I have a Roomba, and while automatically recharging would be cool, unless this thing has some pretty amazing smarts, I doubt that part of it will work well.
The way you normally use the Roomba is you set the room up so the Roomba can't escape, and you let it go. It does the room, and then chirps when it's done (or stuck). If you don't lock the roomba into the room, it'll wander the whole house but not really get anything done since one charge (of either machine) is really only enough battery to do one room.
To automatically recharge, the charger would need to be in the same room as the vacuum cleaner. If you have two floors, or you have doors, steps, or other obstacles, I imagine that part of it wouldn't work so well - you'd have to keep hauling the charger around as well as the vacuum.
Also unless the AI is good enough that the thing really can navigate itself around a changing environment (hey there wasn't a dog there last time) and make it's way back to the charger before dying every time, I imagine you'd find a dead Trilobyte fairly frequently.
The Roomba normaly takes 12 hours to charge, but if you get the fast charger, it charges in an hour and a half. The fast charger is $69, but well worth it.
And if you buy it from http://www.hammacher.com, they give you a lifetime warranty! I'm wondering if they're going to regret that someday..
So unless this thing shows some other serious advantage over the Roomba, I can't see how it justifies the price..
And I'm not sure how they can say "While other firms have shown off prototype robot cleaners, Electrolux is the first to put one into production.", the Roomba has been on the market for a while now.
If so it's about time the Win16 subsystem, which also includes DOS emulation, went away.. and if that's what they're doing that would account for an awful lot of APIs (especially all the DOS interrupt calls).
Codenames make it so developers can work on (and talk about) a product without it continually changing names during it's development cycle. When they say Everett they mean "whatever the next version of Visual Studio is going to be called when it's released" (well it's released already).
Here's one data point: When the SDK came out I compared the framerate of the DirectX samples in C with the framerate of the equivalent samples in C# (most of the samples are available for both, as examples).
The framerates were very similar - the.NET code lost some benchmarks, but it won a few and on the vast majority, they were within a few percent.
There doesn't appear to be any huge disadvantage to using.NET to write games.
One big advantage, however, is CPU portability - with two flavours of 64 bit CPUs just around the corner, plus different optimization strategies for P4 vs Athlon, having bytecode that gets compiled for your CPU when the game is run will be a big advantage if you happen to own anything but a P4.
It's doubtful that anyone's going to ship a game CD with an Itanium build of the binaries, but if it's.NET, then they don't have to.
According to the article they have 5000 developers on the Windows team; continuing your analogy that's only 500 lines of code per day per developer (and that's not including weekends).
I think giving software away for free isn't a good business model. I like to write software and give it away free in my spare time, because I enjoy doing it, but I work for a company that sells proprietary software and that's what pays the bills.
The GPL is cool but I prefer a BSD style license - I've never put any restrictions on any of the code I've personally released.
Shareware, well, the term's not so common these days is it? I still like the idea of "pay for this software if you like it".
A model I've been toying with is one that works like shareware except that once a predefined amount of $$ is donated, soure code is released. Ransomware, I guess - sort of like what happened with Blender, but designed that way from the start.
A well documented API is better than access to source code in most cases anyway.
I comment on articles I feel like commenting on. I use C#/.NET so I'm probably more familiar with it than a lot of people who post here. Most of the time when I bother to respond it's because the parent said something wrong or stupid.
I'm sure if I said something stupid about Linux I'd get a lot of people responding correcting me.. does that make them Linux shills?
Notice in the article that Microsoft invited representatives from a LOT of different languages to the table when designing the CLR, to ensure that while they might not necessarily support them all ideally in v1, they wanted to make sure they weren't doing anything that would preclude them from supporting them in the future.
The next version of the CLR adds support for generics and some other stuff.. language support will only get better. (I don't see Sun working on making the JVM better suited to languages other than Java...)
Did anyone consider that this whole problem may have started with a bug in MSN's support for Opera?
Obviously they have custom stuff they do if they detect the browser is Opera. I seriously doubt someone at MSN set out to disable Opera; they probably put it in to fix what was sent to Opera either to work around a bug in a previous Opera or to fix some of their own noncompliant stuff so it would work with Opera.
Either way, somewhere along the line it got broken. This seems much more likely a scenario to me - that someone screwed up - than that someone set out to specifically make Opera look bad. Wouldn't they be more interested in making Mozilla look bad if anyone?
Perhaps someone from MSN can release a statement on this and clear it up..
I never really "got" Smalltalk but the folks that do love it. One of the cool things about the.NET framework is that being language neutral, your choice of language doesn't have to be based on what toolkits and libraries and whatnot are available to it.
