Thats why I don't have much respect for programmers who completely disregard the performance of their design/software. If their software is part of a particular success story, then its bound to get used much more than it is when they initially design it, so why not design for that success story instead of something that only works right now? That's the difference between programmers and software engineers. Most programmers think they're software engineers, or worse, architects. (I've seen a lot of bad programmers.... call me jaded.)
There's also the well known issues with BD incompatibilities with players.
I'm sure that will be fixed in "the next version" but I've heard that one too many times to hop onto that train.
It's not so much that HD DVD supports fair use, but they at least paid lip service to it via managed copy. BD is just totally anti fair use. Last I read, even recording your own home video to BD is ineffective as it won't be playable on standalone BD players.
Sorry, that's just not the case. OO is just a formalization of what was already happening with good procedural programmers. OO is not fundamentally different that procedural programming-- it is a superset. "good" is the key word there. Yes, good procedural programmers will gravitate towards a programming style that tends towards modules, components, and well-defined interfaces that make the transition to OO much simpler.
Byte alignment and such are important for high performance programs. Most business programs really aren't as concerned with high performance as they are with maintainability and cost of maintainability over time. The first relates to how cheaply a business can hire code monkeys to support the codebase, and the second very often involves portability of your code from system to system, as systems become obsolete and no longer cost-effective to continue running on. The latter issue is why business programs generally don't care about byte alignment in their code, as that requires machine specific knowledge which generally has the unpleasant side effect of tying your code to that specific machine until you hire more expensive specialists to come back through and recode your app for the next set of hardware. That doesn't make business sense.
Note that there are business applications where performance is key, but most business applications do not have this concern.
Oh and the reason most Java core classes are final? The developers were too lazy to do the extra work to make them sub-class-able. An OO language where you can't sub-class the core classes? I think that says a lot about Java.
There's a reason for that. Take String for example. What would happen if someone subbed String and made toString() return the length, or changed hashcode() or equals() because they thought they they were smarter and could write more efficient code? (They very well might, but that's not the point here).
Then consider the ramifications as you add in dynamic class loading, extensive libraries, etc, that may themselves depend upon these classes to behave in an expected manner.
Lastly, nothing's preventing you from re-writing, say, String and using your own implementation in your own code.
I should also note that String specifically has optimizations in it that are unique compared to almost any other class in the JVM, at least prior to JDK5, when the concurrent utility classes were added.
And remember, everyone that bought an HD DVD player bought one to play HD DVD discs. So that's 1 million paying customers.
Take Blu-ray. The player sales have been dismal. The number I've seen quoted, 10M, is an inflated PS3 number as not that many PS3's have been sold. Combine that with the fact that less than 1 in 5 PS3 owners even know they have a BD player....
Either way, I'm in the HD DVD camp, and will stay there until HD DVD really is dead and BD players come down under the $200 level with a set of movies included and fair use supported. Otherwise - no thanks, I'll stick with DVDs.
Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.
As for your comment about corporate buyers and PC enthusiasts, you underestimate their effect. Corporate is where the bulk of MS's revenue comes from. And PC enthusiasts affect much more than their own purchases, as they're generally the "support tech" for their entire extended family and thus will be the ones asked whether someone should buy this "new fangled Vista computer". (The answer will be "no")
I have been a bit worried about an outdated skillset as lots of employers ask for lots of object oriented programming experience and I only occasionally use this. I think this would be my primary problem if I started looking for a new job. I also think it's a bit unfair as the skills are pretty transferrable - there's only a little new theory to learn and after that, good programming practices aren't hugely dependant on language used. You are very very very wrong. OO is an entirely different design/architectural approach than procedural code, and people that think like you are the primary reason there is so little good OO code out there. It's kind of like the difference in understanding required between algebra and calculus. At first, it seems easy, you follow the rules. Only later does true understanding of the meaning of what you're doing become clear. I've personally never heard of anyone getting OO right away. It's always "this is stupid", "why would I want to do that", and "this is so obtuse/inefficient/verbose". Then, one day when they need to change something in their code similar to a file stream converted to, say, an input stream from a socket, the light might come on why you have the "extras".
The theory's pretty simple, the practice is much more complicated.
