Snob factor. Right now, the purpose of a hybrid is less to save the environment than to feel good about saving the environment. If the car just looks like any other car, nobody will notice, and then how are you going to feel superior?
It would be like paying $300 for a pair of desginer jeans that are indistinguishable from a $20 Sears pair. Can't impress anyone that way!
Indeed, but I'll take this one step further. The rule is any external API that you rely but don't control should be factored out similarly. It's not just UIs, though, UIs are the most common, because they change fashion very quickly.
Let's say that you have a Windows app that relies on DirectX for some stuff, OpenGL for other stuff, some POSIX functions for yet others. Each one of those APIs represent a possibly different porting problem: move to a different platform, and one of the libraries might be missing or poorly implemented.
So, if your code intermixes calls to all three libraries, you are going to have a hell of a time porting it over. Example: you move to IRIX and now you problably have a good GL implementation, but too bad, it's mixed up with DirectX code, and now you have to rewrite all that code, even though the GL calls would work.
Portability is in the eye of the beholder. X code is mostly portable, but, you need an X server on the other side. So writing portable X code isn't going to help you make your native Mac UI application. Once you take the view that X is just another external API, and you wall it off appropriately, you've done you work.
Now, you can group APIs - if you're on windows, you are pretty much assured that, say, Win32 GDI calls and DirectX are going to be there, so no need to go overboard and factor them out separately.
The devil is choosing your abstractions. You can't over-abstract, otherwise the application will be too alient and never be completed. You almost have to have a sense of where the project will go in the future and what the most critical components are.
I'm a parent too, and I agree. But what about this cryptic statement?
or information that identify their role in the school.
What does that mean? If a kid posts a picture of him and his friends wearing an X high-school shirt, is that "identifying their role" in school, and kicked out of band?
This is true. I used to work at a movie theater back in college. Some dirty* movie came out, it was Sliver or something, and there was this whole big problem about was nasty it was. Anyway, it was R as expected, and for some reason, this movie brought out the high-schoolers in droves.
Rather than ask them for ID, I would ask the, uh, obvious 13-14 year olds "are you 18 or older?" The answer was invariably yes. Then I'd ask them people their birth year. A surprising number of them got it wrong. I told them: if you can't be bothered to do the math, I'm not going to let you in.
Damn kids. When I lied to get into bars, I made damn well sure I knew the birthday (and everything else) on the license. Thank you James Justus Woell from Ann Arbor, Michigan! Even though you were 30 and I was 17, it was good enough!
*not dirty.
Burned long ago, never to trust again
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been using Privoxy since it was Junkbuster, and old habits die hard. Why did I start?
It all started with animation. There is nothing worse than trying read some articles with dayglo green-on-pink spinning, flashing, !CLICK HERE! on top. I can't... think... with that there! Junkbuster fixed that.
Then there was cookie management. I only log into a handful of sites, why does every single one need cookies to the end of time? JB again to the rescue: it could convert cookies into session-only cookies, and leave the ones I need alone.
Then came the spam. Back then I was using Netscape 4, and it would dutifully load remote images off the web, with no way to stop it. Privoxy helped there by letting me blackmail IPs. Not great, but better than nothing.
Since it's a proxy, all this worked for the times I was also forced to use IE, which I tried to resist as long as possible. Since neither Netscape or IE had any of these features, it was a great add-on.
As everyone around here has said over and over, text ads don't bug me. I could go militant anti-ad and start filtering text ads with Privoxy, but I don't. Google got it right. God bless 'em.
These days, things have changed for the better. Mail clients can disable remote image loading, and actually prefer text over the HTML bullshit. Browsers have per-site cookie management and allow you to accept session cookies silently. Firefox has ad-block.
"Maybe ads aren't so bad anymore", I think, "maybe advertisers have learned their lesson, and I should stop blocking". Then I use my parents' computer without adblock on a Christmas break. The ads now are movies, overlay the entire screen, with swooshing rock soundtracks. Result: adblock not only stays on, but gets installed on permanently on their computer too. And anyone else's I work on.
At home, I picked up a ReplayTV 5040 (the geek PVR) -- two babies made following "24" impossible, and I was tired of swapping tapes. I dumped the stupid VCR the day we got it. Automatically skipping ads was just a pleasant bonus, and saves lots of time.
I agree totally, but basic cable can be for about $15 a month. Couple that with a ReplayTV and there go the commericals. Then, add in the fact that many cable companies have forgotten how to supply basic cable, and accidentally give you extended cable.
I work in a small (30 person) company where everyone has their own offices. I used to work in a cube-farm. Actually, I didn't mind cubicles as much as the fact they would jam 2-4 people in a single cube.
