Excuse me...?? Do you own any DVDs?
I have some video tapes that are 10 years old and I can play them fine. My T2 DVD that I bought 2 years ago has problems already, only the special edition still plays
Your anecdotal data does not conform to the statistical, historical, and scientific data that has accumulated in the past few decades.
A laser is not a kinetic energy weapon--it would be more of a cutting weapon, like a knife.
Looking at the website, the aperature is so large this looks more like a cooking weapon. If your microwave delivered two kilowatts of power you'd have your turkey cooked in no time. Setting a soldier's uniform on fire would be an effective means of taking that soldier out of the combat.
In my (admittedly limited to three years, but in ice and snow) experience on a motorbike, the front end loses it under hasty braking, whereas the rear end loses it under hasty acceleration... but then that too may be a side effect of only ever having ridden rear-wheel-drive bikes...
Whoa! What happens when you lose front wheel traction when breaking? I've never lost front wheel traction for an appreciable length of time on my motorcycle, but it seems to me this is *not* a good thing. At least with the rear wheel, you can keep it locked up and stand a good chance of remaining upright. With no front wheel you are at the mercy of free-body physics.
I never really watched that show but I'm guessing she was actually toast figuratively since you couldn't butter her and serve her with tea, and instead of being composed of yeast-leavened, milled grains she was made of meat. I've never had meat toast, and I don't think it would be pleasant.
Honestly, the KKK hates blacks... Nazis hate Jews. But, I have a great deal of difficulty thinking you actually "hate" Dave Barry.
I think he means he hates Dave the way the world is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles, Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
That does go a long way, but there are a few features of templates that make them unique for "object"-based class hierarchy polymorhpism:
Type-safe containers. This is enforced at compile time, and the fastest way to remove bugs (aside from not having them in the first place) is to compile them out.
Efficient class specialization: By delegating operations to a template class parameter, a class can have its behavior changed dramatically, while operating on a highly abstracted and flexible model. The I/O streams classes of STL are a great example of this. You can, once again, achieve this through polymorphism, but by compiling it with templates, you guarantee at compile time that the required services of the template object are present. If they aren't, the method the second class requires won't be present and the code will not compile, whereas in polymorphism, the function will be there but not implemented, or the requested type conversion will fail.
The STL and libraries. What can I say, this is so cool I don't think I fully appreciate it yet. It seems to me that this is a serious attempt to achieve abstraction in the functional rather than object domain. It is reallly tough to wrap your brain around, but worth it.
Well, that's not everything, but it is a pretty good list, I think.
I don't know why the garbage collection is such an advantage. In the place that I work we have written apps with milions of lines of code using C++ and we never had a problem with memory leaks. Of course, being military and scientific apps, there was a good design before coding, so we had a pretty good knowledge of when to allocate/free stuff. But it is not hard to make C++ objects garbage-collected. All that is needed is a base class that upon its construction puts the object in a global list and a template pointer that increases/decreases automatically the reference counter of the garbage-collected object when assigned to it; later, the list will be traversed and objects with no reference will be deleted.
Even if you ignore the advantages of managed memory, you can't ignore the fact that new is a blocking, non-deterministic, operation. Good garbage collectors can operate on a different thread and (mostly) stay out of the path of execution. new() is nearly a no-op in garbage-collected environments. You would really have to do a lot of (error-prone) work in C++ to achieve this through libraries rather than the compiler itself, and it is still too easy to defeat with bad programming practice.
Also, you mention the lack of stack objects. Java does have stack primitives, and dynamically allocated counterparts to provide object services, which is a clunky combination..NET improves on this with stack-allocated structs and "boxing" where a primitive remains stack allocated until the compiler/interpreter detects that an object service is needed (ToString(), etc), and it boxes the primitive up into an object and unboxes it when done. You don't pay the object penalty if you don't need object services. Good design can allow you to avoid paying much of a penalty for Java's lack of stack-allocated objects (singleton pattern with a Reset() method for reusable working class object, etc.) Unfortunately, some of the Java library's objects aren't well designed for reusing instead of reallocation, especially in the GUI, so you may find yourself doing allocations in the painting loop without some trickery.
That said, it sounds like your lab has sound development practices, which does tend to aleviate much of the need for the outstanding features of Java/.NET.
pushback may get you this, but one of the biggest sources of errors is an out-of-bounds array indexing. In such a case, the behavior of STL's indexing operator for vectors is not defined. Sure, in some decent implementation, you would get an assertion if you compiled with debug macros. But it gets you only so far.
Sure, you can use the indexing operator, which is defined to be insecure, or you can use at() for the same functionality w/o the operator overload but with bounds checking.
It is still, of course, nice to have error checking as a feature of the language rather than the libraries.