You can't track some mythical average price overall. I'm talking about price for normal, popular titles. So I suppose the titles I bought, including Bourne Supremacy, Transformers, The Mummy, and others are not popular nor normal?
The LG BD/HD DVD drive was selling for $229 last month.
Irrelevant since I wasn't talking about last month. I was simply stating that was the new low price for PC Blu-Ray drives to point out costs were not as high as claimed. Actually, it is relevant. Your price was only $30 less than a combo drive that supported both formats a month ago. Granted, it was slightly more than 12% less expensive, but there certainly wasn't a huge price discrepancy then either. The problem with BD is stand alone players. That PC drive won't play any of the BD+ titles out there. That's the problem with BD, the BD on the packaging doesn't indicate with any reliability at all that the disc inside will play on your BD player.
You aren't keeping to BD/HD-DVD only yourself if you talk about "continued" screwing over. You're correct. BD screws people over with region control. HD DVD does not and therefore is the better choice. BD screws people over with no guarantees that a BD disc will play in a BD player. HD DVD guarantees that your HD DVD disc will play in an HD DVD player. Most BD players screw people over by not supporting DVDs. HD DVD players will play DVDs. BD doesn't require the supporting of managed copy. HD DVD does. BD requires encryption for your own content when recording to a BD disc. HD DVD does not.
Thanks for clearing that up, as we now can see that BD seriously screws consumers over while HD DVD does not.
Sorry, but I've been tracking Blu-Ray prices on Amazon for about a year and that's just plain wrong. Sure BOGO's have reduced costs on both discs but I'm talking MSRP *and* actual retail prices which were generally a few dollars lower. You're not alone in tracking. Actual retail prices in Nov/Dec of 2007 were around $24 for HD DVD (only) vs $29+ for BD disks.
A PC drive, and that price is MSRP!!! You obviously are not keeping up with CES. The LG BD/HD DVD drive was selling for $229 last month.
Do you honestly that that DVD (not HD-DVD) had *no* region controls? Read what I said again! We are talking Blu-Ray vs. DVD here as far as what consumers are willing to accept, since obviously DVD represents a baseline for mass acceptance. Let's keep it to HD DVD/BD and not obfuscate the discussion with DVD. My point was that BD continues the consumer screwing over, one facet of which is region control.
Both formats support the same audio codecs. But lacking the space, very few movie titles on HD-DVD include lossless codecs - Transformers being the most egregious example.
When you have more space to spare you can actually make use of all the standards your format supports. HD-DVD is an OK format for HD TV shows which are smaller, but it's not a great format to shoehorn whole movies into. It's actually an all right format for most movies, too, but not all. I wonder if a LOTR movie will fit onto even a 50GB BD disk?
Yes, ever so slightly. BUT, it costs more to manufacture
Since many millions more discs have been pressed in Blu-Ray (thanks to PS3 games) the production costs have dropped substantially. And the consumer only sees movie prices which have remained identical between the two formats. BD prices are generally $5-$10 more than their HD DVD counterparts. Only in the last 2-3 weeks have BD prices dropped on sale to HD DVD prices.
Sony just announced a $200 PC BD-ROM. $200 usually, on sale. So Sony's taking a $300 hit to compete? Note that almost all current BD players are $499, and sometimes $399 on sale. HDDVD players are usually MSRP at $299 and $199 on sale. HDDVD 1080p players MSRP are $399, and can be currently easily gotten for <$250 on sale.
Most titles do not use the region controls, and there are fewer regions than DVD had - which means greater, not lesser, consumer acceptance of the format on region bounds. How does no region control vs any region control = greater consumer acceptance for the latter? You're using double-speak now.
Not if you also want lossless audio, or have a longer movie with a lot of detail. Then you have to make sacrifices. You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well. A greater bit-depth for color requires more space. Both formats support the same audio codecs: TrueHD, whether Dolby or DTS.
This was a paid advertisement by the BD camp to offset the huge surge in HDDVD sales over XMas.
Disney has been rumored to start supporting HDDVD as well, so this might have been a step to halt that. WB was well paid for this announcement, yet oddly, no date has been set, just alluded to. Time will tell.
Personally, I hope HD DVD "wins" for the movie format, and BD for optical storage.
