP, but you'll need some PHP processing or similar on the server, it doesn't support resuming, and it won't work through many company firewalls, and therefore isn't a good option. HTTP uploading it particularly hopeless for large files, as it provides no user-feedback.
However, you should NOT use FTP if you answer no to either of these:
Are you running some flavour of unix? There just aren't any robust Windows FTP servers. Yes, I'm prepared for the flame war about this.:)
Can you be bothered to keep your FTPd patched? ProFTPd and WU-FTPd are both frequent appearers on bugtraq. You need to stay on top of the patches, or you will be 0wn3d.
16 millions colours is not more than the eye can differentiate. Although I believe that 30 bits of colour information is. I can't find a link to substantiate that, though. I'm just remembering from my Cambridge University lectures...:)
Of course, having more than that is nice when you start to signal process stuff - gamma-correct 24bit images much and you'll soon notice big bands where there's not enough colour precision to cope with changing the scale.
25fps is the *bare minimum* that you can run a video source at and have a reasonable sense of motion. That's why PAL stuff is 25fps (50Hz interlaced) - it's the cheapest that is acceptable, and thus made TVs as cheap as possible. Of course, now we're stuck with it.:(
I'm quite surprised that Hollywood hasn't moved to 50fps or so yet. I guess that will come at some point, but converting back to 24fps is probably very hard (you can't just drop frames - the motion blur, etc. would be all wrong).
I'd say you need 60fps in FPS games for them to be very playable these days. Note that it's pointless being able to do more FPS than the refresh rate of your monitor, as any game worth its salt will synch to the vertical refresh. Note that this is worth more in smoothness than all the FPS in the world. 75 or 85 fps v.synched properly just looks liquid. I'd be *extremely* impressed if anyone could tell the difference above this.
I seem to have very sensitive eyes, in that I can very easily tell the difference between a 75Hz and 85Hz refresh rate. But I can't tell the difference between an 85Hz one and a 120Hz one. They just both look solid.
There are some things money can't buy...
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The Future of Money
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R&D budget for developing paperless wallets - $50m Promotional and advertising costs to get everyone to switch - $12m Looks on granny's face when she's told her matress-stuffed with dollar bills isn't valid currency any more - priceless
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Accepted worldnarrow^H^H^H^H^H^Hwide.
I can't believe no one's pointed out that IRIX has had scalable vector icons since for ever.
It's one of those things that's quite cool when you first of all play with it, but isn't really a "killer feature".
After all, desktop resolutions aren't going up in terms of dpi that quickly. 48x48 icons on Windows are more than sufficiently large at the moment. 64x64 and 128x128 support is in the wings, too.
I don't think monitor DPI gets larger faster than software is developed, therefore you'll never really need to "stay on top" of monitor resolution developments. It's just a natural progression.
Besides, at anything less than about 50x50, SVG icons aren't a very good idea compared to a hand-optimised bitmap - they're ugly.
Truetype fonts would look *awful* if they weren't full of information about how to grid-fit themselves at low res. That's why tahoma/verdana look so good at 8pt. on screen.
SVG doesn't have anywhere for this information about grid-fitting to go. Plus doing it in colour rather than B&W is a big issue too.
Things like SQL Server need to be patched regularly. Sysadmins who are lazy/ignorant don't do that. So to solve the problem, you must FORCE sysadmins to patch the system.
How do we force sysadmins to do this? Easy: MAKE THE SOFTWARE _REQUIRE_ A PATCH EVERY TWO MONTHS, or it STOPS WORKING.
Two weeks before it stops working, make it send an e-mail to the sysadmin telling him it's about to go pop unless he gets his act together. Just insert some time-dependent code in there. That way, everyone's forced to patch their systems every two months. If there aren't any outstanding patches, then the vendor should create a patch that simply fixes the expiry timecode to be another two months in advance.
OK, so it won't the problem if a worm exploits something within two months of a patch coming out. But it be a darned sight better than the current situation. There might be issues with firewalls, as you prolly don't want your DBMS to have access to the net. but these could all be got around.
You could even get the machines to apply the patches themselves, automatically.
The only issue I can see is that some MS patches actually introduce new bugs/break existing features. Grrr.
The shuttle has now, after all, had many, many successful missions. Back when Challenger lifted off, it was still relatively unproven. Heck, shuttle launches haven't made the news for years. It's all become routine.
Of course they'll need to find out what went wrong. They might ground the fleet in the meantime. But it's unlikely to be a significant design flaw, simply because it's unlikely that we've ridden the wave of probability this long without something going wrong.