I really like the way some European companies structure their space: shared offices. 2-4 people in a large office, with a door and window. (Something about it being illegal to make employees work in windowless rooms in some countires, I hear.) It seems to be a good compromise between all cubes and all offices. I wonder why I don't see this more in the US?
Just because two parents work does not mean that the kids can't be well-raised. My wife worked in daycare for a while, and saw plenty of the "BMW" couples described above. She also saw plenty of two-job families with no BMWs and well-adjusted kids. The two are not mutually exclusive.
The difference is the first couple doesn't really care about their kids-- they're just fashion accessories. They think they do, but the amount of attention they willingly give them tells the real story. It happens more than you think. Congrats that your family didn't fall into that trap, but there are plenty others that do.
When this ruleset is extended partially to include recieving output of a program as a basis for the right to have its source code, the option for much worse loopholes is created. Loopholes which will terrify and drive away developers, especially when that one loophole is expanded to cover disclosure avoidance loopholes.
What confuses me is this - didn't C compilers, back in the dark ages, try this trick? They tried to claim that the output of the compiler was copyright to them, and required licenses or royalities to distribute.
This utterly failed. Which compilers require licensed runtimes now?
Now the irony is: maybe this is what made it possible to build, say, bootstrap a new, Free as in blahblahblah, C compiler... so it could be written in C instead of assembler? Then run it through itself and poof, no more royalities needed.
The more syllables in the job title, the more likely the job is shoveling bullshit. This guy is 13.
One day I was at a gas statio, and the guy pumping the gas had a button that said "petroleum transfer engineer". At least he didn't take himself seriously.
Did being judge first have anything to do with it?
Example: tech guy strikes it rich founding a company, and is now volunteer fireman. The fireman's paycheck doesn't exactly support his lifestyle, paying for his million-dollar home.
There's a difference between changing jobs to something you love, and retiring.
You're right - except the pitch correction wasn't on the voice. It was on a section of horns that functions a unit. In that case the intent is not a soloistic-like quality, but five horns with the exact same sound. If you fix one horn in the middle of a harmonized group of five, you're not likely to detect it.
Pitch correction can work on voice if you're careful. The better ones can preserve vibrato, etc, so that you don't lose expressiveness. The very good ones are programmable so you define what it fixes and what it doesn't.
if you need to use computers to pitch-correct your vocals because your fake so-called "artist" can't sing
And that's not a even good reason to spend a lot.
Pitch correction is cheap enough that it doesn't even matter. Our band self-produced a CD, and used pitch correction in plenty of spots. But it wasn't just on a single singer. The band has 15 (yes, fifteen) horn players. Even with good players, when you have that many, the "MTBF" gets low enough that fixes are needed.
I would wager we did a lot more pitch correction than an average band with one bad singer would. And we spent very little on it.
I was at an Eclipse conference watching a presentation. One guy used the IDE so much that he barely typed anything. E.g., to add a member to a class, he clicked on an "add member" button. For every modification he made there was a menu item that did it for him.
The sad fact is: it took many times longer to highglight the word, find the menu, and click on "Add Member", than would be to type the "int time;" in the class declaration. It was painful to watch.
I'm no grumpy old man, I like IDEs, but you can take it too far in either direction.
One thing that bugs me is crappy popcorn. Cold, stale, popcorn. Tastes worse than the stuff you get in a bag.
You go to the counter, and want some popcorn. They scoop it out of a giant tub of popcorn that looks like it's been there for a few weeks. The heat lamps are nonexistent, or turned off.
What the hell? I mean, it's not cuisine, but, would you accept a 6-hour old hamburger that's room temp?
This must be a some strange artifact of multiplexes that I don't quite understand. When I managed a small theater years ago, the concession folks were very adept at making just enough popcorn so it was always fresh and hot. Heat lamps always on, turn it over quickly, toss it when it's nasty, and freshen it by mixing in a fresh batch.
I don't recall the last time I've ever seen a popper actually running in a theater. We'd always running the popper right before the movie, because the smell of it running was enough to get people to buy.
How hard of a concept is this? Of all places, a movie theather should make good popcorn, dammit!
Re:But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-g
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 4, Informative
The VxDs actually replaced nearly all of the DOS and BIOS calls with virtualized device drivers -- that's why you could run a bunch of separate DOS windows. IIRC, vmm32.vxd was the 32-bit kernel, and went in and patched up the interrupt table and redirected it to its own code. Otherwise there's no way it would work since the DOS code talked to the hardware directly and had no support for multitasking.
Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.
They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.
