Check out 12 Monkeys when Bruce Willis is in the solitary confinment chamber. Just like in the theater the voice moves around from speaker to speaker.
This assumes that the accoustics in my room are so good that I can tell which of the five speakers it's coming out of. It's not. My room has furniture in it. And windows.
and unless you have seen LD piped through svideo in your home you won't know anything except that "Damn! this looks so much better than VHS".
Who said anything about VHS? There's no question that VHS is shit. We were talking about DVD versus LD.
I just bought a DVD player, because it's finally gotten to the point where it is getting really hard to find movies on Laserdisc. Thankfully my favorite rental place still has a huge selection to rent, but now that neither Tower nor Virgin sell LDs any more, it's been getting too hard to find stuff (and forget about the possibility of older stuff being released on LD now -- no chance.)
And like most internet commerce, all the LD stores on the web suck . In addition to crummy UIs, most of them don't even tell you what version of the movie it is that you're about to order. So the fact that amazon.com sells DVDs but does not sell LDs was a big part of why I decided to go down this path, too.
As far as I can tell, these are the benefits of DVD over LD:
There's no pause in the middle when the player flips to the other side.
Cheaper media.
LD has much better picture quality. DVD has marginally better audio foo, but I just don't buy into all of this surround-sound quadrophonic buzzword crap. Unless your living room is a featureless cube devoid of furniture and windows and equipped with a $20,000 sound system, you're not going to hear much of a difference over a $1000 sound system with a good pair of speakers and maybe a subwoofer.
In the immortal words of Steve Albini on the liner notes to Big Black's compilation album ``The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape'':
``This compact disc, compiled to exploit those of you gullible enough to own the bastardly first-generation digital home music system, contains all-analog masters. Compact discs are quite durable, this being their only advantage over real music media. You should take every opportunity to scratch them, fingerprint them, and eat egg and bacon sandwiches off them. Don't worry about their longevity, as Philips will pronounce them obsolete when the next phase of the market-squeezing technology bonanza begins.
When, in five years, this remarkable achievement in the advancement of fidelity is obsolete and unplayable on any `modern' equipment, remember: in 1971, the 8-track tape was the state of the art.''
Count me among the folks who doesn't see why Ghostbusters is such a big deal. Yeah, it was funny. But it's been out on LD for years. So?
It's also strange when people talk about all these wonderful extras that DVDs come with. Laserdiscs have always done that! The format offers identical functionality (meaning, ``crappy low resolution on-screen UIs.'') The audio-commentary stuff is often very good, but stills and scripts are just gimicks. Ever tried to read a movie script on a tv screen? It sucks.
The Java goal does not allow pollution
on
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· Score: 1
Nice idea, competition, but Sun's goal is write once, run anywhere. How well it works is open to dispute, but you can't have WORA if their are different versions.
Of course you can, you just need to check version numbers. Users and implementors of shared libraries do this all the time. Good programmers provide backward-compatible interfaces when they make improvements, to keep legacy code running.
And Java 1.0 and Java 2.0 are not the same language, you know.
Why not let's have different versions of C, tcl/tk, perl, etc?
We do. Dramatically so, in the case of C. And yet, the world muddles along, and portable programs still get written.
Linux coders are biased against C++, that's why
on
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· Score: 2
I'm not saying it's not possible to write great, small, fast, C++ code, it's just that it's a lot easier to write big, bloated, slow code in C++ than it is in C.
This is true of any high-level language, really. This is something we learned well in the Lisp world: the barrier to entry for high-level languages like Lisp is so low, and for low-level languages like C is so high, that by the time a C programmer gets their program to even compile, they've already had to jump through so many hoops that they probably know a fair amount about what's going on.
It's easier for a bad programmer to get something done in a high-level language than it is for them to get something done in a low-level language.
Does that mean low-level languages are better, or that they encourage better programming? No, you just see fewer but better programs, because they take longer to write and exclude people who aren't really good at programming from even participating.
