By posting that wikipedia disagrees to a post claiming glass to be a liquid, you imply strongly that wikipedia claims that glass is not a liquid.
The Wikipedia article does claim that glass is not a liquid:
Glass is generally classed as an amorphous solid rather than a liquid. Glass displays all the mechanical properties of a solid. The notion that glass flows to an appreciable extent over extended periods of time is not supported by empirical research or theoretical analysis
Perhaps my focus on the old window myth was misplaced, but I don't feel I was being misleading.
Actually, it DOESN'T disagree that glass is a liquid,...
I never really said that the fact that the thickness of window panes is evidence that it is solid; just that it's not evidence that it's liquid. There are 'solid' claims based on other grounds, as the Wikipedia article describes a bit (as you seem to acknowledge).
Debunking crappy negative arguments can be as important as making positive ones to arguing a position (see also: Moon landing 'conspiracy').
If you call it a liquid, it is one so viscous that it will show no appreciable flow in the span of mere centuries.
Or really dozens of millenia; that's also well-supported by observations.
I think the point is that the glass was installed thicker side down for structural reasons, but the sheets of glass themselves weren't really manufactured to deliberately have the thicker bit. The fact that there even was a thicker end was a side effect of the manufacturing process that they took advantage of, but wasn't really a goal of the process.
In particular, the myth that glass in older houses is thicker at the bottom because it flowed definitely seems to be just that -- a myth:
If medieval glass has flowed perceptibly, then ancient Roman and Egyptian objects should have flowed proportionately more but this is not observed. Similarly, prehistoric obsidian blades should have lost their edge; this is not observed either (although obsidian may have a different viscosity from window glass).... If glass flows at a rate that allows changes to be seen with the naked eye after centuries, then the effect should be noticeable in antique telescopes. Any slight deformation in the antique telescopic lenses would lead to a dramatic decrease in optical performance, a phenomenon that is not observed.
Except that 16:9 is still too tall for most movies to be shown with no pan-and-scan or letterboxing.
16:9 is 1.78:1; all the Star Wars movies were shot in 2.35:1, a popular aspect ratio for movies. (1.85:1 is also popular.) You'd need a screen that's almost a full 1/3rd wider than 16:9 is to encompass it at its full height, or letterbox away almost 1/4 of the height.
By contrast, the AT&T version of that has a lot of "what order do the components go in again?" to it. So even if you know that "w(x, y, z)" is somehow the equivalent, you'll probably have to think about or look up which order the parameters are in before you can understand it. (Admittedly if reading it's not so bad because you can sort of guess: the outer number is the offset by convention, the scale is the only remaining immediate, and the index is right next to the scale. It's still not as clear to me as the Intel syntax, and there's no way I'd feel confidant about it without looking it up if I were writing x86 ASM.)
The thing I forgot to say was that even this is a little bit of a red herring; dereferences of that complex nature seem to be relatively rare, at least in compiled code. Much more typical is just a simple '[ebp - 8h]' or something like that to grab a local variable; for something like that, '-8(ebp)' is hardly less readable.
I still think it's a strange syntax and Intel's is more natural (matches closer to high-level languages, math, etc.), but the AT&T syntax for simple memory accesses like that is so common in assembly languages that it doesn't really hurt.
Admittedly, yes I did. The judgments in my previous post are personal preference and probably subject to almost as much controversy as indentation/brace style or similar things. To each his own (esp. with the $% thing).;-)
because I honestly find the latter more readable.
What I like about Intel in this case is that I can walk away from it for a couple months, come back, and if I see something like '[eax + ecx*4h]' I know instantly what it does. You can show that to someone who hasn't seen any x86 assembly before but knows that eax and ecx are registers, and I think they'd have a pretty good guess as to what it does. If not, probably the only thing you'd need to tell them is "[]" means "dereference".
