Yes, it's drawing 50/60 half images a second, but every two of those images is half of the same image. Thus, you still only get a real movement of 25/30 frames per second. Wrong; my point was that the "real" movement with traditional interlaced video *is* 50/60 fields per second. If we show a ball moving across the screen, it will have changed position in the 1/50 or 1/60 second between subsequent fields.
That's primarily why PAL video looks different to a cinema film shown at 25fps on a PAL system. With the 25fps film->video transfer, the same frame is recorded on two adjacent fields, so movement is still only updated 25 times per second. Whereas with material originally recorded on video, if the object is moving, it really will have its position updated 50 times per second.
When television was first crafted, they used this frequency to time the frames - but at the time they could only transfer enough data through radio waves to draw half a frame. More specifically, they could only transfer enough data to draw half a frame at a rate high enough to avoid visible flicker. They could alternately have drawn 50/60 non-interlaced frames with half the vertical resolution, or 25/30 non-interlaced full-resolution frames but with horrible flicker. (Remember that video buffering was impossible back then, so they couldn't- e.g.- show each full-resolution frame twice).
People can readily (although subconsciously) distinguish between "shot on film" and "shot on video" - it's the frame rate that is the biggest giveaway (24 vs 30) You're right that a greater frame rate gives a more "video"-like look. However, 24 vs. 30 fps is a minor difference, and doesn't explain why video loks different.
In fact, PAL uses 25 *full* frames per second, such a minor difference that the easiest way to show 24fps movies on PAL is to simply speed them up to 25 frames per second. Yet, there's still an obvious difference between film and PAL video. Why?
It's because standard PAL/NTSC video doesn't work with complete "frames". The picture is made up of a set of lines. Rather than drawing all these at once, all the odd-numbered lines are drawn, *then* all the even-numbered ones. (This is what's meant by "interlacing").
There are 50 (PAL) or 60 (NTSC) such "half-frames" (fields) per second. This is why video has a more fluid look than film; motion is still being updated at 50 or 60fps, albeit not at complete resolution. So although there are still 25 or 30 complete redraws of the screen per second, any moving object will be shown moving at 50/60 fps.
Recently one theater chain here in australia changed the rules so you couldn't bring in outside food They probably got pissed off with people bringing their barbecues in.
Since I am talking about Erlang/Haskell, what else other than the functional programming model would I have been discussing? your comment seems a little...stupid. Not familiar with Erlang or Dylan, and I assumed you were just throwing around examples. Yeah, I should have been a little sharper on the uptake, but your assumption that everyone should know about your semi-obscure list of languages smacks of ivory towers.
As for "...stupid", would that be stupidity like your original assumption that the XBox security breach was due to the offending OS code being written in C- when in fact the only evidence in the article clearly suggested otherwise?
Haskell/Erlang can replace all applications of assembly/C/C++. I advise you to check out this. No, I'm not reading the whole damn website just to figure out if what you say is true in practice, or just a theoretical possibility.
The billions of dollars spent each year in debugging and testing prove you otherwise. You sound very confident. I recommend you start a mainstream software company (apps, games, etc.) based around these technologies tommorow.
Obviously, finding large numbers of programmers familiar with "real-world" use of Haskell (for *any* applications C/C++/assembler is currently being used for) will be *no problem whatsoever*. Right?
(You'll note that the specific comment you replied to wasn't anti-Haskell, but merely noted the problems with finding enough programmers experienced in the language/paradigm in the short term).
I look forward to hearing of your phenomenal success!
I'm getting paid like 20k$ too much... oh well, at least I've got this awesome list of tips to negotiate a fairer salary. Have you ever noticed that when a child yells "It's not fair!" it's never because they've been given *more* chocolate (or whatever) than someone else?
I get paid a basic salary, plus London weighting In your experience, how much is the typical "London weighting" (are you referring to government jobs or just the phenomenon in general) and does it actually cover the vastly inflated costs of living in London?
If you're running this program via cron, you might want to scale it back to only run every five years. Otherwise, you might crash your system. I ran a C implementation of this program and was doing really well until it overflowed and I found I was paying my employer huge amounts of money to work for them.