If I would have tried that with my parents, they would have said to me: sure, we'll split the cost of the car with you... where's your $10,000? Oh, you mean you haven't saved that much yet? Sorry!
No way in hell they'd ever split a loan, or even cosign one. If you have to cosign for your kids, then they can't afford the loan, and have no business getting it in the first place.
Depends where you are I guess. I've had DSL since basically the first ISP moved in town, which started at 30 but quickly balloned to $60 for 256 SDSL. Yuck. Still better than dialup, though.
These days, Comcast is $50 a month, and Verizon DSL is $30 for 3000/768. In fact, the price recently went down from $40 to $30!
Slashdot Mirror
Snob factor. Right now, the purpose of a hybrid is less to save the environment than to feel good about saving the environment. If the car just looks like any other car, nobody will notice, and then how are you going to feel superior?
It would be like paying $300 for a pair of desginer jeans that are indistinguishable from a $20 Sears pair. Can't impress anyone that way!
Let's say that you have a Windows app that relies on DirectX for some stuff, OpenGL for other stuff, some POSIX functions for yet others. Each one of those APIs represent a possibly different porting problem: move to a different platform, and one of the libraries might be missing or poorly implemented.
So, if your code intermixes calls to all three libraries, you are going to have a hell of a time porting it over. Example: you move to IRIX and now you problably have a good GL implementation, but too bad, it's mixed up with DirectX code, and now you have to rewrite all that code, even though the GL calls would work.
Portability is in the eye of the beholder. X code is mostly portable, but, you need an X server on the other side. So writing portable X code isn't going to help you make your native Mac UI application. Once you take the view that X is just another external API, and you wall it off appropriately, you've done you work.
Now, you can group APIs - if you're on windows, you are pretty much assured that, say, Win32 GDI calls and DirectX are going to be there, so no need to go overboard and factor them out separately.
The devil is choosing your abstractions. You can't over-abstract, otherwise the application will be too alient and never be completed. You almost have to have a sense of where the project will go in the future and what the most critical components are.
Move all the computers in NY to Tennesee! Presto, not only do you save on taxes, but now all your cow-orkers do too.
or information that identify their role in the school.
What does that mean? If a kid posts a picture of him and his friends wearing an X high-school shirt, is that "identifying their role" in school, and kicked out of band?
It would make my day to see Piquepaille at an arraignment.
Rather than ask them for ID, I would ask the, uh, obvious 13-14 year olds "are you 18 or older?" The answer was invariably yes. Then I'd ask them people their birth year. A surprising number of them got it wrong. I told them: if you can't be bothered to do the math, I'm not going to let you in.
Damn kids. When I lied to get into bars, I made damn well sure I knew the birthday (and everything else) on the license. Thank you James Justus Woell from Ann Arbor, Michigan! Even though you were 30 and I was 17, it was good enough!
*not dirty.
It all started with animation. There is nothing worse than trying read some articles with dayglo green-on-pink spinning, flashing, !CLICK HERE! on top. I can't... think... with that there! Junkbuster fixed that.
Then there was cookie management. I only log into a handful of sites, why does every single one need cookies to the end of time? JB again to the rescue: it could convert cookies into session-only cookies, and leave the ones I need alone.
Then came the spam. Back then I was using Netscape 4, and it would dutifully load remote images off the web, with no way to stop it. Privoxy helped there by letting me blackmail IPs. Not great, but better than nothing.
Since it's a proxy, all this worked for the times I was also forced to use IE, which I tried to resist as long as possible. Since neither Netscape or IE had any of these features, it was a great add-on.
As everyone around here has said over and over, text ads don't bug me. I could go militant anti-ad and start filtering text ads with Privoxy, but I don't. Google got it right. God bless 'em.
These days, things have changed for the better. Mail clients can disable remote image loading, and actually prefer text over the HTML bullshit. Browsers have per-site cookie management and allow you to accept session cookies silently. Firefox has ad-block.
"Maybe ads aren't so bad anymore", I think, "maybe advertisers have learned their lesson, and I should stop blocking". Then I use my parents' computer without adblock on a Christmas break. The ads now are movies, overlay the entire screen, with swooshing rock soundtracks. Result: adblock not only stays on, but gets installed on permanently on their computer too. And anyone else's I work on.
At home, I picked up a ReplayTV 5040 (the geek PVR) -- two babies made following "24" impossible, and I was tired of swapping tapes. I dumped the stupid VCR the day we got it. Automatically skipping ads was just a pleasant bonus, and saves lots of time.
I agree totally, but basic cable can be for about $15 a month. Couple that with a ReplayTV and there go the commericals. Then, add in the fact that many cable companies have forgotten how to supply basic cable, and accidentally give you extended cable.
