umm... I was saying running out of digits on a credit card. That is, they are designed to a certain specification where there is a limit to the credit card number. You couldn't honestly have a 100 digit credit card number, none of the equipment is designed for that. I also assume there is some waste in how credit card numbers are generated, similar to how IP addresses are handed out.
It's a valid concern, I'm sorry you didn't understand.
From what I've read on how Windows Longhorn will handle fonts, it seems like they are re-designing it to address this issue. I hope most OS's start doing this for resolutions over 1280x1024. Of course, then you have to wait for years of legacy applications to support this too.
performance is not just about "screen resolution". Many people would like to turn more details on in games. In some cases, these details could give you a tacticle advantage. For example, turning shadows on. Sure, it wastes some CPU time, but if you have it turned on, you might spot someone around the corner that you would not have otherwise.
Let's assume that most gift cards use regular credit card like numbers on them for identification. After you manufacture several billion of these gift cards and place value on them, how do you expect to never run out of numbers? Assuming that the gift card can never expire that means that someone, somewhere has to maintain a database of billions of cards essentially forever. I think this could become costly and might be an unfair burden to some companies.
Why not just lengthen the expireation date on the gift cards to something like 2-5 years? If you haven't used a card by then, it's pretty much your fault for forgetting about it.
No store gives you a 1 year warranty on any product. The warranty is through the manufacturer, so you have to return the product to them. Most stores only give you a 30 day return period.
Of course, you could always buy an extended store "warranty", but that's usually a waste of money unless you really hate going through the hassle of packaging something up to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
Whenever I buy a new computer or new memory, I always run it through a memory tester I boot from a CD. It's good to run one of these for at least 24 hours. If you find any memory problems, you might want to return the product.
It's also fun to benchmark it after the tests are done. I used SiSoftware Sandra BenchmarkHQ.
One thing to look out for though is BIOS programs that load into memory addresses that will effect the test. I kept getting errors until I disabled my onboard IDE RAID controller, and then the memory checked out fine. I guess the controller was loading something into the memory and the test would read it back after the controller changed it.
Say what you want about their other products, but HP printers by far are the highest quality from all my experience with them.
My HP LaserJet 4L is 11 years old and despite the trend of most hardware failing or having to be upgraded after 3 years, it continues operating at the same quality level as the day it was first turned on.
It's a shame they spun off Agilent for their digital oscilliscopes and measurement instruments. These are another high quality product HP used to make.
of course, if you use something like IMAP instead of POP (why does this still exist?) you can view the messages subject/filesize before choosing to download the message. Cool huh? This works the same way with webmail.
I do agree though that it's stupid to send large attachments to people you KNOW who are on dialup and still using a POP account. That's just rude.
The "Big 3"? You make it sound like if it wasn't for the opinions of car companies that consumers would just flock in droves to the "superior" one seater, electric vehicles, that can't drive long distances.
Sparrow concept = just a concept Sparrow utility = completely impracticle for 99% of people, although you can always find a niche market for something like this.
So are you suggesting after someone purchases an audio CD they should then have to purchase it again online for their iPod? Great! Let's buy everything twice.
There is one big benefit to deposits on bottles though, and that is that some people find it worthwhile to pick up litter.
You call that a benefit? It's very annoying hearing racket in the middle of the night from some homeless person digging through the recycling bins collecting bottles/cans that were going to be recycled anyway.
But some systems integrate weird customized slots for the floppy drive, so you can take the drive out, but you have the slot and eject mechanism still in the case. Very annoying. It's also difficult to find blank faceplates or memory drive bays that match the color of the PC.
I used to have 100 floppies lying around. I painstakingly went through all of them, copied the contents to my computer, and burned the contents on a couple CDRs (1 backup). It's made finding my old files so much easier. I then threw the original floppy disks away.
If you see an IDE or SATA drive with only a 1 year waranty, run away! It will probably only last that 1 year. If you get 3 years out of it, you are very, very, lucky.
It is possible though to find some IDE drives with 3 year warranties, but it's more rare nowdays. I would never buy a drive with less than that.
Then can we PLEASE get rid of the floppy drive now? This was one of the last lame excuses I hear from people for needing a floppy drive. I absolutely will not buy a new computer from any company that forces you to have one in the system.
Let's be serious here, how could Palm survive if they sold their devices for only $25-$50? The market is already saturated, they won't magically boost their sales by 10 times simply by making a low power, super cheap device.
The only way they can survive is by offering more features. Otherwise, people would not have a reason to upgrade their existing units, and they won't attract new customers looking for the latest features.
I don't mean that it makes it more difficult to program in various flavors of assembly, but that the resulting code your write is non-portable. If I write a routine in C, I'm almost guaranteed to be able to use it on another platform.