It's a shame when a language gets a reputation for being slow or bloated as a result of people having seen bad programs from bad programmers, whereas assemblers like C get a reputation for being efficient because you have to be a serious guru before you can get anything done at all.
And it's a shame that Java-the-language is going to have to live down the reputation of being slow merely because it's coupled in everyone's minds to Java-the-virtual-machine, which is the (arguably inherently) slow part.
All that said, I think it's easier for novices to write good (and portable) programs in Java than in C++ because Java leaves less land-mines scattered around. With C++, there are just so many parts of the language that you simply must not go near if you want the end result to be portable or efficient. Java is much more straightforward in this respect, by virtue of being significantly less complex.
I dont' blame Sun; look what Microsoft did to C++
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 1
What exactly did Microsoft do to C++?
I'm familiar with Sun's arguments that they need to hold tight control over Java because of the threat from big-bad-bully Microsoft. I just think their arguments are nonsense. Believe it or not, competition is a good thing. Sun is locking everyone out of inovating in the Java space, because they see it as being better that nobody be able to do anything new than Microsoft be able to do it first.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, obviously, but this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
If Microsoft invents a variant of the Java language that's better than the one Sun invented, more power to them. If it's better, I'll use their dialect instead of Sun's, and so will others, and the state of the art will have been thereby improved.
Would you like it if the FSF had been legally forbidden from extending the ANSI C language as they have?
I've always thought it was strange that people refer to Java as not having pointers. It seems to me that it has pointers in abundance: what it lacks is immediate compound objects.
This is true of most (all?) Lisp dialects as well. Nothing new here.
the whole point of java is "write once, run anywhere". compiling to native code does not advance that.
You say this because you have chosen Definition #3 of what the word "Java" means ("a virtual machine") and ignored the other equally true definitions.
Java is also a language. It is a good language. I would like to write programs in it.
Virtual machines are cool. Security models that allow network-distributed code are cool. Serialization and agent-like behavior is also cool.
But these are not what I'm most interested in. There are a lot of people who are most interested in those things, but me, I just want to write a program that will run on some suitable number of architectures. I'm happy distributing binaries for each architecture to do that. Sure, having one binary that ran on everything would be nice, but you know, it's just not a hard requirement.
Today, I program in C.
I think C is a pretty crummy language. I would like to write the same kinds of programs in a better language.
I would like that language to be Java.
It's just that simple, and that's why this is great news.
The reason I like Java is because it's a language that both supports implicit storage management well (meaning, at the language level) and because it provides good tools for programming in an object oriented style.
Note that there is no such thing as an ``object oriented language.'' You can write code that looks like assembler in Java too, if you want. Java is cool because it makes sensible style easy.
Unlike, for example, C++.
C is a fairly crummy language, but the reason is that C is basically a set of macros on top of PDP-10 assembler, and who wants to hack in assembler? That abomination we know as C++ is a set of macros on top of C that try to bring it kicking and screaming into the early 80s, and the end result is, well, object-oriented assembler.
Not to mention that while both K&R C and ANSI C have proven to be extremely portable, C++ has proven to be anything but.
But the main problem with C++ is that it has poisoned so many young minds.
There is a whole generation of programmers who think that these broken, rusty tools that C++ provides have anything to do with an object-oriented programming style! They don't even think to question that C++ has a difference between ``virtual'' and ``non-virtual'' functions: as if a real language would have any other kind!
When I program in an object-oriented style, I do it in C, because C is a better language for writing object-oriented programs (in fact, any programs) than C++.
If you made it this far without gagging, then probably the C++ worms haven't eaten in to your brain yet, and you should go grab yourself a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and learn what object oriented programming is actually all about. (If you're interested, you can read a mini-review of it I wrote at mozillazine.org.)
Java-the-language is not without its faults, but it's so much better than C or C++ it's not even funny. Yeah, I'd rather use CLOS, but that's just not even remotely practical any more.
This is too good to be true.
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 3
This absolutely rocks. I have finally gotten my revenge on JWZ for all the mean things he said about Java.
