OK, question... was there any provision for allowing open-source thirdparty apps that used the Zodiac's API and hardware extensions to be promiscuously signed and made available for free at no cost to anyone who wanted to download them? Or, at best, would the developer have been forced to eat some licensing and/or service fee for his altruism? Or worse, be forced to pay Tapwave royalties for each and every download that someone needed to have signed for his machine?
Put another way, was there an option for a developer writing a Zodiac-specific app to do the equivilent of generating an anonymous J2SE code-signing cert and using it to sign apps for free use by anyone willing to accept the validity of the cert? Or would nothing short of a digital signature from a cert traceable all the way back to Tapwave, with some kind of metered licensing fees, have been good enough?
If you don't believe me, go driving across Miami at 6 or 7 pm the last Friday of DST, and compare it to the experience of driving at the same time the first Monday of standard time... or the next Friday or two (just to compare apples to apples).
In the winter, I rarely go anywhere after work... it takes another half hour to get home, and I'm too burned out from the traffic to even CONTEMPLATE making a non life-or-death trip across town at 8pm.
I wish Florida would join (possibly) Maine and go to year-round Atlantic Standard Time. Even on the darkest morning in December, we'd still have daylight by 8:30... and it would make evening traffic several orders of magnitude better in the winter.
Glad you brought up the hurricanes. I'm in Coral Gables, and we lost EVERY SINGLE OTA digital station except WCIX (whose transmitter is somewhere way down south instead of near the Broward county line to the north) during the storms. It was wacky... we only lost Voom's satellite signal during the worst of the downpours (the 24" dish helped a lot), but the ATSC signals for channels 4, 7, and 10 were "gone with the wind".
Now, it's quite possible that the three stations just shut down their HDTV transmitters altogether to conserve power (if they were running on generators), were running at reduced power that was adequate under normal conditions, but was overwhelmed by the rain, or lost some part of their HDTV transmission sysem (uplink, exciter, antenna, etc)... but it definitely didn't inspire my confidence in 8VSB as an emergency broadcast standard. I suspect NTSC won't finally go away once and for all until a method for modulating a "robust" lower-bitrate signal into the 8VSB broadcast signal gets grafted on to the ATSC standard that can be received by portable and moving receivers with grossly inadequate antennas under adverse reception conditions.
Personally, I don't think Congress should pull the metaphorical plug on Analog as of some arbitrary date. Instead, they should make the broadcasters pick the frequency range they want to keep for their digital channel (the one they're using now, or their legacy channel), then put the borrowed channels up for auction as scheduled. If the local broadcasters think NTSC OTA viewers are sufficiently lucrative, they can bid in the auction for the frequencies like everyone else, and keep broadcasting their channel in NTSC if they win the auction. In all likelihood, those local broadcasters will then form an alliance with each other to collectively subsidize the purchase of ATSC-to-NTSC-channel-3 converter boxes, and make them available to the poor FAR more cost-effectively than the government EVER could.
Dear god, why is it that I never get mod points when I actually WANT to use them:-(
I can't even begin to describe the cultural gulf between programmers at my company who spent their teenage years wedging ML apps into their C-64's cassette buffer, or hacking with copper display lists on their Amiga... and those whose first experience with programming was Visual Basic. My VB-era co-workers can't even fathom how an afternoon of assembly language could possibly be fun.
I feel sorry for them... they never really got to experience the magic summer vacation afternoons of literally discovering new cool things you could do with hardware, like accidentally discovering PCM digital audio by writing a program to rapidly switch the c64's volume between 0 and 15 and getting a tone as a result & wondering whether you could actually do something cool with the effect... or expanding the computer's color range by stuffing new values into the color registers during scanline retraces.
Sigh. Was middle school and the c64/atari 800 era REALLY 20 years ago? I almost feel like taking a road trip to my parents' house, digging my old c64's box out of the closet, and seeing whether the old tapes I saved my summer experiments on way back in '85 are still readable...
I hope this doesn't end up striking the FCC's authority to let people tell their condo/homeowner associations to fsck off when they try to ban the installation of satellite dishes. I'd hate to see a GOOD rule that's genuinely in the interest of normal people get shot down as collateral damage. It'd suck to (for now, at least) retain the right to buy recording devices unhampered by DRM, but have the right to receive it taken away by nazi HOAs...
But that's NOT necessarily true. Monivision makes an entire line of VERY nice CRT-based TVs that can natively sync to both 1280i60 AND 720p60 and lack both screen door and rainbows.
Likewise, 3-chip DLPs are rainbow-free.
Thank god for the Chinese. At least THEY'RE willing to give us (American consumers) all the stuff our own companies won't -- TVs that can natively do BOTH 720p60 and 1080i60 (Monivision), DRM-free DVD-based media with 720p60 resolution (HVD and EVD), and more. And people still wonder why they're going to be the world's next superpower...
CRT manufacturers don't want to go multisync because it would raise the manufacturing cost of a $2,000 TV by a whopping $10 or so by requiring a second coil around the yoke and a few more components on the PC board.
They're also afraid that Joe Sixpack will object to having the screen black out briefly as the TV switches between 720p and 1080i (the way a computer multisync monitor does when you switch between a full-screen command prompt and windows). The REAL solution would be to upgrade the TV's firmware to leave the TV in one mode when surfing, then do the grand mode switch when the user hits a button on the remote that means, "I've found the channel I want and I plan to stay here a while. Switch modes if necessary so I can have the best picture quality possible" (J6p himself won't bother reading the manual, and will have no clue what the button does, so he'll never encounter mode-switching anyway).
Bzzzzzt. Wrong. Rainbowing and screen door effects have NOTHING to do with 720p. They're DLP and LCD artifacts.
Wait, it gets better. Most so-called 1080i TVs can't even resolve 1280 horizontal pixels, let alone 1920. Do the math. Divide the screen width by the dot pitch, factor in the allowable misconvergence, and be horrified to discover that at 1920 pixels across, something like 5 pixels are sharing every pair of phosphor triads on the screen...
What's REALLY criminal is the fact that CRT-based RPTVs don't support BOTH 1080i and 720p natively, and that it's even necessary to hack up the signal in the first place. I mean, for god's sake, if a $50 loss-leader P.O.S. multisync monitor from WalMart can sync up to any arbitrary scanrate within its bandwidth, a $2,000+ TV should too.
