The article states that the IBM PC was an open architecture. In fact it wasn't.
Whilst the OS, CPU, RAM, UARTs, DMAs etc could all be purchased from 3rd parties (Intel, Microsoft, Motorola and friends) they were not open in the OSS sense, the BIOS was proprietory. Compaq then Phoenix had to write clean room BIOS's to make a compatible machine. The same is true of the video BIOS.
I love backgammon and can see only one major flaw with playing against a computer... it has no money for me to take!
But (back on topic) - it could be said that backgammon, whilst maybe not deterministic (real world randomness), is not non-deterministic, at least as far as the creation of a game tree. I've no idea if I'm barking up the wrong tree but it seems that the decision tree of Backgammon must incorporate all (21?) possible die combos. Although the results of the dice are random there is (thanfully) still a finite number of possibilites.
I _know_ many will think I'm over-reacting but... I'm a child of the 70s when cars went VRROOOMMM! In the early 80s when I was about 10 or so I meet my first very quiet car. I was crossing a road on one of those stereotypical winding English country lanes. Well, I didn't get hit (that time) but it was pretty close. Obviously the car driver hadn't seen me and was cruising at a steady 30MPH. I certainly hadn't heard them. We stopped a meter apart and looked equally terrified (yes, I looked both ways... but if you don't know an english country road then... err.. they're scary!)
Well... All I'm saying is that a silent car cuts off one form of input to the human mind to us pedestrians trying to avoid them. Of course a silent car makes living near a big road (like Archway, London) a bit nicer... the choice is "ours" to make.
Banking, insurance even cable can be sorted out over the phone (unless your cable box has HCF'd). If a PC goes wrong then phone support is never going to be useful unless resetting does actually fix things. Even navigating your way through to a potentially incorrect setting is incredibly hard over the phone. Users don't listen properly, get frustrated and confused when they see the control panel for the first time if the machine is actually dead then it'll need to be RMA'd.
Both myself and the bank, cable company, insurance firm can get their hands on my account and/or their hardware (f'nar f'nar) and fix things if broken.
Many times I've tried to help people with their computers over the phone but when the problem is "I hit the power button and nothing happens" there's precious little I can do (other than get them to check connections) unless I can actually get there with a screwdriver.
Much as I hate computer as car analogues I wouldn't phone BMW and ask them to help me fix my Mini's engine over the phone! It just wouldn't work especially as I, like the poor broken computer users, I am no mechanic.
Ah well. My Mum bought a (pretty crap) PC a few years back but she deliberately bought it from a shop about 5 miles away. If it blows up instead of having to post the thing back or arrange pick up a bloke comes out with a screwdriver set and some spares. She paid more for that service but it was invaluable when lightning fried the modem.
...once used. Film, DVD, Video, Computer Games etc. The value of them is only in their initial novelty e.g. _nobody_ has a copy before it is released therefore everyone has to buy it. If you want a giggle try selling a copy of 1984, Zelda:Ocarina of Time or Mean Girls on DVD. I believe this initial novelty is why the film and book industries guards so carefully against copying before release e.g. night vision goggles in cinemas.
Once the experience is done with only the die hard will go back and reuse their media.
After that the media/medium only becomes valuable once it has, once again, become relatively rare. This only happens if the work is considered "good" and the unfaithful (one off experiencers) have discarded, destroyed or lost most of the copies.
As it becomes ever easier to copy and store word and pictures only the packaging (medium) is _actually_ worth (monetary) anything and its value is its collectability (seems to be intrinsically linked to its rarity where rarity is a function of how many people want it versus how many are still available).
Anyhow, this is only my impression. I'd love to hear more from others.
It'd be worth paying just to get at the details of the MS/SCO Unix cross licensing deal and/or the Baystar investing silliness.
The flip side is if Novell are right and SCO don't have any real rights to Unix then MS may want their cash back.
Mark Shuttleworth could afford it...
Mark? YOU OUT THERE!? Fancy a laugh?! G'wan!;-D
Re:How? Intel is a supermassive chip company w/FAB
on
Intel Set To Demo PRAM
·
· Score: 1
They don't have to be fab process compatible. If the customer wants a CPU and Intel says - "Hey! We've got cheap and lovely NVRAM! Wnat a bucket full?" then the customer will buy both products from the one shop.
How? Intel is a supermassive chip company w/FABS.
on
Intel Set To Demo PRAM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Only real men have fabs yadda yadda and Intel probably reckon that for every x86 chip they sell they can sell a couple of gig (or more) of PRAM as well. Intel need stuff for their fabs to manufacture or they cost a lot of money.
