I have a P600 in my basement that I watch divx movies on while I work. It's an XP box. I always had to shrink the playback window to about 300x200 so they wouldn't stutter. I always figured it was that there just wasn't enough horsepower in the cpu or bandwidth to the video card to do full screen.
Then I tried VLC Media Player Portable one day, since I was having a codec problem with one of my movies.
So, I'd start a movie and out of habit shrink the window down to a non-stutter size. But one day a buddy was in the shop and clicked the full screen mode. And surprise! It worked 100%, without a single stutter. They all did. Turns out my P600 had plenty enough horsepower to play full screen movies. It was WMP that was the problem.
Just goes to show you what tight code and self discipline can do when you're programming.
I work with embedded designs for a living. Almost every single design that's ever crossed my desk has either a Xilinx or an Altera FPGA between the CPU and the PCMCIA interface. It's pretty standard.
But hey - since I have your attention I'd like to say thank you for all your posts here on this topic. It's enlightening to read your take on things. Even if you are native-legalese.
But don't go looking for little green men. You might remember HD209458b as a 'hot Jupiter' that boils under the glow of its very nearby star.
Why should that keep little green men from evolving? Read this. It's an article about life on our own planet that lives in the boiling water around volcanic jets on the ocean floor.
Small companies don't fear being squashed by MS because that's not their primary game plan anymore. They have achieved the dominance that phase of their company wished for. Now, the new paradigm is to be acquired by them. MS doesn't innovate anymore, they assimilate.
There are thousands of small start-ups that have this as their primary goal. Get a good idea, build it up to where it shows up on some large company's radar, then be acquired by them. Then, retire. And MS is a leader in this area.
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
Whoo! Man I just can't get enough of these April Fools jokes! I'm just holding my sides here. No. Really. Honest.
I love how Slashdot is entirely useless for a whole day. JESUS BUT THIS IS FUNNY.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Please, no matter what you do - please don't stop. I can't get enough. There's nothing like having Fark be more useful than Slashdot. Holy crap but I'm in stitches here. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The guys who made the AI for that dinky little C64 game did a fantastic job.
Better yet, they included a small book on how they developed the AI. Went to cons and watched expert players. Developed test routines. Tuned those routines. And at the end of the book they include the actual algorithms in the game, too. I'd consider it a must-read for anyone doing game design.
And even knowing the algorithms, it still doesn't help. That game *still* kicks my ass.
Comparatively, I believe they are. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'll bet that the revenue from Windows Vista is somewhat larger than from the Zune.
For that matter, an OS or office suite is hardly big leagues, certainly not in the future. There are plently good, free versions of both to threaten the future viability of commercial in those areas.
Strike to remove, your Honor. Speculative.
Allow me to ask a related question, and it's based on something we both probably know very well. We both know that OpenOffice is entirely sufficient for 99.999% of all people out there who need a word processor. So why do people still buy MS Office then?
Creating the desire to pay premium for your products? Priceless.
Do you know ANYthing about the stock market? Did you not read the article about those stock market mass email spamming ventures. The stock price goes up 5-10% (I forget the exact number) just because someone sends out a bunch of email!!! The stock market is COMPLETELY about "buzz".
Respectfully, I must disagree.
If you reference the Slashdot article you mention, you'll also see that the spam stock price spike doesn't last long enough for you to get in on. By the time you get the email, you've missed the opportunity. The people who sent it out are the ones who reap the benefit. If you buy in, you buy in too late, and you're the one who pays for their gain.
I would venture that the stock market is about performance. You see that a lot on mutual fund disclaimers - "past performance is no guarantee of future results". But it is an excellent indicator. Far more reliable than gut feelings and media hype.
How do you measure buzz? You don't. It's something that experienced people in this industry can just feel.
Would you buy stock in a company based on "buzz"? Doubt it. At least these days, in the post dot-bomb world anyways.
What Apple does currently have is momentum. They keep making good decisions and carving out markets. And that's why MS should fear them. MS is already losing in the junior leagues (Zune vs. iPod). Enough of that, and maybe MS will start losing in the big leagues (OS and Office).
You buy cool buy hireing really cool inventave people, stick them into a room, slide pizzas under the door until they come up with something that is new and people will like.
Sounds good, but I've never seen it work that way. Your experience may be different than mine though.