Actually, I think the HD modes should have been something like the following:
480p60 (for legacy NTSC and DVD; 640x480@4:3 square, 720 x 480 @ 16:9 rectangular)
480p24 (for film stored on compact media; 720 x 480 16:9 aspect ratio)
720p24 (film source material)
720p48 (for "normal" TV)
720p96 (mainly for cable & optical media where bandwidth is negotiable)
1080p24 (film source material)
1080p48 (mainly for cable & optical media where bandwidth is negotiable)
1080p96 (not practical now, but defined for use someday)
Legacy material would just be broadcast at 480p60 (ideally, after Faroudja-grade deinterlacing with the best hardware the station could afford).
Why 48hz?
fast enough for most content
slow enough to keep bandwidth reasonable
whole multiple of film rate
close enough to 50hz to allow PAL content to be slightly slowed down and transcoded in realtime (and to encourage its adoption by Europe & elsewhere too)
Why 96hz?
whole number multiple of film rate
whole number multiple of 48 to prevent judder and provide clean downgrade path for economy TVs (they can just ignore every other frame and run at 48hz)
Why NOT 72hz?
complicates display. To avoid judder, a display would have to run at 144hz (3 x 48hz, 2 x 72hz).
96hz is no big deal for a CRT (hell, even the cheapest multisync monitor can do it). 144hz is another story entirely.
Why NOT 60hz?
60 doesn't divide nicely into 24. Lurching 3/2 pulldown is an abomination. Support it for legacy @ 640 x 480, but going forward, let it die a proper death and have its burial.
Why NOT 50hz?
not a whole multiple of anything resembling 24, and close enough to 48 to kludge. I'd expect European HDTVs to probably go the extra mile and have a little more flexibility to display real 50hz since most of THEIR legacy content would be 50hz, just like I'd expect American HDTVs to go to the extra trouble of explicitly supporting 60hz at 640x480.
What's so holy about 24?
Film. Lots of it, most of it being substantially more valuable per minute than most legacy video.
Wouldn't 24 and 48hz flicker?
Of course not. CRTs would just buffer and show each frame 4 or 2 times in a row at 96hz. Inherently progressive displays would be timed to 96 (ideally), 48 (low-end), or maybe 24 (tiny portable devices) update cycles per second.
Why bother with 720p96 and (god forbid) 1080p96?
Why NOT? It's not like it's all that hard to let the TV just ignore every other frame as a stopgap measure for the next 40 years, and at least it WILL be defined as a valid mode when the happy day comes that content delivery at that resolution and frame rate IS viable.
Why aren't there any interlaced modes?
Interlacing was invented by satan himself. Seriously, it has no place in modern television. It was a nasty kludge 70 years ago, and it's just stupid to use today. It severely limits your ability to scale images up and down, and hardware capable of doing a good job with non-film-source interlaced material is rare & expensive. If you look at broadcast TV and everything that makes it expensive and complicated, nearly all of the reasons are a direct result of interlacing.
For all the talk about it, I don't think I've ever actually known anyone to do the classic accidental rm -Rf / as root
OK, maybe it wasn't QUITE that bad... but way back in '97 when I first started playing with Linux, I did actually delete some very important data files as root. At first, I didn't panic... undeleting files on a FAT32 drive was a pain, but no big deal. EXT2 couldn't be any worse, right? Needless to say, I wasn't amused when I found the following (paraphrased from memory) quote after desperately searching for undelete info on Yahoo:
On a Unix system, "root" is God.
God is perfect and incapable of making mistakes.
THEREFORE, when root-god deletes a file, He obviously intended for it to stay deleted.
THUS, there is no way to undelete files deleted as root.
It's funny to laugh about now, but I was pretty traumatized over it at the time...
Don't forget about Windows' effectively single-threaded name resolver that everything from Internet Explorer to the Explorer desktop and file dialog boxes depend upon to resolve names from internet hosts to the C: drive itself.
With a single CPU, one bad name resolution request will hang EVERYTHING that touches the name resolver. I think that just about every Windows user has seen this happen at some point. In fact, I think it's the major reason why some spyware/trojan apps hang Windows so badly (the hosts the trojan tries to phone home to get their DNS killed by the ISP after a few hundred thousand complaints, but the millions of infected computers keep hammering away trying to reach it anyway).
I don't remember the exact chain of events, but it basically occurs when a hostname Windows thinks SHOULD be a straightforward instantaneous DNS resolution attempt turns into an epic saga that ends with a timeout 30+ seconds later. In the meantime, all the other requests just stack up while Windows waits for the first one to finish or time out. The catch is, there are almost ALWAYS threads running in the background under Windows trying to repeatedly touch files and reassure themselves that distant network shares still exist. When the first one hangs, it's like a 50-car pileup on an icy Interstate. Except that everything eventually sorts itself out, but for 30 seconds to several minutes, apps and the user interface itself just progressively hang until the whole computer appears to be frozen.
It's not just limited to Internet Explorer, either. Moz/Firefox is just as vulnerable (it relies on the Windows DNS client, which relies on the same braindead subsystem), as is the command prompt itself if you're trying to access anything over a network (cmd.exe still does its own resolution for drive letters, thank god).
The author's precise point is that properly-multithreaded apps AREN'T the only ones that benefit from having dual cores. This goes against the traditional view that only apps designed for multithreading benefit. Normal, bogged-down instances of Windows running dozens of apps (including malware and anti-malware) can benefit tremendously from them.
You can criticize the users of such PCs for being stupid and preach the superiority of Linux and OSX & their users over the unwashed Win32 masses until Linus Torvalds gets elected pope and moves to Rome, but the fact is, that pretty accurately describes the vast majority of computers. Given the realities of Windows ubiquity and how messed up most copies are, dual core CPUs are nothing short of a gift from god.
A high-powered PC might be "ridiculously overpowered" for reading email, running Excel, running Word, OR surfing the web... but the last time I checked, users tend to do all the above more or less simultaneously. Try opening Word, Excel, seven or eight instances of IE or Mozilla, AND an email client, and even the much-scorned 3GHz PC w/512mb doesn't seem quite as fast anymore.
A few years ago, I used to work for a small company where I had to administer the other employees' PCs in addition to my usual software development tasks (ouch).
I noticed something interesting... giving users faster machines had a an almost-magical way of fixing 90% of their problems. Placebo? No... try "naive users with fast, responsive PCs don't end up generating dozens of queued input events while their PCs are apparently hung because they're too slow -- and when those queued events finally fire, Windows has a good chance of going down in flames."