That's nice, but there was no chance Thomas was ever going to side with the public interest over corporate interests. Anyway he always votes for strict, literal interpretation of the constitution except when he engages in conservative judicial activism (2000 election, anyone?)
You miss the point. I don't have to watch shitty shows anymore because TiVo watches them for me. Since I don't have to watch my network television programming manually anymore, I have more time to watch my high quality Girls Gone Wild DVDs.
Yes, but can TiVo appreciate the delicious irony when Chandler casually insults Joey and the boderline hysterical fake studio audience mechanically laughs in fitful bursts so as not to fall prostrate, contemplate their empty lives and break into waves of mournful wailing and pulling of hair?
The basic point is that TiVo the idea is very powerful and guaranteed to succeed. TiVo the company is not well-positioned to be a strong market force. PVR's improve the television viewing experience, no if's and's or but's. This does not guarantee they will succeed since some industries consider them to be harmful and will attempt to modify or remove the concept from the market. I doubt they will be even moderately successful.
I am surprised there are not patent lawsuits galore since so many PVR's are so similar. That is one thing that could hold back PVR deployment.
TiVo is not well-positioned for success: the software they develop is not that complex, they don't control hardware production or television media distribution, and satellite or cable television companies have experience putting set-top boxes into customer's homes that TiVo can't match. They will almost certainly live on in name, but not much more than that because all the power is in the hands of the media distributors (satellite, cable.)
Without enforcable patents, the only demi-monopolies in the system are the extremely capital-intensive distribution channels: satellites in geosynchronous orbit and millions of miles of buried coaxial cables. Media providers also have some monopoly power, but the distributors have shown they can flex their muscles more effectively in past battles.
You don't read well, it is a built in DVD\DVR drive. The R is Recordable. So yes, it will burn stuff to DVDs right from the Tivo portion. This will be an incredible device!!
Despite the arrogant and insulting tone of your assertion, the press release does not say that. DVR is an abbreviation for Digital Video Recorder. It merely means it records to a hard drive. Maybe I'm just rising to the profered flamebait, but please make sure you're right before insulting others for being wrong.
Two weeks? I have Tivo with digital cable and I can only see up to 10 days in advance. Does the DirecTivo service let you see more? Or are you just calling 10 days "two weeks".
Yup. It appears the data is downloaded from the satellite rather than through the phone line, so it is a different system than the dial-up guide. Probably explains why they were able to lower the subscription price: fewer phone calls. I have noticed a couple of deficiencies, though: It doesn't list the directors of movies in the movie description text (although the data is in some hidden field because you can still do a director search with wishlists) and the descriptions are sometimes written as if an Attention Deficit Disorder crack addict watched 10 seconds of the movie and extrapolated the plot from that.
Perhaps they know of the curse of the DEC. Now that HP has absorbed Compaq they have also taken on the mantle of the owner of Digital Equipment's corpse, whose wretched santeria can fell the mightiest of companies.
Okay, just kidding. Anyway, as a former HP employee and current Agilent employee... I think I'll just keep my mouth shut.
Then buy a bigger monitor. They do make them in TV sizes
Now you're just being silly. If you look up "alternative" in the dictionary I bet it doesn't say "an available choice that costs thousands of dollars more than a similar choice."
People (especially in.ox.ac.uk) tend to have a variety of interests and expertise, and by googling someone I can find out about those much more quickly than by spending hours talking to them.
Yeah, that's a lot better than having a conversation over a cold one.
Or in the case of your Brits, a warm one.
Seriously, I don't mean to get on your case, but isn't that kind of ack-basswords? If someone isn't interesting or important enough to spend a few hours meeting face-to-face, why do you have any interest knowing their fixation on TJ Hooker re-runs?
My TiVo has to change the channels on my cable box via an infrared wire.
FYI, much of the time the IR wire setup doesn't work and the channel changes because the IR emitter on the front of the TiVo is bouncing off the wall back to your cable box.
Try covering up the front of the TiVo and see if the channel still changes.
People in media companies always see the world in black and white, either consumers lay prostrate while they get, ummm, "coerced", or they are pirates and must be put in prison. It's obvious that the truth is more nuanced, and there really are win-win scenarios out there.
as an aside, the jetfire transparent image in the background only works properly with Mozilla/Netscape 6+, not IE because it has a broken CSS implementation
Thanks for pointing out you deliberately break your web site on the most prevelant web browser. I won't have to waste time going to a rank amateur's web site.
Wow, to think you would deliberately sabotage your own work to prove someone else made a mistake. Doesn't that sound a little dysfunctional?
I disagree. It is certainly okay to use XHTML as a document format, obeying all the rules about the intent of each tag, and use it raw with a CSS to render it into a display format, but that is hardly the only valid solution.
The important thing is to keep content and presentation seperate. There are an infinite number of ways to do this if you're willing to write backend source code. One way of doing that is XHTML and CSS. It has the minor advantage of not requiring backend code in the simplest case.