I've been in product brainstorming sessions. Engineers get happy and think up new features, and management tends to shoot them down. Not out of malice, mind you. Management types just tend not to be risk-takers.
What you really need are management people who aren't out of touch and can spot a good idea.
Also, you need people who have good ideas. Forced brainstorming sessions always seemed to me like an act of desperation. "Hurry up and have an idea." It doesn't work like that. Most of my best ideas are like the Flux Capacitor moment. You can't really force yourself to have an idea. They just sort of happen when they do.
Net speed is nice, but I think these would also make excellent replacements for SATA. Especially when we get those nifty zero-seek time solid state flash drives. Currently, a SATA cable tops out at 3GB/s.
This...Textmate, you say?
on
TextMate
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, this is Slashdot. Your choices are limited to vi or emacs. There are no other editors.
How does that compare with traditional hard drives? I'd love to see some benchmarks on that. What does it do to boot time? Application start? Fun stuff like that.
Yeah, I know it's good to have because it should be more drop-proof than a traditional mechanical hard drive. But something tells me that you're not going to treat a million dollar laptop like a football anyway, so what does this do for the buyer?
Hey mod, I'm serious and I'm making a serious point.
Porting the JVM somewhere is about as much effort as porting a word processor, or any other 100 meg application. But if you port the JVM, all the applications you have in Java are ported by proxy. It's a one-time task.
So if your 100 meg word processor is in Java, once you port the JVM you get the word processor for free. And all of your other Java applications. You don't have to port them seperately. It's one porting task and then you're done.
And now that the JVM is open source, you can expect that to happen more often. It's part of the beauty of running VM based languages.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a P600 in my basement that I watch divx movies on while I work. It's an XP box. I always had to shrink the playback window to about 300x200 so they wouldn't stutter. I always figured it was that there just wasn't enough horsepower in the cpu or bandwidth to the video card to do full screen.
Then I tried VLC Media Player Portable one day, since I was having a codec problem with one of my movies.
So, I'd start a movie and out of habit shrink the window down to a non-stutter size. But one day a buddy was in the shop and clicked the full screen mode. And surprise! It worked 100%, without a single stutter. They all did. Turns out my P600 had plenty enough horsepower to play full screen movies. It was WMP that was the problem.
Just goes to show you what tight code and self discipline can do when you're programming.
The first Zune boasted Wifi too. Misleading as hell.
I work with embedded designs for a living. Almost every single design that's ever crossed my desk has either a Xilinx or an Altera FPGA between the CPU and the PCMCIA interface. It's pretty standard.
Ok that's funny. =)
But hey - since I have your attention I'd like to say thank you for all your posts here on this topic. It's enlightening to read your take on things. Even if you are native-legalese.
NewYorkCountryLawyer to the white courtesy phone, please. We have an RIAA related legal item that needs translation. Thank you.
But don't go looking for little green men. You might remember HD209458b as a 'hot Jupiter' that boils under the glow of its very nearby star.
Why should that keep little green men from evolving? Read this. It's an article about life on our own planet that lives in the boiling water around volcanic jets on the ocean floor.
Small companies don't fear being squashed by MS because that's not their primary game plan anymore. They have achieved the dominance that phase of their company wished for. Now, the new paradigm is to be acquired by them. MS doesn't innovate anymore, they assimilate.
There are thousands of small start-ups that have this as their primary goal. Get a good idea, build it up to where it shows up on some large company's radar, then be acquired by them. Then, retire. And MS is a leader in this area.
I'm sick of paying on them anyways!
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
Patch to bypass advertising to be released in about a week. Probably on Bittorrent.
Whoo! Man I just can't get enough of these April Fools jokes! I'm just holding my sides here. No. Really. Honest.
I love how Slashdot is entirely useless for a whole day. JESUS BUT THIS IS FUNNY.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Please, no matter what you do - please don't stop. I can't get enough. There's nothing like having Fark be more useful than Slashdot. Holy crap but I'm in stitches here. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
No, really. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
At least it's a Sunday and I'm not at work trying to kill time. See you Monday, Slashdot.
The guys who made the AI for that dinky little C64 game did a fantastic job.
Better yet, they included a small book on how they developed the AI. Went to cons and watched expert players. Developed test routines. Tuned those routines. And at the end of the book they include the actual algorithms in the game, too. I'd consider it a must-read for anyone doing game design.
