It was cool back in the day, but you can't simply hold onto some technologies forever. Just because YOU want the world to stay still does not mean that it will.
The RIAA could learn something from you.
And we could learn something from what we're trying to tell the RIAA, is what the GP's saying.
Er... when did they stop making them? Metal Slug 7 was released last year, and as far as I know, it's the same Metal Sluggy action it's always been. Which is to say: Silly and fun.
Two, actually. There WAS a Game Boy Kid Icarus game way back in The Day(tm).
Doesn't make your point any less valid, o'course. And Pit WAS in Smash Bros. Brawl and all, so I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to have some sort of plan up their sleeves. I mean, so long as we don't have to flap a Wiimote and nunchuck to fly.
All ICANN needs to do is give due notice to their customers and give them time to transfer.
That's the exact problem I'm seeing. Who are the non-techie customers going to turn to first? The company with the hip, subversive, almost-but-not-quite softcore pr0n ads aired during the Super Bowl, or this regulatory body they've never heard of who, seemingly out of the blue, just killed their website?
Given the amount of money involved in domain names, I'm guessing ICANN can safely take disciplinary actions without losing a dime in the process.
Until, that is, the bit about registrars losing accreditation means customers without a techie background (or without a techie department to handle such matters) suddenly lose service to their domain names. They go to the registrar to see what's up and, instead of being given a technical/political description that they'll instantly tl;dr (note previous assertion of "customers without a techie background"), they're given the quick summary: "ICANN killed your websites"*.
Then out come the letters to [INSERT LOCAL HIGH-RANKING POLITICAL FIGURES HERE], which would rekindle the arguments to disband/decentralize/de-Americanify ICANN that keep coming up, and, well, long story short, "safely" isn't the adverb I'd use to describe their ability to take disciplinary actions.
*: If they're sleazy enough to do the sorts of things listed in this article, I can trivially assume them to be sleazy enough to do something like that out of spite. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
It wouldn't be too difficult to pack a few hard drives or SSDs with a few thousand movies and episodes of TV shows.
Except, as soon as word got out of them flipping the first bit on the drive during the copy operation, the MPAA/RIAA/ABC/CBS/NBC/etc would be down their necks, complaining to their congresspeople about how much more important their anti-piracy efforts are over scientific discovery, cosmic exploration, and our astronauts not going insane during a nearly one-third year flight. And then they'd add a few extra trillion in to the "potential lost sales" figures they flaunt due to the Martians the astronauts would potentially be sharing the movies with who would then not buy the movies.
Then they'd bitch about making sure there's DRM on the spacecraft (jacking up the price and complexity) and make excuses that a 40-minute round-trip communication back to the central servers on earth every X minutes of playback is a perfectly reasonable compromise to make "sure" it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, and would try their damndest to delay the launch until they could convince the entire judicial branch of the United States government to quite cheerfully treat the astronauts like potential criminals.
I mean, other than THAT, it'd be a perfectly reasonable idea.
The argument's about the <video> tag in the HTML 5 spec, which would allow for movies without the need for Flash (or Silverlight or explicit plugins or etc). Technically, if the browser supported Ogg Theora, then there wouldn't be a problem, except they're arguing the quality's lower than h.264, so it's no go for them (not to mention Apple isn't supporting it in Quicktime and thus Safari and pretty well all of OS X due to, as per the summary's assertion, misguided patent concerns). And stop calling me Shirley.
I used "enthusiasts" specifically to avoid calling either side "fanboys", "zealots", or whatever other pejoratives the kids these days call 'em. But what I'm saying is if you're calling one of them "fanboys" or what have you, you have to call the other side that, too, since they're pretty well the same in this case.
So, the ability to process JavaScript outside of a browser is somehow Google-specific?
Frankly, this was inevitable. If JavaScript is processed by a computer in one application, it can be processed by a computer in another application, and the latter may be more Evil(tm) than the former. So what if Google stops parsing JavaScript in their summaries? How hard is it for the spammers to get a parser of their own and not even touch Google's servers?
That's why I've never really trusted those munging hacks.