If you were listening all those times, you would have heard me saying that I love programming in Java, I think it's a great language, and it's too bad that it's just not yet practical to write and deploy real end-user programs in it.
Having a Java front-end for a real native code compiler is a great thing, and an important first step. Once there's a corresponding complete Java runtime library (like the classpath.org folks are working on) then Java will be on equal footing with C.
But not until.
I'm looking forward to that day, because I really do think Java is a much better language than C or C++. My objections to it have always been that it's just not ready yet. I want to use it, but I can't.
This means that Java is now a real language, just like Objective-C, Pascal, Fortran, or C. The FUD official stops now.
What FUD? You're confusing "FUD" with "facts."
I think it's a damned shame how much Sun screwed this up. Java could have been genuinely useful years ago if they hadn't tried to maintain control so tightly, and hadn't tried to conflate so many completely different things (a language, an enormous class library, a virtual machine, and a security model) under one name.
I would love to have an xscreensaver module for this.
The question is, what kind of graphic visualization of the search should be done? What does their Windows client look like, anything?
Perhaps the display should contain multiple kinds of data, maybe a map of the sky in one part of the screen, and a graph of area searched over time, or hits found over time, or something like that?
Having it be an OpenGL hack might be interesting too: what if the "sky display" was a rolling sphere with a star-map drawn on it, with grid-cells that lit up for the area being searched, or the areas that had already been covered by others? (But maybe the SETI client doesn't work that way?)
Here are the names/dates of some consecutive replies it showed me:
by wayne (wayne@midwestcs.com) on 13:58 26 March 1999 PDT
by adam on 14:23 26 March 1999 PDT by David Gould (dgould@ocf.berkeley.edu) on 15:17 26 March 1999 PDT by beryl on 16:00 26 March 1999 PDT by Jamie Zawinski (jwz@jwz.org) on 16:21 26 March 1999 PDT by Anonymous Coward on 16:21 26 March 1999 PDT by burnsbert (burnsbertNOSPAM@netscape.net) on 13:34 26 March 1999 PDT by Alan Shutko (ats@acm.org) on 14:01 26 March 1999 PDT by Signal 11 on 14:02 26 March 1999 PDT by TedC on 14:06 26 March 1999 PDT
As you see, not only are those not in the order they were posted, they are also not sorted by date.
Does the fact that I have to pick between "PST" and "PDT" mean I'm going to have to change this by hand when daylight-savings time next toggles?
The view-setting menus on each page are cool, but they should not change the user's preferences. It would be better to be able to change the view settings for each window independently, without the changes becoming permanent
I agree, but there is a way around this: I run Junkbuster to filter out ads. By default, it also filters out cookies. So, to let slashdot save its cookie, I had to add slashdot.org to /etc/junkbuster/cookiefile. After you do that, exit your browser, and change ``slashdot.org'' to ``>slashdot.org'' to make it be willing to send cookies to slashdot, but not to receive them. That way, you'll log in by default, but slashdot won't be able to change your settings.
Of course if you want to change the global defaults in the future, you need to muck around with cookiefile again.
Slashdot Mirror
This assumes that the accoustics in my room are so good that I can tell which of the five speakers it's coming out of. It's not. My room has furniture in it. And windows.
Who said anything about VHS? There's no question that VHS is shit. We were talking about DVD versus LD.
I just bought a DVD player, because it's finally gotten to the point where it is getting really hard to find movies on Laserdisc. Thankfully my favorite rental place still has a huge selection to rent, but now that neither Tower nor Virgin sell LDs any more, it's been getting too hard to find stuff (and forget about the possibility of older stuff being released on LD now -- no chance.)
And like most internet commerce, all the LD stores on the web suck . In addition to crummy UIs, most of them don't even tell you what version of the movie it is that you're about to order. So the fact that amazon.com sells DVDs but does not sell LDs was a big part of why I decided to go down this path, too.