So Smalltalk programmers, through S#, will be able to talk to DirectX or Gtk# or MySQL or whatever without someone having to come up with bindings or libraries or whatever they might otherwise need. Scary.:)
- Steve
What kills the Sims Online..
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Is that in the Sims you can fast-forward through the boring parts. Okay, you're tired and you have to pee.. tell your dude to sleep, tell him to pee, and then fast forward until it's done and you can get back to doing what you want to do.
In the Sims Online, you have to sit there and watch while your avatar naps, showers, eats, etc. For me, anyway, that's what made it not fun.
Well it's digital all the way to the projector - the decoder decodes it to pixels and sends em pretty much 1:1 out. I think it looks awesome. I don't have a big screen TV to compare it to though..
>This is splitting hairs at best, and another artful dodge. If Palladium were in the marketplace, would AMI be part of it? Of course they would. And right now they're laying the groundwork.
Palladium is an implementation of the TCPA specification. Mozilla implements W3C specifications, but if I worked on some library code that Mozilla linked to that wouldn't make me a part of Mozilla.
TCPM is about verifying trust. DRM is an application of that technology, but not the only one. Online game servers being able to verify that the game clients aren't using hacked clients to cheat is another use. So is the bank's server checking out your web browser to make sure it's not been hacked. Technology itself isn't evil; applications of technology can be evil.
If a player implements DRM using TCPA, don't use it. Nothing is forcing you to.
Yeah.. and what's up with people trying to play music on their computers? Who wants to waste valuable CPU cycles playing music when you can just turn on the stereo.
Seriously, though, a PC in the media room isn't such a bad idea. I have one set up, and it lets me do a lot of things:
- Use a cheaper RGB projector instead of an HDTV one.
- Use the DVD player in my PC instead of an expensive progressive scan external one.
- Flip between TV, a movie, a game, my email, and the web easily.
It's cool when you're watching a movie to be able to pause it, bring up a browser and look up what other movies the actor was in, that sort of thing.
Recording video on a PC is a big deal today perhaps (for some PCs anyway) but in a few years it won't be - just like playing MP3s was barely possible in real-time a few years ago but now you don't even notice.
A wireless keyboard and mouse makes a great remote control too.
Well, there was never a marketing push for MFC either (or even Win32) but they're both prevalent..NET is a framework. Everything else with the.NET tag is either a rebranding of something that existed before, or something written with the.NET framework but.NET itself is a framework, the CLR, and some languages.
Often the data I'm working on is tough to just look at to see if it's right; being able to write something that would plug into the debugger to display some data would be cool.
For example, lets say I'm writing a scanner driver and I'm receiving buffers of data from the scanner. There's no way to know in the debugger if they look right or not - but if I could write a debugger plugin that could basically be given access to the entire address space the program is in with a target of "show me your data starting at this address if you can" it'd be awesome.
Same would be true for any data that isn't represented as a data structure or ASCII. I found often doing Win32 GDI work that I wanted to see what a particular HBITMAP looked like at a given point of the program's execution and the only way to do it was to blit it onto the desktop or something.
Windows XP has most of the groundwork for this - Windows has actually had it for a while; for some reason the last piece (the filesystem that lets you take advantage of it all) keeps not showing up.
You want metadata on files? NTFS streams give you a place to store metadata (much like Mac resource forks but with any number of named streams).
You want to search on the metadata? The Microsoft Indexing Server will build a database and let you search on it (though it's a very strange system to use - in XP go into Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Services and Applications, Indexing Service, System and click on "Query the Catalog". You can do instant searches for all kinds of stuff, look at the help.
OLE Structured Storage is like a single file version of the filesystem we're talking about - a way of saving a bunch of objects (some of which you didn't create but that are in your document) into a file. I believe Microsoft's Office apps use it (could be wrong there though).
Right-click on an MP3 file and pick Properties in XP and go to the Summary tab. There's the metadata - the stuff the index server is going to index. If you add a new file format to the system, you can supply a DLL that will be able to supply the metadata for those files - so you download an MP3, save it on your disk, and the index server uses the DLL to get the metadata and add it to the database. It works pretty well.
I don't really have a point to all this, just listing some stuff that Windows has that "should" make it easy for Microsoft to add the OO FS someday and have it instantly work with existing apps.
Slashdot Mirror
The way you normally use the Roomba is you set the room up so the Roomba can't escape, and you let it go. It does the room, and then chirps when it's done (or stuck). If you don't lock the roomba into the room, it'll wander the whole house but not really get anything done since one charge (of either machine) is really only enough battery to do one room.
To automatically recharge, the charger would need to be in the same room as the vacuum cleaner. If you have two floors, or you have doors, steps, or other obstacles, I imagine that part of it wouldn't work so well - you'd have to keep hauling the charger around as well as the vacuum.