Given the iPhone does, believe it or not*, have some users who aren't hardcore Apple enthusiasts ("normal people"), and the C64, as it's been out of production for upwards of 20 years now and is therefore effectively entirely used by Commodore enthusiasts nowadays and not by "normal people", I'd say the iPhone wins that category.
If either instance of "enthusiasts" in that previous sentence is to be replaced with "fanboys" or "zealots" or similar, the other must be as well.
*: Yes, I know, the answer is you don't believe it, but too bad, reality rears its inconvenient head again.
Isn't resonant coupling what Wacom tablets use to both power and communicate with their styluses and pucks (kinda-sorta tablet mice)? I know it's not technically "charging" either of them, per se, but it IS powering them, and it's done by resonance coupling.
Strange, then, how in Team Fortress 2, the Heavy (Russian accent) isn't portrayed in the vodka-loving stereotype of other games. Granted, he IS portrayed as a large, slow, violent person homicidally protective of his minigun, but not so much on the vodka.
Of course, the Demoman (Scotsman) IS portrayed as quite the drinking man, so I guess Valve's not entirely innocent. Funny as hell, though.:-)
Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova.
Well, I'm glad to see celestial phenomena follow the metric system, at least. I propose we name this a kilonova and rename the supernova to a meganova.
And Futurama is animated so you're not limited by budgets and CGI.
I'm certain all the artists they have animating the show would be happy to hear that they're all working for free, since they're obviously not included in your budget plan.
And Futurama DOES use a lot of CGI effects (i.e. the New New York skyline shots). They're just not too obvious and they fit in with the hand-drawn stuff.
The fact is that firmware upgrades for older iPods are unlikely to be installed by users for some time.
iTunes manages iPod firmware updates, and quite visibly pops up an alert saying that the firmware needs updating when it does once the iPod is connected. One click and it's on its way to upgrading (if that; there may be an option to auto-upgrade, I don't have iTunes open in front of me). This isn't like a BIOS firmware upgrade that requires some manner of special trickery outside the normal course of your computing day. iPod firmware updates happen in the application used to manage and transfer data to the iPod, all fairly seamlessly, all during the normal workflow of using iTunes.
Factor that in with the other steps mentioned (iTMS refuses to work with old iTunes, new iTunes wants to upgrade firmware), and I'd put it at more like... say... a week for it to propagate. Two if they're really slow with it. The only people that wouldn't get the update are people not using iTunes or the iTMS and thus wouldn't care that their iPod(s) don't work with it (or pathologically stubborn people who firmly believe they can outwait Apple).
You generally don't have a direct list of memory in use; you usually have a list of variables in use (which in turn is a list of memory in use, indirectly) and how many references to each variable still exist "in the wild" (recursed; if something isn't accessible to the rest of the program, any references it holds are considered to be dead). THAT list is handled by the VM, and at that point, yes, programmers in that area just trust that the VM knows what it's doing in terms of GC.
Of course, that's just for a simplistic, maybe somewhat primitive GC. There's probably all sorts of whatchamahoozit algorithms and whatever else out there nowadays. I don't develop GCs, I just have a peripheral knowledge of how they work.
From a real-time/embedded standpoint, no, you wouldn't find it very useful at all. In fact, you'd find it horribly counter-productive, as you lose control of how memory is allocated in an environment where memory can be at a premium and the clock cycles needed for automatic garbage collection need to be rock-solid. But for general day-to-day programming on machines with cheap RAM and non-real-time kernels and processes, it removes a major source of unnecessary headaches from many programmers' heads.
The problem, in my opinion, is that people who don't seem to care about computer security are the sort of people who abstract a computer into real-world analogues and stick to that, hard. That is, they're the sort who've been taught how a computer works solely by comparing it to things they know outside the computer world (i.e. "your hard drive is like a big filing cabinet and you don't need to care past that", "email is just like getting letters, just over the internet!", "the media player is like a big jukebox with all your favorite songs!"). Anything that doesn't fit in their real-world analogue system is for those stupid smelly nerds who exist solely to fix your problems when they inevitably happen.
And that last part is where it starts to go wrong. Try explaining computer security to a non-techie. If you go from the technical end of what's happening, they'll get confused and ignore you. If you go from a real-world analogue method, you'll be inventing all sorts of fantastical explanations that, to a real-world person, sound patently absurd, the stuff of fantasies and science fiction for those stupid smelly nerds who exist solely to fix their problems when they inevitably happen.
