Completely wrong on the first two counts, and the third is irrelevant. Here is why: Grand Central Dispatch is not a "thread manager" in the sense you mean. It makes and manages threads on its own, rather than relying on the programmer to handle them in inside the application.
From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, GCD still requires the application to be programmed to use GCD. (The code samples all have a
dispatch_apply
call applied to the stuff that should be concurrent.) If your program wasn't written to that API, then GCD does exactly zero good for it.
So GCD makes it easier to write concurrent programs, but if you're running non-concurrent programs than the OS can't really do anything about it. That's what your parent was saying.
(BTW, there exist APIs that behave similarly on other platforms, including Windows; MS just doesn't provide any.)
Almost all mondern LCD computer displays are capable of displaying HD content (1080p). Even CRT monitors can nativley display 1080p. With that being said, why not grab a 30 inch display (most which support 1600p). It is a MUCH better display. if you look at price per pixel, it is technically more affordable.
As beautiful as 30" displays (usually) are, "technically more affordable" doesn't mean "actually more affordable", and a 30" display sitting across the living room still doesn't look anything like a 45" or 50" display sitting across the living room. Resolution is nice, but it isn't the complete story. 1600p or a 30" screen doesn't buy you a ton if you're sitting 15 feet away.
I agree. I use a convertible tablet for notetaking in class and I love it; it's great. Way better (IMO) than typing, definitely way better than paper notes.
(OneNote is an amazing piece of software too, and I don't say that lightly; I hate to varying degrees almost all the software I use frequently. (That includes Windows and Linux, Firefox and Opera, Thunderbird, Emacs and Visual Studio, Bash and Zsh and CMD.exe, MS Office and OpenOffice (mostly PowerPoint & Impress, except for the fact that I just stopped using the latter), and many others.) There are a couple features I wish it had, but I have almost no complaints about what it does except that I don't know of any open source program that interoperates with it.)
The difference is that the PC does all that you stated more than adequately.
Eh, sort of, at least for the stereo and TV.
Stereo: a computer can definitely make a decent stereo, but you have to look around for decent speakers. Currently the easiest way to make the computer operate as a mid-range stereo system is to buy a mid-range stereo system and use an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter and plug your computer into it.
TV: you need a TV tuner card, which is not exactly standard equipment. Certainly doable; I used my computer as a TV for a long time. But the bigger point is that in an era where large HDTVs are increasingly popular, there's nothing that's sold as a computer monitor that is in the same area as a large HDTV. If you want to use your computer as a large TV, the best way to do it is buy a large TV and plug your computer into it; and at that point why not just use the tuner in your TV? (You can also buy a projector; that would argue for using your computer as a TV.)
That said, typewriter: definitely; not even a contest.
Calculator: other than the fact that you can't put it in your pocket, same as the typewriter. A computer makes an outstanding calculator.
Isn't it SOP to wear properly insulated work boots when working with power tools?
That doesn't really matter; my understanding is the parent was slightly off on his description of the technology. When your finger hits the blade, it senses a change in capacitance, presumably similar to how capacitive touchscreens work.
Even without platform exclusivity, how long would it have been from when MS rejected some application for sort of grey-area reasons (is spyware the user "agrees" to malware or not?) until the offended party cried antitrust?
(Without doing some filtering, an app store doesn't really buy you anything.)
As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.
Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.
Still I think US$10 for a CD is overpriced. Pirated CD's are selling for well under USD 1 each. So that is a $9.something mark-up for what? Recording and artist's share?
Let me rephrase: "so that is a $9.something mark-up for what? Almost all of what went into producing the album?"
(Though of course both arguments are dumb because the artist gets so little, but it really isn't that pressing the CDs and distributions are supposed to be a substantial part of the cost.)
Case in point, look at what happened when Valve temporarily slashed the price on Left 4 Dead a while back - from full retail price down to $15-20, IIRC. Sales that weekend skyrocketed.
I was going to reply with this exact example. According to Jeff Atwood quoted an article saying that the sale didn't just dramatically increase sales and didn't even "just" cause more copies to be sold than launch, but brought in more raw revenue than launch day did.
So you don't have a long-term storage medium (CD-Rs don't last as long as pressed CDs), your music is encoded with a lossy codec, you can't lend your music to friends, but really, there's no difference.
I've only done the Amazon MP3 thing once because of the lossy codec thing, but your other arguments are kind of dumb. It's probably *easier* to "lend" your music to friends with an MP3, and it's not like you're forced to store them on burned CDs. Passing the data from one hard disk to another is plenty sufficient. (And with the online backup he mentioned, he's got a distributed backup in case his house burns down.)