Also unless the AI is good enough that the thing really can navigate itself around a changing environment (hey there wasn't a dog there last time) and make it's way back to the charger before dying every time, I imagine you'd find a dead Trilobyte fairly frequently.
The Roomba normaly takes 12 hours to charge, but if you get the fast charger, it charges in an hour and a half. The fast charger is $69, but well worth it.
And if you buy it from http://www.hammacher.com, they give you a lifetime warranty! I'm wondering if they're going to regret that someday..
So unless this thing shows some other serious advantage over the Roomba, I can't see how it justifies the price..
And I'm not sure how they can say "While other firms have shown off prototype robot cleaners, Electrolux is the first to put one into production.", the Roomba has been on the market for a while now.
- Steve
If so it's about time the Win16 subsystem, which also includes DOS emulation, went away.. and if that's what they're doing that would account for an awful lot of APIs (especially all the DOS interrupt calls).
- Steve
Codenames make it so developers can work on (and talk about) a product without it continually changing names during it's development cycle. When they say Everett they mean "whatever the next version of Visual Studio is going to be called when it's released" (well it's released already).
- Steve
Here's one data point: When the SDK came out I compared the framerate of the DirectX samples in C with the framerate of the equivalent samples in C# (most of the samples are available for both, as examples).
.NET code lost some benchmarks, but it won a few and on the vast majority, they were within a few percent.
.NET to write games.
.NET, then they don't have to.
The framerates were very similar - the
There doesn't appear to be any huge disadvantage to using
One big advantage, however, is CPU portability - with two flavours of 64 bit CPUs just around the corner, plus different optimization strategies for P4 vs Athlon, having bytecode that gets compiled for your CPU when the game is run will be a big advantage if you happen to own anything but a P4.
It's doubtful that anyone's going to ship a game CD with an Itanium build of the binaries, but if it's
- Steve
Huh?
I've used C# on Linux and on a number of Windows platforms (including handhelds). While it's not on as many as Java, it's still > 0.
- Steve
"Apparently, all formatting and presentation information is removed from the XML"
And moved into stylesheets where it belongs.
Some people who have reviewed the XML stuff in the new Office beta think it's a good thing.. guess it depends on your perspective.
According to the article they have 5000 developers on the Windows team; continuing your analogy that's only 500 lines of code per day per developer (and that's not including weekends).
- Steve
>If MS were to stop worrying about the legal implications
Hah, bankrobbing would be more popular and a profitable business model if you were to stop worrying about the legal implications...
If it amuses me to do so, yes. :)
Nope. Not an MCSE either. :)
I think giving software away for free isn't a good business model. I like to write software and give it away free in my spare time, because I enjoy doing it, but I work for a company that sells proprietary software and that's what pays the bills.
The GPL is cool but I prefer a BSD style license - I've never put any restrictions on any of the code I've personally released.
Shareware, well, the term's not so common these days is it? I still like the idea of "pay for this software if you like it".
A model I've been toying with is one that works like shareware except that once a predefined amount of $$ is donated, soure code is released. Ransomware, I guess - sort of like what happened with Blender, but designed that way from the start.
A well documented API is better than access to source code in most cases anyway.
- Steve
Hah, I've been stevex longer than there's been a DirectX. here is some proof if you like.
I comment on articles I feel like commenting on. I use C#/.NET so I'm probably more familiar with it than a lot of people who post here. Most of the time when I bother to respond it's because the parent said something wrong or stupid.
I'm sure if I said something stupid about Linux I'd get a lot of people responding correcting me.. does that make them Linux shills?
- Steve
Notice in the article that Microsoft invited representatives from a LOT of different languages to the table when designing the CLR, to ensure that while they might not necessarily support them all ideally in v1, they wanted to make sure they weren't doing anything that would preclude them from supporting them in the future.
The next version of the CLR adds support for generics and some other stuff.. language support will only get better. (I don't see Sun working on making the JVM better suited to languages other than Java...)
- Steve
Did anyone consider that this whole problem may have started with a bug in MSN's support for Opera?
Obviously they have custom stuff they do if they detect the browser is Opera. I seriously doubt someone at MSN set out to disable Opera; they probably put it in to fix what was sent to Opera either to work around a bug in a previous Opera or to fix some of their own noncompliant stuff so it would work with Opera.
Either way, somewhere along the line it got broken. This seems much more likely a scenario to me - that someone screwed up - than that someone set out to specifically make Opera look bad. Wouldn't they be more interested in making Mozilla look bad if anyone?
Perhaps someone from MSN can release a statement on this and clear it up..
- Steve
I never really "got" Smalltalk but the folks that do love it. One of the cool things about the .NET framework is that being language neutral, your choice of language doesn't have to be based on what toolkits and libraries and whatnot are available to it.
