I've never seen this behavior on the desktop or any of my laptops. Your bad, I'm afraid.
--
And yes, for the grammar police, I meant "Your bad," not "You're bad," which has a completely different meaning. To the slang patrol - yeah, its a colloquialism. My bad.
PS2 outputs 480p. And 480p has nothing to do with widescreen. You can have 4:3 480i, 4:3 480p, 16:9 480i and 16:9 480p.
Yup. But at the time PS2 had almost no widescreen games, whereas everything I wanted on the XBOX supported widescreen. Likewise, I didn't see anything to allow the PS2 to push 480p - at least at the time I bought my XBOX.
Any game can be viewed in widescreen, although some are designed to look right in 16:9, some aren't. This is true on Xbox and PS2. Thus many of your games are highly distorted.
Nope, they all look fine. And yes, I can tell the difference.
But why the !@#*@ are you arguing and trying to tell me what my games look like on my tv? More to the point, why did I just waste my time replying?
Actually, its been around since the 3.0 days IIRC. Maybe even before then. And MSFT very rarely removes any API call, since they have an exceptional (no joke here) track record of backwards compatibility. After all, if they pulled a function that caused a major - or even a minor - product to stop working, even if that product hadn't been certified against their new OS version, you just know that they'd take the blame when the users upgraded Windows versions.
Quick question though: when I walk down the street, I see people with widescreen TVs in their front rooms. However, no one ever seems to ever be watching anything widescreen - instead they are usually watching 4x3 formatted TV in 'Fatvision' (i.e. stretched to fill the width, instead of 'vertical letterbox'). I suppose it brings new meaning to "TV makes people look fat". Do you watch 4x3 TV in Stretchvision or vertical letterbox? If you watch it in Stretchvision, WHY!?
I don't watch much TV, but I enjoy movies (65" Widescreen). I only buy Anamorphic discs (hard to find non- these days), so no issues there. When I watch SDTV, I view it in standard mode, with the vertical letterboxing on the sides. Most of the TV that I watch these days is HD though, which fills the screen just fine since it uses the 16x9 format as well. I don't play many videogames, but I got an XBOX instead of a PS2 simply because outputs widescreen 480p - again, the full view area is used with no distortion.
Funny, no where in the doc for GetTickCount() does it say it is deprecated and not to use it. The only thing it does say is "If you need a higher resolution timer, use a multimedia timer or a high-resolution timer." I don't know what the program needs since I did not write it nor have I seen the code. Maybe they didn't need a high-res timer and wanted a tick count for how long the system has been up? I don't think that is too much to ask from on OS.
Let me simply quote from that very same webpage. Highlighting mine:
The elapsed time is stored as a DWORD value. Therefore,
the time will wrap around to zero if the system is run continuously for 49.7 days.
If you need a higher resolution timer, use a multimedia timer or a high-resolution timer.
To obtain the time elapsed since the computer was started, retrieve the System Up Time counter in the performance data in the registry key HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA. The value returned is an 8-byte value. For more information, see Performance Monitoring.
If GetTickCount is "deprecated" as you state, why in the world is MS's own programmers using it in rpcss.exe?
Because they're lazy? And its still there? And its not deprecated in the Java @deprecated sense, just no longer considered to be an acceptable way of doing those kind of operations? As referenced in the docs?
What would you have them do instead - break the API because some people misuse it?
Wow, nothing like being an MS apologist. MS had this same logic flaw in Win95 and they did it again in their WinNT based systems. They stuck the system time in milliseconds in a 32-bit int. It basically gives about 49.7 days. What a coincedence. This app was probably relying on the system timer when MS's logic flaw caused the issues.
Yeah, except that that call had been deprecated by Microsoft for years. Try GetSystemTimeAsFileTime for a change, which has been available since the Windows 95 days.
Or is it now Microsoft's fault that someone called a method that they had been told not to call for the past decade? Hmm. In your world, hey, maybe it is. From the source...
The GetTickCount function retrieves the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the system was started. It is limited to the resolution of the system timer.... The elapsed time is stored as a DWORD value. Therefore, the time will wrap around to zero if the system is run continuously for 49.7 days.
It's M$'s fault. Why do I hate to say it? Because it'll just be seen as more anti-MS crap from another/.er.
All I have to say is if the shoe fits, wear it.
