Apple ships a DVD player (app) with their OS... Apple has probably known this for quite some time..
The real question is: How is this different than watching a DVD at 1024x768 on my PowerBook? Last I checked there was no need to pass the signal through a D/A prior to displaying it on the flat screen..
That's WHY apple should sue them. It's anti-competitive.
The difference is quality. Believe it or not as pretty as DVD is on your powerbook it would be even prettier if it were running at full bandwidth.
Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in Hollywood's contracts with DVD makers. "All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI," he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into computers.
I can't believe that they had to sign a contract agreeing not to make a FIREWARE DVD player! Apple should sue the hell out of them.
No. We're not all angst-ridden 16 year olds, most of us have more important things to worry about, like where the next meal comes from.
Oh please, if you've got the free time to post on slashdot you aren't exactly homeless and starving... I'm 20, I have a mortgage, car payments, bills, etc... So what? That doesn't make the constant barrage of marketing any less crushing, it doesn't make the massive amounts of crap going on in the world any less depressing. The attitude of 'I have more important things to worry about than whether or not the world is going to hell in a handbasket' is exactly why the world is going to hell. Wake up, do something nice for someone, try to make the world just that much more pleasant to live in.
On a whim I plugged my name into various search engines and saw how amazingly easy it was to track me down and get reams of information about me. It didn't bother me too much - I could have done it with a phone book and a decent library. It did reduce the time, though. This would reduce it even further, and probably be a bit more accurate.
How odd, I did that a couple of days ago and well, according to the internet I don't exist. At all. Anywhere. I found 3 other people who have my same first and last name, and a lot of peopel with my last name, but none that are me....
It always amuses me to see people earnestly analysing the English translations of the Tanach. How do you know the translation is accurate? Learn Hebrew, then you can do some analysis. Also, Tehillim (Psalms) are not "hymns"! No choirs standing around in white robes in the time of David the King!
The Psalms were meant to be sung, they were being sung in the court of David. Do you even bother to read the book? If you know Hebrew you have the distinct advantage of being able to do so, so go read it. The Book of Psalms is a book of poetry, hymns, songs, whatever. Just because something is a Hymn doesn't mean it has to be sung by a choir.
I was simply pointing out that he is incorectly interpreting the meaning of the word in English. So unless he's reading the original he doesn't have a leg to stand on.
That's all. Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable. Does anyone here have any suggestions?
Stop twisting the words of the bible for your own evil purposes. Psalms 67:2, "That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation AMONG all nations." The word AMONG combined with the word ALL, means EVERYONE, all people. Among all nations means that people in every nation will know salvation. This amount could be 1 person per nation, or every single person in every nation. The word Among does not automatically mean that not everyone will have salvation. Also, how do you draw a connection between the book of John and the book of Psalms? The book of Psalms is a book of Hymns, it contains very little actual information. The book of John contains much of the direct words of Christ, the two books do not reference each other. I think you need to spend some more time reading the Bible and perhaps praying for guidance. You are hopelessly lost...
Sometimes I look at the world, and I see what goes on, the lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, rampant stupidity, pervasive apathy, corruption, ignorance, bigotry, and I just think, "Why can't anyone else see how wrong this is? Why don't people just say what they mean, do what they say, and stop going out of their way to screw other people over?". The sort of situations I see makes me start to hope we do destroy ourselves and let the earth start over. Either that or I need to comb through the earths population and find the few hundred thousand decent people left out of 6 billion, and find some way to escape from this cess pit.
Does anyone else ever look around and just want to throw their arms up in despair, give in to the marketing, and go buy a Brittany Spears CD, some pants that are 4 sizes too big, and watch MTV all day long?
Who said it had to be 100% immobile? Fasten it to the floor, us a key to secure it. If it malfunctions just unlock it, move it, and have a human take over. You think they built the one on the demo into the floor? Not likely. The idea is perfectly sound. This may not be the BEST design for it, but it does have advantages.
Now the question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing. Sure, implementing this across the nation in burger joints is good for business, but when does it stop? A large investment can do the work of two people, but what of those two people? Or everyone else this puts out of work. Sure, robots and technology are great, but there has to be a moral point when putting people out of work - like students for whom McDonalds is a great source of tuition - becomes wrong. We have millions of people on this planet, with thousands being born everyday. Does *anyone* see a problem in the near future? Human nature makes us progress and use technology to our benefit, but human nature also makes a lot o' babies! We might see a huge rise in unemployment soon.