For example, they'll think you're out of your mind when you tell them there's botnets trying to break into your computer(s) endlessly without rest, and they don't care who you are or how rich you are. Try explaining that in a real-world or sorta-real-world context: There's an army of zombies on your lawn, they feel no pain, they want to get into your house, they will never stop, your brains are as good as anyone else's, and unless you stay on the ball, they WILL get in and make you one of them (not to mention the fact that, of course, we don't want zombies on the lawn). Does that sound like something anyone outside the computer world would take seriously?
They can't see it, they can't abstract it out to anything that makes sense in their minds, they don't know how it would happen, it sounds really stupid, so you're the crazy person, and they can go back to cheerfully installing smiley packs. End of story. Unless there's some way to explain it that doesn't bore them, test their attention spans, or make them think we're the crazy people, they're going to ignore security concerns and just assume it's someone else's problem. Like those stupid smelly nerds. They don't have anything better to do, just staring at all that white on black text all day long.
Nope, Godwin's gotta get in line just like everyone else. Stupid legendary internet name. Why does he think he gets special treatment over the rest of us?
If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.
Y'know, I'll admit to my fair share of 16-bit zealotry back in The Day(tm), as well as my then and current rampant dirty hippy Nintendo fanboyism, but that line makes me glad I didn't grow up in your playground.
Slashdot Mirror
It was cool back in the day, but you can't simply hold onto some technologies forever. Just because YOU want the world to stay still does not mean that it will.
The RIAA could learn something from you.
And we could learn something from what we're trying to tell the RIAA, is what the GP's saying.
Er... when did they stop making them? Metal Slug 7 was released last year, and as far as I know, it's the same Metal Sluggy action it's always been. Which is to say: Silly and fun.
Two, actually. There WAS a Game Boy Kid Icarus game way back in The Day(tm).
Doesn't make your point any less valid, o'course. And Pit WAS in Smash Bros. Brawl and all, so I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to have some sort of plan up their sleeves. I mean, so long as we don't have to flap a Wiimote and nunchuck to fly.
So... you're suggesting we kill RMS first so that he can spin his way out of his grave?
And make sure we bury him the right side up so he helicopters out instead of drills his way through the planet?
Yeah, well, you can just bite my (apparently) shiny non-metallic ass!
All ICANN needs to do is give due notice to their customers and give them time to transfer.
That's the exact problem I'm seeing. Who are the non-techie customers going to turn to first? The company with the hip, subversive, almost-but-not-quite softcore pr0n ads aired during the Super Bowl, or this regulatory body they've never heard of who, seemingly out of the blue, just killed their website?
Given the amount of money involved in domain names, I'm guessing ICANN can safely take disciplinary actions without losing a dime in the process.
Until, that is, the bit about registrars losing accreditation means customers without a techie background (or without a techie department to handle such matters) suddenly lose service to their domain names. They go to the registrar to see what's up and, instead of being given a technical/political description that they'll instantly tl;dr (note previous assertion of "customers without a techie background"), they're given the quick summary: "ICANN killed your websites"*.
Then out come the letters to [INSERT LOCAL HIGH-RANKING POLITICAL FIGURES HERE], which would rekindle the arguments to disband/decentralize/de-Americanify ICANN that keep coming up, and, well, long story short, "safely" isn't the adverb I'd use to describe their ability to take disciplinary actions.
*: If they're sleazy enough to do the sorts of things listed in this article, I can trivially assume them to be sleazy enough to do something like that out of spite. Maybe I'm just too cynical.
It wouldn't be too difficult to pack a few hard drives or SSDs with a few thousand movies and episodes of TV shows.
Except, as soon as word got out of them flipping the first bit on the drive during the copy operation, the MPAA/RIAA/ABC/CBS/NBC/etc would be down their necks, complaining to their congresspeople about how much more important their anti-piracy efforts are over scientific discovery, cosmic exploration, and our astronauts not going insane during a nearly one-third year flight. And then they'd add a few extra trillion in to the "potential lost sales" figures they flaunt due to the Martians the astronauts would potentially be sharing the movies with who would then not buy the movies.