So can we stop using Sony as a reason to attack Blu-ray? No. It's simply the most effective attack against Bluray, since lots of people understand Sony==rootkit==bad.
Here's the real scoop: Bluray and HDDVD are equivalent from a consumer picture standpoint. There is no effective difference in the quality of the material presented to the consumer. Where they differ greatly is in consumer restrictions, with HDDVD having many fewer restrictions compared to Bluray, and also being far more stable than Bluray. I'm sure we've all heard the reports of the problems of BD/BD+ and playability on players? I wouldn't touch a BD player until there's a guarantee it will play all BD discs, without me having to do squat. Yes, I'm aware that HDDVD also "requires" updates, but so far, in 23 discs, not a single update has been required. BD encourages updates, HDDVD does not.
vs a Company who gives you a rootkit disguised as a OS (VISTA)?
Forgetting the fallacy of one stake holder behind both formats; it's like pontificating on weather you'll buy a Volkswagen or Mitsubishi based on what evils those two companies did in WWII. What's funny about that is that HD DVD players run Linux. I think MS's support for HD DVD is more about HD DVD not depending upon Java than anything else. (That makes MS/Gates sound more like Apple/Jobs...:)
It has a lot to do with DRM, or rather, the effects DRM cause on the system and the perceived lack of performance. You can read that latter statement as not meeting customer expectations, if you like, and from all accounts, BD does less to meet expectations than HDDVD with or without DRM.
DVDs even on a good player with a decent HDTV, are no match compared to a decent HD disc on te same HDTV.
The real issue here is that both HDDVD and BD produce the same picture for all practical purposes. Yes, one has more space, but if all the movie requires is 15-30GB, either format will do fine. Honestly, I don't like Sony. Here's a company who's tried to rootkit your system, and appears to have every intention of inforinging upon your fair use rights.
I'd rather go with the consortium on this one, not to mention that the collection of movies I received with the player more than paid for the player.
There's a group of people who are living with varying levels of that now. I can't say it's all bad either. Sure made certain aspects of school easier, while non-intuitively making later portions harder. (Something about study habits that were never developed...)
I personally like "the limited bucket theory", where you remember everything until the bucket overflows. Different people have different size buckets. There's also the quality of what's in the bucket.
Re:well, not effortlessly
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RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 1
Because there's a couple of pieces of the spec missing in MS's solution. Read this for a bit of background info on what multi-cast entails.
IIRC, MS fails to register, and works by flooding the network. The first part prevents utilizing multicast at the switch/router levels, thus limiting multicasting only to those machines on a single network segment. The second means you do not have any of the efficiencies of multicasting even on a LAN.
And I may not even have described all or the major flaws in how MS implemented it. 8+ years makes things fuzzy.
Re:well, not effortlessly
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 1
IIRC, multicast for windows only works on LANS. The windows stack can't route it. It's likewise been 7 years since I dealt with this issue on windows, so I freely admit I could be fuzzy about the fine details.
Re:well, not effortlessly
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 5, Informative
You know, if the only item I had to compare formats with was MS and applications trying to be MS, I might have come to your conclusion.
However, you should look to older and other standards. HTML - 4 versions and all of them work seamlessly together, although newer versions may not have the pizazz in older renderers. WordPerfect and WordStar, good examples of how file formats don't have to break backwards compatibility from what I recall.
As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)
Slashdot Mirror
What about someone that's a black belt? What happens to them these days?
And wouldn't that be the expected "unexpected"?
I'm so confused.
There's also the well known issues with BD incompatibilities with players.
I'm sure that will be fixed in "the next version" but I've heard that one too many times to hop onto that train.
It's not so much that HD DVD supports fair use, but they at least paid lip service to it via managed copy. BD is just totally anti fair use. Last I read, even recording your own home video to BD is ineffective as it won't be playable on standalone BD players.
Byte alignment and such are important for high performance programs. Most business programs really aren't as concerned with high performance as they are with maintainability and cost of maintainability over time. The first relates to how cheaply a business can hire code monkeys to support the codebase, and the second very often involves portability of your code from system to system, as systems become obsolete and no longer cost-effective to continue running on. The latter issue is why business programs generally don't care about byte alignment in their code, as that requires machine specific knowledge which generally has the unpleasant side effect of tying your code to that specific machine until you hire more expensive specialists to come back through and recode your app for the next set of hardware. That doesn't make business sense.