Ok, did you read the article? Did you see the apart about how HARD it is to find people to fill these jobs? The robots wouldn't be taking anyone's job, they would be filling positions that are currently empty from lack of applicants. Though personally I'd love to have some working the register so they'd get my order right, I said EXTRA ONIONS AND CHEESE! EXTRA! Not NONE DAMNIT!! >:) I always wondered why they don't just turn the push button register around and let me enter my own order, scan my credit card, and then pick my food up and leave 5 minutes later...
The value in using this particular arm design is that it can be fitted into the existing kitchen without a redesign as it simply acts as another person. And you maintain the ability for a person to take over for a few hours if the robot fails and needs to be repaired. There are certainly more efficient ways to perform the same task, but they aren't always practical in a given situation.
It depends on whether you interpret the constitution in a loose or strict manner. I interpret it in a strict manner meaning that anything it doesn't SAY the government can do, the people have to approve. So, if everyone voted to outlaw all firearms that would be a violation of our rights, but one that we apparently didn't mind.
You've come across the bane of programmers all over the world. You're expecting some sort of psychic interface to the computer. Some sort of consciousness that lets it do what you WANT not what you SAY. You'd like the computer to have some sort of eyeballs and brain stem to recognise the box that you're showing it "see, computer? This is my new video card! Make it work!"
I'm not quite that ambitious. I just want a system that works. If I tell it something about my hardware it should believe me. If I want to run two programs at the sime time I should not get an 'Illegal Operation' or GPF. I realize that there is an infinite combination of software running on an infinite combination of hardware to test for, but sometimes it seems like if you leave a program running, all by itself, for 15 minutes, the thing will explode. And that's anything from little open source widgets to $600+ software packages. There needs to be more emphasis on quality, working, functional, robust software.
Then the community as a whole shouldn't be bragging about how superior their software is to commercial, closed source software unless the piece of software in question ACTUALLY is. The open source ideology might be far superior, but that means bugger all if the code doesn't work.
You sure you want to go that route? The obvious implication being that you find it more often neccesary to delve into your dictionary. My posts are all 100% dictionary free, posted while working, and frequently while only half paying attention. Given those circumstances I'd say my error rate is pretty low. Yours should be nonexistant given your apparent derth of free time.
Part of the reason a lot of software sucks is because almost every time some new hardware company gets a large crazy idea everything needs to be rewritten or hacked up to keep working (which is why we are still stuck with x86, etc--hacking up and rewritting would have been too expensive/time consuming even though there is better hardware to run on out there). Video cards are the *perfect* example of this problem.
I will definately agree with this. Hardware people are just as likely to go running off after 'Newest, Greatest, Spiffiest' when they should also be concentrating on making the stuff we have now WORK.
But the original topic was programmers. So that was the subject of my post. And BOY did I piss a lot of people off. That was fun, 4 mod points used to keep my original post exactly where it was, 20 or so posts under mine... And I've apparently attracted my own division of trolls. >:)
The newest XFree (XFree86 V4.0) does access this information by setting up a virtual real mode processor, and calling the video card BIOS. However, the XFree guys haven't yet tied this into the modeline code to allow X to read the monitor's data & set itself up automatically. However, this is coming soon.
So, as I had imagined previously, it's back to being a programmer problem. The hardware exists and works just fine. But the software is faulty. So, one of you hot shot programmers go make it work.
But there is not, and never has been, any way for a VGA/SVGA monitor to report to the video card what brand it is or what sweep values it can accept without melting into a puddle of slag; ergo, X asks YOU. If you don't tell it otherwise, then, sure, you'll be looking at 640x480, the lowest common denominator of screen resolution settings.
There isn't YET. You forgot that very important word. The hardware fix for that is relatively simple conceptually, a bit harder in implementation though. What I have a big problem with is that when X asks me 'What resolution does your monitor run at' and I tell it 1024x768@60 and it comes back and tells me I'm wrong. Ok, so which is it? Does X know WTF my monitor is doing or not?
But I got news for you, pal: hardware ain't the holy grail you think it to be. I got lots of dead hardware sitting around that died for no apparent reason.
Well, wait, actually that's not true.
It did die for an apparent reason: the quality of the hardware sucked.
Did you pay any attention to that little sticker on the back of the device that tells you under what conditions it's rated to operate? No? How surprising.
Oh, and don't dis my apostrophe usage until you can properly use the contraction 'ain't' in a sentence.