As far as I can tell, these are the benefits of DVD over LD:
LD has much better picture quality. DVD has marginally better audio foo, but I just don't buy into all of this surround-sound quadrophonic buzzword crap. Unless your living room is a featureless cube devoid of furniture and windows and equipped with a $20,000 sound system, you're not going to hear much of a difference over a $1000 sound system with a good pair of speakers and maybe a subwoofer.
In the immortal words of Steve Albini on the liner notes to Big Black's compilation album ``The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape'':
Count me among the folks who doesn't see why Ghostbusters is such a big deal. Yeah, it was funny. But it's been out on LD for years. So?
It's also strange when people talk about all these wonderful extras that DVDs come with. Laserdiscs have always done that! The format offers identical functionality (meaning, ``crappy low resolution on-screen UIs.'') The audio-commentary stuff is often very good, but stills and scripts are just gimicks. Ever tried to read a movie script on a tv screen? It sucks.
Of course you can, you just need to check version numbers. Users and implementors of shared libraries do this all the time. Good programmers provide backward-compatible interfaces when they make improvements, to keep legacy code running.
And Java 1.0 and Java 2.0 are not the same language, you know.
We do. Dramatically so, in the case of C. And yet, the world muddles along, and portable programs still get written.
This is true of any high-level language, really. This is something we learned well in the Lisp world: the barrier to entry for high-level languages like Lisp is so low, and for low-level languages like C is so high, that by the time a C programmer gets their program to even compile, they've already had to jump through so many hoops that they probably know a fair amount about what's going on.
It's easier for a bad programmer to get something done in a high-level language than it is for them to get something done in a low-level language.
Does that mean low-level languages are better, or that they encourage better programming? No, you just see fewer but better programs, because they take longer to write and exclude people who aren't really good at programming from even participating.
It's a shame when a language gets a reputation for being slow or bloated as a result of people having seen bad programs from bad programmers, whereas assemblers like C get a reputation for being efficient because you have to be a serious guru before you can get anything done at all.
And it's a shame that Java-the-language is going to have to live down the reputation of being slow merely because it's coupled in everyone's minds to Java-the-virtual-machine, which is the (arguably inherently) slow part.
All that said, I think it's easier for novices to write good (and portable) programs in Java than in C++ because Java leaves less land-mines scattered around. With C++, there are just so many parts of the language that you simply must not go near if you want the end result to be portable or efficient. Java is much more straightforward in this respect, by virtue of being significantly less complex.
What exactly did Microsoft do to C++?
I'm familiar with Sun's arguments that they need to hold tight control over Java because of the threat from big-bad-bully Microsoft. I just think their arguments are nonsense. Believe it or not, competition is a good thing. Sun is locking everyone out of inovating in the Java space, because they see it as being better that nobody be able to do anything new than Microsoft be able to do it first.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, obviously, but this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
If Microsoft invents a variant of the Java language that's better than the one Sun invented, more power to them. If it's better, I'll use their dialect instead of Sun's, and so will others, and the state of the art will have been thereby improved.
Would you like it if the FSF had been legally forbidden from extending the ANSI C language as they have?
This is true of most (all?) Lisp dialects as well. Nothing new here.
Thank god!
You say this because you have chosen Definition #3 of what the word "Java" means ("a virtual machine") and ignored the other equally true definitions.
Java is also a language. It is a good language. I would like to write programs in it.
Virtual machines are cool. Security models that allow network-distributed code are cool. Serialization and agent-like behavior is also cool.
But these are not what I'm most interested in. There are a lot of people who are most interested in those things, but me, I just want to write a program that will run on some suitable number of architectures. I'm happy distributing binaries for each architecture to do that. Sure, having one binary that ran on everything would be nice, but you know, it's just not a hard requirement.
Today, I program in C.
I think C is a pretty crummy language. I would like to write the same kinds of programs in a better language.
I would like that language to be Java.
It's just that simple, and that's why this is great news.
The reason I like Java is because it's a language that both supports implicit storage management well (meaning, at the language level) and because it provides good tools for programming in an object oriented style.
Note that there is no such thing as an ``object oriented language.'' You can write code that looks like assembler in Java too, if you want. Java is cool because it makes sensible style easy.