I think dual-core CPUs are the most profound breakthrough this century. If you think about how typical office PCs are REALLY used, most users would be MUCH happier with a (nominally slower) dual core CPU that rarely hangs the UI due to blocking events than with a single CPU twice the speed. You can blame Microsoft and some questionable architectural decisions they made along the way to XP (like running everything through Explorer's single-threaded name resolver), but the fact is, most users EASILY engage in "heavy multitasking".
As for administrability, what Microsoft REALLY needs to do is bundle Virtual PC with Longhorn. That way, corporate PCs could have their core OS and apps locked down without crippling the more advanced (and vocal) power users (giving them instead a neatly-sandboxed "back yard" to play in).
Better yet, try editing a Java app that uses Unicode Han ("Chinese") characters for variable names... It would probably make the app more understandable to a beginning Chinese programmer, but leave just about everyone else raiding their office's jug of Advil LiquiGels...
Actually, what's happened is that Microsoft is now in the position occupied by Netscape in 1997: an old (7+ year) codebase with kludge on top of kludge, patched patches, and programming duct tape everywhere.
Internet Explorer 4 didn't blow away Netscape because Microsoft is a big, evil, monopolistic corporation... it blew Netscape away because Netscape 4 sucked, and was broken beyond repair. Internet Explorer was (then) a shiny, lean, brand-new application with a squeaky-clean codebase.
The past ~6 years haven't been kind. Half (or more) of the fundamental design objectives and goals that went into its creation were ultimately deprecated and abandoned. Things like transparent interoperability (with other Microsoft apps) and automatic extensibility, that were the product of a younger, more naive and innocent era of the internet. What started out as a metaphorical commune seeking effortless interaction with the (presumed) friendly natives has been transformed out of necessity into an armored fortress, but the long-forgotten and superficially covered-up relics of its past keep getting discovered beneath the metaphorical plywood nailed over them and exploited by "the bad guys".
Now, Mozilla/Firefox is the new, shiny app written from scratch. And like most brand new, shiny apps free from legacy baggage and megabytes of creaky ancient source code written by others who have long since left the project, it currently works better than IE.
I believe Microsoft now realizes that tying IE so closely to the operating system itself was a bad design decision, because it now forces them to consider the effect of changes on both browsing AND Windows itself. My guess is that Microsoft is currently working to separate out the "pure" browser content-rendering DLLs from the general codebase so that they can take the Gecko approach in Longhorn -- liberally sharing the rendering engine among Windows, apps, and IE itself, but separating out the container now known as "Internet Explorer" from the OS shell known as "Explorer" so they can go their own separate directions in the future.
Few devices have has as far-reaching social consequences as the affordable VCR -- specifically, by making porn widely available to mainstream America.
Think about it. Prior to VCRs, if you wanted to watch adult movies, you basically had one option: the XXX movie theater (unless you were incredibly wealthy and had the resources to build your own at your residence). Social stigma effectively ensured that few Americans ever saw a real XXX movie, other than maybe a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a seedy XXX theater in some distant city. Once VCRs became widely available, the adult film industry's entire focus shifted away from actual theaters (do they even EXIST anymore?) to home viewers, and in less than a decade it became normal and acceptable to proudly list production experience (videography, editing, promotion, etc) in adult films on one's resume.
Make no mistake... it was the VCR that gave birth to the entire adult video industry as we know it today. The internet obviously took it to a new level, but VCRs established adult movies as mass market consumer items.
Ask yourself: had videotaped porn not emerged 20 years ago, how many average housewives, schoolteachers, accountants, or even presidents of the United States would have the slightest idea what "DV/DA" is?:-D
Actually, it's a staggering example of a nearly instantaneous change in mass culture. Think about it... for decades (LONG before the Russians, or even the Germans for that matter) invaded Poland, it was on the receiving end of jokes (particularly in America). In less than one generation, Polish jokes ceased to be funny (to Americans, at least). Not out of increased sensitivity, political correctness, or because people in Poland bitterly complained that they were unfair or offensive... simply because the whole unspoken and underlying premise that made them funny in the first place vanished.
Even people who thought they were funny 20 years ago have a hard time now trying to figure out why they were funny.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. Yeah, believe it or not, people apparently thought it was outrageously funny a hundred years ago. Why? Who knows. The whole set of cultural references that made it funny are gone, and nobody even knows what they were.
In some ways, Canadian laser eye surgery is a couple of years ahead of the US. It's not much of a secret that American eye surgeons send patients with lasik complications resulting in uncorrectable astigmatism (mostly from flap complications) to Canada for corrective surgery that (as of two years ago) couldn't (legally) be performed in the US. From what I remember, the FDA was intentionally dragging its feet over approving wavefront laser surgery (where the ablation pattern is determined by analyzing the actual light path through the cornea in realtime, instead of applying a predetermined uniform pattern).
The FDA's rationale for refusing to approve wavefront? It's a little bit TOO good. Laser eye centers in Canada were advertising BETTER than normal vision to people with nominally normal vison -- and achieving it often enough for lots of people with technically normal vision to get the procedure done.
As we all know, the FDA (and its evil twin, the DEA) has a long-standing institutional bias against "normal" people using drugs/surgery to become "supernormal". The last time I checked, they granted it "provisional" approval last year for "humanitarian" procedures (read: people with problems that can't be corrected via glasses or contacts), but still weren't in any real hurry to approve for general use.
Worries about programming jobs being sent to India are misplaced. India, without a MAJOR culture and attitude shift, will *NEVER* be the center of the world's creative software development.
Why? Becaus in India, programming is just another job. A nice, white-collar one... but for the most part, Indian programmers (in India) are about as passionate about programming as a means of creative self-expression as accountants are within their own field. Sure, among a billion people in India there are obviously a few who are passionately into programming... but they're few, far between, generally looked down upon by their peers, and usually end up working in America.
Want evidence? OK. What percentage of American programmers own computers and use them at home. 100%? OK, maybe 99.99999999998%. Now, what percentage of INDIAN programmers own computers and use them at home? Or even WANT a computer to use at home? How many web sites have you ever been to that were created and maintained by Indians living in India? Have you ever seen a single piece of Indian entertainment software -- commercial, shareware, open-source, or otherwise -- created for their domestic market? No. Of course not. There's (almost) no market for it there.