Note that there are business applications where performance is key, but most business applications do not have this concern.
Oh and the reason most Java core classes are final? The developers were too lazy to do the extra work to make them sub-class-able. An OO language where you can't sub-class the core classes? I think that says a lot about Java.
There's a reason for that. Take String for example. What would happen if someone subbed String and made toString() return the length, or changed hashcode() or equals() because they thought they they were smarter and could write more efficient code? (They very well might, but that's not the point here).Then consider the ramifications as you add in dynamic class loading, extensive libraries, etc, that may themselves depend upon these classes to behave in an expected manner.
Lastly, nothing's preventing you from re-writing, say, String and using your own implementation in your own code.
I should also note that String specifically has optimizations in it that are unique compared to almost any other class in the JVM, at least prior to JDK5, when the concurrent utility classes were added.
Warner got paid. It's as simple as that.
And remember, everyone that bought an HD DVD player bought one to play HD DVD discs. So that's 1 million paying customers.
Take Blu-ray. The player sales have been dismal. The number I've seen quoted, 10M, is an inflated PS3 number as not that many PS3's have been sold. Combine that with the fact that less than 1 in 5 PS3 owners even know they have a BD player....
Either way, I'm in the HD DVD camp, and will stay there until HD DVD really is dead and BD players come down under the $200 level with a set of movies included and fair use supported. Otherwise - no thanks, I'll stick with DVDs.
Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
It's extremely obvious you've not run Vista. You'll have better luck in supporting those gadgets with OSX or Linux, although the generally supported OS is still, of course, XP.As for your comment about corporate buyers and PC enthusiasts, you underestimate their effect. Corporate is where the bulk of MS's revenue comes from. And PC enthusiasts affect much more than their own purchases, as they're generally the "support tech" for their entire extended family and thus will be the ones asked whether someone should buy this "new fangled Vista computer". (The answer will be "no")
The theory's pretty simple, the practice is much more complicated.
Irrelevant since I wasn't talking about last month. I was simply stating that was the new low price for PC Blu-Ray drives to point out costs were not as high as claimed. Actually, it is relevant. Your price was only $30 less than a combo drive that supported both formats a month ago. Granted, it was slightly more than 12% less expensive, but there certainly wasn't a huge price discrepancy then either. The problem with BD is stand alone players. That PC drive won't play any of the BD+ titles out there. That's the problem with BD, the BD on the packaging doesn't indicate with any reliability at all that the disc inside will play on your BD player. You aren't keeping to BD/HD-DVD only yourself if you talk about "continued" screwing over. You're correct. BD screws people over with region control. HD DVD does not and therefore is the better choice. BD screws people over with no guarantees that a BD disc will play in a BD player. HD DVD guarantees that your HD DVD disc will play in an HD DVD player. Most BD players screw people over by not supporting DVDs. HD DVD players will play DVDs. BD doesn't require the supporting of managed copy. HD DVD does. BD requires encryption for your own content when recording to a BD disc. HD DVD does not.
Thanks for clearing that up, as we now can see that BD seriously screws consumers over while HD DVD does not.
When you have more space to spare you can actually make use of all the standards your format supports. HD-DVD is an OK format for HD TV shows which are smaller, but it's not a great format to shoehorn whole movies into. It's actually an all right format for most movies, too, but not all. I wonder if a LOTR movie will fit onto even a 50GB BD disk?
Since many millions more discs have been pressed in Blu-Ray (thanks to PS3 games) the production costs have dropped substantially. And the consumer only sees movie prices which have remained identical between the two formats. BD prices are generally $5-$10 more than their HD DVD counterparts. Only in the last 2-3 weeks have BD prices dropped on sale to HD DVD prices. Sony just announced a $200 PC BD-ROM. $200 usually, on sale. So Sony's taking a $300 hit to compete? Note that almost all current BD players are $499, and sometimes $399 on sale. HDDVD players are usually MSRP at $299 and $199 on sale. HDDVD 1080p players MSRP are $399, and can be currently easily gotten for <$250 on sale. Most titles do not use the region controls, and there are fewer regions than DVD had - which means greater, not lesser, consumer acceptance of the format on region bounds. How does no region control vs any region control = greater consumer acceptance for the latter? You're using double-speak now. Not if you also want lossless audio, or have a longer movie with a lot of detail. Then you have to make sacrifices. You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well. A greater bit-depth for color requires more space. Both formats support the same audio codecs: TrueHD, whether Dolby or DTS.