Using a backend database with a proprietary format and an HTML rendering scheme of some kind is another way of achieving the same ends. I haven't looked at Slashdot's formatting, but it is apparent that they have chosen a backend database strategy. Cry all you want about the intent of HTML, there is no reason to treat it with any more deference than Flash or any other arbitrary formatting language if you know which web browsers you care about (and can therefore test against them.) Developers care about the end user experience and development costs, not the standards conformance of their proprietary display technology. The only thing missing is an interchange format or standard format converters so that they can take external input (the raw XHTML recieved from Mr. Clark) and translate it into their backend format, for later display through their display filter. They already have this, as I am using it right now, but it could use extending.
I couldn't care less if they use FONT tags instead of stylesheets to achieve pretty formatting in the browsers they choose to support. If they can save time or make the output a little prettier by violating all of the anal-retentive HTML rules that have been retrofitted onto the standard, good for them. Their raw data is in a consistent, protected format (I assume), even if they didn't choose the naive backend XHTML format you so love.
You're speaking from your personal perspective. From the perspective of the author of a book, if s/he can limit uses of the book in such a way as to increase units sold, s/he would want to do that, regardless of your arguments about static vs. dynamic content.
The only two reasons why more books (some already are, as noted on slashdot) don't have shrinkwrap licenses is because there is a cultural expectation of books being open and transferrable and it isn't clear there are significant incremental revenues to be achieved by shrinkwrapping books. Once books move to an e-format, look for shrinkwrap licensing to occur.
Furthermore, when this starts to happen, I hope there will be a re-examination of the whole shrinkwrap phenomena from top to bottom. I hope the public and politicians will realize that significant portions of our culture and knowledge are in dange of being lost since shrinkwrapping discourages archiving and distribution of important works, two activities necessary for their long-term survival.
Slashdot Mirror
Your anecdotal data does not conform to the statistical, historical, and scientific data that has accumulated in the past few decades.
That's okay because the weapon will probably weigh 90 lbs by the time they move from fantasy to reality.
Looking at the website, the aperature is so large this looks more like a cooking weapon. If your microwave delivered two kilowatts of power you'd have your turkey cooked in no time. Setting a soldier's uniform on fire would be an effective means of taking that soldier out of the combat.
It'll get a little less funny, and then it'll come back in a big way around the 10th dupe.
Whoa! What happens when you lose front wheel traction when breaking? I've never lost front wheel traction for an appreciable length of time on my motorcycle, but it seems to me this is *not* a good thing. At least with the rear wheel, you can keep it locked up and stand a good chance of remaining upright. With no front wheel you are at the mercy of free-body physics.
Yeah!!
I got a linux and a Phillip K. Dick reference in the same thought!
my work done, I am signing off...
I never really watched that show but I'm guessing she was actually toast figuratively since you couldn't butter her and serve her with tea, and instead of being composed of yeast-leavened, milled grains she was made of meat. I've never had meat toast, and I don't think it would be pleasant.
I think he means he hates Dave the way the world is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles, Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
p.s. I don't like anybody very much.
I think it's obvious that the original Metroid was the best game ever. That thing creeped me out and got my heart racing with only 8 bits.
Well, that's not everything, but it is a pretty good list, I think.
Even if you ignore the advantages of managed memory, you can't ignore the fact that new is a blocking, non-deterministic, operation. Good garbage collectors can operate on a different thread and (mostly) stay out of the path of execution. new() is nearly a no-op in garbage-collected environments. You would really have to do a lot of (error-prone) work in C++ to achieve this through libraries rather than the compiler itself, and it is still too easy to defeat with bad programming practice.
Also, you mention the lack of stack objects. Java does have stack primitives, and dynamically allocated counterparts to provide object services, which is a clunky combination. .NET improves on this with stack-allocated structs and "boxing" where a primitive remains stack allocated until the compiler/interpreter detects that an object service is needed (ToString(), etc), and it boxes the primitive up into an object and unboxes it when done. You don't pay the object penalty if you don't need object services. Good design can allow you to avoid paying much of a penalty for Java's lack of stack-allocated objects (singleton pattern with a Reset() method for reusable working class object, etc.) Unfortunately, some of the Java library's objects aren't well designed for reusing instead of reallocation, especially in the GUI, so you may find yourself doing allocations in the painting loop without some trickery.
That said, it sounds like your lab has sound development practices, which does tend to aleviate much of the need for the outstanding features of Java/.NET.
Sure, you can use the indexing operator, which is defined to be insecure, or you can use at() for the same functionality w/o the operator overload but with bounds checking.
It is still, of course, nice to have error checking as a feature of the language rather than the libraries.