Actually if you put "their's" in quotes (which avoids hits for "theirs"), you only get 474,000, a little over 1/4 of the hits as "hermeneutics." (And the first two hits are talking about how "their's" isn't a word, while there's no such apparent hit for "digicam" anywhere in the first five pages of results.)
Windows 64bit is just 32bit but only with long long's and the ability to acces 64bit.
Howevah... by Googling the citation for it (and I couldn't find it at WineHQ, although it's there somewhere) I came to find out that starting with Win7 64bit is fully supported.
I still have no idea about what you're babbling about, and am still calling BS. There's nothing substantial that has changed re. 64-bit support from x64 XP to x64.
For some sites, this is true... sites that don't care if it's a little easy to download their video will do that, and probably will switch to HTML5.
On the other hand, if you can tell me how to download, e.g., this or this, just by typing some URL I can obtain relatively easily from the source of a page into the browser, I'd forever be your friend.
Does have. Just that JIT compilation doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be winning speed contests.
CPython (the standard Python implementation you get from Python.org) does not have a JIT compiler. It doesn't do straight Python interpretation, but it does do straight bytecode interpretation. (That's different from a JIT compiler though.)
A self-signed cert would be perfectly fine for most sites out there. Sure, it's susceptable to MitM attacks, but there's a reasonably big step from "I can eavesdrop" to "I can reroute your connections to me."
The biggest obstacle to this is the horrendous hoops you have to jump through to OK a self-signed cert in browsers.
Personally, my dislike for Perl has almost nothing to do with the runtime environment and more to do with the mindset that causes someone to think this is a good idea.
Is it not possible to have the browser use an external codec while still controlling rendering of controls and such? Like can Firefox theoretically rely on the x264 library from VLC while still controlling how it looks?
Well, that depends on what you mean.
I may have misinterpreted your "Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP)" statement; I was thinking you were suggesting that the browser just use a plugin from the appropriate media player. In that case, the browser probably wouldn't have control unless it pulled some pretty elaborate tricks.
However, there are frameworks where the OS itself provides codec support and programs can just harness what's available, and Mozilla certainly could do that. (See here for a discussion of why Firefox won't do this, at least in the immediate term. If the dust from the codec war settles on the side of H.264 you'll probably see them change their decision, but that won't happen for a while.) However, in this case it wouldn't really be using the rendering library from VLC or whatever.
As far as scraping... yeah... I'm not sure I care. If you put a copyrighted GIF on your site, it's not totally easy to keep people from downloading it and violating the copyright. That doesn't make it a good idea to render all GIF files in Flash
No, but if changing to HTML5 would mean that it became rather easier to scrape the URL, it does mean that there would be plenty of sites that wouldn't make the switch. From their perspective, HTML5 wouldn't really offer any benefit, and Flash is going to be sticking around for a long time more even if this codec issue was solved overnight and all browsers immediately supported HTML5, so a lot of them would choose to lose the few visitors who would refuse to run the Flash plugin. That's my speculation anyway.
Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP) instead of trying to include codecs in browsers?
Because, as a website developer, you'd lose control over how things appear in the browser, and it' would likely become easier to scrape the raw video URL and download it, which most providers wouldn't want.
Would Google have been able to add in closed captioning or annotation support to YouTube, let alone the ability to edit them from within almost the same interface, if it displayed videos in a VLC window instead of something that it could control?
Um what? Maybe you can specify what you mean a little further.
(And for the record, I have a program and input that will hit 31 1/2 GB of memory use on a 32 GB system running XP 64-bit, so this is my way of calling BS.)
Unlike on Windows 7 and Mac OS X, licensed H.264 decoders are not "available on the system" for users of Windows XP or Linux. Besides, just because a home desktop operating system comes with a licensed decoder doesn't mean a server operating system comes with a licensed encoder.
Oh, I don't deny there are patent problems with H.264 -- just that they have to be Firefox's problem.
That said, on the first point: the proportion of Win7 users to XP users will continue to grow over time, while the quality difference between H.264 and Theora (yes, I do believe there's a noticeable quality difference in H.264's favor) probably won't change all that much over time.
Personally, my viewpoint is I'd like to see browsers implement both Theora and H.264. Sites that want the extra quality at the same size, same quality at a lower size, or whatever benefit the people behind the site see in H.264, and can afford the licensing for it can go ahead and use H.264. Other sites don't have to.
Other than that, I'm relatively uninvested in the debate, provided that when the dust settles I can watch YouTube and a couple other sites in Opera and Firefox.
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Completely wrong on the first two counts, and the third is irrelevant. Here is why: Grand Central Dispatch is not a "thread manager" in the sense you mean. It makes and manages threads on its own, rather than relying on the programmer to handle them in inside the application.