As for greater bit-depth I strongly suspect it'll be a while: "currently, studios don't distribute content in 10-bit color depth, though most filmmaking is done in 10-bit video"
This was a paid advertisement by the BD camp to offset the huge surge in HDDVD sales over XMas.
Disney has been rumored to start supporting HDDVD as well, so this might have been a step to halt that. WB was well paid for this announcement, yet oddly, no date has been set, just alluded to. Time will tell.
Personally, I hope HD DVD "wins" for the movie format, and BD for optical storage.
Here's the real scoop: Bluray and HDDVD are equivalent from a consumer picture standpoint. There is no effective difference in the quality of the material presented to the consumer. Where they differ greatly is in consumer restrictions, with HDDVD having many fewer restrictions compared to Bluray, and also being far more stable than Bluray. I'm sure we've all heard the reports of the problems of BD/BD+ and playability on players? I wouldn't touch a BD player until there's a guarantee it will play all BD discs, without me having to do squat. Yes, I'm aware that HDDVD also "requires" updates, but so far, in 23 discs, not a single update has been required. BD encourages updates, HDDVD does not.
Forgetting the fallacy of one stake holder behind both formats; it's like pontificating on weather you'll buy a Volkswagen or Mitsubishi based on what evils those two companies did in WWII. What's funny about that is that HD DVD players run Linux. I think MS's support for HD DVD is more about HD DVD not depending upon Java than anything else. (That makes MS/Gates sound more like Apple/Jobs...:)
It's been out on Mitsubishi since at least 2000.
It has a lot to do with DRM, or rather, the effects DRM cause on the system and the perceived lack of performance. You can read that latter statement as not meeting customer expectations, if you like, and from all accounts, BD does less to meet expectations than HDDVD with or without DRM.
DVDs even on a good player with a decent HDTV, are no match compared to a decent HD disc on te same HDTV.
The real issue here is that both HDDVD and BD produce the same picture for all practical purposes. Yes, one has more space, but if all the movie requires is 15-30GB, either format will do fine. Honestly, I don't like Sony. Here's a company who's tried to rootkit your system, and appears to have every intention of inforinging upon your fair use rights.
I'd rather go with the consortium on this one, not to mention that the collection of movies I received with the player more than paid for the player.
Look at MythTV...
There's my entertainment.
You've got to be kidding me!
Not that it matters, I've got Gutsy Gibbon ready to go on my new 4GB system.
There's a group of people who are living with varying levels of that now. I can't say it's all bad either. Sure made certain aspects of school easier, while non-intuitively making later portions harder. (Something about study habits that were never developed...)
I personally like "the limited bucket theory", where you remember everything until the bucket overflows. Different people have different size buckets. There's also the quality of what's in the bucket.
Because there's a couple of pieces of the spec missing in MS's solution. Read this for a bit of background info on what multi-cast entails.
IIRC, MS fails to register, and works by flooding the network. The first part prevents utilizing multicast at the switch/router levels, thus limiting multicasting only to those machines on a single network segment. The second means you do not have any of the efficiencies of multicasting even on a LAN.
And I may not even have described all or the major flaws in how MS implemented it. 8+ years makes things fuzzy.
IIRC, multicast for windows only works on LANS. The windows stack can't route it. It's likewise been 7 years since I dealt with this issue on windows, so I freely admit I could be fuzzy about the fine details.
You know, if the only item I had to compare formats with was MS and applications trying to be MS, I might have come to your conclusion.
However, you should look to older and other standards. HTML - 4 versions and all of them work seamlessly together, although newer versions may not have the pizazz in older renderers. WordPerfect and WordStar, good examples of how file formats don't have to break backwards compatibility from what I recall.
As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)
I can see Botox becoming just another minor item in the terrorist toolkit, and thus an indication of "potential terrorist activity".
I wonder how celebrities are going to handle the extra scrutiny?