In this individual case a PHB made a decision to scrap the old, stable OS to a new, known-to-be-unstable OS. That screams PHB
Yeah, it would be. Except that the OS kept running along just fine, and one of the FAA's applications cratered. Which means... er... that its not "M$" fault. It's somebody else's fault and Microsoft is blameless in this matter. But apart from that minor detail, I agree with your post entirely.
Used to be that when you asked "funny" questions, you got "funny" answers. In fact, you can read the old result to this question here. So - they may have confused more potent technology with "growing up" in a way that Google, thankfully, has yet to do.
Out of curiosity, what issues do you have with Snopes, et al? I've found them to be pedestrian, but fairly reasonable in their findings for the most part...
So presumably they need to read your "ham" too, that's slightly worrying.
Nah, nah, this is covered in the TOS:
eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
Except that changing Hans' character to remove the ambiguity also removes the relief and excitment when Han and Chewbacca return at the last minute to cover Luke's back in the run on the Death Star
Er, you forgot the most important character in that scene - the Falcon. Do you think that anyone would have cared if he'd shown up in an X-Wing or some stupid stunt like that? God, I loved that ship.
Dunno. All EULA'a I came across in proprietary software state that the vendor bears no responsibility for the usefullness, stability and security of the software. The attitude follows.
And that's why, to this day, many people (myself included) don't see Microsoft as a real player in the "Enterprise" market. Becuase the folk at IBM and Sun, et al, don't have that attitude. Sure, you may have to go through a couple of levels of support, but you can pretty effectively reach someone who cares, and who can help you out. Really.
My uncle tells the funniest stories. Since then he's sold baby formula to Africa, used cars, and now he's in Kuwait organizing shipping to Iraq once again.
Hmm. He's "sold baby formula to Africa"? Might make an interesting story (doubtful, but hey, you never know). He's "in Kuwait organizing shipping"? That sounds pretty interesting, actually, but I'm a bit of a logistics geek. He's "used cars"? Well, by golly, so have I! I guess I've got some funny stories about being on the road myself...
The maintenance people prefer to use older but more stable versions to the point of living without nifty features for months until they are stable because alot (but by no means all) OSS software is regression tested on the users.
And that's the world that I come from. I've worked with IBM to get AIX patches created that pull bugs fixed on "current" versions back to older versions. I can't tell you how many times I've done it with database vendors - Oracle, Informix, etc. While these aren't fully vetted fixes, they've still gone through far more vigorous testing than doing the same thing with OSS - taking a specific patch and applying the code to an older version, for example.
You know what else? I'm happy to pay for those services. There's no way that I could know all of the ramifications of changing a few lines of code in the middle of a database engine without making that - knowing the database code - my full time job. And it isn't. Not that it might not be a fun way to spend my time, but hey, I've got other fun and profitable things to do with it instead.
For my personal stuff? Absolutely. Let me apply random patches. Update to new versions sight-unseen. If it doesn't work, I can roll back or just forge on ahead, figure it out, and send in new patches. Great. For my production environments, where downtime can be measured in thousands of dollars a minute? Not a chance in hell I take that risk.
My colleagues rebuttal was that such people would not want the type of lifestyle that comes along with being El Presidente, thus would never even enter themselves in the running.
And that's the way it was at first. The reason that you don't have term limits, and that the jobs of President, Congresscritter, et cetera pay quite well is that when they were created, nobody really expected people to want to stay in them forever. It was a challenge to get good, qualified candidates.
If getting drunk is your only reason for drinking, why not just get some grain alchohol in a 2L plastic bottle and drink that?
Re:Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I'm not mistaken, he talked about one of the safe's passwords being set to "e". He got the idea because he found a post-it with the 3.1415... written on it in the secretary's desk. That wasn't it, but he judged that the owner of the safe was exactly the kind of person to use that type of number - and tried the other obvious one. Which did the trick.
Its funny - I haven't really tried open office at all lately, since I use Linux exclusively for server tasks (and we have full MSFT licenses), but this particular snippet caught my eye:
Yoper's speed is evident mostly in everyday functions, such a opening a OpenOffice document. I have always found OpenOffice.org to open painfully slowly, but the start time in Yoper was impressive. In most systems it can take 15-20 seconds to start the massive OpenOffice, Yoper manages this in about 10 (on my machine, these are not official numbers from OpenOffice, just mine).
