Flash has always suffered from some inherit design flaws. For example, it's difficult to build a crawler that can index a flash-based site. Microsoft claims, however, that "content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash."
I, for one, actually look forward to seeing what Microsoft can deliver with Silverlight. As of now, Adobe has Flex, which has some features that are somewhat appealing. However, being Flash-based, it will suffer from some of the same limitations. Ignoring the Linux community, however, would leave an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.
Interesting. I ride motorcycles and always wear a full-face helmet. One of the problems I have is that in the morning, the sunlight can be incredibly bright, so I like to wear a reflective shield, which acts like sunglasses. The problem, of course, is that in the evening, it makes it difficult to see (it's almost impossible to ride with a reflective shield at night). This is also true at high noon on country roads where the trees create shadows on the road. I'll have to check into a shield with a yellow tint.
By the way, I wear ski goggles with a yellow tint and everything looks really weird when I take them off after having them on all day!
I'm not sure I agree with you. When I was first learning to develop in C, I went the route of implementing ANSI directly and, in the end, I wished I had known about ncurses. I spent a lot of time designing a UI because I had to essentially write everything from scratch (functions to draw shapes, buttons, etc.), whereas I could have designed it pretty quickly had I used ncurses.
I went the ncurses route on a robotic project I developed a few years back and things were way easier and the end result was much more desirable. I was using code that had been in development and tested for years rather than some fun project I built in my spare time at home.
I highly recommend not reinventing the wheel unless you have a really good reason.
That's all and well for software that you expect to process a request and then return to the shell; however, I don't exactly think his users would find it to be very user friendly for, say an accounting application.
"Yea, and better yet, if an editor doesn't like your comment, they will just change it to mean something completely different. THAT is why I don't Digg anymore."
I don't follow you. Are you saying that one of the digg operators has manually edited your comment? If so, I've not heard of that. What I have experienced is a very large base of people that know very little, but think they know a lot. I recently got flamed on Digg for suggesting that it would likely take billions and billions of dollars to create a new Internet network. This was a response to a person suggesting that the Internet was little more than servers that do domain resolution and such. He attempted to argue that it was quite easy to build a new Internet, which will be free of the telcoms pushing against net neutrality. I, on the other hand believe that it's quite a lot more work than the guy thought it was. Unfortunately, I was in the presence of a bunch of "know it all's" that managed to convince the other "know it all's" that creating a new Internet was indeed quite an easy endeavor.
"IIRC, there are 480 US tax forms and 6,000 pages of tax law containing 75 million words."
That might be; but, how many of them do most companies actually use? No doubt companies make similar (if not worse) mistakes every year. However, we'd usually expect more of a company who's business is to understand the tax laws to generate reliable and accurate documentation for those of us who don't understand (or want to understand) how to do our own taxes. If they can't even get their own taxes right, why should we trust them to do ours?
On that note, I actually do my own taxes. I wouldn't, however, turn away from H&R Block just because of a little mix up; but, I totally understand why others would feel differently.
I'm running on only a few hours of sleep so I hope that made sense;-).
Didn't Bill Gates make that speech around the same time Microsoft announced their "ingenious" idea about Microsoft Stamps? If so, Bill Gates deserves no credit, whatsoever, because it had nothing to do with Microsoft. Rather major email providers have introduced spam filtering techniques similar to or using SpamAssassin.
I'm no expert, but don't routers already do this? I figure there must be a reason that there are occasionally multiple IP addresses for a single DNS entry.
user@host ~ $ host www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.225.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.18.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.19.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.20.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.20.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.198.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.198.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.199.30
user@host ~ $
"Noone WANTS a format war. They do tend to gravitate towards the simplest and most practical technologies, though. Thats for for sure. When Microsoft includes HD-DVD with the 360, average Joe consumer will care."
I don't follow you. Why would an Average Joe support HD-DVD over Blue Ray or vice versa? Average Joe hasn't heard of the format war. Average Joe doesn't know the difference. Average Joe accepts what is in front of him for what it's worth. If he doesn't know better, he doesn't know what he's missing.
Once and only once have I escaped by speeding up and that was on a 2003 ZX-6R (sport bike) capable of accelerating MUCH faster than your average car. I had somebody to my right and I was in the left lane when some idiot in an SUV decided to take the shoulder to pass a bunch of cars. the jersey wall started to come in, decreasing room on the shoulder for his truck. When he realized this, he was heading right for my tail. I had ZERO time to maneuver because I was trapped. I had no choice but to cut down the middle of two 18 wheelers in order to make my escape.
Very fortunate was that this was also the only time there was ever a cop around when you needed one. A Maryland state trooper saw the whole thing and pulled him over. Hopefully he lost his license.
Even worse, think about load times. First it has to be downloaded, then it has have the bit you want to use copied to part of the memory where it can used from.