Innovation is definitely not the first word that comes to mind when anyone -- INCLUDING Indians -- thinks about India. Efficiency? Sure. Meticulous quality? Yeah. Strict adherence to detailed procedures? Of course. But raw, bare-metal living-on-the-edge-adrenaline-rush adhoc innovation? No.
How is China different? Like their American peers, Chinese programmers tend to eat, breathe, and live around computers. They're every bit as passionate about them as Americans. And yes, they have a thriving domestic entertainment software industry.
Oh, and the language? Not a big problem anymore. Some of those same passionate programmers came up with a new way to type Chinese on a keyboard that uses keypresses to build characters much the same way someone would write them by hand. With practice, a Chinese computer user can type just as fast as an English-speaking computer user... maybe even 5-10% faster.
Chinese programmers are just as cheap as Indian programmers... but they -- like American programmers -- genuinely get off on programming as a means for creative self-actualization.
The only real advantage India has is the near-ubiquity of English as the de-facto language of business and commerce (with hundreds of regional dialects, there's not much choice). But then again... if you were determined to outsource an important software development project, who would YOU want to have working on it:
* polite, english-speaking programmers who'll give you EXACTLY what you asked for (nothing more, nothing less) and work hard as long as their supervisor walks back and forth to make sure they're working. Until they go home at the end of their shift.
* slightly more chaotic programmers whose English isn't quite as good, but who'll actually CARE if they notice that something in the specs seems stupid and mention it to someone... and happily work all night when they're having one of those caffeine-fueled creative moments.
Pretty cool stuff that pretty much guarentees your data's safety.
it depends on your definition of "safety".
Most people are FAR more concerned about the prospect of losing data than the possibility that it might fall into the wrong hands. Go ahead... ask any random stranger on the street... "Would you rather have a computer that Securely Destroys all of your personal, private data at the slightest suspicion of a security breach to keep it from falling into unauthorized hands... or a system that any idiot with half a brain and physical possession could rip the data off of, but stores the data in such a robust manner as to render it capable of surviving just about anything short of a nuclear blast"?
I'd say that just about any sane individual besides maybe the Pentagon would go for door #2 and choose robustness over scorched-earth security... Ask any small business owner who enabled EFS to make his office server More Secure, then had someone reformat the windows drive with no backup of the hive or keys... god, it's fun telling someone he might as well toss the drive in the ocean (evil laugh)
That's basically my complaint -- Gosling basically forced the Java team to check their sensibilities at the door and blindly enforce rules that contravene just about every conceivable real-world scenario JUST TO BE CONSISTENT.
Actually, I've thought of a few more... like the way you're forced to explicitly try/catch UnsupportedEncodingException even when the encoding is UTF8 -- an encoding that BY DEFINITION must be supported by any remotely compliant JVM. At the VERY LEAST, the core libraries should offer two methods: a flexible one that supports any encoding and requires try/catch for UnsupportedEncodingException, and a rigid one that's hardwired to UTF8 for the other 99.99999% of the time when you just don't want to be bothered by pointless ceremony.
And don't even GET ME STARTED on HTML in javadocs. Yeah, embedding bulleted lists with html might be consistent, but it's BUTT UGLY and UNPLEASANT TO READ by the very people who depend upon it the most -- the people who actually have to maintain the classes themselves.
Now, if javadoc offered a way to preprocess javadoc bodies to allow wiki-ish shortcuts, I'd be happy:/** Some method documentation...
* This is ***bold***.
* This ***whole phrase*** is bold.
* This is ---italicized---.
* This has ---multiple italicized words--- in it.
*
* ===[This is the heading for a list:]
* ===This is an item in the list.
* ======This is a sub-item in the list.
* ======This is the second sub-item in the list.
* This continues the second sub-item in the list.
*
* ======This is the third sub-item in the list. Notice the blank line?
* ===This is the second item in the big list.
*
* and so on...
*/
Ultimately, it comes down to the ideological battle between those who believe everyone should be forced to do things the One Right Way(TM) vs those who'd rather give everyone maximum flexibility to do things the way they happen to like the best.
It might be politically incorrect to say anything good about Microsoft on/., but I'd bet lots of money there's an experimental version of VisualSourceSafe floating around at Microsoft that treats VB.NET and C# as nothing more than different presentations of the same underlying code and allows developers to work on code checked out from the repository using whichever language they happen to like better (the only hard part would be dealing with attempts to check in invalid code which can't be tokenized at all).
* What were they smoking when they decided to make "byte" a signed primitive type?
* Signed hexadecimal?!? OK, let's take a vote: what do you REALLY want byte foo = Byte.parseByte("80",16); to do? a) throw a NumberFormatException because '80' is larger than 127 and isn't negative b)Realize that if you're handing it a hex value, you want it to just shut up and set the bits to "10000000". At the very least, the various Number-implementing classes should have a.parseLiteral("value", radix) method that just sets bits without trying to second-guess the setter's motives.
* Would it have REALLY killed them to have made the JVM step in when somebody tries to call the.equals(Object) method of an object the JVM knows to be null and simply return "true" if the argument object is null, and false if it's not instead of throwing a NullPointerException?
* Likewise, would it have REALLY killed Gosling to acknowledge that String DESERVES special treatment relative to other Object types and overloaded "==" to test for semantic equality instead of literal equality when applied to Strings? I challenge him to think of one single instance where ANYONE has ever genuinely cared whether two semantically equivalent strings do or don't literally point to the same sequence of bytes in memory.
While we're at it... how 'bout some games that just kind of pretend the 3D arms race never happened and start making non-immersive-non-first-person-perspective games again?
Dear god, did I just say that?
Sigh. My desktop PC (dual Opterons, AIW 9600) and company laptop (Dell D600) have gaming capabilities I would have sold my parents to Saddam Hussein for less than a decade ago. Hell, so does my Gamecube attached to my 61" DLP TV. And what REALLY SUCKS is the fact that I can't play 3D games on ANY of them because they ALL give me vertigo (the Gamecube on the 61" DLP being the absolute worst... too late, I learned the hard way that playing on a bigger TV and making the experience even more immersive makes things WAY worse).
At first I thought it was just old age (I'm 31), but then I found out that lots of teenage guys have problems with vertigo too.