This is the best explanation I've ever seen of this. Thank you!
I really like the way some European companies structure their space: shared offices. 2-4 people in a large office, with a door and window. (Something about it being illegal to make employees work in windowless rooms in some countires, I hear.) It seems to be a good compromise between all cubes and all offices. I wonder why I don't see this more in the US?
Just because two parents work does not mean that the kids can't be well-raised. My wife worked in daycare for a while, and saw plenty of the "BMW" couples described above. She also saw plenty of two-job families with no BMWs and well-adjusted kids. The two are not mutually exclusive.
The difference is the first couple doesn't really care about their kids-- they're just fashion accessories. They think they do, but the amount of attention they willingly give them tells the real story. It happens more than you think. Congrats that your family didn't fall into that trap, but there are plenty others that do.
What confuses me is this - didn't C compilers, back in the dark ages, try this trick? They tried to claim that the output of the compiler was copyright to them, and required licenses or royalities to distribute.
This utterly failed. Which compilers require licensed runtimes now?
Now the irony is: maybe this is what made it possible to build, say, bootstrap a new, Free as in blahblahblah, C compiler... so it could be written in C instead of assembler? Then run it through itself and poof, no more royalities needed.
Use Privoxy (any browser) or Adblock (firefox) to filter things out based on arbitrary criteria. Domain-based filtering is way too crude to be useful.
One day I was at a gas statio, and the guy pumping the gas had a button that said "petroleum transfer engineer". At least he didn't take himself seriously.
Example: tech guy strikes it rich founding a company, and is now volunteer fireman. The fireman's paycheck doesn't exactly support his lifestyle, paying for his million-dollar home.
There's a difference between changing jobs to something you love, and retiring.
Pitch correction can work on voice if you're careful. The better ones can preserve vibrato, etc, so that you don't lose expressiveness. The very good ones are programmable so you define what it fixes and what it doesn't.
And that's not a even good reason to spend a lot.
Pitch correction is cheap enough that it doesn't even matter. Our band self-produced a CD, and used pitch correction in plenty of spots. But it wasn't just on a single singer. The band has 15 (yes, fifteen) horn players. Even with good players, when you have that many, the "MTBF" gets low enough that fixes are needed.
I would wager we did a lot more pitch correction than an average band with one bad singer would. And we spent very little on it.
It used to be El Niño a few years ago, better known as El Excúso. At least it's not getting stale. I wonder what it will be in another 10 years?
I was at an Eclipse conference watching a presentation. One guy used the IDE so much that he barely typed anything. E.g., to add a member to a class, he clicked on an "add member" button. For every modification he made there was a menu item that did it for him.
The sad fact is: it took many times longer to highglight the word, find the menu, and click on "Add Member", than would be to type the "int time;" in the class declaration. It was painful to watch.
I'm no grumpy old man, I like IDEs, but you can take it too far in either direction.
Wrong. Learn the difference between Islamist and Muslim.
You go to the counter, and want some popcorn. They scoop it out of a giant tub of popcorn that looks like it's been there for a few weeks. The heat lamps are nonexistent, or turned off.
What the hell? I mean, it's not cuisine, but, would you accept a 6-hour old hamburger that's room temp?
This must be a some strange artifact of multiplexes that I don't quite understand. When I managed a small theater years ago, the concession folks were very adept at making just enough popcorn so it was always fresh and hot. Heat lamps always on, turn it over quickly, toss it when it's nasty, and freshen it by mixing in a fresh batch.
I don't recall the last time I've ever seen a popper actually running in a theater. We'd always running the popper right before the movie, because the smell of it running was enough to get people to buy.
How hard of a concept is this? Of all places, a movie theather should make good popcorn, dammit!
Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.
They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.
If I would have tried that with my parents, they would have said to me: sure, we'll split the cost of the car with you... where's your $10,000? Oh, you mean you haven't saved that much yet? Sorry!
No way in hell they'd ever split a loan, or even cosign one. If you have to cosign for your kids, then they can't afford the loan, and have no business getting it in the first place.
I can think of no better incentive to save.
Depends where you are I guess. I've had DSL since basically the first ISP moved in town, which started at 30 but quickly balloned to $60 for 256 SDSL. Yuck. Still better than dialup, though.
These days, Comcast is $50 a month, and Verizon DSL is $30 for 3000/768. In fact, the price recently went down from $40 to $30!
So why do cordless phones fall apart after a year or two, then? Those are built by electrical and industrial... uh, engineers?
Because you paid $30 for it, not $100 million.
The things that structural and civil engineers have different price tags and longevity requirements.