His machine is a P4/1.8ghz/512mb box. Is it really noteworthy when an office suite opens in <sarcasm>about 10 seconds</sarcasm%gt; on a machine of that class? Really? Wow. That's... pretty sad.
Other than that, the experience looked promising. Does anyone know if it works as well with apt as Debian does? Or as poorly?
I also did a google search and it appears that the overwhelming recommondation is either gramps (supported) or genes (which is alpha). So for the Debian user they would choose gramps. Similarly redhat and mandrake support gramps and I find.rpms with no problem.
How is this any worse
Of course, you realize that by the same logic Windows users should never install any web browser but IE (hey, it comes in their distribution and can be automatically updated). Same with any media player that's not WMP. After all, who cares what software you want to run - if a similar package is available in the distribution, that's what you should use, right?
Its funny - I've been a UNIX user since '91, and a Linux user for about 10 years. Heck, I ran a FreeBSD based ISP back in 95/6 - modded all the software myself, etc. So I like to think that I'm at least slightly more informed than the average computer-user. I didn't know either of the commands parprouted or brctl off the top of my head. Yet I've shared a connection on my XP laptop before without even thinking about it - and by exploring, certainly without having explicitly gone to learn about it.
I don't know if its on there - maybe you checked, maybe you didn't - but you should always check out http://www.sunfreeware.com/ for stuff like this. Saved my ass when I had a Sparc to take care of in my copious spare time. Just an idea.
I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap
I'm honestly confused here. You're not a couch potato, but you'd rather watch crap on the TV at 2am than turn it off and do something else?
Or another example: "[How many] stars [are there] in the galaxy?" Hmmm... what galaxy? I don't know....A lot? More than I'd ever get around to counting? Part of the problem here is that the number is too big, and I'm not sure if people can really *experience* the difference between 10 billion and 100 billion. I mean, geeze, astronomers don't count the number of stars in a galaxy- all we have are mathematical estimates based on god-knows-what. So this isn't a question of estimating, it's a question of how learned you are about astro-physics.
So give yourself leeway. Say, 100 billion, plus or minus an order of magnitude. One problem is that people when presented with something like that, will lock themselves in way too closely, saying, "Oh, I don't know - 85-90 billion," rather than accepting that they don't know what it is and stating their (ranged) estimate accordingly.
That's cool - I've pretty much always done that, much to the annoyance of my wife when I tried to explain it to her at some point, but I never realized that it was considered legitimate by anyone. Same works for multiplying as well:
( x * 78 ) ( x * 80 ) - ( 2 x ) [ since 2x is easy ] ( x * 100 ) - ( 2 x * 10 ) - ( 2 x )
Efficient? Probably not for a computer, but its fast for humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never seen this behavior on the desktop or any of my laptops. Your bad, I'm afraid.
--
And yes, for the grammar police, I meant "Your bad," not "You're bad," which has a completely different meaning. To the slang patrol - yeah, its a colloquialism. My bad.
PS2 outputs 480p. And 480p has nothing to do with widescreen. You can have 4:3 480i, 4:3 480p, 16:9 480i and 16:9 480p.
Yup. But at the time PS2 had almost no widescreen games, whereas everything I wanted on the XBOX supported widescreen. Likewise, I didn't see anything to allow the PS2 to push 480p - at least at the time I bought my XBOX.
Any game can be viewed in widescreen, although some are designed to look right in 16:9, some aren't. This is true on Xbox and PS2. Thus many of your games are highly distorted.
Nope, they all look fine. And yes, I can tell the difference.
But why the !@#*@ are you arguing and trying to tell me what my games look like on my tv? More to the point, why did I just waste my time replying?
[sigh]
Actually, its been around since the 3.0 days IIRC. Maybe even before then. And MSFT very rarely removes any API call, since they have an exceptional (no joke here) track record of backwards compatibility. After all, if they pulled a function that caused a major - or even a minor - product to stop working, even if that product hadn't been certified against their new OS version, you just know that they'd take the blame when the users upgraded Windows versions.
Quick question though: when I walk down the street, I see people with widescreen TVs in their front rooms. However, no one ever seems to ever be watching anything widescreen - instead they are usually watching 4x3 formatted TV in 'Fatvision' (i.e. stretched to fill the width, instead of 'vertical letterbox'). I suppose it brings new meaning to "TV makes people look fat". Do you watch 4x3 TV in Stretchvision or vertical letterbox? If you watch it in Stretchvision, WHY!?