Okay, fair point; I've always accepted that the Bible was a compilation of sorts. I didn't intend this to become a theological analysis; my original criticism was of the original article and its simplistic "proof" of the truth of the Bible, which is still duff (if the guy had what you said in mind, he should have stated it explicitly, but that would have changed the whole flavour of what he was trying to put across).
As for proof whether the Isaiah book accurately reflected what Isaiah said, and whether it has been subsequently polished, is a can of worms...
The same is true of any written history that no one alive today has witnessed personally. And the kind of "proof" you're looking for doesn't exist for anything. You're assuming I require more proof than I would reasonably expect.
You missed the point. The veracity of the source is being proved using evidence available only via that source.
And yes, there's plenty of that for many Biblical events and locations in the form of archaeological findings, other recorded history, etc. Sure, I've no doubt that many things in the Bible actually happened, albeit probably not exactly as described therein, and very often not for the reasons ascribed. But unless we know exactly what Isaiah said, and can be sure that his words were not distorted later by potentially interested parties, it's very hard to say what those prophesies were. As I said, I don't accept proving the veracity of a source by quoting from an example filtered through that source.
(Meant to address this point in my original reply)
C is much more like assembly than a high level programming language. I'd always considered C a moderately high-level language that allowed some very low-level operations to be carried out in a far more expressive manner than assembly.
Just out of interest, what constitutes a "high-level" language in your opinion?
I apologize for saying it, but you are still wrong and ignorant. Functional programs do not need to check their parameters If you were specifically discussing the functional programming model, you should have stated this clearly. Yes, all the languages you mention are functional, and perhaps I should have noticed that. However, you don't explicitly mention this, you simply mentioned "a proper type system" (which could include something like- e.g.- Ada's better type-checking); so I make no apologies for missing the veiled thrust of your argument.
There is nothing that Haskell or Erlang can not do. There is nothing that a Sinclair ZX80 cannot do, given enough memory and time. So what?
Or are you claiming that Haskell can replace *all* applications of assembly/C/C++ (even allowing for the fact that in the real world, compilers can often optimise better than doing it by hand)?
There is no excuse in using C/C++/assembly any more You're claiming that Haskell (or Erlang) is capable of carrying out the operations that were (supposedly) too low-level to be done in C? And that they can do this with the performance required by something like the XBox 360?
Furthermore, I suspect that there are "real-world" practical issues surrounding the choice of C/C++/assembly, even if that is only programmer familiarity with the language and procedural paradigms; and that is a good enough "excuse", even if long-term we'd be better off writing everything in Haskell.
I got "Nothing to see here. Move along". Offtopic?
Sounds about fair. Summary makes the article sound interesting. In reality, it says that WiFi is going to kick the mobile phone networks' asses in the near future, they might not like this, and it suggests vaguely that they might buy some politicians and run some misleading ads. That's it; there's no revealing of any great conspiracy or anything.
a billion viewers got to see that Calgary is not a cowtown any more, is next door to better skiing than Colorado, and you can drink beer on an outside deck in February if a Chinook blows into town As someone else mentioned elsewhere, what you say may be true if the place (or country) has something to prove, such as South Korea. OTOH, I can't see the Summer Olympics doing much to change anyone's perception of London, since it's quite well-known and positively-regarded anyway.
My favorite was always the "If you heat up a needle and put it through this particular spot on your Tomb Raider CD, Lara Croft will be naked!" How many did that one disappoint, I wonder? An even "better" one was for the Intel 486SX CPU, the cheapo version of the Pentium's predecessor. To quote the Foldoc entry:-
All 486SX chips were fabricated with FPUs. If testing showed that the CPU was OK but the FPU was defective, the FPU's power and bus connections were destroyed with a laser and the chip was sold cheaper as an SX, if the FPU worked it was sold as a DX.
The Jargon File claimed that the SX was deliberately disabled crippleware. The German computer magazine, "c't", made this same theory the basis of an April Fools Joke. They claimed that if one drilled a hole of a specified diameter through the right point on a SX chip, this would brake the circuit that disables the FPU. Some people actually tried (and then bought themselves new processors).