There are 2 ways they can win assuming they have the capacity for massive scale manufacturing, which they seem to.
1 - They can undercut the cost of NOR/NAND chips in the market place. 2 - they can sell at price parity with NOR/NAND but solve the serious technical problems with both designs. TBH neither is terribly nice to interface to and both are very slow compared to DRAM. Beating the technical problems are explained to PHB's as Instant Boot (suspend to RAM - except its PRAM, not battery backed DRAM). Quietness. The G shocks required to actually damage the stuff as compared to a spinning HD. etc etc...
Actually there's a lot of reasons to go for it. Not least of all that HD sizes on consumer products (cheapo laptops etc) seem to be stuck at 80 gig. It's cheap and most (not all - I've a terabyte+ of storage and still run out) users will never fill it anyway. Instant boot is a real serious seller - 2 minutes of boot time feels a lot longer as you can't do anything for 2 minutes.
But, personally, I think Intel's massive production capability and their endless search to find something to do with all those billions of transistors is where they'll "win".
Win95,3.1, probably 98 etc - none at all! Just 1bpp
98SE,ME - these have support for 2 bit per pixel transparency masks as part of the GDI device driver. I can't remember how to turn on this feature but the Win2K method is shown below.
NT4 - no support - just 1bpp text.
Win2K - Same as 98/ME, 2 bits per pixel transparency. Try Desktop (Win+D), Right Click (or Right Menu Key), Properties, Settings Tab, Tick "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts".
WinXP - ClearType fonts supported (at least on Pro) - get a control panel applet from msdn/microsoft.com to change settings. HW support via alpha blending.
WinXP Tablet Edition - Support of 90 degree rotation e.g. aliasing in Y instead of X (screens mounted portrait)... I think I'm right on this.
Vista - more of the same I guess!
YMMV - It's been a while since I mucked with Windows GDI Drivers.
Right Click (or Right Menu Key) -> Properties -> Settings Tab -> Tick "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts".
WinXP - ClearType fonts supported (at least on Pro) - get a control panel applet from msdn/microsoft.com to change settings. HW support via alpha blending.
WinXP Tablet Edition - Support of 90 degree rotation e.g. aliasing in Y instead of X (screens mounted portrait)... I think I'm right on this.
Vista - more of the same I guess!
YMMV - It's been a while since I mucked with Windows GDI Drivers.
In terms of volume shipments ARM and even Z80 sell _BILLIONS_. However margins are lower and the devices are either embedded or software compatibility is simply not an issue e.g. mobile phones where one uses the JVM or data is provided to an app and apps are recompiled per platform.
In terms of the PC - well, x86 is in charge and always will be. Without x86 a PC wouldn't really be a PC. Can one emulate/simulate x86? Yup, been done - especially well with FX!32. Is it more cost effective than just using x86? Not really.
Boot loaders tend to be 16bit segment model code 8086, at least they contain enough code to get into 32bit mode. The BIOS will be 16bit legacy code, at least some anyway as a x86 PC chip still boots in Real Mode (there is a 386 embedded variant that doesn't). Windows 9x series is _RIDDLED_ with 16 bit code esp the display drivers, although many of these switch to 32bit mode ASAP the entry points are 16 bit code. Any attempt at killing off 16bit code would stop any 9X system running.
For WinNT and variants (2K, XP) I don't know how much 16bit code is in there. I've written drivers for 2K/XP and could not find a single 16bit style instruction however even NT series for x86 uses segments. FS is used for process & thread info. IIRC even AMD64 long mode implements FS & GS to make OS porting easier.
Lastly. 16bit code (instruction operating on 16bits of a 32bit register) are trivial in 32bit mode - all you have to do is preceed an instruction with 0x66 and/or 0x67 to switch a 32bit instruction to a 16bit instruction.
The problem transcends MSDOS and goes to the BIOS and boot sequence itself. Intel tried to address the with EFI but that seems to be slow gaining traction - probably because of backwards compatibility.
Given the totality of time and space surely such an event as the combination of millions of proteins becomes statistically probable e.g. above 0 (although not much) unless there is some process that would actually prevent this from happening (like magnets repelling each other). Just like monkeys and typewriters... which, incidentally, doesn't seem to work with real monkeys http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/0 5/58790
Some very old drives just don't play CD-R's but there probably aren't that many left.