By contrast, the AT&T version of that has a lot of "what order do the components go in again?" to it. So even if you know that "w(x, y, z)" is somehow the equivalent, you'll probably have to think about or look up which order the parameters are in before you can understand it. (Admittedly if reading it's not so bad because you can sort of guess: the outer number is the offset by convention, the scale is the only remaining immediate, and the index is right next to the scale. It's still not as clear to me as the Intel syntax, and there's no way I'd feel confidant about it without looking it up if I were writing x86 ASM.)
The best thing I find about at&t syntax is that it is portable across architectures. You can code in arm, mips etc all with the same syntax. I have not yet seen intel syntax used on anything but intel.
Admittedly I don't work with architectures other than x86 more than once in a blue moon, but I don't see how this is such a benefit. The different architectures already have different instructions, different registers, etc., so it doesn't seem like it'd be at all possible to take code for one processor and use it on another. Sure, the AT&T syntax will be closer between the two, but there will still be tons of changes. (Probably less between different RISC instruction sets, but we're talking x86 here.)
About the one benefit I see is consistent "data flow" direction, since Intel and AT&T are backwards. I don't have strong opinions on either direction*, but it is a little annoying to have to adjust to different syntaxes.
(* Though the link I posted before said "The advantage of AT&T syntax in this situation is obvious. We read from left to right, we write from left to right, so this way is only natural." I strongly disagree that the benefit is obvious... after all, in almost no programming language (TI-BASIC is the one exception I can think of) do you say "5 -> x" or something like that. It's always "x = 5." Thus "add a, b, c" being "a = b + c" is perfectly natural to programmers too. I can see it both ways.)
Oh, I fully agree with you (for other reasons too). I just appreciate that not everyone may agree with us, and for them, jailbreaking the iPhone to get multiprocessing might be a no-brainer.
I tend to play less mainstream boardgames. If this played games like Titan (cheapest found $52.95) and Settlers ($50+ to get started) the potential savings for not having to produce and distribute adds up a lot faster.
I don't buy that the primary reason those are more expensive are because of production and distribution costs. Take Settlers. What does it have? A bunch of cardboard cutouts and some wooden pieces (on the same scale as a Monopoly set with wooden buildings). A couple dice. I mean, it's decent quality stuff: it's not just cardstock like chance/community chest cards or something, it's good, thick cardboard. But that's not enough for it to cost $20 or $30 more than stuff you can buy in WalMart. Scrabble has dozens of nicely crafted wooden tiles. Monopoly has the player tokens.
IMO, the primary reason that they are expensive is that the companies can charge as much as they do, because people will pay it, because they're good games.
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively. Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time.
"Incapable of" vs "capable of but disallows" seems to be a pretty pedantic difference. The one way it's not is that it means that if you jailbreak it, there's a chance that you can break that restriction too.
So what do you do with your cardboard monopoly or chess board when you are half way through a game and the captain says to return to your seats, place the tray tables in the upright locked position and prepare for landing? I guess it's game over.
You could use the time between when you drop below 10,000 ft (when you have to put away your iPad) and when you're on immediate approach and have to put up the tray tables to record the configuration of the game.;-)
(Not arguing that there's a convenience factor with the iPad, but it's not all win. For instance, you could even keep going with many games even after the tray tables have to go up. I'd guess that with something like this you could get around 30 minutes more playing time -- and even that could be low if you're stuck in a holding pattern below 10K feet or even spend a ton of time on the taxyways -- each flight than you could with an iPad simply due to legal constraints on when you can use electronic devices.)
Mass produced games are around that price, but wander around a specialty game store. Many (not all) of the games there will be quite expensive. E.g. Settlers of Catan lists for $50, though you can get it for the low-to-mid $30s.
To answer your other question about benefits, most of the benefit comes from your toolchain. If you're using a toolchain that is designed to work with AT&T syntax, like GCC, then no, there's no benefit. If you want to interoperate with MSVC, there's a ton of benefit. (In particular, if you want to use inline asm in a MSVC program, it uses Intel syntax.)
And how does its syntax differs from NASM and AT&T ?
Intel syntax doesn't feel like it was designed by a sadist.