I don't watch much TV, but I enjoy movies (65" Widescreen). I only buy Anamorphic discs (hard to find non- these days), so no issues there. When I watch SDTV, I view it in standard mode, with the vertical letterboxing on the sides. Most of the TV that I watch these days is HD though, which fills the screen just fine since it uses the 16x9 format as well. I don't play many videogames, but I got an XBOX instead of a PS2 simply because outputs widescreen 480p - again, the full view area is used with no distortion.
Let me simply quote from that very same webpage. Highlighting mine:
If GetTickCount is "deprecated" as you state, why in the world is MS's own programmers using it in rpcss.exe?
Because they're lazy? And its still there? And its not deprecated in the Java @deprecated sense, just no longer considered to be an acceptable way of doing those kind of operations? As referenced in the docs?
What would you have them do instead - break the API because some people misuse it?
Yeah, except that that call had been deprecated by Microsoft for years. Try GetSystemTimeAsFileTime for a change, which has been available since the Windows 95 days.
Or is it now Microsoft's fault that someone called a method that they had been told not to call for the past decade? Hmm. In your world, hey, maybe it is. From the source...
Yeah, evil Microsoft.
But I'm going to.
/.er.
It's M$'s fault. Why do I hate to say it? Because it'll just be seen as more anti-MS crap from another
All I have to say is if the shoe fits, wear it.
In this individual case a PHB made a decision to scrap the old, stable OS to a new, known-to-be-unstable OS. That screams PHB
Yeah, it would be. Except that the OS kept running along just fine, and one of the FAA's applications cratered. Which means... er... that its not "M$" fault. It's somebody else's fault and Microsoft is blameless in this matter. But apart from that minor detail, I agree with your post entirely.
Used to be that when you asked "funny" questions, you got "funny" answers. In fact, you can read the old result to this question here. So - they may have confused more potent technology with "growing up" in a way that Google, thankfully, has yet to do.
Out of curiosity, what issues do you have with Snopes, et al? I've found them to be pedestrian, but fairly reasonable in their findings for the most part...
He's a democrat - and he's the treasurer of the DNC - and he's gay. All told, some interesting stories.
Check it out at http://andrewtobias.com/
So presumably they need to read your "ham" too, that's slightly worrying.
Nah, nah, this is covered in the TOS:
eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
See? Right there in black and white.
Except that changing Hans' character to remove the ambiguity also removes the relief and excitment when Han and Chewbacca return at the last minute to cover Luke's back in the run on the Death Star
Er, you forgot the most important character in that scene - the Falcon. Do you think that anyone would have cared if he'd shown up in an X-Wing or some stupid stunt like that? God, I loved that ship.
Dunno. All EULA'a I came across in proprietary software state that the vendor bears no responsibility for the usefullness, stability and security of the software. The attitude follows.
And that's why, to this day, many people (myself included) don't see Microsoft as a real player in the "Enterprise" market. Becuase the folk at IBM and Sun, et al, don't have that attitude. Sure, you may have to go through a couple of levels of support, but you can pretty effectively reach someone who cares, and who can help you out. Really.
My uncle tells the funniest stories. Since then he's sold baby formula to Africa, used cars, and now he's in Kuwait organizing shipping to Iraq once again.
Hmm. He's "sold baby formula to Africa"? Might make an interesting story (doubtful, but hey, you never know). He's "in Kuwait organizing shipping"? That sounds pretty interesting, actually, but I'm a bit of a logistics geek. He's "used cars"? Well, by golly, so have I! I guess I've got some funny stories about being on the road myself...
The maintenance people prefer to use older but more stable versions to the point of living without nifty features for months until they are stable because alot (but by no means all) OSS software is regression tested on the users.
And that's the world that I come from. I've worked with IBM to get AIX patches created that pull bugs fixed on "current" versions back to older versions. I can't tell you how many times I've done it with database vendors - Oracle, Informix, etc. While these aren't fully vetted fixes, they've still gone through far more vigorous testing than doing the same thing with OSS - taking a specific patch and applying the code to an older version, for example.
You know what else? I'm happy to pay for those services. There's no way that I could know all of the ramifications of changing a few lines of code in the middle of a database engine without making that - knowing the database code - my full time job. And it isn't. Not that it might not be a fun way to spend my time, but hey, I've got other fun and profitable things to do with it instead.