Then they'd bitch about making sure there's DRM on the spacecraft (jacking up the price and complexity) and make excuses that a 40-minute round-trip communication back to the central servers on earth every X minutes of playback is a perfectly reasonable compromise to make "sure" it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, and would try their damndest to delay the launch until they could convince the entire judicial branch of the United States government to quite cheerfully treat the astronauts like potential criminals.
I mean, other than THAT, it'd be a perfectly reasonable idea.
The argument's about the <video> tag in the HTML 5 spec, which would allow for movies without the need for Flash (or Silverlight or explicit plugins or etc). Technically, if the browser supported Ogg Theora, then there wouldn't be a problem, except they're arguing the quality's lower than h.264, so it's no go for them (not to mention Apple isn't supporting it in Quicktime and thus Safari and pretty well all of OS X due to, as per the summary's assertion, misguided patent concerns). And stop calling me Shirley.
They invented Blu-Ray to fully monetize the high-def video market, which includes all those things in the first sentence.
That is funny. I thought you needed customers to fully monetize something.
Oh, heavens no. That's so 1970s of you. As is trying to be proved every day nowadays, what you need are defendants, not customers. Far more lucrative.
I mean, it has to work, else these fancy MBA-toting executives wouldn't keep doing it, right?
I used "enthusiasts" specifically to avoid calling either side "fanboys", "zealots", or whatever other pejoratives the kids these days call 'em. But what I'm saying is if you're calling one of them "fanboys" or what have you, you have to call the other side that, too, since they're pretty well the same in this case.
So, the ability to process JavaScript outside of a browser is somehow Google-specific?
Frankly, this was inevitable. If JavaScript is processed by a computer in one application, it can be processed by a computer in another application, and the latter may be more Evil(tm) than the former. So what if Google stops parsing JavaScript in their summaries? How hard is it for the spammers to get a parser of their own and not even touch Google's servers?
That's why I've never really trusted those munging hacks.
Number of owners who arent fanbois (C64 has more)
Given the iPhone does, believe it or not*, have some users who aren't hardcore Apple enthusiasts ("normal people"), and the C64, as it's been out of production for upwards of 20 years now and is therefore effectively entirely used by Commodore enthusiasts nowadays and not by "normal people", I'd say the iPhone wins that category.
If either instance of "enthusiasts" in that previous sentence is to be replaced with "fanboys" or "zealots" or similar, the other must be as well.
*: Yes, I know, the answer is you don't believe it, but too bad, reality rears its inconvenient head again.
Isn't resonant coupling what Wacom tablets use to both power and communicate with their styluses and pucks (kinda-sorta tablet mice)? I know it's not technically "charging" either of them, per se, but it IS powering them, and it's done by resonance coupling.
Strange, then, how in Team Fortress 2, the Heavy (Russian accent) isn't portrayed in the vodka-loving stereotype of other games. Granted, he IS portrayed as a large, slow, violent person homicidally protective of his minigun, but not so much on the vodka.
Of course, the Demoman (Scotsman) IS portrayed as quite the drinking man, so I guess Valve's not entirely innocent. Funny as hell, though. :-)
Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova.
Well, I'm glad to see celestial phenomena follow the metric system, at least. I propose we name this a kilonova and rename the supernova to a meganova.
And Futurama is animated so you're not limited by budgets and CGI.
I'm certain all the artists they have animating the show would be happy to hear that they're all working for free, since they're obviously not included in your budget plan.
And Futurama DOES use a lot of CGI effects (i.e. the New New York skyline shots). They're just not too obvious and they fit in with the hand-drawn stuff.
use reference counting != deterministic behavior
reference counting + any indirect circular reference == memory leak
That sounds pretty deterministic to me. Indirect circular reference == memory leak, all the time. You can count on that.
The fact is that firmware upgrades for older iPods are unlikely to be installed by users for some time.
iTunes manages iPod firmware updates, and quite visibly pops up an alert saying that the firmware needs updating when it does once the iPod is connected. One click and it's on its way to upgrading (if that; there may be an option to auto-upgrade, I don't have iTunes open in front of me). This isn't like a BIOS firmware upgrade that requires some manner of special trickery outside the normal course of your computing day. iPod firmware updates happen in the application used to manage and transfer data to the iPod, all fairly seamlessly, all during the normal workflow of using iTunes.