More seriously, this site link covers some differences. Among the things I like much more about Intel syntax: there's no need to add a ton of visual noise with what-should-be-extraneous $ and % symbols, and things like memory indirection is much easier to learn. Compare "[ebx+ecx*4h-20h]" to "-0x20(%ebx,%ecx,0x4)"; the former almost tells you what it does even if you're not at all familiar with the syntax, the latter definitely doesn't.
The main benefit that AT&T syntax has is that they "hungarian notation" their instructions: movb works on 1 byte, movw on 2 bytes, movl on 4. Most of the time this is extra visual noise (I don't need the 'l' to tell me that 'mov eax, ebx' works on 4 bytes), but it does make memory dereferences more concise. With Intel syntax you'll get a lot of 'dword ptr' stuff lying around to tell how much should be brought in from memory.
...but am I the only one vaguely turned off by the idea you'd *have* to buy it with cell service (and thus pay an additional $1500-2000 for it)?
Nope. In fact, the only reason I'd be only "vaguely turned off" instead of "completely turned off" the thing (if that's true) is because I was only vaguely turned on in the first place. Otherwise, it'd be a deal-killer.
(The forced contract and app store are basically the two reasons I don't currently have an iPhone; if both were changed, I would very possibly pick one up on very short order.)
I've got a tablet PC (i.e. a convertible tablet) and the handwriting recognition is actually pretty good, at least when you stay within English words. Sometimes things like URLs can make you go letter-by-letter, and there seems to be little hope of it getting to recognize math and such*, but it's plenty usable. OneNote even has what I call "fuzzy" handwriting recognition, in that if what you write can match a couple different words, searching your notes for either one will produce a match. (In this way it's actually way better than converting the whole document using handwriting recognition, which fares pretty poorly in spite of what I said about the overall state of things.)
(* At least Win7 actually has a "math input panel" where you can write mathematical expressions -- reasonable complex ones too, e.g. with integral symbols and such -- but it's not something I think you're likely to use.)
(What's so bad about changing the major version shortly if something had again to be changed incompatibly? and why not keep the major version if there is only things added?)
I would say this: It's because users don't care about incompatible changes (at least to their web browser), and version numbers are as much for the user -- if not more -- than for the devs.
What is going to become incompatible if Firefox upgrades? Basically, plugins. And most of those in popular use will be updated in short order (often before release), and Firefox makes updating those painless.
By contrast, what users expect (reasonably expect, I'll add) is that if a significant feature update is done, or a significant UI update is made, or a large number of bugs are fixed, then the major version number will be updated.
Yes and no. This court isn't high enough that any precedent was set. If the RIAA appeals to a Circuit Court and the remittitur amount is upheld, it'll be precedent for that circuit but not others. (Circuit Courts do look at decisions by other Circuit Courts, but they are considered guidance, not binding.) If it's appealed to SCOTUS and upheld, it'll be precedent for the whole US.
Well, he might have chosen to triple it, but treble damages are not part of the statute.
This is correct; the decision addresses this issue:
Of course, the Copyright Act contains no treble damages provision. The Courts remittitur is not an attempt to create such a provision. Rather, the Court has labored to fashion a reasonable limit on statutory damages awards against noncommercial individuals who illegally download and upload music such that the award of statutory damages does not veer into the realm of gross injustice. Finding a precise dollar amount that delineates the border between the jurys wide discretion to calculate its own number to address ThomasRassets willful violations, Plaintiffs farreaching, but nebulous damages, and the need to deter online piracy in general and the outrageousness of a $2 million verdict is a considerable task. The Court concludes that setting the limit at three times the minimum statutory damages amount in this case is the most reasoned solution.
It didn't occur to me to even see if I could uninstall IE from my current W7 system...
You probably can't uninstall IE in the sense that you want (then again, you probably can't uninstall Notepad either). I guess I wasn't being entirely fair, because the IE DLLs* are actually somewhat vital to the system: at the very least, for rendering help files.