Ah, but that's my point, isn't it? "best viewed in IE" is highly offensive.:)
The thing is, the site authors who write the tag "best viewed in IE" aren't doing a substitution, so it's not a euphemism.
Just because in your mind you replace the phrase "best viewed in IE" with "is entirely buggered" doesn't make it a euphemism. That just means you see it as a metaphor. Or something.
I struggle to see how you purport to know so much about qubits when you can't spell the word "prove" or the word "parallel".
I'm amused by your assertion that "quantum mechanics is mostly small, straightforward and self-consistent". In my albeit limited experience it generally involves much, much more difficult calculus than that required to do Newtonian-type classical physics.
> a number of very nice looking typefaces that exactly coincide with the ones Microsoft ships; > as a result, their browser renders pages "best viewed in Internet Explorer," as the incompaibility > is euphemistically called, exactly as if in Internet Explorer.
Erm, fonts != web rendering technology. If it's broke in Gecko it's broke in Gecko, and having the right fonts won't make any difference. Or does he mean, "best viewed in Windows"?
What's euphemistic about it? And why does the author call it an "incompatibility" when he means a "recommendation"? Euphemism, n.: "an inoffensive expression that is substituted for one that is considered offensive".
As another user points out, the article offers so salient points regarding any actual new features or improvements, just a general mish-mash. Then to round off it sounds off on a whole load of random mismatched arguements about how free software's wonderful. We've heard it all a thousand times before.
I get so annoyed by people writing pretentious twaddle using words they don't understand because they think it looks impressive, while simultaneously making grammatical, spelling and typographical errors all over the shop. You ain't fooling no one...
I think you could legitimately claim that you're not in the loop. It's encrypted, and you're effectively holding something like a "cached copy". I use the quotes because I think it'd be a similar situation legally to ISP proxies, etc. You can't sue an ISP because their proxy server has some of your content on it. It's the end-user who's infringing. I think the same would hold true in this case. Mind you, IANAL, AIDWTB (And I Don't Want To Be).;)
Reasons why this is a truly impressively bad idea:
Poor availability: If you're storing it on home-type machines, typical availability is probably <50%. Assuming no hardware failure, if you store your data across four machines, you have a 6.25% chance that all four machines will be down at once and you can't get the data back when you want it.
Slow networks cause slow backup retrieval.
Most people want to back up all their data, as sifting through it to find the bits you do or don't want to backup is difficult. Now, once you've performed the initial backup, you can do incremental backups, which cuts bandwidth requirements, but you still have to initially transfer up to multiple gigabytes over a slow internet connection.
If a peer drops off the network, you must transfer all the data across to a new machine to maintain the same level of availability.
If it's properly distributed, you can place no guarantees on the quality of service (i.e. the speed/reliability). Peers can go away and never come back without warning. Data would have to be massively replicated (1000 to 1 or more) for it to be considered vaguely secure. If there is implied trust between peers (i.e. two people know each other and authorise the data movement, this problem is mitigated.
Massively prone to poor cryptography. If you use very strong cryptography, the system becomes very slow. You really need physical data separation for this.
Requires an internet connection. Won't work from behind firewalls, etc. This is pretty obvious, but is still a factor
Bugs are difficult to fix, as you have to maintain backwards compatibility between versions. Hardware solutions (or simple software ones like mirroring) aren't so prone to bugs. Because this is a complex software solution, there are bound to be bugs. Anything that can go wrong will.:)
Due to the lower reliability of this system per node compared to say a RAID array, it's more expensive per megabyte. Note that it *has* to be lower - you're comparing the reliability of a HDD/tape in a normal backup scenario to a HDD+network+supporting computers.
Prolly lots of other stuff I've missed that other people have covered.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need a Microsoft-powered 'phone to do that. I've been synching my contacts and calendar from Outlook to my phone(s) for years.
FusionOne used to offer a free service to give you synch across many devices (including many mobile 'phone types).
If you want free stuff and have a Nokia, you can get software from their web site which lets you do this. Other manufacturers also have synch software these days too.
All you need is an IR-port (USB ones are sub-$20) or a data cable for your phone (which will probably be more than that).
I want someone to realise that I always carry around my wallet, my keys and my phone.
Why is it, therefore, that we don't see a combination smartphone/pda/wallet? An average wallet is large enough to put a decent-sized LCD screen and a keypad in (after all, many wallets are quite similar in design to a clamshell-type 'phone).
This would be a kick-ass device because it'd have a big screen *and* reduce the amount of space everything takes up in my pockets. Surely it's the obvious thing to do?
Hang on - given it's obvious, I'll just off and patent it...
All the people who say "I don't get spam, why do you?" will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Well, first after the damned spammers, anyway.