Factor that in with the other steps mentioned (iTMS refuses to work with old iTunes, new iTunes wants to upgrade firmware), and I'd put it at more like... say... a week for it to propagate. Two if they're really slow with it. The only people that wouldn't get the update are people not using iTunes or the iTMS and thus wouldn't care that their iPod(s) don't work with it (or pathologically stubborn people who firmly believe they can outwait Apple).
You generally don't have a direct list of memory in use; you usually have a list of variables in use (which in turn is a list of memory in use, indirectly) and how many references to each variable still exist "in the wild" (recursed; if something isn't accessible to the rest of the program, any references it holds are considered to be dead). THAT list is handled by the VM, and at that point, yes, programmers in that area just trust that the VM knows what it's doing in terms of GC.
Of course, that's just for a simplistic, maybe somewhat primitive GC. There's probably all sorts of whatchamahoozit algorithms and whatever else out there nowadays. I don't develop GCs, I just have a peripheral knowledge of how they work.
From a real-time/embedded standpoint, no, you wouldn't find it very useful at all. In fact, you'd find it horribly counter-productive, as you lose control of how memory is allocated in an environment where memory can be at a premium and the clock cycles needed for automatic garbage collection need to be rock-solid. But for general day-to-day programming on machines with cheap RAM and non-real-time kernels and processes, it removes a major source of unnecessary headaches from many programmers' heads.
The problem, in my opinion, is that people who don't seem to care about computer security are the sort of people who abstract a computer into real-world analogues and stick to that, hard. That is, they're the sort who've been taught how a computer works solely by comparing it to things they know outside the computer world (i.e. "your hard drive is like a big filing cabinet and you don't need to care past that", "email is just like getting letters, just over the internet!", "the media player is like a big jukebox with all your favorite songs!"). Anything that doesn't fit in their real-world analogue system is for those stupid smelly nerds who exist solely to fix your problems when they inevitably happen.
And that last part is where it starts to go wrong. Try explaining computer security to a non-techie. If you go from the technical end of what's happening, they'll get confused and ignore you. If you go from a real-world analogue method, you'll be inventing all sorts of fantastical explanations that, to a real-world person, sound patently absurd, the stuff of fantasies and science fiction for those stupid smelly nerds who exist solely to fix their problems when they inevitably happen.
For example, they'll think you're out of your mind when you tell them there's botnets trying to break into your computer(s) endlessly without rest, and they don't care who you are or how rich you are. Try explaining that in a real-world or sorta-real-world context: There's an army of zombies on your lawn, they feel no pain, they want to get into your house, they will never stop, your brains are as good as anyone else's, and unless you stay on the ball, they WILL get in and make you one of them (not to mention the fact that, of course, we don't want zombies on the lawn). Does that sound like something anyone outside the computer world would take seriously?
They can't see it, they can't abstract it out to anything that makes sense in their minds, they don't know how it would happen, it sounds really stupid, so you're the crazy person, and they can go back to cheerfully installing smiley packs. End of story. Unless there's some way to explain it that doesn't bore them, test their attention spans, or make them think we're the crazy people, they're going to ignore security concerns and just assume it's someone else's problem. Like those stupid smelly nerds. They don't have anything better to do, just staring at all that white on black text all day long.
Hockey is our national sport.
Actually, it's Lacrosse.
Frankly, the point still stands. Perhaps even better.
He's out there begging for guard rails on the highway while the rest of us are flying right over the highways in our spiffy flying cars.
...hey, lookie that, I just made a metaphor!
Nope, Godwin's gotta get in line just like everyone else. Stupid legendary internet name. Why does he think he gets special treatment over the rest of us?
If some kid on the playground said "Sega does what Nintendon't", you bashed his head in with a rock. It's just how it was.
Y'know, I'll admit to my fair share of 16-bit zealotry back in The Day(tm), as well as my then and current rampant dirty hippy Nintendo fanboyism, but that line makes me glad I didn't grow up in your playground.