Here's what I've found. Burn an audio disk at 2x or 4x and it'll probably play on even the crappest, cheapest, nasty plastic CD player with built in speakers. As the burn speed increases the chances of it failing increase. I've had problems like this with numerous players and burners but burning at a lower speed seems to work out most of these problems... even if waiting longer is boring at least it works. I especially encountered this when burning audio demo CDs for http://www.purrpurrpussy.co.uk/
...because in London alone there will be, maybe, 150 to 200 JS/PHP/SQL jobs paying well whilst for embedded C/asm work there will be 5 or 6.
Thus it is far easy to find webdev work from the very outset despite the increased numbers of candidates for each position.
Also, those 5->6 embedded jobs in London will be for 1, maybe 2 companies. Basically if it say "ARM" or "Embedded" it will be Symbian. Either that or it'll be 3DLabs in Egham. Hmmm... worked for both of them already!
OK, First of all I'll blow my own trumpet. Over the last 20 years or so I've programmed 6502, Z80, x86 (16/32/MMX/SSE/SSE2), ARM and various proprietory SIMD & RISC machines and pseudo-MIMD machines. TBH the payoff for these skills simply isn't worth it.
As an asm coder I _may_ find a full time job but asm will take as little as 10% of my time. Contract asm work is out of the question and I haven't seen any in years (since I wrote a serial port driver for Win3.1). I actually like programming in assembler but for the sake of my pay packet and career I have reskilled in PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript etc simply because I can find contract work that pays well. Something that appears unachievable with asm. Maybe this is why we are a dying breed.
Lastly, you're right. This discussion crops up so frequently on BBS's, Usenet etc. It seems that the answer must be that asm coders are still needed and asm is still relevant! If they weren't why would we be discussing its relevance!
Incidentally, if anyone would like to hire an asm coder who like asm mail asm@burnttoys.net;-)
You can always flog the old one and get, maybe, 1/2 the money of the cost of the new one if you _really_ can't live without it.
Failing that they make good hand me downs... err.. presents for siblings or fiends. (I hope my bros isn't reading this. He got my old DS as a prezzy!).
Also, a lot of people enjoy collecting. I know people who have collected several (or all) variants of a machine just to build a collection and hardware updates especially useful, as Drinkypoo said, is when your SW catalogue isn't made worthless but backwards incompatibility.
Classical Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 199 hits Pop Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 564 hits (not all of these are DVD Audio, some are SACD + a DVD) Classical Music - Search SACD - 1536 hits Pop Music - Search SACD - 1450 hits
Now, I haven't actually attempted to validate all the results beyond clicking on few to see if they really were/are SACD or DVD Audio.
So it looks like SACD has "won", or at least is winning. However it's largely made irrelevant as Amazon actually stock hundreds of thousands of titles making either SACD or DVD-A niche at best.
Maybe this will happen to BR vs HDDVD e.g. they'll both succeed but only in a niche market. Sky, telewest etc (uk) all offer film on demand and integrate this with broadband net. Sky offer HD too. I suspect this is going to be HD's biggest long term competitor.
Maybe the companies involved should start supplying rental stores with boxen e.g. rent a HD disk and borrow a player from us to see how great it is.
Everyone would like HD in much the same way they'd like a crystal slop bucket, the old steel one still does the job though.
Probably wouldn't fire anyway. How often have you seen...
#ifdef DEBUG #define ASSERT(x) #else #define ASSERT(x)... a real definition goes here. #endif...but the release builds do not define DEBUG... From what I've seen (and, good god, I've seen some code) that's fairly typical programming.
ASSERTS are all well and good but not as useful as they seem for 2 reasons. Firstly the assert would never have been fired in the IFE software as, clearly, nobody tested this code path anyway and secondly if an assert _does_ fire in a release build what exactly is the code supposed to do!? Chances are the code is stiffed at that point so there's little point in continuing, in fact that would defeat the purpose of the assert as it is known that the program contains an invalid state.
Maybe a far better solution would've been code reuse e.g. the reusing of a "range" object/class/prototype/contract/template (whatever is fashionable this week) with a specified _AND TESTED_ min and max range.
Anyway... I was just having my 10:39AM thoughts & coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
The article states that the IBM PC was an open architecture. In fact it wasn't.
Whilst the OS, CPU, RAM, UARTs, DMAs etc could all be purchased from 3rd parties (Intel, Microsoft, Motorola and friends) they were not open in the OSS sense, the BIOS was proprietory. Compaq then Phoenix had to write clean room BIOS's to make a compatible machine. The same is true of the video BIOS.