Yeah, as a sysadmin on a mail server, that sucks.
:(
You can get the system to deliver all mail with a precedence: bulk header (mailing lists) to people automagically, but a fair bit of spam (I reckon about 5% of it) has that header on it too.
Oooooh, you're so wrong!
You can prove the correctness of a bit of code, but it's very hard, takes a long time and is highly skilled work. It becomes especially hard if you're trying to do it with a grammar for any real-world programming language and the code is anything approaching complex. For most real world cases it's simply imppossible.
Mathematical proof of a program's correctness is simply too hard and costs too much money to be applicable in the real world.
If you did a real CompSci course, such as the one I did at Cambridge University, you'll discover that "CS people" are very very far from being "code nerds". I was supervised by a couple of mathematicians for some courses who could code no Java, C++ or Perl (although one of them knew much ML). Proper Computer Science folk are seriously academic and embrace the mathematical side of the field. You can't write an optimising compiler without doing so, to name but one thing.
People don't "ignore this issue" - it's just virtually inapplicable to real world problems. Exteme programming is not "management rubbish". If you'd ever actually read a book about it and tried some of the methodology you'd appreciate that. You forget that the driving force for commerical products is pretty much how much it costs, against the feature set and speed. Provided it doesn't crash very often, that's Good Enough. Unless you're the sort of type who doesn't pay for Windows, I'd suspect most people would rather have a version for $100 that crashes once a month than a version for $1000 that crashes only once a year.
Get down off your pretentious high horse and get a clue.
Congratulations. This is the most self-evidently false comment I've seen on here in a long while...
:)
"Decompiling" to ASM is a simple matter of replacing machine codes with mnemonics. It's trivial. Of course, you lose the comments your ASM coder (hopefully) put in the source code, which makes things difficult to understand on some level.
"Decompiling" to C code is trivial. You lose the names of variables, function names, etc, but that's about it. You get a slightly different set of (equivalent) logic, too, given the compiler will probably have optimised things a fair bit. A good C coder (heck, a moderately reasonable C coder) should be able to pretty much see what assembly the C code he writes is going to generate, though. It's difficult to write efficient code otherwise.
"Decompiling" to C++, I wouldn't even know where to start. The suggestion you make of "recognising patterns" should ring alarm bells even if you don't know anything about the subject. Recognising patterns is about the hardest thing you can ask a computer to do. I'd say that this is probably more difficult that attempting face-recognition, for example. At least with that there's established research and various biometrics you can use.
Of course, some languages like Java compile to intermediate byte code which doesn't lose quite so much information, making it easier to "decompile". This is one reason why C# will have issues penetrating the desktop app market - it's too easy to nick other people's code.
Note that I put "decompile" in quotes. That's because there's really no such thing.
As another poster points out, you really should do a course in optimising compiler construction. If you did you'd realise just how silly you sound.
This is all well and good, but some of us have e-mail addresses hanging about from before spam was a problem. Once you're on a list, you stay there, and your address propogates to lots of other lists too. I for one don't want to change my e-mail address - too many people know it and it has too much inherent value.
I'm currently using an active automatic whitelisting program (ASK) which seems to have stopped the vast flood in its tracks. You really need your own mailserver to run it, though (although you can do this on your Linux DSL/cable firewall box).
Mailing lists aren't a problem, because you can filter them out with other procmail filters, either on the basis of who it's sent to (bugtraq@your.domain.com), who it's from (many mailing lists rewrite headers) or what the subject is (many prefix things). Failing all else, you can process the headers for a particular mail server a mailing list always goes through (although this is barely ever necessary).
I subscribe to about 20 mailing lists. I don't have any problems.
It's simple - when a mail comes in you send an e-mail back to the sender with a cookie in the subject line. That e-mail requests they send you a confirmation e-mail to get onto your whitelist, which also causes the original e-mail they sent you to be de-queued and delivered.
If you feed your inbox/archives into your whitelist, 99% of people who e-mail you won't even notice the system is running.
I used to get about 200 spams a day. I tried RBLs, I tried spamassassin. None of it worked reliably - RBLs were only catching about 20% of my spam and spammers now get around spamassassin by looking at the rules when they craft e-mails. False positives were also a problem - sure, it's quicker filtering suspected spam into a spam folder for batch-checking, but it's still a serious hassle with >80 dubious borderline spams a day, and tens slipping straight through the spamassassin/RBL net into your inbox.
Happily for those of you running your own mail servers (or sitting on a *nix box which delivers mail locally via procmail), you can get a program which will do this for you for free. It's called Active Spam Killer, it's written in Python, and you can get it here.