Bring on the 720p PacMania, Jumpman, Pogo Joe, and Super Giana Sisters:-)
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OK, question... was there any provision for allowing open-source thirdparty apps that used the Zodiac's API and hardware extensions to be promiscuously signed and made available for free at no cost to anyone who wanted to download them? Or, at best, would the developer have been forced to eat some licensing and/or service fee for his altruism? Or worse, be forced to pay Tapwave royalties for each and every download that someone needed to have signed for his machine?
Put another way, was there an option for a developer writing a Zodiac-specific app to do the equivilent of generating an anonymous J2SE code-signing cert and using it to sign apps for free use by anyone willing to accept the validity of the cert? Or would nothing short of a digital signature from a cert traceable all the way back to Tapwave, with some kind of metered licensing fees, have been good enough?
If you don't believe me, go driving across Miami at 6 or 7 pm the last Friday of DST, and compare it to the experience of driving at the same time the first Monday of standard time... or the next Friday or two (just to compare apples to apples).
In the winter, I rarely go anywhere after work... it takes another half hour to get home, and I'm too burned out from the traffic to even CONTEMPLATE making a non life-or-death trip across town at 8pm.
I wish Florida would join (possibly) Maine and go to year-round Atlantic Standard Time. Even on the darkest morning in December, we'd still have daylight by 8:30... and it would make evening traffic several orders of magnitude better in the winter.
Glad you brought up the hurricanes. I'm in Coral Gables, and we lost EVERY SINGLE OTA digital station except WCIX (whose transmitter is somewhere way down south instead of near the Broward county line to the north) during the storms. It was wacky... we only lost Voom's satellite signal during the worst of the downpours (the 24" dish helped a lot), but the ATSC signals for channels 4, 7, and 10 were "gone with the wind".
Now, it's quite possible that the three stations just shut down their HDTV transmitters altogether to conserve power (if they were running on generators), were running at reduced power that was adequate under normal conditions, but was overwhelmed by the rain, or lost some part of their HDTV transmission sysem (uplink, exciter, antenna, etc)... but it definitely didn't inspire my confidence in 8VSB as an emergency broadcast standard. I suspect NTSC won't finally go away once and for all until a method for modulating a "robust" lower-bitrate signal into the 8VSB broadcast signal gets grafted on to the ATSC standard that can be received by portable and moving receivers with grossly inadequate antennas under adverse reception conditions.
Personally, I don't think Congress should pull the metaphorical plug on Analog as of some arbitrary date. Instead, they should make the broadcasters pick the frequency range they want to keep for their digital channel (the one they're using now, or their legacy channel), then put the borrowed channels up for auction as scheduled. If the local broadcasters think NTSC OTA viewers are sufficiently lucrative, they can bid in the auction for the frequencies like everyone else, and keep broadcasting their channel in NTSC if they win the auction. In all likelihood, those local broadcasters will then form an alliance with each other to collectively subsidize the purchase of ATSC-to-NTSC-channel-3 converter boxes, and make them available to the poor FAR more cost-effectively than the government
EVER could.
Dear god, why is it that I never get mod points when I actually WANT to use them :-(
I can't even begin to describe the cultural gulf between programmers at my company who spent their teenage years wedging ML apps into their C-64's cassette buffer, or hacking with copper display lists on their Amiga... and those whose first experience with programming was Visual Basic. My VB-era co-workers can't even fathom how an afternoon of assembly language could possibly be fun.
I feel sorry for them... they never really got to experience the magic summer vacation afternoons of literally discovering new cool things you could do with hardware, like accidentally discovering PCM digital audio by writing a program to rapidly switch the c64's volume between 0 and 15 and getting a tone as a result & wondering whether you could actually do something cool with the effect... or expanding the computer's color range by stuffing new values into the color registers during scanline retraces.
Sigh. Was middle school and the c64/atari 800 era REALLY 20 years ago? I almost feel like taking a road trip to my parents' house, digging my old c64's box out of the closet, and seeing whether the old tapes I saved my summer experiments on way back in '85 are still readable...
I hope this doesn't end up striking the FCC's authority to let people tell their condo/homeowner associations to fsck off when they try to ban the installation of satellite dishes. I'd hate to see a GOOD rule that's genuinely in the interest of normal people get shot down as collateral damage. It'd suck to (for now, at least) retain the right to buy recording devices unhampered by DRM, but have the right to receive it taken away by nazi HOAs...
But that's NOT necessarily true. Monivision makes an entire line of VERY nice CRT-based TVs that can natively sync to both 1280i60 AND 720p60 and lack both screen door and rainbows.
Likewise, 3-chip DLPs are rainbow-free.
Thank god for the Chinese. At least THEY'RE willing to give us (American consumers) all the stuff our own companies won't -- TVs that can natively do BOTH 720p60 and 1080i60 (Monivision), DRM-free DVD-based media with 720p60 resolution (HVD and EVD), and more. And people still wonder why they're going to be the world's next superpower...
CRT manufacturers don't want to go multisync because it would raise the manufacturing cost of a $2,000 TV by a whopping $10 or so by requiring a second coil around the yoke and a few more components on the PC board.
They're also afraid that Joe Sixpack will object to having the screen black out briefly as the TV switches between 720p and 1080i (the way a computer multisync monitor does when you switch between a full-screen command prompt and windows). The REAL solution would be to upgrade the TV's firmware to leave the TV in one mode when surfing, then do the grand mode switch when the user hits a button on the remote that means, "I've found the channel I want and I plan to stay here a while. Switch modes if necessary so I can have the best picture quality possible" (J6p himself won't bother reading the manual, and will have no clue what the button does, so he'll never encounter mode-switching anyway).
Bzzzzzt. Wrong. Rainbowing and screen door effects have NOTHING to do with 720p. They're DLP and LCD artifacts.
Wait, it gets better. Most so-called 1080i TVs can't even resolve 1280 horizontal pixels, let alone 1920. Do the math. Divide the screen width by the dot pitch, factor in the allowable misconvergence, and be horrified to discover that at 1920 pixels across, something like 5 pixels are sharing every pair of phosphor triads on the screen...
What's REALLY criminal is the fact that CRT-based RPTVs don't support BOTH 1080i and 720p natively, and that it's even necessary to hack up the signal in the first place. I mean, for god's sake, if a $50 loss-leader P.O.S. multisync monitor from WalMart can sync up to any arbitrary scanrate within its bandwidth, a $2,000+ TV should too.