I love backgammon and can see only one major flaw with playing against a computer... it has no money for me to take!
But (back on topic) - it could be said that backgammon, whilst maybe not deterministic (real world randomness), is not non-deterministic, at least as far as the creation of a game tree. I've no idea if I'm barking up the wrong tree but it seems that the decision tree of Backgammon must incorporate all (21?) possible die combos. Although the results of the dice are random there is (thanfully) still a finite number of possibilites.
I _know_ many will think I'm over-reacting but... I'm a child of the 70s when cars went VRROOOMMM! In the early 80s when I was about 10 or so I meet my first very quiet car. I was crossing a road on one of those stereotypical winding English country lanes. Well, I didn't get hit (that time) but it was pretty close. Obviously the car driver hadn't seen me and was cruising at a steady 30MPH. I certainly hadn't heard them. We stopped a meter apart and looked equally terrified (yes, I looked both ways... but if you don't know an english country road then... err.. they're scary!)
Well... All I'm saying is that a silent car cuts off one form of input to the human mind to us pedestrians trying to avoid them. Of course a silent car makes living near a big road (like Archway, London) a bit nicer... the choice is "ours" to make.
Banking, insurance even cable can be sorted out over the phone (unless your cable box has HCF'd). If a PC goes wrong then phone support is never going to be useful unless resetting does actually fix things. Even navigating your way through to a potentially incorrect setting is incredibly hard over the phone. Users don't listen properly, get frustrated and confused when they see the control panel for the first time if the machine is actually dead then it'll need to be RMA'd.
Both myself and the bank, cable company, insurance firm can get their hands on my account and/or their hardware (f'nar f'nar) and fix things if broken.
Many times I've tried to help people with their computers over the phone but when the problem is "I hit the power button and nothing happens" there's precious little I can do (other than get them to check connections) unless I can actually get there with a screwdriver.
Much as I hate computer as car analogues I wouldn't phone BMW and ask them to help me fix my Mini's engine over the phone! It just wouldn't work especially as I, like the poor broken computer users, I am no mechanic.
Ah well. My Mum bought a (pretty crap) PC a few years back but she deliberately bought it from a shop about 5 miles away. If it blows up instead of having to post the thing back or arrange pick up a bloke comes out with a screwdriver set and some spares. She paid more for that service but it was invaluable when lightning fried the modem.
...once used. Film, DVD, Video, Computer Games etc. The value of them is only in their initial novelty e.g. _nobody_ has a copy before it is released therefore everyone has to buy it. If you want a giggle try selling a copy of 1984, Zelda:Ocarina of Time or Mean Girls on DVD. I believe this initial novelty is why the film and book industries guards so carefully against copying before release e.g. night vision goggles in cinemas.
Once the experience is done with only the die hard will go back and reuse their media.
After that the media/medium only becomes valuable once it has, once again, become relatively rare. This only happens if the work is considered "good" and the unfaithful (one off experiencers) have discarded, destroyed or lost most of the copies.
As it becomes ever easier to copy and store word and pictures only the packaging (medium) is _actually_ worth (monetary) anything and its value is its collectability (seems to be intrinsically linked to its rarity where rarity is a function of how many people want it versus how many are still available).
Anyhow, this is only my impression. I'd love to hear more from others.
CAN YOU SEE I AM SERIOUS?!
or something...
It'd be worth paying just to get at the details of the MS/SCO Unix cross licensing deal and/or the Baystar investing silliness.
;-D
The flip side is if Novell are right and SCO don't have any real rights to Unix then MS may want their cash back.
Mark Shuttleworth could afford it...
Mark? YOU OUT THERE!? Fancy a laugh?! G'wan!
They don't have to be fab process compatible. If the customer wants a CPU and Intel says - "Hey! We've got cheap and lovely NVRAM! Wnat a bucket full?" then the customer will buy both products from the one shop.
Only real men have fabs yadda yadda and Intel probably reckon that for every x86 chip they sell they can sell a couple of gig (or more) of PRAM as well. Intel need stuff for their fabs to manufacture or they cost a lot of money.
There are 2 ways they can win assuming they have the capacity for massive scale manufacturing, which they seem to.
1 - They can undercut the cost of NOR/NAND chips in the market place.
2 - they can sell at price parity with NOR/NAND but solve the serious technical problems with both designs. TBH neither is terribly nice to interface to and both are very slow compared to DRAM. Beating the technical problems are explained to PHB's as Instant Boot (suspend to RAM - except its PRAM, not battery backed DRAM). Quietness. The G shocks required to actually damage the stuff as compared to a spinning HD. etc etc...