You can play back VP5 in software happily, but you can't encode in realtime. I doubt very much you can encode MPEG-2 in realtime, and that's a much simpler algorithm.
So you've laid out $10,000 for an encoder license then?
Shoutcast/icecast will stream VP3, not VP5. I think you've confused the two. You might like to check out On2's page on VP5 system requirements. You'll notice that the realtime VP5 encoder is still "coming soon". I suspect now VP6 is out, it'll stay that way.
Another poster pointed out that this codec isn't free, and is just as commercial and proprietry as Real and WMV. They're wrong - it's actually much worse than those in terms of cost and lock-in.
Now, I don't know what the terms are for VP6, but our company investigated implementing VP5 a while back. To encode in realtime, you needed dedicated hardware ($15,000 per license). To encode offline, you need software at $10,000 per license. This is licensed on a rolling annual basis - i.e. $10,000 a year. You then additionally need to license the TrueCast on-demand server to distribute content, which is similarly priced.
I'd expect VP6 to be similarly priced to VP5. You'd better be encoding an awful lot of video and saving an awful lot of bandwidth to make it worth your while.
OTOH, the quality of VP5 was extremely good for a given bandwidth (much better than xvid).
Hmmm... it's the wrong question to ask. A much more interesting one is "will there even *be* any major games for PCs in one/two/five years' time?". After all, it's much cheaper developing for xbox, ps2, etc. as you don't have to test on thirty-five different graphics cards, etc. What's more, consoles are steadily increasing in power, and with the advent of consoles with VGA ports and/or HDTV, the last remaining reasons to use a PC for games (higher resolution and a mouse) will go away. Combine that with the cheapness of consoles these days (xbox is now only £130 in the UK, the price of a mid range graphics card for a PC) and what's the point of developing for PC, which has a smaller market and lower returns?
After all, if I didn't buy stuff from all the e-mails I received, I wouldn't have this pair of 36DD breasts! I just love kicking around in my cheaply-re-mortgaged home not having a clue what to do with my 24" penis...
- Do you have bandwidth issues? If you are serving files to many people, FTP servers allow maximum concurrent users, which can be useful. I know you can do this with HTTP, but it's difficult to segment the downloading >1Mb files traffic from the normal site traffic. A separate service also allows you to use all the Quality of Service stuff in the 2.4 kernel nicely.
- Do you have a large array of files that the user might want to download, such that using an FTP client to ctrl+select multiple files is the right answer compared to having your users click on twenty links and have to cope with twenty dialog boxes?
- Do your users need to be able to upload files to you? This can be done with HTTP, but you'll need some PHP processing or similar on the server, it doesn't support resuming, and it won't work through many company firewalls, and therefore isn't a good option. HTTP uploading it particularly hopeless for large files, as it provides no user-feedback.
However, you should NOT use FTP if you answer no to either of these:- Are you running some flavour of unix? There just aren't any robust Windows FTP servers. Yes, I'm prepared for the flame war about this.
:) - Can you be bothered to keep your FTPd patched? ProFTPd and WU-FTPd are both frequent appearers on bugtraq. You need to stay on top of the patches, or you will be 0wn3d.
Simple, see?16 millions colours is not more than the eye can differentiate. Although I believe that 30 bits of colour information is. I can't find a link to substantiate that, though. I'm just remembering from my Cambridge University lectures... :)
:(
Of course, having more than that is nice when you start to signal process stuff - gamma-correct 24bit images much and you'll soon notice big bands where there's not enough colour precision to cope with changing the scale.
25fps is the *bare minimum* that you can run a video source at and have a reasonable sense of motion. That's why PAL stuff is 25fps (50Hz interlaced) - it's the cheapest that is acceptable, and thus made TVs as cheap as possible. Of course, now we're stuck with it.
I'm quite surprised that Hollywood hasn't moved to 50fps or so yet. I guess that will come at some point, but converting back to 24fps is probably very hard (you can't just drop frames - the motion blur, etc. would be all wrong).
I'd say you need 60fps in FPS games for them to be very playable these days. Note that it's pointless being able to do more FPS than the refresh rate of your monitor, as any game worth its salt will synch to the vertical refresh. Note that this is worth more in smoothness than all the FPS in the world. 75 or 85 fps v.synched properly just looks liquid. I'd be *extremely* impressed if anyone could tell the difference above this.
I seem to have very sensitive eyes, in that I can very easily tell the difference between a 75Hz and 85Hz refresh rate. But I can't tell the difference between an 85Hz one and a 120Hz one. They just both look solid.