Now, you give me your dead hardware and I'll tell you why it died. And I ain't just makin' that up.
(Friendly advice, Ain't is a contraction of 'Am not')
Do yourself a favor and switch to SuSE or Mandrake. SuSE has some sort of deal with Xfree86 so their X looks good. Both they and Mandrake use KDE, which a lot of people hate, but it looks good. With Redhat, even if you get the X stuff set up properly it just never looks quite perfect.
Of course, I'm just spoiled from years of Winduhs, Macs, BeOS, NeXT cubes, etc.
Too late, I gave up on X-windows. I just use the cmd line for everything.
Hardware that does PRECISELY what it was designed to do and hardware that is badly designed is not mutually exclusive. Why shouldn't a video card be able to determine a monitor's capabilities directly? Why put the user into the loop when a communications link between the video card and the monitor already exists?
Sure, have the monitor send a brief signal burst every few seconds until it gets a return message from the vid card that acknowledges the monitors existence and stats. Why isn't that implemented in hardware? Damned if I know. Seems simple enough. But ATM I lack the facilities to do it myself (open source hardware is just a LITTLE BIT more difficult than software), so I have to wait until I can get a decent EE lab or some company listens to me.
One could argue that they want the software to default to 1600x1200@80 and let the user change it to 640x480@60! No matter what you default to, someone's not going to be satisfied with it. So, instead of guessing what a good default should be, I think it's better to ask the user for information to determine what he or she wants!
Umm, the default should always be the most likely to work. It is more likely that 100% of the monitors around will run properly at 640x480 than at 1600x1200. That would be good engineering, which I suppose is something you programmers don't go in for....
How is the hardware designed badly? It does PRECISELY what it was designed to do. There is poorly designed hardware, it needs to be redone as well. But last time I checked my CRT didn't suddenly decide it was pissed at my keyboard and refuse to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple ships a DVD player (app) with their OS... Apple has probably known this for quite some time..
The real question is: How is this different than watching a DVD at 1024x768 on my PowerBook? Last I checked there was no need to pass the signal through a D/A prior to displaying it on the flat screen..
That's WHY apple should sue them. It's anti-competitive.
The difference is quality. Believe it or not as pretty as DVD is on your powerbook it would be even prettier if it were running at full bandwidth.
Kintanon
Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in Hollywood's contracts with DVD makers. "All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI," he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into computers.
I can't believe that they had to sign a contract agreeing not to make a FIREWARE DVD player! Apple should sue the hell out of them.
Kintanon
No. We're not all angst-ridden 16 year olds, most of us have more important things to worry about, like where the next meal comes from.
Oh please, if you've got the free time to post on slashdot you aren't exactly homeless and starving...
I'm 20, I have a mortgage, car payments, bills, etc... So what? That doesn't make the constant barrage of marketing any less crushing, it doesn't make the massive amounts of crap going on in the world any less depressing.
The attitude of 'I have more important things to worry about than whether or not the world is going to hell in a handbasket' is exactly why the world is going to hell. Wake up, do something nice for someone, try to make the world just that much more pleasant to live in.
Kintanon
On a whim I plugged my name into various search engines and saw how amazingly easy it was to track me down and get reams of information about me. It didn't bother me too much - I could have done it with a phone book and a decent library. It did reduce the time, though. This would reduce it even further, and probably be a bit more accurate.
How odd, I did that a couple of days ago and well, according to the internet I don't exist. At all. Anywhere. I found 3 other people who have my same first and last name, and a lot of peopel with my last name, but none that are me....
Kintanon
It always amuses me to see people earnestly analysing the English translations of the Tanach. How do you know the translation is accurate? Learn Hebrew, then you can do some analysis. Also, Tehillim (Psalms) are not "hymns"! No choirs standing around in white robes in the time of David the King!
The Psalms were meant to be sung, they were being sung in the court of David. Do you even bother to read the book? If you know Hebrew you have the distinct advantage of being able to do so, so go read it. The Book of Psalms is a book of poetry, hymns, songs, whatever. Just because something is a Hymn doesn't mean it has to be sung by a choir.
Kintanon
I was simply pointing out that he is incorectly interpreting the meaning of the word in English.
So unless he's reading the original he doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Kintanon
That's all. Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable. Does anyone here have any suggestions?
Stop twisting the words of the bible for your own evil purposes.
Psalms 67:2, "That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation AMONG all nations."