- 480p60 (for legacy NTSC and DVD; 640x480@4:3 square, 720 x 480 @ 16:9 rectangular)
- 480p24 (for film stored on compact media; 720 x 480 16:9 aspect ratio)
- 720p24 (film source material)
- 720p48 (for "normal" TV)
- 720p96 (mainly for cable & optical media where bandwidth is negotiable)
- 1080p24 (film source material)
- 1080p48 (mainly for cable & optical media where bandwidth is negotiable)
- 1080p96 (not practical now, but defined for use someday)
Legacy material would just be broadcast at 480p60 (ideally, after Faroudja-grade deinterlacing with the best hardware the station could afford). Why 48hz?- fast enough for most content
- slow enough to keep bandwidth reasonable
- whole multiple of film rate
- close enough to 50hz to allow PAL content to be slightly slowed down and transcoded in realtime (and to encourage its adoption by Europe & elsewhere too)
Why 96hz?- whole number multiple of film rate
- whole number multiple of 48 to prevent judder and provide clean downgrade path for economy TVs (they can just ignore every other frame and run at 48hz)
Why NOT 72hz?- complicates display. To avoid judder, a display would have to run at 144hz (3 x 48hz, 2 x 72hz).
- 96hz is no big deal for a CRT (hell, even the cheapest multisync monitor can do it). 144hz is another story entirely.
Why NOT 60hz? 60 doesn't divide nicely into 24. Lurching 3/2 pulldown is an abomination. Support it for legacy @ 640 x 480, but going forward, let it die a proper death and have its burial. Why NOT 50hz? not a whole multiple of anything resembling 24, and close enough to 48 to kludge. I'd expect European HDTVs to probably go the extra mile and have a little more flexibility to display real 50hz since most of THEIR legacy content would be 50hz, just like I'd expect American HDTVs to go to the extra trouble of explicitly supporting 60hz at 640x480. What's so holy about 24? Film. Lots of it, most of it being substantially more valuable per minute than most legacy video. Wouldn't 24 and 48hz flicker? Of course not. CRTs would just buffer and show each frame 4 or 2 times in a row at 96hz. Inherently progressive displays would be timed to 96 (ideally), 48 (low-end), or maybe 24 (tiny portable devices) update cycles per second. Why bother with 720p96 and (god forbid) 1080p96? Why NOT? It's not like it's all that hard to let the TV just ignore every other frame as a stopgap measure for the next 40 years, and at least it WILL be defined as a valid mode when the happy day comes that content delivery at that resolution and frame rate IS viable. Why aren't there any interlaced modes? Interlacing was invented by satan himself. Seriously, it has no place in modern television. It was a nasty kludge 70 years ago, and it's just stupid to use today. It severely limits your ability to scale images up and down, and hardware capable of doing a good job with non-film-source interlaced material is rare & expensive. If you look at broadcast TV and everything that makes it expensive and complicated, nearly all of the reasons are a direct result of interlacing.For all the talk about it, I don't think I've ever actually known anyone to do the classic accidental rm -Rf / as root
OK, maybe it wasn't QUITE that bad... but way back in '97 when I first started playing with Linux, I did actually delete some very important data files as root. At first, I didn't panic... undeleting files on a FAT32 drive was a pain, but no big deal. EXT2 couldn't be any worse, right? Needless to say, I wasn't amused when I found the following (paraphrased from memory) quote after desperately searching for undelete info on Yahoo:
It's funny to laugh about now, but I was pretty traumatized over it at the time...
Don't forget about Windows' effectively single-threaded name resolver that everything from Internet Explorer to the Explorer desktop and file dialog boxes depend upon to resolve names from internet hosts to the C: drive itself.
With a single CPU, one bad name resolution request will hang EVERYTHING that touches the name resolver. I think that just about every Windows user has seen this happen at some point. In fact, I think it's the major reason why some spyware/trojan apps hang Windows so badly (the hosts the trojan tries to phone home to get their DNS killed by the ISP after a few hundred thousand complaints, but the millions of infected computers keep hammering away trying to reach it anyway).
I don't remember the exact chain of events, but it basically occurs when a hostname Windows thinks SHOULD be a straightforward instantaneous DNS resolution attempt turns into an epic saga that ends with a timeout 30+ seconds later. In the meantime, all the other requests just stack up while Windows waits for the first one to finish or time out. The catch is, there are almost ALWAYS threads running in the background under Windows trying to repeatedly touch files and reassure themselves that distant network shares still exist. When the first one hangs, it's like a 50-car pileup on an icy Interstate. Except that everything eventually sorts itself out, but for 30 seconds to several minutes, apps and the user interface itself just progressively hang until the whole computer appears to be frozen.
It's not just limited to Internet Explorer, either. Moz/Firefox is just as vulnerable (it relies on the Windows DNS client, which relies on the same braindead subsystem), as is the command prompt itself if you're trying to access anything over a network (cmd.exe still does its own resolution for drive letters, thank god).
The author's precise point is that properly-multithreaded apps AREN'T the only ones that benefit from having dual cores. This goes against the traditional view that only apps designed for multithreading benefit. Normal, bogged-down instances of Windows running dozens of apps (including malware and anti-malware) can benefit tremendously from them.
You can criticize the users of such PCs for being stupid and preach the superiority of Linux and OSX & their users over the unwashed Win32 masses until Linus Torvalds gets elected pope and moves to Rome, but the fact is, that pretty accurately describes the vast majority of computers. Given the realities of Windows ubiquity and how messed up most copies are, dual core CPUs are nothing short of a gift from god.
A high-powered PC might be "ridiculously overpowered" for reading email, running Excel, running Word, OR surfing the web... but the last time I checked, users tend to do all the above more or less simultaneously. Try opening Word, Excel, seven or eight instances of IE or Mozilla, AND an email client, and even the much-scorned 3GHz PC w/512mb doesn't seem quite as fast anymore.
A few years ago, I used to work for a small company where I had to administer the other employees' PCs in addition to my usual software development tasks (ouch).
I noticed something interesting... giving users faster machines had a an almost-magical way of fixing 90% of their problems. Placebo? No... try "naive users with fast, responsive PCs don't end up generating dozens of queued input events while their PCs are apparently hung because they're too slow -- and when those queued events finally fire, Windows has a good chance of going down in flames."
