It's apparent you haven't been using Windows on portable devices lately... For one it's been called Windows Mobile (not CE) for over six years now, and while it looks the same, it's made considerable progress. Many device manufacturers have integrated some really nice frontends for WM6 that look stunning (Spb mobile shell, TouchFlo3D, TouchWiz, etc). Facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter apps can be integrated into some of these, so there's hardly a need to navigate to those web sites directly from these devices.
WM6 seems to scale pretty well to the 800x480 displays of some smartphones (HTC Touch HD, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, etc), so I don't doubt that it'll be hard for WM7 to handle 1024x600 or higher when ARM-based netbooks with those displays start coming. While WM6 is designed for use with a touchscreen, it wouldn't take much effort to make the UI more mouse/touchpad-centric.
PocketIE aside, there are some very good web browsers for WM. Opera Mobile (not the Mini/Java version) is a godsend for WM users like me. There's other browsers available- even Mozilla is working on a mobile browser (Fennec) for mobile devices (which will include a WinMo port).
Listen, I'm not a MS shill, and I would love to be able to run Linux or Android on my HTC Touch Pro (WM 6.1 and 6.5 are bloated pieces of crap and don't handle multitasking particularly well), but don't be too cocky. My TouchPro runs WM6.1, and despite its OS I believe it still runs circles around most smartphones out there.
Btw, many cheap sub-$100 Chinese devices (GPS, PMPs, etc) already run atop WinMo. So the price of admission wouldn't hold WM-based netbooks back.
In your small scale experiment, the ice cubes are floating freely, and already mostly under water. In reality, there is a significant amount of ice in Antarctica that resides above sea level, resting directly on terra firma.
You jest, but an ex of mine had a glow-in-the-dark blue dildo. That's what I immediately thought of when I saw Dr. Manhattan's junk. Coincidently, she names her sex toys, and that particular one was named "John".
Every time a character referred ti Dr. Manhattan by his first name (Jon), I actually laughed.
I think your chemistry teacher was too strict. Both hydrogen hydroxide and dihydrogen monoxide are correct (so are hydrogen oxide and hydroxic acid).
In cases where elements (like hydrogen) are normally in a compound (H2), the numerical prefix is often dropped. For example: H2S is commonly referred to as hydrogen sulfide (though dihydrogen sulfide is correct as well).
Your teacher was either ill-informed, or just didn't like you.
The phone wasn't built by Microsoft. It wasn't even MS-branded- it was an HTC Touch Pro 2.
This is pretty much non-news. WM 6.5 beta has been leaked in various iterations and some of the guys at xda-developers have already cooked these into roms for several devices. I've even flashed it onto my HTC Touch Pro just to see what it's like. Guess what, (surprise!) it's slower and even more bloated than WM6.1. It didn't last for more than a couple hours before I got fed up and rolled it back. Honestly, 6.5 didn't add anything useful to 6.1. Just a honey-comb UI that looks crappier/more jerky than TouchFlo/Manilla or Spb Mobile shell.
I don't really think MS has to worry about trade secrets about its "new and improved" mobile OS being leaked to Apple, RIM, or Google. The only benefit a competitor would gain is a quick laugh.
First of all, I was able to get a good one for under $200 now.
Sub-$200 BD players lack the newer profile support (BD-Live), 1080p24 (cheap BD players only do 1080p60) as well as support for lossless codecs (which is noticeable) as DolbyHD and DTS-MA to LPCM decoding. And they do crappy upscaling on regular DVDs. While this might not matter to you, this is an important thing for those of us who have older HDMI receivers that want to listen to lossless audio without having to upgrade.
Add in some HTPC capabilities (streaming Xvid movies over the network
Secondly, my new blu-ray player can be actually used with a universal remote (with a nice back-light, unlike the crappy PS3 blutooth remote) without some jerry-rigged patch that doesn't even work with a number of features. That adapter was never meant to be used with a PS3 and only half-ass works.
I bought a $6 USB-IR adapter on Ebay that allows me to control my PS3 with my Harmony remote. Other than not being able to turn on the PS3, it works perfectly. If you're too lazy to get up and press the power button, how did you manage to put the disc in?
Thirdly, I no longer have to put up with mandatory system updates when I just want to play a blu-ray.
Now you're just bitching pointlessly. Users were only forced to update the firmware if BD-Live was enabled (you can disable this in your PS3 settings). Never saw a nag screen when I put in a blu-ray. Then again, I update the firmware regularly, since they aren't just bugfixes, but added functionality (DTS-MA decoding, in-game XMB accessibility, Home, etc).
It's not a thick, bulky mess with a rounded top that eats up an entire shelf in my entertainment center and gets hot as Hell when it's on.