Unlike, for example, C++.
C is a fairly crummy language, but the reason is that C is basically a set of macros on top of PDP-10 assembler, and who wants to hack in assembler? That abomination we know as C++ is a set of macros on top of C that try to bring it kicking and screaming into the early 80s, and the end result is, well, object-oriented assembler.
Not to mention that while both K&R C and ANSI C have proven to be extremely portable, C++ has proven to be anything but.
But the main problem with C++ is that it has poisoned so many young minds.
There is a whole generation of programmers who think that these broken, rusty tools that C++ provides have anything to do with an object-oriented programming style! They don't even think to question that C++ has a difference between ``virtual'' and ``non-virtual'' functions: as if a real language would have any other kind!
When I program in an object-oriented style, I do it in C, because C is a better language for writing object-oriented programs (in fact, any programs) than C++.
If you made it this far without gagging, then probably the C++ worms haven't eaten in to your brain yet, and you should go grab yourself a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and learn what object oriented programming is actually all about. (If you're interested, you can read a mini-review of it I wrote at mozillazine.org.)
Java-the-language is not without its faults, but it's so much better than C or C++ it's not even funny. Yeah, I'd rather use CLOS, but that's just not even remotely practical any more.
If you were listening all those times, you would have heard me saying that I love programming in Java, I think it's a great language, and it's too bad that it's just not yet practical to write and deploy real end-user programs in it.
Having a Java front-end for a real native code compiler is a great thing, and an important first step. Once there's a corresponding complete Java runtime library (like the classpath.org folks are working on) then Java will be on equal footing with C.
But not until.
I'm looking forward to that day, because I really do think Java is a much better language than C or C++. My objections to it have always been that it's just not ready yet. I want to use it, but I can't.
What FUD? You're confusing "FUD" with "facts."
I think it's a damned shame how much Sun screwed this up. Java could have been genuinely useful years ago if they hadn't tried to maintain control so tightly, and hadn't tried to conflate so many completely different things (a language, an enormous class library, a virtual machine, and a security model) under one name.
The question is, what kind of graphic visualization of the search should be done? What does their Windows client look like, anything?
Perhaps the display should contain multiple kinds of data, maybe a map of the sky in one part of the screen, and a graph of area searched over time, or hits found over time, or something like that?
Having it be an OpenGL hack might be interesting too: what if the "sky display" was a rolling sphere with a star-map drawn on it, with grid-cells that lit up for the area being searched, or the areas that had already been covered by others? (But maybe the SETI client doesn't work that way?)
Comment order: oldest first
Comment threshold: 0
Here are the names/dates of some consecutive replies it showed me:
by adam on 14:23 26 March 1999 PDT
by David Gould (dgould@ocf.berkeley.edu) on 15:17 26 March 1999 PDT
by beryl on 16:00 26 March 1999 PDT
by Jamie Zawinski (jwz@jwz.org) on 16:21 26 March 1999 PDT
by Anonymous Coward on 16:21 26 March 1999 PDT
by burnsbert (burnsbertNOSPAM@netscape.net) on 13:34 26 March 1999 PDT
by Alan Shutko (ats@acm.org) on 14:01 26 March 1999 PDT
by Signal 11 on 14:02 26 March 1999 PDT
by TedC on 14:06 26 March 1999 PDT
As you see, not only are those not in the order they were posted, they are also not sorted by date.
Does the fact that I have to pick between "PST" and "PDT" mean I'm going to have to change this by hand when daylight-savings time next toggles?
I agree, but there is a way around this: I run Junkbuster to filter out ads. By default, it also filters out cookies. So, to let slashdot save its cookie, I had to add slashdot.org to /etc/junkbuster/cookiefile . After you do that, exit your browser, and change ``slashdot.org'' to ``>slashdot.org'' to make it be willing to send cookies to slashdot, but not to receive them. That way, you'll log in by default, but slashdot won't be able to change your settings.
Of course if you want to change the global defaults in the future, you need to muck around with cookiefile again.