Actually there's a lot of reasons to go for it. Not least of all that HD sizes on consumer products (cheapo laptops etc) seem to be stuck at 80 gig. It's cheap and most (not all - I've a terabyte+ of storage and still run out) users will never fill it anyway. Instant boot is a real serious seller - 2 minutes of boot time feels a lot longer as you can't do anything for 2 minutes.
But, personally, I think Intel's massive production capability and their endless search to find something to do with all those billions of transistors is where they'll "win".
Gotcha. Couldn't remember if it was the 95 Plus Pack or 98SE.
Windows has had AA text in the following formats.
Win95,3.1, probably 98 etc - none at all! Just 1bpp
98SE,ME - these have support for 2 bit per pixel transparency masks as part of the GDI device driver. I can't remember how to turn on this feature but the Win2K method is shown below.
NT4 - no support - just 1bpp text.
Win2K - Same as 98/ME, 2 bits per pixel transparency. Try Desktop (Win+D), Right Click (or Right Menu Key), Properties, Settings Tab, Tick "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts".
WinXP - ClearType fonts supported (at least on Pro) - get a control panel applet from msdn/microsoft.com to change settings. HW support via alpha blending.
WinXP Tablet Edition - Support of 90 degree rotation e.g. aliasing in Y instead of X (screens mounted portrait)... I think I'm right on this.
Vista - more of the same I guess!
YMMV - It's been a while since I mucked with Windows GDI Drivers.
Windows has had AA text in the following formats.
Right Click (or Right Menu Key) -> Properties -> Settings Tab -> Tick "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts".
WinXP - ClearType fonts supported (at least on Pro) - get a control panel applet from msdn/microsoft.com to change settings. HW support via alpha blending.
WinXP Tablet Edition - Support of 90 degree rotation e.g. aliasing in Y instead of X (screens mounted portrait)... I think I'm right on this.
Vista - more of the same I guess!
YMMV - It's been a while since I mucked with Windows GDI Drivers.
In terms of volume shipments ARM and even Z80 sell _BILLIONS_. However margins are lower and the devices are either embedded or software compatibility is simply not an issue e.g. mobile phones where one uses the JVM or data is provided to an app and apps are recompiled per platform.
In terms of the PC - well, x86 is in charge and always will be. Without x86 a PC wouldn't really be a PC. Can one emulate/simulate x86? Yup, been done - especially well with FX!32. Is it more cost effective than just using x86? Not really.
Boot loaders tend to be 16bit segment model code 8086, at least they contain enough code to get into 32bit mode. The BIOS will be 16bit legacy code, at least some anyway as a x86 PC chip still boots in Real Mode (there is a 386 embedded variant that doesn't). Windows 9x series is _RIDDLED_ with 16 bit code esp the display drivers, although many of these switch to 32bit mode ASAP the entry points are 16 bit code. Any attempt at killing off 16bit code would stop any 9X system running.
For WinNT and variants (2K, XP) I don't know how much 16bit code is in there. I've written drivers for 2K/XP and could not find a single 16bit style instruction however even NT series for x86 uses segments. FS is used for process & thread info. IIRC even AMD64 long mode implements FS & GS to make OS porting easier.
Lastly. 16bit code (instruction operating on 16bits of a 32bit register) are trivial in 32bit mode - all you have to do is preceed an instruction with 0x66 and/or 0x67 to switch a 32bit instruction to a 16bit instruction.
The problem transcends MSDOS and goes to the BIOS and boot sequence itself. Intel tried to address the with EFI but that seems to be slow gaining traction - probably because of backwards compatibility.
Given the totality of time and space surely such an event as the combination of millions of proteins becomes statistically probable e.g. above 0 (although not much) unless there is some process that would actually prevent this from happening (like magnets repelling each other). Just like monkeys and typewriters... which, incidentally, doesn't seem to work with real monkeys http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/0 5/58790
Some very old drives just don't play CD-R's but there probably aren't that many left.
Here's what I've found. Burn an audio disk at 2x or 4x and it'll probably play on even the crappest, cheapest, nasty plastic CD player with built in speakers. As the burn speed increases the chances of it failing increase. I've had problems like this with numerous players and burners but burning at a lower speed seems to work out most of these problems... even if waiting longer is boring at least it works. I especially encountered this when burning audio demo CDs for http://www.purrpurrpussy.co.uk/
As for the rest, yup, seems par for the course.