And even knowing the algorithms, it still doesn't help. That game *still* kicks my ass.
Personal music devices are hardly junior leagues.
Comparatively, I believe they are. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'll bet that the revenue from Windows Vista is somewhat larger than from the Zune.
For that matter, an OS or office suite is hardly big leagues, certainly not in the future. There are plently good, free versions of both to threaten the future viability of commercial in those areas.
Strike to remove, your Honor. Speculative.
Allow me to ask a related question, and it's based on something we both probably know very well. We both know that OpenOffice is entirely sufficient for 99.999% of all people out there who need a word processor. So why do people still buy MS Office then?
Creating the desire to pay premium for your products? Priceless.
Agreed, 100%.
Do you know ANYthing about the stock market? Did you not read the article about those stock market mass email spamming ventures. The stock price goes up 5-10% (I forget the exact number) just because someone sends out a bunch of email!!! The stock market is COMPLETELY about "buzz".
Respectfully, I must disagree.
If you reference the Slashdot article you mention, you'll also see that the spam stock price spike doesn't last long enough for you to get in on. By the time you get the email, you've missed the opportunity. The people who sent it out are the ones who reap the benefit. If you buy in, you buy in too late, and you're the one who pays for their gain.
I would venture that the stock market is about performance. You see that a lot on mutual fund disclaimers - "past performance is no guarantee of future results". But it is an excellent indicator. Far more reliable than gut feelings and media hype.
Pure baloney, Scot Finnie.
How do you measure buzz? You don't. It's something that experienced people in this industry can just feel.
Would you buy stock in a company based on "buzz"? Doubt it. At least these days, in the post dot-bomb world anyways.
What Apple does currently have is momentum. They keep making good decisions and carving out markets. And that's why MS should fear them. MS is already losing in the junior leagues (Zune vs. iPod). Enough of that, and maybe MS will start losing in the big leagues (OS and Office).
You buy cool buy hireing really cool inventave people, stick them into a room, slide pizzas under the door until they come up with something that is new and people will like.
Sounds good, but I've never seen it work that way. Your experience may be different than mine though.
I've been in product brainstorming sessions. Engineers get happy and think up new features, and management tends to shoot them down. Not out of malice, mind you. Management types just tend not to be risk-takers.
What you really need are management people who aren't out of touch and can spot a good idea.
Also, you need people who have good ideas. Forced brainstorming sessions always seemed to me like an act of desperation. "Hurry up and have an idea." It doesn't work like that. Most of my best ideas are like the Flux Capacitor moment. You can't really force yourself to have an idea. They just sort of happen when they do.
Can Large Corporations Buy "Cool?"
Of course they can! A good example is the entertainment industry's Captain Copyright!
Why, if that doesn't make little Timmy stop downloading his Metallica MP3s, then by golly nothing will! Captain Copyright is totally fresh!
IBM tech promises 160Gb/s downloads
Net speed is nice, but I think these would also make excellent replacements for SATA. Especially when we get those nifty zero-seek time solid state flash drives. Currently, a SATA cable tops out at 3GB/s.
I'm sorry, this is Slashdot. Your choices are limited to vi or emacs. There are no other editors.
With 128GB of solid state disk space
How does that compare with traditional hard drives? I'd love to see some benchmarks on that. What does it do to boot time? Application start? Fun stuff like that.
Yeah, I know it's good to have because it should be more drop-proof than a traditional mechanical hard drive. But something tells me that you're not going to treat a million dollar laptop like a football anyway, so what does this do for the buyer?
Hey mod, I'm serious and I'm making a serious point.
Porting the JVM somewhere is about as much effort as porting a word processor, or any other 100 meg application. But if you port the JVM, all the applications you have in Java are ported by proxy. It's a one-time task.
So if your 100 meg word processor is in Java, once you port the JVM you get the word processor for free. And all of your other Java applications. You don't have to port them seperately. It's one porting task and then you're done.
And now that the JVM is open source, you can expect that to happen more often. It's part of the beauty of running VM based languages.
Then, everything else just works.
You're posting on a Saturday, sir.
Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work
I like the gist of what you're saying, but I think this point is a moot one. Vista has plenty of incompatibilites.
And sadly, it'll wind up being the best selling OS of al time, most likely.