From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, GCD still requires the application to be programmed to use GCD. (The code samples all have a
call applied to the stuff that should be concurrent.) If your program wasn't written to that API, then GCD does exactly zero good for it.
So GCD makes it easier to write concurrent programs, but if you're running non-concurrent programs than the OS can't really do anything about it. That's what your parent was saying.
(BTW, there exist APIs that behave similarly on other platforms, including Windows; MS just doesn't provide any.)
Almost all mondern LCD computer displays are capable of displaying HD content (1080p). Even CRT monitors can nativley display 1080p. With that being said, why not grab a 30 inch display (most which support 1600p). It is a MUCH better display. if you look at price per pixel, it is technically more affordable.
As beautiful as 30" displays (usually) are, "technically more affordable" doesn't mean "actually more affordable", and a 30" display sitting across the living room still doesn't look anything like a 45" or 50" display sitting across the living room. Resolution is nice, but it isn't the complete story. 1600p or a 30" screen doesn't buy you a ton if you're sitting 15 feet away.
I agree. I use a convertible tablet for notetaking in class and I love it; it's great. Way better (IMO) than typing, definitely way better than paper notes.
(OneNote is an amazing piece of software too, and I don't say that lightly; I hate to varying degrees almost all the software I use frequently. (That includes Windows and Linux, Firefox and Opera, Thunderbird, Emacs and Visual Studio, Bash and Zsh and CMD.exe, MS Office and OpenOffice (mostly PowerPoint & Impress, except for the fact that I just stopped using the latter), and many others.) There are a couple features I wish it had, but I have almost no complaints about what it does except that I don't know of any open source program that interoperates with it.)
The difference is that the PC does all that you stated more than adequately.
Eh, sort of, at least for the stereo and TV.
Stereo: a computer can definitely make a decent stereo, but you have to look around for decent speakers. Currently the easiest way to make the computer operate as a mid-range stereo system is to buy a mid-range stereo system and use an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter and plug your computer into it.
TV: you need a TV tuner card, which is not exactly standard equipment. Certainly doable; I used my computer as a TV for a long time. But the bigger point is that in an era where large HDTVs are increasingly popular, there's nothing that's sold as a computer monitor that is in the same area as a large HDTV. If you want to use your computer as a large TV, the best way to do it is buy a large TV and plug your computer into it; and at that point why not just use the tuner in your TV? (You can also buy a projector; that would argue for using your computer as a TV.)
That said, typewriter: definitely; not even a contest.
Calculator: other than the fact that you can't put it in your pocket, same as the typewriter. A computer makes an outstanding calculator.
Isn't it SOP to wear properly insulated work boots when working with power tools?
That doesn't really matter; my understanding is the parent was slightly off on his description of the technology. When your finger hits the blade, it senses a change in capacitance, presumably similar to how capacitive touchscreens work.
That's why SawStop saws have switches to disable the safety feature, for when you're cutting wet wood etc.
Even without platform exclusivity, how long would it have been from when MS rejected some application for sort of grey-area reasons (is spyware the user "agrees" to malware or not?) until the offended party cried antitrust?
(Without doing some filtering, an app store doesn't really buy you anything.)
As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.
Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.
Oh man, wait 'till the Romulans hear about this.
Still I think US$10 for a CD is overpriced. Pirated CD's are selling for well under USD 1 each. So that is a $9.something mark-up for what? Recording and artist's share?
Let me rephrase: "so that is a $9.something mark-up for what? Almost all of what went into producing the album?"
(Though of course both arguments are dumb because the artist gets so little, but it really isn't that pressing the CDs and distributions are supposed to be a substantial part of the cost.)
Case in point, look at what happened when Valve temporarily slashed the price on Left 4 Dead a while back - from full retail price down to $15-20, IIRC. Sales that weekend skyrocketed.
I was going to reply with this exact example. According to Jeff Atwood quoted an article saying that the sale didn't just dramatically increase sales and didn't even "just" cause more copies to be sold than launch, but brought in more raw revenue than launch day did.
So you don't have a long-term storage medium (CD-Rs don't last as long as pressed CDs), your music is encoded with a lossy codec, you can't lend your music to friends, but really, there's no difference.
I've only done the Amazon MP3 thing once because of the lossy codec thing, but your other arguments are kind of dumb. It's probably *easier* to "lend" your music to friends with an MP3, and it's not like you're forced to store them on burned CDs. Passing the data from one hard disk to another is plenty sufficient. (And with the online backup he mentioned, he's got a distributed backup in case his house burns down.)
Actually if you put "their's" in quotes (which avoids hits for "theirs"), you only get 474,000, a little over 1/4 of the hits as "hermeneutics." (And the first two hits are talking about how "their's" isn't a word, while there's no such apparent hit for "digicam" anywhere in the first five pages of results.)