The word AMONG combined with the word ALL, means EVERYONE, all people. Among all nations means that people in every nation will know salvation. This amount could be 1 person per nation, or every single person in every nation. The word Among does not automatically mean that not everyone will have salvation.
Also, how do you draw a connection between the book of John and the book of Psalms? The book of Psalms is a book of Hymns, it contains very little actual information. The book of John contains much of the direct words of Christ, the two books do not reference each other. I think you need to spend some more time reading the Bible and perhaps praying for guidance. You are hopelessly lost...
Kintanon
Sometimes I look at the world, and I see what goes on, the lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, rampant stupidity, pervasive apathy, corruption, ignorance, bigotry, and I just think, "Why can't anyone else see how wrong this is? Why don't people just say what they mean, do what they say, and stop going out of their way to screw other people over?". The sort of situations I see makes me start to hope we do destroy ourselves and let the earth start over. Either that or I need to comb through the earths population and find the few hundred thousand decent people left out of 6 billion, and find some way to escape from this cess pit.
Does anyone else ever look around and just want to throw their arms up in despair, give in to the marketing, and go buy a Brittany Spears CD, some pants that are 4 sizes too big, and watch MTV all day long?
Kintanon
Who said it had to be 100% immobile? Fasten it to the floor, us a key to secure it. If it malfunctions just unlock it, move it, and have a human take over.
You think they built the one on the demo into the floor? Not likely.
The idea is perfectly sound. This may not be the BEST design for it, but it does have advantages.
Kintanon
Now the question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing. Sure, implementing this across the nation in burger joints is good for business, but when does it stop? A large investment can do the work of two people, but what of those two people? Or everyone else this puts out of work. Sure, robots and technology are great, but there has to be a moral point when putting people out of work - like students for whom McDonalds is a great source of tuition - becomes wrong. We have millions of people on this planet, with thousands being born everyday. Does *anyone* see a problem in the near future? Human nature makes us progress and use technology to our benefit, but human nature also makes a lot o' babies! We might see a huge rise in unemployment soon.
Ok, did you read the article? Did you see the apart about how HARD it is to find people to fill these jobs? The robots wouldn't be taking anyone's job, they would be filling positions that are currently empty from lack of applicants.
Though personally I'd love to have some working the register so they'd get my order right, I said EXTRA ONIONS AND CHEESE! EXTRA! Not NONE DAMNIT!! >:)
I always wondered why they don't just turn the push button register around and let me enter my own order, scan my credit card, and then pick my food up and leave 5 minutes later...
Kintanon
The value in using this particular arm design is that it can be fitted into the existing kitchen without a redesign as it simply acts as another person. And you maintain the ability for a person to take over for a few hours if the robot fails and needs to be repaired. There are certainly more efficient ways to perform the same task, but they aren't always practical in a given situation.
Kintanon
It depends on whether you interpret the constitution in a loose or strict manner. I interpret it in a strict manner meaning that anything it doesn't SAY the government can do, the people have to approve. So, if everyone voted to outlaw all firearms that would be a violation of our rights, but one that we apparently didn't mind.
Kintanon
You've come across the bane of programmers all over the world. You're expecting some sort of psychic interface to the computer. Some sort of consciousness that lets it do what you WANT not what you SAY. You'd like the computer to have some sort of eyeballs and brain stem to recognise the box that you're showing it "see, computer? This is my new video card! Make it work!"
I'm not quite that ambitious. I just want a system that works. If I tell it something about my hardware it should believe me. If I want to run two programs at the sime time I should not get an 'Illegal Operation' or GPF. I realize that there is an infinite combination of software running on an infinite combination of hardware to test for, but sometimes it seems like if you leave a program running, all by itself, for 15 minutes, the thing will explode. And that's anything from little open source widgets to $600+ software packages. There needs to be more emphasis on quality, working, functional, robust software.
Kintanon
Then the community as a whole shouldn't be bragging about how superior their software is to commercial, closed source software unless the piece of software in question ACTUALLY is.
The open source ideology might be far superior, but that means bugger all if the code doesn't work.
Kintanon
s/bigger/more often used/
You sure you want to go that route?
The obvious implication being that you find it more often neccesary to delve into your dictionary. My posts are all 100% dictionary free, posted while working, and frequently while only half paying attention. Given those circumstances I'd say my error rate is pretty low.
Yours should be nonexistant given your apparent derth of free time.