YMMV,
Matthew
...because in London alone there will be, maybe, 150 to 200 JS/PHP/SQL jobs paying well whilst for embedded C/asm work there will be 5 or 6.
Thus it is far easy to find webdev work from the very outset despite the increased numbers of candidates for each position.
Also, those 5->6 embedded jobs in London will be for 1, maybe 2 companies. Basically if it say "ARM" or "Embedded" it will be Symbian. Either that or it'll be 3DLabs in Egham. Hmmm... worked for both of them already!
OK, First of all I'll blow my own trumpet. Over the last 20 years or so I've programmed 6502, Z80, x86 (16/32/MMX/SSE/SSE2), ARM and various proprietory SIMD & RISC machines and pseudo-MIMD machines. TBH the payoff for these skills simply isn't worth it.
;-)
As an asm coder I _may_ find a full time job but asm will take as little as 10% of my time. Contract asm work is out of the question and I haven't seen any in years (since I wrote a serial port driver for Win3.1). I actually like programming in assembler but for the sake of my pay packet and career I have reskilled in PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript etc simply because I can find contract work that pays well. Something that appears unachievable with asm. Maybe this is why we are a dying breed.
Lastly, you're right. This discussion crops up so frequently on BBS's, Usenet etc. It seems that the answer must be that asm coders are still needed and asm is still relevant! If they weren't why would we be discussing its relevance!
Incidentally, if anyone would like to hire an asm coder who like asm mail asm@burnttoys.net
A bit of time off, for good behaviour.
I could do with a rest. Been working very hard...
You can always flog the old one and get, maybe, 1/2 the money of the cost of the new one if you _really_ can't live without it.
Failing that they make good hand me downs... err.. presents for siblings or fiends. (I hope my bros isn't reading this. He got my old DS as a prezzy!).
Also, a lot of people enjoy collecting. I know people who have collected several (or all) variants of a machine just to build a collection and hardware updates especially useful, as Drinkypoo said, is when your SW catalogue isn't made worthless but backwards incompatibility.
A quick scan through amazon.co.uk shows...
Classical Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 199 hits
Pop Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 564 hits (not all of these are DVD Audio, some are SACD + a DVD)
Classical Music - Search SACD - 1536 hits
Pop Music - Search SACD - 1450 hits
Now, I haven't actually attempted to validate all the results beyond clicking on few to see if they really were/are SACD or DVD Audio.
So it looks like SACD has "won", or at least is winning. However it's largely made irrelevant as Amazon actually stock hundreds of thousands of titles making either SACD or DVD-A niche at best.
Maybe this will happen to BR vs HDDVD e.g. they'll both succeed but only in a niche market. Sky, telewest etc (uk) all offer film on demand and integrate this with broadband net. Sky offer HD too. I suspect this is going to be HD's biggest long term competitor.
Maybe the companies involved should start supplying rental stores with boxen e.g. rent a HD disk and borrow a player from us to see how great it is.
Everyone would like HD in much the same way they'd like a crystal slop bucket, the old steel one still does the job though.
Of course, there's a bug in my code! Maybe I meant #ifndef not #ifdef eesh... /me whistles innocently...
Probably wouldn't fire anyway. How often have you seen...
... a real definition goes here. ...but the release builds do not define DEBUG... From what I've seen (and, good god, I've seen some code) that's fairly typical programming.
#ifdef DEBUG
#define ASSERT(x)
#else
#define ASSERT(x)
#endif
ASSERTS are all well and good but not as useful as they seem for 2 reasons. Firstly the assert would never have been fired in the IFE software as, clearly, nobody tested this code path anyway and secondly if an assert _does_ fire in a release build what exactly is the code supposed to do!? Chances are the code is stiffed at that point so there's little point in continuing, in fact that would defeat the purpose of the assert as it is known that the program contains an invalid state.
Maybe a far better solution would've been code reuse e.g. the reusing of a "range" object/class/prototype/contract/template (whatever is fashionable this week) with a specified _AND TESTED_ min and max range.
Anyway... I was just having my 10:39AM thoughts & coffee.
Over here at the Social Computing for Digital Change Foundation we've finished with Web 2.0
We're already seeking venture capital for Web 4.0 as Web 3.0 is nearly done. Then there's Web++ and WebXP coming along nicely and Internet 3.
It's going holographic and you can listen to 2 songs at once (one for each ear).
G'z Web 2.0 is just like so totally last year.