Again, pointless bitching. The PS3 is designed to replace multiple components (HTPC, Bluray/DVD player, game console), and it's smaller than most affordable HTPC cases. Maybe it's because I might have a newer PS3 (80Gb with the 65nm chips), but mine doesn't get warm, even after playing games for hours, and it's virtually silent- my 360 is ridiculously loud and hot in comparison, and while it's smaller, neither system are very stackable so that's a moot point.
If I sound angry it's because I've spent the last 2 1/2 years dealing with the PS3's stubborn way of making something that should have been very simple into something incredibly frustrating and annoying.
Sounds to me like you're generally frustrated and annoyed by everything.
The consensus on avsforum would agree that the PS3's the most capable/featured and futureproof BD-player, and it rivals even the top-end players (>$700). And it's certainly the fastest BD player on the market (try out the BD-Live and Java features if you get a chance- standalone players suck in this regard). And it has excellent DVD upscaling compared to most standalone players.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. Emulators rely on tricks like dynamic recompilation and low-level assembly translation. This adds considerable overhead, especially if you're trying to emulate hardware.
Wine is simply reimplementing the Win32 API DLLs in native, linux-compiled shared libraries. Direct3D functions are reimplemented using OpenGL, and it adds very minimal overhead. Much of the performance decrease from running games on Wine vs WinXP is due to better graphics drivers for Windows.
So it's not uncommon to see new games like Fallout3 running well under Wine.
My point was that the federal government is out of money period. That ~$18 billion (my assumption- $20b - $1.5b for the coupon/advertising - $0.5b for general FCC funding) was immediately pooled in with the rest of the federal funds and has already been earmarked and/or spent by our wonderful spendthrift busybodies in Congress.
The question doesn't make any sense since it is bogus.
Analog isn't being cut as a requirement of DTV. DTV is already here. In fact, the the reality of this situation runs contrary to that argument; the ability to broadcast DTV is allowing the FCC to cut analog in the first place.
The OP who originally posted the question was implying that analog was going away merely to make the switch to digital. And like the reasons you stated, that is false.
Win 3.1 was a shell. It actually required DOS to be installed first. And it was a completely separate product from DOS (packaged and sold separately). So in order to run Windows legally, you also needed to own a copy of DOS.
Win95 was a true OS in the sense that it could be installed on an empty partition and would boot to the GUI by default- though you could reboot in DOS mode to run certain programs (ie- games that required protected mode). Previous versions of Windows required you to put "win" in the autoexec.bat in order to do the same thing.
That was sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that any type of investing can carry risk, even with all of the due diligence that retail investors (ie- people like me who aren't worth more than $10m). There are always going to be freak cases of dishonest fund managers (Madoff) and corporate management (Enron, WorldCom, etc) who lie and cook books to make it seem like going long with their securities is a sound investment.
I'm not saying that investing in blue chip stocks with solid financials and a bright outlook is akin to throwing money into fly-by-night companies that trade on the pinks/OTC and rarely (if ever) send 8K reports to the SEC. But investing still carries risk, and it's not farfetched that even your retirement may someday get wiped out by sneaky accounting and shady fund managers.
Investing in anything that carries any risk whatsoever is a gamble.
Exactly. You should always perform due diligence on the funds and stocks you buy into. Look at important things, like the yields over the last 10+ years, the prestige and experience of the people running the fund, and really scrutinize every document that is reported to the SEC.
This is why you should invest all of your life savings with us.
I realize that the parent post was made in jest, but I was arguing that it wasn't really relevant. The rest of my post was directed to the GP.
My point was that programmers will generally accept technological advances if they make their lives easier. Non-fixed width fonts don't help (much to the contrary, actually), so we don't use them.
That's because fixed-space fonts are far more readable if you're looking at any number of nested blocks in a computer program. Go ahead and set your IDE to use Arial and debug someone else's spaghetti code in your favorite procedural language and see how long it takes before you go insane.
Voice-activated programming is a far different paradigm that requires different grammar and willingness to think about problems differently than what we're used to. And the technology is only now where it can finally be implemented into its infancy/experimental stage, but it will take an entirely new generation of computer scientists to make it practical/useful.
Just wait. I think Kurzweil is probably early and too optimistic in this case, but certainly not incorrect.
Introversion (makers of Darwinia) has done exactly this for their upcoming game, Subversion. It uses auto-generated cities that do a pretty convincing job at modeling procedural cities, with roads and buildings.
Slashdot Mirror
It's apparent you haven't been using Windows on portable devices lately... For one it's been called Windows Mobile (not CE) for over six years now, and while it looks the same, it's made considerable progress. Many device manufacturers have integrated some really nice frontends for WM6 that look stunning (Spb mobile shell, TouchFlo3D, TouchWiz, etc). Facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter apps can be integrated into some of these, so there's hardly a need to navigate to those web sites directly from these devices.