You bring a few billion dollars of economic activity, and the government will listen to you too. A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking real money. I didn't buy that line before the UK government bid for the 2012 Olympics, and I'm even more sceptical now. It cost the Greek government a fortune when they hosted it, and for all the hype that Blair and chums have been giving about "regeneration" and so on, you have to bear in mind that they budgeted £2.4bn, but there are now rumours that it may go as high as £9-10bn. Is the supposed regeneration really going to be worth that much? Yeah, it might get Britain some positive attention, but I've always considered this to be overstated.
If I wanted to make a profit, there are plenty of things I'd consider before hosting the Olympics. Like.... not hosting the Olympics and keeping the money in my pocket.
This sounds like a variant of the service that some ISPs already allow; i.e. if my normal email address was dogtanian@randomisp.com, you can give out your email as whatever@dogtanian.randomisp.com, and the email still gets to you. In this case, the part before the "@" can be anything.
Since dogtanian.randomisp.com isn't likely to be a valid domain, I don't think spammers are as likely to send something via a dictionary attack.
If you want to entirely rule out the possibility that spam to (e.g.) "bestbuy@mydomain.com" wasn't just a coincidental dictionary attack (though I think it unlikely that they'd use the prefix 'bestbuy'), simply choose a number (e.g. 53279) and append it to any address you give out (e.g. bestbuy53279@mydomain.com, pcworld53279@mydomain.com). Chances of a spammer choosing that prefix are vanishingly small; any false positives are almost certainly due to you inadvertantly reusing that address when communicating with someone else. Though I'd have said that was the case even without using the number.
Yes, all the articles about how easy it is to game Digg has really hurt their reputation. For me, being full of crap news stories was what hurt their reputation. The articles about how easy it is to game the system just made it clearer *why* this was the case.
I never liked it because of the way it hurts my eyes and the overall poor quality of the comments there. Much, if not most, of my reason for visiting Slashdot is to check the comments. Whilst it's very far from perfect, Digg is miles worse than/. in the one-line redundant "me too!", stupid, un-insightful, downright pointless comments, and the moderation is so broken as to be useless (it all smacks of agenda and groupthink, rather than what someone thinks others might want to read), so you can't filter them out.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; any problems Slashdot has, Digg has them squared and a whole lot more besides.
It's astonishing how many people don't know CS. No, what's astonishing is how you assumed my question was due to ignorance of type-checking, rather than because the article didn't make clear whether it was a type-checking problem at all.
To answer your question, a proper type system ala ML/Haskell/Erlang/Dylan would solve the problem at compile-time. My question was "Can you briefly explain why you believe this flaw to be due to the limitations of C?"
I'm well aware that type-checking is much weaker in C than in more modern languages. However, the article stated that the problem was due to "incomplete checking of the parameters". This doesn't necessarily imply a type-checking problem; hence my question.
And bearing in mind that the code example given doesn't even appear to be written in C (as you had assumed), and that the poster who guessed it was PPC assembly is likely closer to the mark, I don't see that your argument is necessarily applicable here.
I'm not familiar with with PowerPC assembly, but my guess is that its type-checking is pretty low-level (if any). And I'm pretty sure that no-one is going to use assembler these days unless they have a damn good reason for it; if (as others have suggested), C didn't support the required facilities for such low-level OS programming, there was no way they were going to be able to do it in the higher level languages you had in mind.
But will it be worth $832?
FYI the PS3 is £425 in the UK which is how I got to the above number. That likely includes VAT (i.e. 17.5% sales tax); ex. VAT it's £362.
If I'm right, listed U.S. prices don't normally include sales tax; and however much- if any- they have to pay is irrelevant, since Sony don't get any of that money (nor have any choice in whether to charge it or not).
Slashdot's trying to compete with digg. All the 12yr olds are flocking over there. That's precisely *why* I stopped using Digg. It was hyped up to be user-voted, democratic, better-than-Slashdot. Well, maybe it was when it started out (though I suspect it was partly getting hyped due to being a Web 2.0 poster child). However, it was already mediocre when I first started using it in early '06, and it seemed to go downhill from there.
See this article, which does a good job of examining what's wrong with Digg. I have to say it articulated the reasons I stopped using Digg and a lot more besides.
Maybe Slashdot's owners want the advertising revenue etc. that Digg are getting.... well, that's their business. From a personal point of view, I'm quite happy for "all the 12yr olds" to stick with Digg.