Yeah, writing a web server is "inappropriate" languages is pretty easy. As long as you can send bytes out of a port, it's pretty easy.
I once wrote a webserver for an industrial microcontroller using some obscure language called "optoscript". But at least I made sure that I only needed to connect to one port to access different pages.
I've programmed a few embedded systems in assembly and it's not very fun at all.
To make matters worse, each CPU has it's own instruction set, and special set of commands that you must learn before you can even sit down and start writing code.
With C++ or at least a C compiler, you don't need to worry about so many implementation details. You should only resort to assembly if you absolutely, must have the performance required. Maybe the author of this article forgets how difficult it is to debug assembly code, or how difficult it is to implement abstract concepts such as OO at such a low level.
I don't agree at all that writing "efficient code" necessarily creates better code. Writing "clearer" is better from a quality standard.
We have compilers for a reason, to produce assembly code as efficiently as possible for a higher level language. Most 99% of the time, the compiler will optomize the code just as well, or better than you can.
I would still recommend learning assembly language to C++ programmers simply so they understand how the computer is actually working. But to require anyone to program in assembly requires a great deal of justification.
Digital communications does not make things use less bandwidth. The USFS just went narrowband this year on all their radios, but it is still analog voice. They are trying to lead by example. Digital is just a buzzword people use to make it sound like it is important and should get money.
Yes, digital is a buzzword, but what is usually meant is that you can digitally encode and compress voice/music/video so it makes much, much more efficient use of the existing spectrum. You also benefit from error correction algorithms which can eliminate noise that would be impossible to do with live analog signals.
how many people who have owned cellphones over the years _haven't_ bought new ones? I'm at my 4th cellphone in 5 or so years, and I don't even upgrade as often as most people I know.
delicate cutting edge technology? Embedded microprocessors are already found in billions of devices. Adding them to a walky talkie to process digital signals would be a trivial cost to the manufacturer. Why should we keep walky talkies at $5/each when the spetrum they use is worth so much more than that?
Slashdot Mirror
umm... I was saying running out of digits on a credit card. That is, they are designed to a certain specification where there is a limit to the credit card number. You couldn't honestly have a 100 digit credit card number, none of the equipment is designed for that. I also assume there is some waste in how credit card numbers are generated, similar to how IP addresses are handed out.
It's a valid concern, I'm sorry you didn't understand.
From what I've read on how Windows Longhorn will handle fonts, it seems like they are re-designing it to address this issue. I hope most OS's start doing this for resolutions over 1280x1024. Of course, then you have to wait for years of legacy applications to support this too.
performance is not just about "screen resolution". Many people would like to turn more details on in games. In some cases, these details could give you a tacticle advantage. For example, turning shadows on. Sure, it wastes some CPU time, but if you have it turned on, you might spot someone around the corner that you would not have otherwise.
Let's assume that most gift cards use regular credit card like numbers on them for identification. After you manufacture several billion of these gift cards and place value on them, how do you expect to never run out of numbers? Assuming that the gift card can never expire that means that someone, somewhere has to maintain a database of billions of cards essentially forever. I think this could become costly and might be an unfair burden to some companies.
Why not just lengthen the expireation date on the gift cards to something like 2-5 years? If you haven't used a card by then, it's pretty much your fault for forgetting about it.
No store gives you a 1 year warranty on any product. The warranty is through the manufacturer, so you have to return the product to them. Most stores only give you a 30 day return period.
Of course, you could always buy an extended store "warranty", but that's usually a waste of money unless you really hate going through the hassle of packaging something up to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
Whenever I buy a new computer or new memory, I always run it through a memory tester I boot from a CD. It's good to run one of these for at least 24 hours. If you find any memory problems, you might want to return the product.
It's also fun to benchmark it after the tests are done. I used SiSoftware Sandra BenchmarkHQ.
One thing to look out for though is BIOS programs that load into memory addresses that will effect the test. I kept getting errors until I disabled my onboard IDE RAID controller, and then the memory checked out fine. I guess the controller was loading something into the memory and the test would read it back after the controller changed it.
Say what you want about their other products, but HP printers by far are the highest quality from all my experience with them.
My HP LaserJet 4L is 11 years old and despite the trend of most hardware failing or having to be upgraded after 3 years, it continues operating at the same quality level as the day it was first turned on.
It's a shame they spun off Agilent for their digital oscilliscopes and measurement instruments. These are another high quality product HP used to make.
This is not a flame.....you're no better than your unelected president who believes war prisoners are a subclass of the human species
Not a flame huh?
of course, if you use something like IMAP instead of POP (why does this still exist?) you can view the messages subject/filesize before choosing to download the message. Cool huh? This works the same way with webmail.