:)
So Smalltalk programmers, through S#, will be able to talk to DirectX or Gtk# or MySQL or whatever without someone having to come up with bindings or libraries or whatever they might otherwise need. Scary.
- Steve
Is that in the Sims you can fast-forward through the boring parts. Okay, you're tired and you have to pee.. tell your dude to sleep, tell him to pee, and then fast forward until it's done and you can get back to doing what you want to do.
In the Sims Online, you have to sit there and watch while your avatar naps, showers, eats, etc. For me, anyway, that's what made it not fun.
- Steve
I've been marking up a map with locations reported by CNN.. it shows the path the shuttle was on as it went down. It's here. - Steve
Well it's digital all the way to the projector - the decoder decodes it to pixels and sends em pretty much 1:1 out. I think it looks awesome. I don't have a big screen TV to compare it to though..
>This is splitting hairs at best, and another artful dodge. If Palladium were in the marketplace, would AMI be part of it? Of course they would. And right now they're laying the groundwork.
Palladium is an implementation of the TCPA specification. Mozilla implements W3C specifications, but if I worked on some library code that Mozilla linked to that wouldn't make me a part of Mozilla.
TCPM is about verifying trust. DRM is an application of that technology, but not the only one. Online game servers being able to verify that the game clients aren't using hacked clients to cheat is another use. So is the bank's server checking out your web browser to make sure it's not been hacked. Technology itself isn't evil; applications of technology can be evil.
If a player implements DRM using TCPA, don't use it. Nothing is forcing you to.
- Steve
Yeah.. and what's up with people trying to play music on their computers? Who wants to waste valuable CPU cycles playing music when you can just turn on the stereo.
Seriously, though, a PC in the media room isn't such a bad idea. I have one set up, and it lets me do a lot of things:
- Use a cheaper RGB projector instead of an HDTV one.
- Use the DVD player in my PC instead of an expensive progressive scan external one.
- Flip between TV, a movie, a game, my email, and the web easily.
It's cool when you're watching a movie to be able to pause it, bring up a browser and look up what other movies the actor was in, that sort of thing.
Recording video on a PC is a big deal today perhaps (for some PCs anyway) but in a few years it won't be - just like playing MP3s was barely possible in real-time a few years ago but now you don't even notice.
A wireless keyboard and mouse makes a great remote control too.
- Steve
Well, there was never a marketing push for MFC either (or even Win32) but they're both prevalent. .NET is a framework. Everything else with the .NET tag is either a rebranding of something that existed before, or something written with the .NET framework but .NET itself is a framework, the CLR, and some languages.
-Steve
Often the data I'm working on is tough to just look at to see if it's right; being able to write something that would plug into the debugger to display some data would be cool.
For example, lets say I'm writing a scanner driver and I'm receiving buffers of data from the scanner. There's no way to know in the debugger if they look right or not - but if I could write a debugger plugin that could basically be given access to the entire address space the program is in with a target of "show me your data starting at this address if you can" it'd be awesome.
Same would be true for any data that isn't represented as a data structure or ASCII. I found often doing Win32 GDI work that I wanted to see what a particular HBITMAP looked like at a given point of the program's execution and the only way to do it was to blit it onto the desktop or something.
- Steve
Windows XP has most of the groundwork for this - Windows has actually had it for a while; for some reason the last piece (the filesystem that lets you take advantage of it all) keeps not showing up.
You want metadata on files? NTFS streams give you a place to store metadata (much like Mac resource forks but with any number of named streams).
You want to search on the metadata? The Microsoft Indexing Server will build a database and let you search on it (though it's a very strange system to use - in XP go into Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Services and Applications, Indexing Service, System and click on "Query the Catalog". You can do instant searches for all kinds of stuff, look at the help.
OLE Structured Storage is like a single file version of the filesystem we're talking about - a way of saving a bunch of objects (some of which you didn't create but that are in your document) into a file. I believe Microsoft's Office apps use it (could be wrong there though).
Right-click on an MP3 file and pick Properties in XP and go to the Summary tab. There's the metadata - the stuff the index server is going to index. If you add a new file format to the system, you can supply a DLL that will be able to supply the metadata for those files - so you download an MP3, save it on your disk, and the index server uses the DLL to get the metadata and add it to the database. It works pretty well.
I don't really have a point to all this, just listing some stuff that Windows has that "should" make it easy for Microsoft to add the OO FS someday and have it instantly work with existing apps.
- Steve
I think you answered your own question there.
"AppleScript is an object oriented scripting langauge".
We're talking about things you can do in a shell - writing a script, saving it and running it isn't quite the same thing.