For my personal stuff? Absolutely. Let me apply random patches. Update to new versions sight-unseen. If it doesn't work, I can roll back or just forge on ahead, figure it out, and send in new patches. Great. For my production environments, where downtime can be measured in thousands of dollars a minute? Not a chance in hell I take that risk.
My colleagues rebuttal was that such people would not want the type of lifestyle that comes along with being El Presidente, thus would never even enter themselves in the running.
And that's the way it was at first. The reason that you don't have term limits, and that the jobs of President, Congresscritter, et cetera pay quite well is that when they were created, nobody really expected people to want to stay in them forever. It was a challenge to get good, qualified candidates.
If getting drunk is your only reason for drinking, why not just get some grain alchohol in a 2L plastic bottle and drink that?
If I'm not mistaken, he talked about one of the safe's passwords being set to "e". He got the idea because he found a post-it with the 3.1415... written on it in the secretary's desk. That wasn't it, but he judged that the owner of the safe was exactly the kind of person to use that type of number - and tried the other obvious one. Which did the trick.
Its funny - I haven't really tried open office at all lately, since I use Linux exclusively for server tasks (and we have full MSFT licenses), but this particular snippet caught my eye:
... pretty sad.
Yoper's speed is evident mostly in everyday functions, such a opening a OpenOffice document. I have always found OpenOffice.org to open painfully slowly, but the start time in Yoper was impressive. In most systems it can take 15-20 seconds to start the massive OpenOffice, Yoper manages this in about 10 (on my machine, these are not official numbers from OpenOffice, just mine).
His machine is a P4/1.8ghz/512mb box. Is it really noteworthy when an office suite opens in <sarcasm>about 10 seconds</sarcasm%gt; on a machine of that class? Really? Wow. That's
Other than that, the experience looked promising. Does anyone know if it works as well with apt as Debian does? Or as poorly?
I also did a google search and it appears that the overwhelming recommondation is either gramps (supported) or genes (which is alpha). So for the Debian user they would choose gramps. Similarly redhat and mandrake support gramps and I find .rpms with no problem.
How is this any worse
Of course, you realize that by the same logic Windows users should never install any web browser but IE (hey, it comes in their distribution and can be automatically updated). Same with any media player that's not WMP. After all, who cares what software you want to run - if a similar package is available in the distribution, that's what you should use, right?
Sheesh.
Its funny - I've been a UNIX user since '91, and a Linux user for about 10 years. Heck, I ran a FreeBSD based ISP back in 95/6 - modded all the software myself, etc. So I like to think that I'm at least slightly more informed than the average computer-user. I didn't know either of the commands parprouted or brctl off the top of my head. Yet I've shared a connection on my XP laptop before without even thinking about it - and by exploring, certainly without having explicitly gone to learn about it.
I don't know if its on there - maybe you checked, maybe you didn't - but you should always check out http://www.sunfreeware.com/ for stuff like this. Saved my ass when I had a Sparc to take care of in my copious spare time. Just an idea.
I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap
I'm honestly confused here. You're not a couch potato, but you'd rather watch crap on the TV at 2am than turn it off and do something else?
Or another example: "[How many] stars [are there] in the galaxy?" Hmmm... what galaxy? I don't know....A lot? More than I'd ever get around to counting? Part of the problem here is that the number is too big, and I'm not sure if people can really *experience* the difference between 10 billion and 100 billion. I mean, geeze, astronomers don't count the number of stars in a galaxy- all we have are mathematical estimates based on god-knows-what. So this isn't a question of estimating, it's a question of how learned you are about astro-physics.
So give yourself leeway. Say, 100 billion, plus or minus an order of magnitude. One problem is that people when presented with something like that, will lock themselves in way too closely, saying, "Oh, I don't know - 85-90 billion," rather than accepting that they don't know what it is and stating their (ranged) estimate accordingly.
That's cool - I've pretty much always done that, much to the annoyance of my wife when I tried to explain it to her at some point, but I never realized that it was considered legitimate by anyone. Same works for multiplying as well:
( x * 78 )
( x * 80 ) - ( 2 x ) [ since 2x is easy ]
( x * 100 ) - ( 2 x * 10 ) - ( 2 x )
Efficient? Probably not for a computer, but its fast for humans.