That said, I think that might be all; in particular, the IE and Windows Explorer processes are definitely not tied together like they used to be. (This is true starting with Vista, and maybe even XP SP3, I can't check that easily at all.)
* More precisely, the MSHTML DLLs, which are used by IE and other programs
Slashdot Mirror
Try going to windows update without IE.
Would you people stop saying this? Windows Update hasn't used IE for years. It became a standalone app in Vista.
By posting that wikipedia disagrees to a post claiming glass to be a liquid, you imply strongly that wikipedia claims that glass is not a liquid.
The Wikipedia article does claim that glass is not a liquid:
Perhaps my focus on the old window myth was misplaced, but I don't feel I was being misleading.
Actually, it DOESN'T disagree that glass is a liquid, ...
I never really said that the fact that the thickness of window panes is evidence that it is solid; just that it's not evidence that it's liquid. There are 'solid' claims based on other grounds, as the Wikipedia article describes a bit (as you seem to acknowledge).
Debunking crappy negative arguments can be as important as making positive ones to arguing a position (see also: Moon landing 'conspiracy').
If you call it a liquid, it is one so viscous that it will show no appreciable flow in the span of mere centuries.
Or really dozens of millenia; that's also well-supported by observations.
I think the point is that the glass was installed thicker side down for structural reasons, but the sheets of glass themselves weren't really manufactured to deliberately have the thicker bit. The fact that there even was a thicker end was a side effect of the manufacturing process that they took advantage of, but wasn't really a goal of the process.
Wikipedia disagrees.
In particular, the myth that glass in older houses is thicker at the bottom because it flowed definitely seems to be just that -- a myth:
Except that 16:9 is still too tall for most movies to be shown with no pan-and-scan or letterboxing.
16:9 is 1.78:1; all the Star Wars movies were shot in 2.35:1, a popular aspect ratio for movies. (1.85:1 is also popular.) You'd need a screen that's almost a full 1/3rd wider than 16:9 is to encompass it at its full height, or letterbox away almost 1/4 of the height.
What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:
I see your point; the fact that your whose name is an anagram for "a cosy round woman" only reinforces it.
By contrast, the AT&T version of that has a lot of "what order do the components go in again?" to it. So even if you know that "w(x, y, z)" is somehow the equivalent, you'll probably have to think about or look up which order the parameters are in before you can understand it. (Admittedly if reading it's not so bad because you can sort of guess: the outer number is the offset by convention, the scale is the only remaining immediate, and the index is right next to the scale. It's still not as clear to me as the Intel syntax, and there's no way I'd feel confidant about it without looking it up if I were writing x86 ASM.)
The thing I forgot to say was that even this is a little bit of a red herring; dereferences of that complex nature seem to be relatively rare, at least in compiled code. Much more typical is just a simple '[ebp - 8h]' or something like that to grab a local variable; for something like that, '-8(ebp)' is hardly less readable.
I still think it's a strange syntax and Intel's is more natural (matches closer to high-level languages, math, etc.), but the AT&T syntax for simple memory accesses like that is so common in assembly languages that it doesn't really hurt.
I'm guessing you started with intel syntax then?
Admittedly, yes I did. The judgments in my previous post are personal preference and probably subject to almost as much controversy as indentation/brace style or similar things. To each his own (esp. with the $% thing). ;-)
because I honestly find the latter more readable.
What I like about Intel in this case is that I can walk away from it for a couple months, come back, and if I see something like '[eax + ecx*4h]' I know instantly what it does. You can show that to someone who hasn't seen any x86 assembly before but knows that eax and ecx are registers, and I think they'd have a pretty good guess as to what it does. If not, probably the only thing you'd need to tell them is "[]" means "dereference".
By contrast, the AT&T version of that has a lot of "what order do the components go in again?" to it. So even if you know that "w(x, y, z)" is somehow the equivalent, you'll probably have to think about or look up which order the parameters are in before you can understand it. (Admittedly if reading it's not so bad because you can sort of guess: the outer number is the offset by convention, the scale is the only remaining immediate, and the index is right next to the scale. It's still not as clear to me as the Intel syntax, and there's no way I'd feel confidant about it without looking it up if I were writing x86 ASM.)