Unfortunately, it's already happening and it doesn't require you to download the entire game every time. Look at modern-day cell phones, for example. Even after a subscription expires, the binary is still stored on the device. You simply reactivate the game by buying more subscription time.
I'm honestly not sure if it's upgradeable or not; but even if it is, you have to realize that it's definitely NOT the same kind of market.
I guess after years of working with Microsoft operating systems and just assuming that Windows was part of the computer, many users have grown to accept crashing and the need to run periodic upgrades. However, in the "black box" market, people are much less forgiving of programming bugs that lead to crashes and are much less likely to upgrade to newer firmware versions.
I work with embedded systems at my job and it's known by all programmers that our firmware needs to be as close to bug free as we can possibly get it. Think of a little "black box" that controls your printer (a print server), for example. How would you feel if you had to reset some idiot box a couple times a day for no reason? For everybody I've ever worked with, it's entirely unacceptable and it's an almost certainty that the IT managers would be replacing the box with another brand as soon as possible.
I don't know about you, but it's bad enough for me --and most people-- when my computer crashes. I would be pretty upset, however, if my game console crashed after hours of game play to complete a mission.
Oh, come on, people, take a joke! You can't say that [supposed to be] hidden key-loggers don't upset you. Uninstalling them is fine, but there's really not much satisfaction in that. Smashing somebody's attempt and leaving it on their desk is far more satisfying than merely uninstalling their annoying software. I think it also leaves a far greater impression on exactly how you feel about having your keystrokes logged.
You're missing the point, entirely. You're right that most humans cannot hear audio below 20 Hz. They can, however, feel it. A speaker, which per my very quick skimming through the specifications, designed to reproduce sounds only under 30 Hz. would be fairly useless to somebody that cares only about sound.
In comparison to conventional cone speakers, it's become possible for smaller cones to reproduce audio at a surprisingly low frequency. These speakers, however, are quite dull (to me) because they fail to provide the sensation of vibration in my body, which I have come to expect. Take, for example, the pounding of the Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park. Simply reproducing the audio frequencies associated with the foot steps is one thing. But feeling the pounding of each foot step hitting you in the chest as you watch the water ripple with the vibration, it gives you an entirely more lifelike experience.
"One of the things I hate about C (and especially C++) is its ability to be non-C-like. Take a valid C implementation of your program for example:"
I broke my arm back in February and went to the doctor about a month later to talk about my progress. I told him that I was feeling alright, except that my arm hurt when I "do this" (I moved my arm in a way that made it hurt). The doctor looked at me for a few seconds and proceeded to tell me in a very firm voice, "Don't do that."
Although possible, it's very rare (for me) to come across code written as you posted. When used properly, the preprocessor can be a great tool. Perhaps one of my favorite uses of it is to do away with "magic numbers" without the need of creating variables to store them in, which some languages enforce. Unfortunately, as you have demonstrated, the preprocessor does have the possibility of being abused.
In the infamous words of my orthopedic surgeon, "Don't do that";-).
"I followed your "Kill Your Browser" link clicked on everything. And this is the same window that was supposed to be killed... I dunno but those must be Windows specific, I am running Gentoo with FF 1.0.7"
This sounds like a great idea to me. I've often watched a movie on PPV and wished afterwards I had purchased the hard copy. The best thing is that it sounds like they're selling the DVD at a reduced rate.
IANAL, so please take this with a grain of salt; but, I'd certainly think that this would be a major invasion of our right to privacy. Imagine having somebody trace you from place to place as you walk around the city. This is certainly not something out of the realm of capabilities. You say it's not as scary as the police thing. Personally, I think it's worse. Therefore I do not believe it will happen. I'm not going to deny that money allows companies/people to get away with things they would otherwise not be able to get away with; however, this is would also greatly affect the privacy of our politicians. Lets just hope I'm not proved wrong.
I admit that I know nothing about this technology, at all, but in my imagination, I would like to think that a technology such as the one used for hunting via the internet would be a little better. At least a real human would have the ability to decide when and where to shoot rather than relying on code to decide whether or not the target is friend of foe.
Just a thought, though I admit that a robot has a lot more of the geek quality many of us would like to see;-).
I see your point. Now I don't know much about the movie industry so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Hollywood have to make more of an investment in hardware now? I mean, the same DVD would have to be burned about a zillion more times because nobody just wants to see a movie a single time. Or is this the job of some kind of "printing press" or what-have-you?
Slashdot Mirror
Flash has always suffered from some inherit design flaws. For example, it's difficult to build a crawler that can index a flash-based site. Microsoft claims, however, that "content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash."
I, for one, actually look forward to seeing what Microsoft can deliver with Silverlight. As of now, Adobe has Flex, which has some features that are somewhat appealing. However, being Flash-based, it will suffer from some of the same limitations. Ignoring the Linux community, however, would leave an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.