Contact the people that made it ? The card dates from the late 1980s, almost 20 years ago. Possibilities:-
* The company went bankrupt in the early 1990s.
* They merged with another company, which was later taken over by another company that had some success, but went bankrupt in the mid-1990s, and whose name and key assets were taken over by another business who just wanted the brand awareness (and everyone had probably forgotten about the SSI 2001 by this time, so they probably didn't give a toss about the design or rights to that). That company in turn got swallowed up by Creative or someone like that, and their branding has long since been abandoned, and the company structure dissolved into Creative.... In short, good luck figuring out who "the people who made it" are. Well, it might not have played out exactly like that, but you get the picture.
You might find a few ex-employees, but I doubt they've got tonnes of spare cards lying around in their house. More likely that there are a few lying forgotten at the back of someone's warehouse, waiting to be purchased by someone with an eye for retro computer kit, but that might take some time.
How soon until slashdot accepts articles about "i'm having a problem in my freshman java class, here's the code, can anyone help?" are the norm? If you think this is bad, you haven't seen some of the garbage that makes the front page of Digg on a regular basis.
This means that Microsoft will follow by putting their much loved 'MS Paint' online. "Funny", huh? It's already been done, albeit not by MS themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Useful reply, thank you.
That's primarily why PAL video looks different to a cinema film shown at 25fps on a PAL system. With the 25fps film->video transfer, the same frame is recorded on two adjacent fields, so movement is still only updated 25 times per second. Whereas with material originally recorded on video, if the object is moving, it really will have its position updated 50 times per second.
When television was first crafted, they used this frequency to time the frames - but at the time they could only transfer enough data through radio waves to draw half a frame. More specifically, they could only transfer enough data to draw half a frame at a rate high enough to avoid visible flicker. They could alternately have drawn 50/60 non-interlaced frames with half the vertical resolution, or 25/30 non-interlaced full-resolution frames but with horrible flicker. (Remember that video buffering was impossible back then, so they couldn't- e.g.- show each full-resolution frame twice).
It's because standard PAL/NTSC video doesn't work with complete "frames". The picture is made up of a set of lines. Rather than drawing all these at once, all the odd-numbered lines are drawn, *then* all the even-numbered ones. (This is what's meant by "interlacing").
There are 50 (PAL) or 60 (NTSC) such "half-frames" (fields) per second. This is why video has a more fluid look than film; motion is still being updated at 50 or 60fps, albeit not at complete resolution. So although there are still 25 or 30 complete redraws of the screen per second, any moving object will be shown moving at 50/60 fps.
I think you've totally missed the point of Imax.
As for "...stupid", would that be stupidity like your original assumption that the XBox security breach was due to the offending OS code being written in C- when in fact the only evidence in the article clearly suggested otherwise? Haskell/Erlang can replace all applications of assembly/C/C++. I advise you to check out this. No, I'm not reading the whole damn website just to figure out if what you say is true in practice, or just a theoretical possibility. The billions of dollars spent each year in debugging and testing prove you otherwise. You sound very confident. I recommend you start a mainstream software company (apps, games, etc.) based around these technologies tommorow.
Obviously, finding large numbers of programmers familiar with "real-world" use of Haskell (for *any* applications C/C++/assembler is currently being used for) will be *no problem whatsoever*. Right?
(You'll note that the specific comment you replied to wasn't anti-Haskell, but merely noted the problems with finding enough programmers experienced in the language/paradigm in the short term).
I look forward to hearing of your phenomenal success!
Okay, fair point; I've always accepted that the Bible was a compilation of sorts. I didn't intend this to become a theological analysis; my original criticism was of the original article and its simplistic "proof" of the truth of the Bible, which is still duff (if the guy had what you said in mind, he should have stated it explicitly, but that would have changed the whole flavour of what he was trying to put across).
As for proof whether the Isaiah book accurately reflected what Isaiah said, and whether it has been subsequently polished, is a can of worms...
You missed the point. The veracity of the source is being proved using evidence available only via that source. And yes, there's plenty of that for many Biblical events and locations in the form of archaeological findings, other recorded history, etc. Sure, I've no doubt that many things in the Bible actually happened, albeit probably not exactly as described therein, and very often not for the reasons ascribed. But unless we know exactly what Isaiah said, and can be sure that his words were not distorted later by potentially interested parties, it's very hard to say what those prophesies were. As I said, I don't accept proving the veracity of a source by quoting from an example filtered through that source.