The best thing I find about at&t syntax is that it is portable across architectures. You can code in arm, mips etc all with the same syntax. I have not yet seen intel syntax used on anything but intel.
Admittedly I don't work with architectures other than x86 more than once in a blue moon, but I don't see how this is such a benefit. The different architectures already have different instructions, different registers, etc., so it doesn't seem like it'd be at all possible to take code for one processor and use it on another. Sure, the AT&T syntax will be closer between the two, but there will still be tons of changes. (Probably less between different RISC instruction sets, but we're talking x86 here.)
About the one benefit I see is consistent "data flow" direction, since Intel and AT&T are backwards. I don't have strong opinions on either direction*, but it is a little annoying to have to adjust to different syntaxes.
(* Though the link I posted before said "The advantage of AT&T syntax in this situation is obvious. We read from left to right, we write from left to right, so this way is only natural." I strongly disagree that the benefit is obvious... after all, in almost no programming language (TI-BASIC is the one exception I can think of) do you say "5 -> x" or something like that. It's always "x = 5." Thus "add a, b, c" being "a = b + c" is perfectly natural to programmers too. I can see it both ways.)
Oh, I fully agree with you (for other reasons too). I just appreciate that not everyone may agree with us, and for them, jailbreaking the iPhone to get multiprocessing might be a no-brainer.
I tend to play less mainstream boardgames. If this played games like Titan (cheapest found $52.95) and Settlers ($50+ to get started) the potential savings for not having to produce and distribute adds up a lot faster.
I don't buy that the primary reason those are more expensive are because of production and distribution costs. Take Settlers. What does it have? A bunch of cardboard cutouts and some wooden pieces (on the same scale as a Monopoly set with wooden buildings). A couple dice. I mean, it's decent quality stuff: it's not just cardstock like chance/community chest cards or something, it's good, thick cardboard. But that's not enough for it to cost $20 or $30 more than stuff you can buy in WalMart. Scrabble has dozens of nicely crafted wooden tiles. Monopoly has the player tokens.
IMO, the primary reason that they are expensive is that the companies can charge as much as they do, because people will pay it, because they're good games.
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively. Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time.
"Incapable of" vs "capable of but disallows" seems to be a pretty pedantic difference. The one way it's not is that it means that if you jailbreak it, there's a chance that you can break that restriction too.
So what do you do with your cardboard monopoly or chess board when you are half way through a game and the captain says to return to your seats, place the tray tables in the upright locked position and prepare for landing? I guess it's game over.
You could use the time between when you drop below 10,000 ft (when you have to put away your iPad) and when you're on immediate approach and have to put up the tray tables to record the configuration of the game. ;-)
(Not arguing that there's a convenience factor with the iPad, but it's not all win. For instance, you could even keep going with many games even after the tray tables have to go up. I'd guess that with something like this you could get around 30 minutes more playing time -- and even that could be low if you're stuck in a holding pattern below 10K feet or even spend a ton of time on the taxyways -- each flight than you could with an iPad simply due to legal constraints on when you can use electronic devices.)
Mass produced games are around that price, but wander around a specialty game store. Many (not all) of the games there will be quite expensive. E.g. Settlers of Catan lists for $50, though you can get it for the low-to-mid $30s.
To answer your other question about benefits, most of the benefit comes from your toolchain. If you're using a toolchain that is designed to work with AT&T syntax, like GCC, then no, there's no benefit. If you want to interoperate with MSVC, there's a ton of benefit. (In particular, if you want to use inline asm in a MSVC program, it uses Intel syntax.)
And how does its syntax differs from NASM and AT&T ?
Intel syntax doesn't feel like it was designed by a sadist.