Interesting. I ride motorcycles and always wear a full-face helmet. One of the problems I have is that in the morning, the sunlight can be incredibly bright, so I like to wear a reflective shield, which acts like sunglasses. The problem, of course, is that in the evening, it makes it difficult to see (it's almost impossible to ride with a reflective shield at night). This is also true at high noon on country roads where the trees create shadows on the road. I'll have to check into a shield with a yellow tint.
By the way, I wear ski goggles with a yellow tint and everything looks really weird when I take them off after having them on all day!
That's why I skip ahead to the printer friendly version. http://www.dvrplayground.com/article/14501/MythTV- and-TiVo-Series-3-Comparison/;jsessionid=04B2D16BA B650A56F53AAC0E4C43607C
I'm not sure I agree with you. When I was first learning to develop in C, I went the route of implementing ANSI directly and, in the end, I wished I had known about ncurses. I spent a lot of time designing a UI because I had to essentially write everything from scratch (functions to draw shapes, buttons, etc.), whereas I could have designed it pretty quickly had I used ncurses.
I went the ncurses route on a robotic project I developed a few years back and things were way easier and the end result was much more desirable. I was using code that had been in development and tested for years rather than some fun project I built in my spare time at home.
I highly recommend not reinventing the wheel unless you have a really good reason.
That's all and well for software that you expect to process a request and then return to the shell; however, I don't exactly think his users would find it to be very user friendly for, say an accounting application.
"Yea, and better yet, if an editor doesn't like your comment, they will just change it to mean something completely different. THAT is why I don't Digg anymore."
I don't follow you. Are you saying that one of the digg operators has manually edited your comment? If so, I've not heard of that. What I have experienced is a very large base of people that know very little, but think they know a lot. I recently got flamed on Digg for suggesting that it would likely take billions and billions of dollars to create a new Internet network. This was a response to a person suggesting that the Internet was little more than servers that do domain resolution and such. He attempted to argue that it was quite easy to build a new Internet, which will be free of the telcoms pushing against net neutrality. I, on the other hand believe that it's quite a lot more work than the guy thought it was. Unfortunately, I was in the presence of a bunch of "know it all's" that managed to convince the other "know it all's" that creating a new Internet was indeed quite an easy endeavor.
Pro tip: He's talking about Mozilla.
Can you expand on this a little bit?
"IIRC, there are 480 US tax forms and 6,000 pages of tax law containing 75 million words."
;-).
That might be; but, how many of them do most companies actually use? No doubt companies make similar (if not worse) mistakes every year. However, we'd usually expect more of a company who's business is to understand the tax laws to generate reliable and accurate documentation for those of us who don't understand (or want to understand) how to do our own taxes. If they can't even get their own taxes right, why should we trust them to do ours?
On that note, I actually do my own taxes. I wouldn't, however, turn away from H&R Block just because of a little mix up; but, I totally understand why others would feel differently.
I'm running on only a few hours of sleep so I hope that made sense
Didn't Bill Gates make that speech around the same time Microsoft announced their "ingenious" idea about Microsoft Stamps? If so, Bill Gates deserves no credit, whatsoever, because it had nothing to do with Microsoft. Rather major email providers have introduced spam filtering techniques similar to or using SpamAssassin.
I'm no expert, but don't routers already do this? I figure there must be a reason that there are occasionally multiple IP addresses for a single DNS entry.
user@host ~ $ host www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.225.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.18.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.19.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.20.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.20.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.198.30
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.198.60
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.199.30
user@host ~ $
"Noone WANTS a format war. They do tend to gravitate towards the simplest and most practical technologies, though. Thats for for sure. When Microsoft includes HD-DVD with the 360, average Joe consumer will care."
I don't follow you. Why would an Average Joe support HD-DVD over Blue Ray or vice versa? Average Joe hasn't heard of the format war. Average Joe doesn't know the difference. Average Joe accepts what is in front of him for what it's worth. If he doesn't know better, he doesn't know what he's missing.
If I misunderstand you, I apologize in advance.
Once and only once have I escaped by speeding up and that was on a 2003 ZX-6R (sport bike) capable of accelerating MUCH faster than your average car. I had somebody to my right and I was in the left lane when some idiot in an SUV decided to take the shoulder to pass a bunch of cars. the jersey wall started to come in, decreasing room on the shoulder for his truck. When he realized this, he was heading right for my tail. I had ZERO time to maneuver because I was trapped. I had no choice but to cut down the middle of two 18 wheelers in order to make my escape.
Very fortunate was that this was also the only time there was ever a cop around when you needed one. A Maryland state trooper saw the whole thing and pulled him over. Hopefully he lost his license.
Even worse, think about load times. First it has to be downloaded, then it has have the bit you want to use copied to part of the memory where it can used from.