That's nice, but there was no chance Thomas was ever going to side with the public interest over corporate interests. Anyway he always votes for strict, literal interpretation of the constitution except when he engages in conservative judicial activism (2000 election, anyone?)
Yes, but can TiVo appreciate the delicious irony when Chandler casually insults Joey and the boderline hysterical fake studio audience mechanically laughs in fitful bursts so as not to fall prostrate, contemplate their empty lives and break into waves of mournful wailing and pulling of hair?
I think not.
I am surprised there are not patent lawsuits galore since so many PVR's are so similar. That is one thing that could hold back PVR deployment.
TiVo is not well-positioned for success: the software they develop is not that complex, they don't control hardware production or television media distribution, and satellite or cable television companies have experience putting set-top boxes into customer's homes that TiVo can't match. They will almost certainly live on in name, but not much more than that because all the power is in the hands of the media distributors (satellite, cable.)
Without enforcable patents, the only demi-monopolies in the system are the extremely capital-intensive distribution channels: satellites in geosynchronous orbit and millions of miles of buried coaxial cables. Media providers also have some monopoly power, but the distributors have shown they can flex their muscles more effectively in past battles.
Despite the arrogant and insulting tone of your assertion, the press release does not say that. DVR is an abbreviation for Digital Video Recorder. It merely means it records to a hard drive. Maybe I'm just rising to the profered flamebait, but please make sure you're right before insulting others for being wrong.
Yup. It appears the data is downloaded from the satellite rather than through the phone line, so it is a different system than the dial-up guide. Probably explains why they were able to lower the subscription price: fewer phone calls. I have noticed a couple of deficiencies, though: It doesn't list the directors of movies in the movie description text (although the data is in some hidden field because you can still do a director search with wishlists) and the descriptions are sometimes written as if an Attention Deficit Disorder crack addict watched 10 seconds of the movie and extrapolated the plot from that.
Okay, just kidding. Anyway, as a former HP employee and current Agilent employee ... I think I'll just keep my mouth shut.
Now you're just being silly. If you look up "alternative" in the dictionary I bet it doesn't say "an available choice that costs thousands of dollars more than a similar choice."
Or in the case of your Brits, a warm one.
Seriously, I don't mean to get on your case, but isn't that kind of ack-basswords? If someone isn't interesting or important enough to spend a few hours meeting face-to-face, why do you have any interest knowing their fixation on TJ Hooker re-runs?
FYI, much of the time the IR wire setup doesn't work and the channel changes because the IR emitter on the front of the TiVo is bouncing off the wall back to your cable box.
Try covering up the front of the TiVo and see if the channel still changes.
People in media companies always see the world in black and white, either consumers lay prostrate while they get, ummm, "coerced", or they are pirates and must be put in prison. It's obvious that the truth is more nuanced, and there really are win-win scenarios out there.
Thanks for pointing out you deliberately break your web site on the most prevelant web browser. I won't have to waste time going to a rank amateur's web site.
Wow, to think you would deliberately sabotage your own work to prove someone else made a mistake. Doesn't that sound a little dysfunctional?
The important thing is to keep content and presentation seperate. There are an infinite number of ways to do this if you're willing to write backend source code. One way of doing that is XHTML and CSS. It has the minor advantage of not requiring backend code in the simplest case.
Using a backend database with a proprietary format and an HTML rendering scheme of some kind is another way of achieving the same ends. I haven't looked at Slashdot's formatting, but it is apparent that they have chosen a backend database strategy. Cry all you want about the intent of HTML, there is no reason to treat it with any more deference than Flash or any other arbitrary formatting language if you know which web browsers you care about (and can therefore test against them.) Developers care about the end user experience and development costs, not the standards conformance of their proprietary display technology. The only thing missing is an interchange format or standard format converters so that they can take external input (the raw XHTML recieved from Mr. Clark) and translate it into their backend format, for later display through their display filter. They already have this, as I am using it right now, but it could use extending.
I couldn't care less if they use FONT tags instead of stylesheets to achieve pretty formatting in the browsers they choose to support. If they can save time or make the output a little prettier by violating all of the anal-retentive HTML rules that have been retrofitted onto the standard, good for them. Their raw data is in a consistent, protected format (I assume), even if they didn't choose the naive backend XHTML format you so love.
The only two reasons why more books (some already are, as noted on slashdot) don't have shrinkwrap licenses is because there is a cultural expectation of books being open and transferrable and it isn't clear there are significant incremental revenues to be achieved by shrinkwrapping books. Once books move to an e-format, look for shrinkwrap licensing to occur.
Furthermore, when this starts to happen, I hope there will be a re-examination of the whole shrinkwrap phenomena from top to bottom. I hope the public and politicians will realize that significant portions of our culture and knowledge are in dange of being lost since shrinkwrapping discourages archiving and distribution of important works, two activities necessary for their long-term survival.