Kintanon
Part of the reason a lot of software sucks is because almost every time some new hardware company gets a large crazy idea everything needs to be rewritten or hacked up to keep working (which is why we are still stuck with x86, etc--hacking up and rewritting would have been too expensive/time consuming even though there is better hardware to run on out there). Video cards are the *perfect* example of this problem.
I will definately agree with this. Hardware people are just as likely to go running off after 'Newest, Greatest, Spiffiest' when they should also be concentrating on making the stuff we have now WORK.
But the original topic was programmers. So that was the subject of my post.
And BOY did I piss a lot of people off. That was fun, 4 mod points used to keep my original post exactly where it was, 20 or so posts under mine...
And I've apparently attracted my own division of trolls. >:)
Kintanon
/me capitulates
I surrender, your dictionary is obviously bigger than mine.
Now, go do something productive, like fix all of those Gnome bugs.
Kintanon
The newest XFree (XFree86 V4.0) does access this information by setting up a virtual real mode processor, and calling the video card BIOS. However, the XFree guys haven't yet tied this into the modeline code to allow X to read the monitor's data & set itself up automatically. However, this is coming soon.
So, as I had imagined previously, it's back to being a programmer problem. The hardware exists and works just fine. But the software is faulty. So, one of you hot shot programmers go make it work.
Kintanon
But there is not, and never has been, any way for a VGA/SVGA monitor to report to the video card what brand it is or what sweep values it can accept without melting into a puddle of slag; ergo, X asks YOU. If you don't tell it otherwise, then, sure, you'll be looking at 640x480, the lowest common denominator of screen resolution settings.
There isn't YET. You forgot that very important word. The hardware fix for that is relatively simple conceptually, a bit harder in implementation though.
What I have a big problem with is that when X asks me 'What resolution does your monitor run at' and I tell it 1024x768@60 and it comes back and tells me I'm wrong.
Ok, so which is it? Does X know WTF my monitor is doing or not?
Kintanon
But I got news for you, pal: hardware ain't the holy grail you think it to be. I got lots of dead hardware sitting around that died for no apparent reason.
Well, wait, actually that's not true.
It did die for an apparent reason: the quality of the hardware sucked.
Did you pay any attention to that little sticker on the back of the device that tells you under what conditions it's rated to operate? No? How surprising.
Oh, and don't dis my apostrophe usage until you can properly use the contraction 'ain't' in a sentence.
Now, you give me your dead hardware and I'll tell you why it died. And I ain't just makin' that up.
(Friendly advice, Ain't is a contraction of 'Am not')
Kintanon
Ummm, that's the entire POINT. He doesn't WANT to be e-mailed.
Some people are so dense.
Kintanon
Do yourself a favor and switch to SuSE or Mandrake. SuSE has some sort of deal with Xfree86 so their X looks good. Both they and Mandrake use KDE, which a lot of people hate, but it looks good. With Redhat, even if you get the X stuff set up properly it just never looks quite perfect.
Of course, I'm just spoiled from years of Winduhs, Macs, BeOS, NeXT cubes, etc.
Too late, I gave up on X-windows. I just use the cmd line for everything.
Kintanon
Hardware that does PRECISELY what it was designed to do and hardware that is badly designed is not mutually exclusive. Why shouldn't a video card be able to determine a monitor's capabilities directly? Why put the user into the loop when a communications link between the video card and the monitor already exists?
Sure, have the monitor send a brief signal burst every few seconds until it gets a return message from the vid card that acknowledges the monitors existence and stats. Why isn't that implemented in hardware? Damned if I know. Seems simple enough. But ATM I lack the facilities to do it myself (open source hardware is just a LITTLE BIT more difficult than software), so I have to wait until I can get a decent EE lab or some company listens to me.
Kintanon
Heh, you have to royally fuck up to toast a monitor that fast....
Extra 0 on one of those numbers somewhere?
Kintanon
One could argue that they want the software to default to 1600x1200@80 and let the user change it to 640x480@60! No matter what you default to, someone's not going to be satisfied with it. So, instead of guessing what a good default should be, I think it's better to ask the user for information to determine what he or she wants!
Umm, the default should always be the most likely to work. It is more likely that 100% of the monitors around will run properly at 640x480 than at 1600x1200. That would be good engineering, which I suppose is something you programmers don't go in for....
How is the hardware designed badly? It does PRECISELY what it was designed to do. There is poorly designed hardware, it needs to be redone as well. But last time I checked my CRT didn't suddenly decide it was pissed at my keyboard and refuse to work.
Kintanon