Unfortunately, it's already happening and it doesn't require you to download the entire game every time. Look at modern-day cell phones, for example. Even after a subscription expires, the binary is still stored on the device. You simply reactivate the game by buying more subscription time.
"I don't have an Xbox, but maybe you could try running it with the cover off or a fan blowing on it?"
IANAL, but wouldn't that violate the DMCA?
I'm honestly not sure if it's upgradeable or not; but even if it is, you have to realize that it's definitely NOT the same kind of market.
I guess after years of working with Microsoft operating systems and just assuming that Windows was part of the computer, many users have grown to accept crashing and the need to run periodic upgrades. However, in the "black box" market, people are much less forgiving of programming bugs that lead to crashes and are much less likely to upgrade to newer firmware versions.
I work with embedded systems at my job and it's known by all programmers that our firmware needs to be as close to bug free as we can possibly get it. Think of a little "black box" that controls your printer (a print server), for example. How would you feel if you had to reset some idiot box a couple times a day for no reason? For everybody I've ever worked with, it's entirely unacceptable and it's an almost certainty that the IT managers would be replacing the box with another brand as soon as possible.
I don't know about you, but it's bad enough for me --and most people-- when my computer crashes. I would be pretty upset, however, if my game console crashed after hours of game play to complete a mission.
Oh, come on, people, take a joke! You can't say that [supposed to be] hidden key-loggers don't upset you. Uninstalling them is fine, but there's really not much satisfaction in that. Smashing somebody's attempt and leaving it on their desk is far more satisfying than merely uninstalling their annoying software. I think it also leaves a far greater impression on exactly how you feel about having your keystrokes logged.
Cool! And if somebody installed that on my PC, I could actually have the satisfaction of smashing it instead of just uninstalling it.
You're missing the point, entirely. You're right that most humans cannot hear audio below 20 Hz. They can, however, feel it. A speaker, which per my very quick skimming through the specifications, designed to reproduce sounds only under 30 Hz. would be fairly useless to somebody that cares only about sound.
In comparison to conventional cone speakers, it's become possible for smaller cones to reproduce audio at a surprisingly low frequency. These speakers, however, are quite dull (to me) because they fail to provide the sensation of vibration in my body, which I have come to expect. Take, for example, the pounding of the Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park. Simply reproducing the audio frequencies associated with the foot steps is one thing. But feeling the pounding of each foot step hitting you in the chest as you watch the water ripple with the vibration, it gives you an entirely more lifelike experience.
"One of the things I hate about C (and especially C++) is its ability to be non-C-like. Take a valid C implementation of your program for example:"
;-).
I broke my arm back in February and went to the doctor about a month later to talk about my progress. I told him that I was feeling alright, except that my arm hurt when I "do this" (I moved my arm in a way that made it hurt). The doctor looked at me for a few seconds and proceeded to tell me in a very firm voice, "Don't do that."
Although possible, it's very rare (for me) to come across code written as you posted. When used properly, the preprocessor can be a great tool. Perhaps one of my favorite uses of it is to do away with "magic numbers" without the need of creating variables to store them in, which some languages enforce. Unfortunately, as you have demonstrated, the preprocessor does have the possibility of being abused.
In the infamous words of my orthopedic surgeon, "Don't do that"
Send me up with all these women all you guys speak of and I'll personally let the world know how my mission goes.
"I followed your "Kill Your Browser" link clicked on everything. And this is the same window that was supposed to be killed... I dunno but those must be Windows specific, I am running Gentoo with FF 1.0.7"
http://www.steve.org.uk/firefox/README.html
This sounds like a great idea to me. I've often watched a movie on PPV and wished afterwards I had purchased the hard copy. The best thing is that it sounds like they're selling the DVD at a reduced rate.
IANAL, so please take this with a grain of salt; but, I'd certainly think that this would be a major invasion of our right to privacy. Imagine having somebody trace you from place to place as you walk around the city. This is certainly not something out of the realm of capabilities. You say it's not as scary as the police thing. Personally, I think it's worse. Therefore I do not believe it will happen. I'm not going to deny that money allows companies/people to get away with things they would otherwise not be able to get away with; however, this is would also greatly affect the privacy of our politicians. Lets just hope I'm not proved wrong.
I admit that I know nothing about this technology, at all, but in my imagination, I would like to think that a technology such as the one used for hunting via the internet would be a little better. At least a real human would have the ability to decide when and where to shoot rather than relying on code to decide whether or not the target is friend of foe.
;-).
Just a thought, though I admit that a robot has a lot more of the geek quality many of us would like to see
I see your point. Now I don't know much about the movie industry so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Hollywood have to make more of an investment in hardware now? I mean, the same DVD would have to be burned about a zillion more times because nobody just wants to see a movie a single time. Or is this the job of some kind of "printing press" or what-have-you?