WM6 seems to scale pretty well to the 800x480 displays of some smartphones (HTC Touch HD, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, etc), so I don't doubt that it'll be hard for WM7 to handle 1024x600 or higher when ARM-based netbooks with those displays start coming. While WM6 is designed for use with a touchscreen, it wouldn't take much effort to make the UI more mouse/touchpad-centric.
PocketIE aside, there are some very good web browsers for WM. Opera Mobile (not the Mini/Java version) is a godsend for WM users like me. There's other browsers available- even Mozilla is working on a mobile browser (Fennec) for mobile devices (which will include a WinMo port).
Listen, I'm not a MS shill, and I would love to be able to run Linux or Android on my HTC Touch Pro (WM 6.1 and 6.5 are bloated pieces of crap and don't handle multitasking particularly well), but don't be too cocky. My TouchPro runs WM6.1, and despite its OS I believe it still runs circles around most smartphones out there.
Btw, many cheap sub-$100 Chinese devices (GPS, PMPs, etc) already run atop WinMo. So the price of admission wouldn't hold WM-based netbooks back.
In your small scale experiment, the ice cubes are floating freely, and already mostly under water. In reality, there is a significant amount of ice in Antarctica that resides above sea level, resting directly on terra firma.
Now they call them "premium" channels (HBO, Showtime, etc).
Vista does quite the opposite: it spends so much resources rendering pretty pixels that there's less room for useful computation.
You jest, but an ex of mine had a glow-in-the-dark blue dildo. That's what I immediately thought of when I saw Dr. Manhattan's junk. Coincidently, she names her sex toys, and that particular one was named "John".
Every time a character referred ti Dr. Manhattan by his first name (Jon), I actually laughed.
Are you trying to say that those who aren't lactose-tolerant (or dislike milk) can't use heroin?
I think your chemistry teacher was too strict. Both hydrogen hydroxide and dihydrogen monoxide are correct (so are hydrogen oxide and hydroxic acid).
In cases where elements (like hydrogen) are normally in a compound (H2), the numerical prefix is often dropped. For example: H2S is commonly referred to as hydrogen sulfide (though dihydrogen sulfide is correct as well).
Your teacher was either ill-informed, or just didn't like you.
The phone wasn't built by Microsoft. It wasn't even MS-branded- it was an HTC Touch Pro 2.
This is pretty much non-news. WM 6.5 beta has been leaked in various iterations and some of the guys at xda-developers have already cooked these into roms for several devices. I've even flashed it onto my HTC Touch Pro just to see what it's like. Guess what, (surprise!) it's slower and even more bloated than WM6.1. It didn't last for more than a couple hours before I got fed up and rolled it back. Honestly, 6.5 didn't add anything useful to 6.1. Just a honey-comb UI that looks crappier/more jerky than TouchFlo/Manilla or Spb Mobile shell.
I don't really think MS has to worry about trade secrets about its "new and improved" mobile OS being leaked to Apple, RIM, or Google. The only benefit a competitor would gain is a quick laugh.
So why do these companies continue releasing FPS games to a platform that's clearly not meant for them?
Money?
First of all, I was able to get a good one for under $200 now.
Sub-$200 BD players lack the newer profile support (BD-Live), 1080p24 (cheap BD players only do 1080p60) as well as support for lossless codecs (which is noticeable) as DolbyHD and DTS-MA to LPCM decoding. And they do crappy upscaling on regular DVDs. While this might not matter to you, this is an important thing for those of us who have older HDMI receivers that want to listen to lossless audio without having to upgrade.
Add in some HTPC capabilities (streaming Xvid movies over the network
Secondly, my new blu-ray player can be actually used with a universal remote (with a nice back-light, unlike the crappy PS3 blutooth remote) without some jerry-rigged patch that doesn't even work with a number of features. That adapter was never meant to be used with a PS3 and only half-ass works.
I bought a $6 USB-IR adapter on Ebay that allows me to control my PS3 with my Harmony remote. Other than not being able to turn on the PS3, it works perfectly. If you're too lazy to get up and press the power button, how did you manage to put the disc in?
Thirdly, I no longer have to put up with mandatory system updates when I just want to play a blu-ray.
Now you're just bitching pointlessly. Users were only forced to update the firmware if BD-Live was enabled (you can disable this in your PS3 settings). Never saw a nag screen when I put in a blu-ray. Then again, I update the firmware regularly, since they aren't just bugfixes, but added functionality (DTS-MA decoding, in-game XMB accessibility, Home, etc).
It's not a thick, bulky mess with a rounded top that eats up an entire shelf in my entertainment center and gets hot as Hell when it's on.
Again, pointless bitching. The PS3 is designed to replace multiple components (HTPC, Bluray/DVD player, game console), and it's smaller than most affordable HTPC cases. Maybe it's because I might have a newer PS3 (80Gb with the 65nm chips), but mine doesn't get warm, even after playing games for hours, and it's virtually silent- my 360 is ridiculously loud and hot in comparison, and while it's smaller, neither system are very stackable so that's a moot point.