Just out of interest, what constitutes a "high-level" language in your opinion?
Or are you claiming that Haskell can replace *all* applications of assembly/C/C++ (even allowing for the fact that in the real world, compilers can often optimise better than doing it by hand)? There is no excuse in using C/C++/assembly any more You're claiming that Haskell (or Erlang) is capable of carrying out the operations that were (supposedly) too low-level to be done in C? And that they can do this with the performance required by something like the XBox 360?
Furthermore, I suspect that there are "real-world" practical issues surrounding the choice of C/C++/assembly, even if that is only programmer familiarity with the language and procedural paradigms; and that is a good enough "excuse", even if long-term we'd be better off writing everything in Haskell.
Sounds about fair. Summary makes the article sound interesting. In reality, it says that WiFi is going to kick the mobile phone networks' asses in the near future, they might not like this, and it suggests vaguely that they might buy some politicians and run some misleading ads. That's it; there's no revealing of any great conspiracy or anything.
If I wanted to make a profit, there are plenty of things I'd consider before hosting the Olympics. Like.... not hosting the Olympics and keeping the money in my pocket.
This sounds like a variant of the service that some ISPs already allow; i.e. if my normal email address was dogtanian@randomisp.com, you can give out your email as whatever@dogtanian.randomisp.com, and the email still gets to you. In this case, the part before the "@" can be anything.
Since dogtanian.randomisp.com isn't likely to be a valid domain, I don't think spammers are as likely to send something via a dictionary attack.
If you want to entirely rule out the possibility that spam to (e.g.) "bestbuy@mydomain.com" wasn't just a coincidental dictionary attack (though I think it unlikely that they'd use the prefix 'bestbuy'), simply choose a number (e.g. 53279) and append it to any address you give out (e.g. bestbuy53279@mydomain.com, pcworld53279@mydomain.com). Chances of a spammer choosing that prefix are vanishingly small; any false positives are almost certainly due to you inadvertantly reusing that address when communicating with someone else. Though I'd have said that was the case even without using the number.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; any problems Slashdot has, Digg has them squared and a whole lot more besides.
I'm well aware that type-checking is much weaker in C than in more modern languages. However, the article stated that the problem was due to "incomplete checking of the parameters". This doesn't necessarily imply a type-checking problem; hence my question.
And bearing in mind that the code example given doesn't even appear to be written in C (as you had assumed), and that the poster who guessed it was PPC assembly is likely closer to the mark, I don't see that your argument is necessarily applicable here.
I'm not familiar with with PowerPC assembly, but my guess is that its type-checking is pretty low-level (if any). And I'm pretty sure that no-one is going to use assembler these days unless they have a damn good reason for it; if (as others have suggested), C didn't support the required facilities for such low-level OS programming, there was no way they were going to be able to do it in the higher level languages you had in mind.
If I'm right, listed U.S. prices don't normally include sales tax; and however much- if any- they have to pay is irrelevant, since Sony don't get any of that money (nor have any choice in whether to charge it or not).
See this article, which does a good job of examining what's wrong with Digg. I have to say it articulated the reasons I stopped using Digg and a lot more besides.
Maybe Slashdot's owners want the advertising revenue etc. that Digg are getting.... well, that's their business. From a personal point of view, I'm quite happy for "all the 12yr olds" to stick with Digg.
* The company went bankrupt in the early 1990s.
* They merged with another company, which was later taken over by another company that had some success, but went bankrupt in the mid-1990s, and whose name and key assets were taken over by another business who just wanted the brand awareness (and everyone had probably forgotten about the SSI 2001 by this time, so they probably didn't give a toss about the design or rights to that). That company in turn got swallowed up by Creative or someone like that, and their branding has long since been abandoned, and the company structure dissolved into Creative.... In short, good luck figuring out who "the people who made it" are. Well, it might not have played out exactly like that, but you get the picture.
You might find a few ex-employees, but I doubt they've got tonnes of spare cards lying around in their house. More likely that there are a few lying forgotten at the back of someone's warehouse, waiting to be purchased by someone with an eye for retro computer kit, but that might take some time.