More seriously, this site link covers some differences. Among the things I like much more about Intel syntax: there's no need to add a ton of visual noise with what-should-be-extraneous $ and % symbols, and things like memory indirection is much easier to learn. Compare "[ebx+ecx*4h-20h]" to "-0x20(%ebx,%ecx,0x4)"; the former almost tells you what it does even if you're not at all familiar with the syntax, the latter definitely doesn't.
The main benefit that AT&T syntax has is that they "hungarian notation" their instructions: movb works on 1 byte, movw on 2 bytes, movl on 4. Most of the time this is extra visual noise (I don't need the 'l' to tell me that 'mov eax, ebx' works on 4 bytes), but it does make memory dereferences more concise. With Intel syntax you'll get a lot of 'dword ptr' stuff lying around to tell how much should be brought in from memory.
...but am I the only one vaguely turned off by the idea you'd *have* to buy it with cell service (and thus pay an additional $1500-2000 for it)?
Nope. In fact, the only reason I'd be only "vaguely turned off" instead of "completely turned off" the thing (if that's true) is because I was only vaguely turned on in the first place. Otherwise, it'd be a deal-killer.
(The forced contract and app store are basically the two reasons I don't currently have an iPhone; if both were changed, I would very possibly pick one up on very short order.)
I've got a tablet PC (i.e. a convertible tablet) and the handwriting recognition is actually pretty good, at least when you stay within English words. Sometimes things like URLs can make you go letter-by-letter, and there seems to be little hope of it getting to recognize math and such*, but it's plenty usable. OneNote even has what I call "fuzzy" handwriting recognition, in that if what you write can match a couple different words, searching your notes for either one will produce a match. (In this way it's actually way better than converting the whole document using handwriting recognition, which fares pretty poorly in spite of what I said about the overall state of things.)
(* At least Win7 actually has a "math input panel" where you can write mathematical expressions -- reasonable complex ones too, e.g. with integral symbols and such -- but it's not something I think you're likely to use.)
(What's so bad about changing the major version shortly if something had again to be changed incompatibly? and why not keep the major version if there is only things added?)
I would say this: It's because users don't care about incompatible changes (at least to their web browser), and version numbers are as much for the user -- if not more -- than for the devs.
What is going to become incompatible if Firefox upgrades? Basically, plugins. And most of those in popular use will be updated in short order (often before release), and Firefox makes updating those painless.
By contrast, what users expect (reasonably expect, I'll add) is that if a significant feature update is done, or a significant UI update is made, or a large number of bugs are fixed, then the major version number will be updated.
Because I'm sure MS hasn't done anything to the codebase in the last decade...
(Hint: The place where I consider them separated begins with Vista, when Windows Explorer would no longer host the IE renderer.)
The judge seemed to indicate he thought $54,000 was still high, how did he settle on that number?
Hmmm, if only he wrote some sort of opinion that explained his reasoning...
Is that how legal precedence is established?
Yes and no. This court isn't high enough that any precedent was set. If the RIAA appeals to a Circuit Court and the remittitur amount is upheld, it'll be precedent for that circuit but not others. (Circuit Courts do look at decisions by other Circuit Courts, but they are considered guidance, not binding.) If it's appealed to SCOTUS and upheld, it'll be precedent for the whole US.
(IANAL)
Well, he might have chosen to triple it, but treble damages are not part of the statute.
This is correct; the decision addresses this issue:
It didn't occur to me to even see if I could uninstall IE from my current W7 system...
You probably can't uninstall IE in the sense that you want (then again, you probably can't uninstall Notepad either). I guess I wasn't being entirely fair, because the IE DLLs* are actually somewhat vital to the system: at the very least, for rendering help files.
That said, I think that might be all; in particular, the IE and Windows Explorer processes are definitely not tied together like they used to be. (This is true starting with Vista, and maybe even XP SP3, I can't check that easily at all.)
* More precisely, the MSHTML DLLs, which are used by IE and other programs
Actually, I'm with this group. MS made IE "part" of Windows, good choice or not.
I'll agree with you through XP... but it's not really part of windows, not any more. Not any more than Notepad.