If I sound angry it's because I've spent the last 2 1/2 years dealing with the PS3's stubborn way of making something that should have been very simple into something incredibly frustrating and annoying.
Sounds to me like you're generally frustrated and annoyed by everything.
The consensus on avsforum would agree that the PS3's the most capable/featured and futureproof BD-player, and it rivals even the top-end players (>$700). And it's certainly the fastest BD player on the market (try out the BD-Live and Java features if you get a chance- standalone players suck in this regard). And it has excellent DVD upscaling compared to most standalone players.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. Emulators rely on tricks like dynamic recompilation and low-level assembly translation. This adds considerable overhead, especially if you're trying to emulate hardware.
Wine is simply reimplementing the Win32 API DLLs in native, linux-compiled shared libraries. Direct3D functions are reimplemented using OpenGL, and it adds very minimal overhead. Much of the performance decrease from running games on Wine vs WinXP is due to better graphics drivers for Windows.
So it's not uncommon to see new games like Fallout3 running well under Wine.
EA didn't develop Crysis. They only published it.
My point was that the federal government is out of money period. That ~$18 billion (my assumption- $20b - $1.5b for the coupon/advertising - $0.5b for general FCC funding) was immediately pooled in with the rest of the federal funds and has already been earmarked and/or spent by our wonderful spendthrift busybodies in Congress.
In other words, that money is already gone.
The question doesn't make any sense since it is bogus.
Analog isn't being cut as a requirement of DTV. DTV is already here. In fact, the the reality of this situation runs contrary to that argument; the ability to broadcast DTV is allowing the FCC to cut analog in the first place.
The OP who originally posted the question was implying that analog was going away merely to make the switch to digital. And like the reasons you stated, that is false.
I'll call your $20 bln and raise you the $700+ bln they're spending to bail out irresponsible banks and corporations.
Still, it makes for great TV.
While LAME encoded mp3s are of comparable quality to AAC encoders (today anyway), the mp3 encoder in iTunes is terrible.
Why would news of possible sale drop the share price? Generally, if a public company is bought, the shareholders have to agree to the terms.
No, a better way would be to start rumors that a certain chic company's messianic CEO has a terminal illness.
Win 3.1 was a shell. It actually required DOS to be installed first. And it was a completely separate product from DOS (packaged and sold separately). So in order to run Windows legally, you also needed to own a copy of DOS.
Win95 was a true OS in the sense that it could be installed on an empty partition and would boot to the GUI by default- though you could reboot in DOS mode to run certain programs (ie- games that required protected mode). Previous versions of Windows required you to put "win" in the autoexec.bat in order to do the same thing.
That was sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that any type of investing can carry risk, even with all of the due diligence that retail investors (ie- people like me who aren't worth more than $10m). There are always going to be freak cases of dishonest fund managers (Madoff) and corporate management (Enron, WorldCom, etc) who lie and cook books to make it seem like going long with their securities is a sound investment.
I'm not saying that investing in blue chip stocks with solid financials and a bright outlook is akin to throwing money into fly-by-night companies that trade on the pinks/OTC and rarely (if ever) send 8K reports to the SEC. But investing still carries risk, and it's not farfetched that even your retirement may someday get wiped out by sneaky accounting and shady fund managers.
Investing in anything that carries any risk whatsoever is a gamble.
Exactly. You should always perform due diligence on the funds and stocks you buy into. Look at important things, like the yields over the last 10+ years, the prestige and experience of the people running the fund, and really scrutinize every document that is reported to the SEC.
This is why you should invest all of your life savings with us.
Otherwise, you're simply gambling.
Sincerely,
Bernie Madoff
What, have you been asleep since Sept 10, 2001?
Why, what did I miss?
I realize that the parent post was made in jest, but I was arguing that it wasn't really relevant. The rest of my post was directed to the GP.
My point was that programmers will generally accept technological advances if they make their lives easier. Non-fixed width fonts don't help (much to the contrary, actually), so we don't use them.
That's because fixed-space fonts are far more readable if you're looking at any number of nested blocks in a computer program. Go ahead and set your IDE to use Arial and debug someone else's spaghetti code in your favorite procedural language and see how long it takes before you go insane.
Voice-activated programming is a far different paradigm that requires different grammar and willingness to think about problems differently than what we're used to. And the technology is only now where it can finally be implemented into its infancy/experimental stage, but it will take an entirely new generation of computer scientists to make it practical/useful.
Just wait. I think Kurzweil is probably early and too optimistic in this case, but certainly not incorrect.
Introversion (makers of Darwinia) has done exactly this for their upcoming game, Subversion. It uses auto-generated cities that do a pretty convincing job at modeling procedural cities, with roads and buildings.
Here are some screenshots and info.