I do agree though that it's stupid to send large attachments to people you KNOW who are on dialup and still using a POP account. That's just rude.
The "Big 3"? You make it sound like if it wasn't for the opinions of car companies that consumers would just flock in droves to the "superior" one seater, electric vehicles, that can't drive long distances.
Sparrow concept = just a concept
Sparrow utility = completely impracticle for 99% of people, although you can always find a niche market for something like this.
and MNG support! Oh wait, Mozilla doesn't natively support that anymore :(
So are you suggesting after someone purchases an audio CD they should then have to purchase it again online for their iPod? Great! Let's buy everything twice.
There is one big benefit to deposits on bottles though, and that is that some people find it worthwhile to pick up litter.
You call that a benefit? It's very annoying hearing racket in the middle of the night from some homeless person digging through the recycling bins collecting bottles/cans that were going to be recycled anyway.
But some systems integrate weird customized slots for the floppy drive, so you can take the drive out, but you have the slot and eject mechanism still in the case. Very annoying. It's also difficult to find blank faceplates or memory drive bays that match the color of the PC.
I used to have 100 floppies lying around. I painstakingly went through all of them, copied the contents to my computer, and burned the contents on a couple CDRs (1 backup). It's made finding my old files so much easier. I then threw the original floppy disks away.
If you see an IDE or SATA drive with only a 1 year waranty, run away! It will probably only last that 1 year. If you get 3 years out of it, you are very, very, lucky.
It is possible though to find some IDE drives with 3 year warranties, but it's more rare nowdays. I would never buy a drive with less than that.
Then can we PLEASE get rid of the floppy drive now? This was one of the last lame excuses I hear from people for needing a floppy drive. I absolutely will not buy a new computer from any company that forces you to have one in the system.
Let's be serious here, how could Palm survive if they sold their devices for only $25-$50? The market is already saturated, they won't magically boost their sales by 10 times simply by making a low power, super cheap device.
The only way they can survive is by offering more features. Otherwise, people would not have a reason to upgrade their existing units, and they won't attract new customers looking for the latest features.
How many fully paid student scholorships could have that money have bought?
I don't mean that it makes it more difficult to program in various flavors of assembly, but that the resulting code your write is non-portable. If I write a routine in C, I'm almost guaranteed to be able to use it on another platform.
Yeah, writing a web server is "inappropriate" languages is pretty easy. As long as you can send bytes out of a port, it's pretty easy.
I once wrote a webserver for an industrial microcontroller using some obscure language called "optoscript". But at least I made sure that I only needed to connect to one port to access different pages.
I've programmed a few embedded systems in assembly and it's not very fun at all.
To make matters worse, each CPU has it's own instruction set, and special set of commands that you must learn before you can even sit down and start writing code.
With C++ or at least a C compiler, you don't need to worry about so many implementation details. You should only resort to assembly if you absolutely, must have the performance required. Maybe the author of this article forgets how difficult it is to debug assembly code, or how difficult it is to implement abstract concepts such as OO at such a low level.
I don't agree at all that writing "efficient code" necessarily creates better code. Writing "clearer" is better from a quality standard.
We have compilers for a reason, to produce assembly code as efficiently as possible for a higher level language. Most 99% of the time, the compiler will optomize the code just as well, or better than you can.
I would still recommend learning assembly language to C++ programmers simply so they understand how the computer is actually working. But to require anyone to program in assembly requires a great deal of justification.
Digital communications does not make things use less bandwidth. The USFS just went narrowband this year on all their radios, but it is still analog voice. They are trying to lead by example. Digital is just a buzzword people use to make it sound like it is important and should get money.
Yes, digital is a buzzword, but what is usually meant is that you can digitally encode and compress voice/music/video so it makes much, much more efficient use of the existing spectrum. You also benefit from error correction algorithms which can eliminate noise that would be impossible to do with live analog signals.
how many people who have owned cellphones over the years _haven't_ bought new ones? I'm at my 4th cellphone in 5 or so years, and I don't even upgrade as often as most people I know.
delicate cutting edge technology? Embedded microprocessors are already found in billions of devices. Adding them to a walky talkie to process digital signals would be a trivial cost to the manufacturer. Why should we keep walky talkies at $5/each when the spetrum they use is worth so much more than that?
The benchmarks show a doubling of transfer, but load times (esp in BF1942) only drop by about 10%.
Then obviously, BF1942 loading maps is CPU or memory bound, not disk bound.
Hmm... since you mentioned that, maybe I shouldn't spend the money on a two drive 10,000RPM SATA RAID0 array...