I think dual-core CPUs are the most profound breakthrough this century. If you think about how typical office PCs are REALLY used, most users would be MUCH happier with a (nominally slower) dual core CPU that rarely hangs the UI due to blocking events than with a single CPU twice the speed. You can blame Microsoft and some questionable architectural decisions they made along the way to XP (like running everything through Explorer's single-threaded name resolver), but the fact is, most users EASILY engage in "heavy multitasking".
As for administrability, what Microsoft REALLY needs to do is bundle Virtual PC with Longhorn. That way, corporate PCs could have their core OS and apps locked down without crippling the more advanced (and vocal) power users (giving them instead a neatly-sandboxed "back yard" to play in).
Better yet, try editing a Java app that uses Unicode Han ("Chinese") characters for variable names... It would probably make the app more understandable to a beginning Chinese programmer, but leave just about everyone else raiding their office's jug of Advil LiquiGels...
Actually, what's happened is that Microsoft is now in the position occupied by Netscape in 1997: an old (7+ year) codebase with kludge on top of kludge, patched patches, and programming duct tape everywhere.
Internet Explorer 4 didn't blow away Netscape because Microsoft is a big, evil, monopolistic corporation... it blew Netscape away because Netscape 4 sucked, and was broken beyond repair. Internet Explorer was (then) a shiny, lean, brand-new application with a squeaky-clean codebase.
The past ~6 years haven't been kind. Half (or more) of the fundamental design objectives and goals that went into its creation were ultimately deprecated and abandoned. Things like transparent interoperability (with other Microsoft apps) and automatic extensibility, that were the product of a younger, more naive and innocent era of the internet. What started out as a metaphorical commune seeking effortless interaction with the (presumed) friendly natives has been transformed out of necessity into an armored fortress, but the long-forgotten and superficially covered-up relics of its past keep getting discovered beneath the metaphorical plywood nailed over them and exploited by "the bad guys".
Now, Mozilla/Firefox is the new, shiny app written from scratch. And like most brand new, shiny apps free from legacy baggage and megabytes of creaky ancient source code written by others who have long since left the project, it currently works better than IE.
I believe Microsoft now realizes that tying IE so closely to the operating system itself was a bad design decision, because it now forces them to consider the effect of changes on both browsing AND Windows itself. My guess is that Microsoft is currently working to separate out the "pure" browser content-rendering DLLs from the general codebase so that they can take the Gecko approach in Longhorn -- liberally sharing the rendering engine among Windows, apps, and IE itself, but separating out the container now known as "Internet Explorer" from the OS shell known as "Explorer" so they can go their own separate directions in the future.
Few devices have has as far-reaching social consequences as the affordable VCR -- specifically, by making porn widely available to mainstream America.
:-D
Think about it. Prior to VCRs, if you wanted to watch adult movies, you basically had one option: the XXX movie theater (unless you were incredibly wealthy and had the resources to build your own at your residence). Social stigma effectively ensured that few Americans ever saw a real XXX movie, other than maybe a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a seedy XXX theater in some distant city. Once VCRs became widely available, the adult film industry's entire focus shifted away from actual theaters (do they even EXIST anymore?) to home viewers, and in less than a decade it became normal and acceptable to proudly list production experience (videography, editing, promotion, etc) in adult films on one's resume.
Make no mistake... it was the VCR that gave birth to the entire adult video industry as we know it today. The internet obviously took it to a new level, but VCRs established adult movies as mass market consumer items.
Ask yourself: had videotaped porn not emerged 20 years ago, how many average housewives, schoolteachers, accountants, or even presidents of the United States would have the slightest idea what "DV/DA" is?
Actually, it's a staggering example of a nearly instantaneous change in mass culture. Think about it... for decades (LONG before the Russians, or even the Germans for that matter) invaded Poland, it was on the receiving end of jokes (particularly in America). In less than one generation, Polish jokes ceased to be funny (to Americans, at least). Not out of increased sensitivity, political correctness, or because people in Poland bitterly complained that they were unfair or offensive... simply because the whole unspoken and underlying premise that made them funny in the first place vanished.
Even people who thought they were funny 20 years ago have a hard time now trying to figure out why they were funny.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. Yeah, believe it or not, people apparently thought it was outrageously funny a hundred years ago. Why? Who knows. The whole set of cultural references that made it funny are gone, and nobody even knows what they were.
In some ways, Canadian laser eye surgery is a couple of years ahead of the US. It's not much of a secret that American eye surgeons send patients with lasik complications resulting in uncorrectable astigmatism (mostly from flap complications) to Canada for corrective surgery that (as of two years ago) couldn't (legally) be performed in the US. From what I remember, the FDA was intentionally dragging its feet over approving wavefront laser surgery (where the ablation pattern is determined by analyzing the actual light path through the cornea in realtime, instead of applying a predetermined uniform pattern).
The FDA's rationale for refusing to approve wavefront? It's a little bit TOO good. Laser eye centers in Canada were advertising BETTER than normal vision to people with nominally normal vison -- and achieving it often enough for lots of people with technically normal vision to get the procedure done.
As we all know, the FDA (and its evil twin, the DEA) has a long-standing institutional bias against "normal" people using drugs/surgery to become "supernormal". The last time I checked, they granted it "provisional" approval last year for "humanitarian" procedures (read: people with problems that can't be corrected via glasses or contacts), but still weren't in any real hurry to approve for general use.
Worries about programming jobs being sent to India are misplaced. India, without a MAJOR culture and attitude shift, will *NEVER* be the center of the world's creative software development.
Why? Becaus in India, programming is just another job. A nice, white-collar one... but for the most part, Indian programmers (in India) are about as passionate about programming as a means of creative self-expression as accountants are within their own field. Sure, among a billion people in India there are obviously a few who are passionately into programming... but they're few, far between, generally looked down upon by their peers, and usually end up working in America.
Want evidence? OK. What percentage of American programmers own computers and use them at home. 100%? OK, maybe 99.99999999998%. Now, what percentage of INDIAN programmers own computers and use them at home? Or even WANT a computer to use at home? How many web sites have you ever been to that were created and maintained by Indians living in India? Have you ever seen a single piece of Indian entertainment software -- commercial, shareware, open-source, or otherwise -- created for their domestic market? No. Of course not. There's (almost) no market for it there.