Not that a Google fight is much of an arbiter on what words are in English, but there are nearly 10x more hits for digicam than there are for lexeme.
Take a look at WoW64. Any idea as to why you can run 64bit apps on 32bit Windows?
BS and FUD. WoW64 is the subsystem that runs 32-bit programs on 64-bit Windows, not the other way around.
Learn what you're talking about before you go spouting nonsense.
Windows 64bit is just 32bit but only with long long's and the ability to acces 64bit.
Howevah... by Googling the citation for it (and I couldn't find it at WineHQ, although it's there somewhere) I came to find out that starting with Win7 64bit is fully supported.
I still have no idea about what you're babbling about, and am still calling BS. There's nothing substantial that has changed re. 64-bit support from x64 XP to x64.
For some sites, this is true... sites that don't care if it's a little easy to download their video will do that, and probably will switch to HTML5.
On the other hand, if you can tell me how to download, e.g., this or this, just by typing some URL I can obtain relatively easily from the source of a page into the browser, I'd forever be your friend.
Does have. Just that JIT compilation doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be winning speed contests.
CPython (the standard Python implementation you get from Python.org) does not have a JIT compiler. It doesn't do straight Python interpretation, but it does do straight bytecode interpretation. (That's different from a JIT compiler though.)
Until your certificate expires.
A self-signed cert would be perfectly fine for most sites out there. Sure, it's susceptable to MitM attacks, but there's a reasonably big step from "I can eavesdrop" to "I can reroute your connections to me."
The biggest obstacle to this is the horrendous hoops you have to jump through to OK a self-signed cert in browsers.
Personally, my dislike for Perl has almost nothing to do with the runtime environment and more to do with the mindset that causes someone to think this is a good idea.
Playing the downloaded video isn't the problem; scraping the URL so you know what to download is.
Is it not possible to have the browser use an external codec while still controlling rendering of controls and such? Like can Firefox theoretically rely on the x264 library from VLC while still controlling how it looks?
Well, that depends on what you mean.
I may have misinterpreted your "Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP)" statement; I was thinking you were suggesting that the browser just use a plugin from the appropriate media player. In that case, the browser probably wouldn't have control unless it pulled some pretty elaborate tricks.
However, there are frameworks where the OS itself provides codec support and programs can just harness what's available, and Mozilla certainly could do that. (See here for a discussion of why Firefox won't do this, at least in the immediate term. If the dust from the codec war settles on the side of H.264 you'll probably see them change their decision, but that won't happen for a while.) However, in this case it wouldn't really be using the rendering library from VLC or whatever.
As far as scraping... yeah... I'm not sure I care. If you put a copyrighted GIF on your site, it's not totally easy to keep people from downloading it and violating the copyright. That doesn't make it a good idea to render all GIF files in Flash
No, but if changing to HTML5 would mean that it became rather easier to scrape the URL, it does mean that there would be plenty of sites that wouldn't make the switch. From their perspective, HTML5 wouldn't really offer any benefit, and Flash is going to be sticking around for a long time more even if this codec issue was solved overnight and all browsers immediately supported HTML5, so a lot of them would choose to lose the few visitors who would refuse to run the Flash plugin. That's my speculation anyway.
Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP) instead of trying to include codecs in browsers?
Because, as a website developer, you'd lose control over how things appear in the browser, and it' would likely become easier to scrape the raw video URL and download it, which most providers wouldn't want.
Would Google have been able to add in closed captioning or annotation support to YouTube, let alone the ability to edit them from within almost the same interface, if it displayed videos in a VLC window instead of something that it could control?
Um what? Maybe you can specify what you mean a little further.
(And for the record, I have a program and input that will hit 31 1/2 GB of memory use on a 32 GB system running XP 64-bit, so this is my way of calling BS.)
Unlike on Windows 7 and Mac OS X, licensed H.264 decoders are not "available on the system" for users of Windows XP or Linux. Besides, just because a home desktop operating system comes with a licensed decoder doesn't mean a server operating system comes with a licensed encoder.
Oh, I don't deny there are patent problems with H.264 -- just that they have to be Firefox's problem.
That said, on the first point: the proportion of Win7 users to XP users will continue to grow over time, while the quality difference between H.264 and Theora (yes, I do believe there's a noticeable quality difference in H.264's favor) probably won't change all that much over time.
Personally, my viewpoint is I'd like to see browsers implement both Theora and H.264. Sites that want the extra quality at the same size, same quality at a lower size, or whatever benefit the people behind the site see in H.264, and can afford the licensing for it can go ahead and use H.264. Other sites don't have to.
Other than that, I'm relatively uninvested in the debate, provided that when the dust settles I can watch YouTube and a couple other sites in Opera and Firefox.