R&D budget for developing paperless wallets - $50m
Promotional and advertising costs to get everyone to switch - $12m
Looks on granny's face when she's told her matress-stuffed with dollar bills isn't valid currency any more - priceless
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Accepted worldnarrow^H^H^H^H^H^Hwide.
I can't believe no one's pointed out that IRIX has had scalable vector icons since for ever.
It's one of those things that's quite cool when you first of all play with it, but isn't really a "killer feature".
After all, desktop resolutions aren't going up in terms of dpi that quickly. 48x48 icons on Windows are more than sufficiently large at the moment. 64x64 and 128x128 support is in the wings, too.
I don't think monitor DPI gets larger faster than software is developed, therefore you'll never really need to "stay on top" of monitor resolution developments. It's just a natural progression.
Besides, at anything less than about 50x50, SVG icons aren't a very good idea compared to a hand-optimised bitmap - they're ugly.
Truetype fonts would look *awful* if they weren't full of information about how to grid-fit themselves at low res. That's why tahoma/verdana look so good at 8pt. on screen.
SVG doesn't have anywhere for this information about grid-fitting to go. Plus doing it in colour rather than B&W is a big issue too.
> I suspect that a large percentage of the problems
:)
> on Microsoft's network were caused by boxes
> managed by individual users.
Then why did Windows Update go down?
Things like SQL Server need to be patched regularly. Sysadmins who are lazy/ignorant don't do that. So to solve the problem, you must FORCE sysadmins to patch the system.
How do we force sysadmins to do this? Easy: MAKE THE SOFTWARE _REQUIRE_ A PATCH EVERY TWO MONTHS, or it STOPS WORKING.
Two weeks before it stops working, make it send an e-mail to the sysadmin telling him it's about to go pop unless he gets his act together. Just insert some time-dependent code in there. That way, everyone's forced to patch their systems every two months. If there aren't any outstanding patches, then the vendor should create a patch that simply fixes the expiry timecode to be another two months in advance.
OK, so it won't the problem if a worm exploits something within two months of a patch coming out. But it be a darned sight better than the current situation. There might be issues with firewalls, as you prolly don't want your DBMS to have access to the net. but these could all be got around.
You could even get the machines to apply the patches themselves, automatically.
The only issue I can see is that some MS patches actually introduce new bugs/break existing features. Grrr.
The shuttle has now, after all, had many, many successful missions. Back when Challenger lifted off, it was still relatively unproven. Heck, shuttle launches haven't made the news for years. It's all become routine.
Of course they'll need to find out what went wrong. They might ground the fleet in the meantime. But it's unlikely to be a significant design flaw, simply because it's unlikely that we've ridden the wave of probability this long without something going wrong.
Ah, but that's my point, isn't it? "best viewed in IE" is highly offensive. :)
The thing is, the site authors who write the tag "best viewed in IE" aren't doing a substitution, so it's not a euphemism.
Just because in your mind you replace the phrase "best viewed in IE" with "is entirely buggered" doesn't make it a euphemism. That just means you see it as a metaphor. Or something.
I struggle to see how you purport to know so much about qubits when you can't spell the word "prove" or the word "parallel".
I'm amused by your assertion that "quantum mechanics is mostly small, straightforward and self-consistent". In my albeit limited experience it generally involves much, much more difficult calculus than that required to do Newtonian-type classical physics.
> a number of very nice looking typefaces that exactly coincide with the ones Microsoft ships;
> as a result, their browser renders pages "best viewed in Internet Explorer," as the incompaibility
> is euphemistically called, exactly as if in Internet Explorer.
Erm, fonts != web rendering technology. If it's broke in Gecko it's broke in Gecko, and having the right fonts won't make any difference. Or does he mean, "best viewed in Windows"?
What's euphemistic about it? And why does the author call it an "incompatibility" when he means a "recommendation"? Euphemism, n.: "an inoffensive expression that is substituted for one that is considered offensive".
As another user points out, the article offers so salient points regarding any actual new features or improvements, just a general mish-mash. Then to round off it sounds off on a whole load of random mismatched arguements about how free software's wonderful. We've heard it all a thousand times before.
I get so annoyed by people writing pretentious twaddle using words they don't understand because they think it looks impressive, while simultaneously making grammatical, spelling and typographical errors all over the shop. You ain't fooling no one...
Next please.
I think you could legitimately claim that you're not in the loop. It's encrypted, and you're effectively holding something like a "cached copy". I use the quotes because I think it'd be a similar situation legally to ISP proxies, etc. You can't sue an ISP because their proxy server has some of your content on it. It's the end-user who's infringing. I think the same would hold true in this case. Mind you, IANAL, AIDWTB (And I Don't Want To Be). ;)