Innovation is definitely not the first word that comes to mind when anyone -- INCLUDING Indians -- thinks about India. Efficiency? Sure. Meticulous quality? Yeah. Strict adherence to detailed procedures? Of course. But raw, bare-metal living-on-the-edge-adrenaline-rush adhoc innovation? No.
How is China different? Like their American peers, Chinese programmers tend to eat, breathe, and live around computers. They're every bit as passionate about them as Americans. And yes, they have a thriving domestic entertainment software industry.
Oh, and the language? Not a big problem anymore. Some of those same passionate programmers came up with a new way to type Chinese on a keyboard that uses keypresses to build characters much the same way someone would write them by hand. With practice, a Chinese computer user can type just as fast as an English-speaking computer user... maybe even 5-10% faster.
Chinese programmers are just as cheap as Indian programmers... but they -- like American programmers -- genuinely get off on programming as a means for creative self-actualization.
The only real advantage India has is the near-ubiquity of English as the de-facto language of business and commerce (with hundreds of regional dialects, there's not much choice). But then again... if you were determined to outsource an important software development project, who would YOU want to have working on it:
* polite, english-speaking programmers who'll give you EXACTLY what you asked for (nothing more, nothing less) and work hard as long as their supervisor walks back and forth to make sure they're working. Until they go home at the end of their shift.
* slightly more chaotic programmers whose English isn't quite as good, but who'll actually CARE if they notice that something in the specs seems stupid and mention it to someone... and happily work all night when they're having one of those caffeine-fueled creative moments.
it depends on your definition of "safety".
Most people are FAR more concerned about the prospect of losing data than the possibility that it might fall into the wrong hands. Go ahead... ask any random stranger on the street... "Would you rather have a computer that Securely Destroys all of your personal, private data at the slightest suspicion of a security breach to keep it from falling into unauthorized hands... or a system that any idiot with half a brain and physical possession could rip the data off of, but stores the data in such a robust manner as to render it capable of surviving just about anything short of a nuclear blast"?
I'd say that just about any sane individual besides maybe the Pentagon would go for door #2 and choose robustness over scorched-earth security... Ask any small business owner who enabled EFS to make his office server More Secure, then had someone reformat the windows drive with no backup of the hive or keys... god, it's fun telling someone he might as well toss the drive in the ocean (evil laugh)
That's basically my complaint -- Gosling basically forced the Java team to check their sensibilities at the door and blindly enforce rules that contravene just about every conceivable real-world scenario JUST TO BE CONSISTENT.
/** Some method documentation...
/., but I'd bet lots of money there's an experimental version of VisualSourceSafe floating around at Microsoft that treats VB.NET and C# as nothing more than different presentations of the same underlying code and allows developers to work on code checked out from the repository using whichever language they happen to like better (the only hard part would be dealing with attempts to check in invalid code which can't be tokenized at all).
Actually, I've thought of a few more... like the way you're forced to explicitly try/catch UnsupportedEncodingException even when the encoding is UTF8 -- an encoding that BY DEFINITION must be supported by any remotely compliant JVM. At the VERY LEAST, the core libraries should offer two methods: a flexible one that supports any encoding and requires try/catch for UnsupportedEncodingException, and a rigid one that's hardwired to UTF8 for the other 99.99999% of the time when you just don't want to be bothered by pointless ceremony.
And don't even GET ME STARTED on HTML in javadocs. Yeah, embedding bulleted lists with html might be consistent, but it's BUTT UGLY and UNPLEASANT TO READ by the very people who depend upon it the most -- the people who actually have to maintain the classes themselves.
Now, if javadoc offered a way to preprocess javadoc bodies to allow wiki-ish shortcuts, I'd be happy:
* This is ***bold***.
* This ***whole phrase*** is bold.
* This is ---italicized---.
* This has ---multiple italicized words--- in it.
*
* ===[This is the heading for a list:]
* ===This is an item in the list.
* ======This is a sub-item in the list.
* ======This is the second sub-item in the list.
* This continues the second sub-item in the list.
*
* ======This is the third sub-item in the list. Notice the blank line?
* ===This is the second item in the big list.
*
* and so on...
*/
Ultimately, it comes down to the ideological battle between those who believe everyone should be forced to do things the One Right Way(TM) vs those who'd rather give everyone maximum flexibility to do things the way they happen to like the best.
It might be politically incorrect to say anything good about Microsoft on
aaaaa...aaargh. Hurricane stress is driving me crazy. It wasn't a typo after all.
eek. uneditable typo... ...just shut up and set the bits to "0001000".
You mean, like:
.parseLiteral("value", radix) method that just sets bits without trying to second-guess the setter's motives.
.equals(Object) method of an object the JVM knows to be null and simply return "true" if the argument object is null, and false if it's not instead of throwing a NullPointerException?
* What were they smoking when they decided to make "byte" a signed primitive type?
* Signed hexadecimal?!? OK, let's take a vote: what do you REALLY want byte foo = Byte.parseByte("80",16); to do? a) throw a NumberFormatException because '80' is larger than 127 and isn't negative b)Realize that if you're handing it a hex value, you want it to just shut up and set the bits to "10000000". At the very least, the various Number-implementing classes should have a
* Would it have REALLY killed them to have made the JVM step in when somebody tries to call the
* Likewise, would it have REALLY killed Gosling to acknowledge that String DESERVES special treatment relative to other Object types and overloaded "==" to test for semantic equality instead of literal equality when applied to Strings? I challenge him to think of one single instance where ANYONE has ever genuinely cared whether two semantically equivalent strings do or don't literally point to the same sequence of bytes in memory.
While we're at it... how 'bout some games that just kind of pretend the 3D arms race never happened and start making non-immersive-non-first-person-perspective games again?
:-)
Dear god, did I just say that?
Sigh. My desktop PC (dual Opterons, AIW 9600) and company laptop (Dell D600) have gaming capabilities I would have sold my parents to Saddam Hussein for less than a decade ago. Hell, so does my Gamecube attached to my 61" DLP TV. And what REALLY SUCKS is the fact that I can't play 3D games on ANY of them because they ALL give me vertigo (the Gamecube on the 61" DLP being the absolute worst... too late, I learned the hard way that playing on a bigger TV and making the experience even more immersive makes things WAY worse).
At first I thought it was just old age (I'm 31), but then I found out that lots of teenage guys have problems with vertigo too.
Bring on the 720p PacMania, Jumpman, Pogo Joe, and Super Giana Sisters