I doubt that you got a signal inside a brick building using xm.
Both XM and Sirius have repeaters on the ground for urban areas where buildings can block the signal. I've listened to XM in parking garages in San Francisco, and listened to Sirius underground in Portland.
Because then people realize that having sattelite radio is stupid when you can have have 2+ weeks worth of songs that are replayable, searchable, and pauseable.
Yeah, that's what I used to think. Then I realized it was a pain to have to choose between (1) listening to the same 2+ weeks worth of songs forever, and (2) spending all my time looking for good new music.
Now, in exchange for $12.95 a month, a bunch of professionals pick out good music for me in any genre I can think of, and I get 4 channels of political talk, 2 channels of comedy, and all kinds of other news/talk/entertainment programming.
The biggest problem with Sirius is that is has a terrible signal -- on my last two vacations we rented cars with Sirius systems, and were regularly frustrated by not getting a signal when driving in forests, under light cloud cover, fog around the San Francisco bay, or clear skys in Napa Valley. XM radio on the other hand, has an excellent signal - I have used it inside of brick buildings with no trouble.
That's because XM has terrestrial repeaters around San Francisco. Try listening to it in a parking garage in SF and marvel at how well it works... that's not because XM's satellite has the power to transmit through concrete, it's because XM put antennas on the ground nearby.
I suspect you haven't taken your XM radio to the same forests you visited on vacation - XM has more repeaters than Sirius, but they aren't in the middle of nowhere. If all you have is the sky, Sirius is more likely to work than XM (because of the higher angle of their figure-eight orbit), which is why XM has so many repeaters in the first place.
Does anyone know why they would do something so stupid as having sattelites in LEO and not geo-stationary?
Because it's not really stupid.;)
Thanks to those elliptical orbits, Sirius usually has a satellite visible at a higher angle in the sky than XM. That means better reception and less need for ground repeaters in light urban areas.
It also means you're more likely to be able to see two satellites at once, which is how the buffering works.
Ever drive under a bridge while listening to Sirius and notice the music not stop? That's because one satellite is on a 4 second delay, so your tuner fills its buffer with one stream and plays the other. If the signal is interrupted, you can still listen to the buffered data until you reacquire the signal. But with satellites at fixed lower angles, you're more likely to lose the signal from one of them, making buffering impossible.
Just the first time Symantec has admitted it, I guess.
See the link in my sig blatantly pimping a software product? A while back, that product was compressed with UPX to make the download faster - UPX did a much better job of compressing the executable than either ZIP or Inno Setup. Things were good.
But that had to stop when I got mysterious complaints from users who said their computer would freeze for a minute or so each time they ran my program. Even stranger, their computer froze in exactly the same way when they installed the program. Turns out these users were all running Norton AntiVirus, and when NAV scans some (but not all) executables compressed with UPX, it just sucks. CPU time, that is. I searched the web and found some other reports of the same problem with other compressed apps.
I reported it to Symantec, and what did they tell me? Why, I must be mistaken! There's no incompatibility between NAV and UPX! Go away.
So I'm pleasantly surprised that they're actually admitting that a problem with UPX exists, even if it might not be the same one I encountered. Maybe once everyone has upgraded, I can go back to compressing the software I distribute.
Matsushita declined to say whether it thinks any other software vendors may be infringing its patent.
Gee, do you think there might be any other software out there that uses a help icon? *cough* *coughwindowsmacoswordexcelaccesspowerpointwordper fect--* *sputter* *choke*
But yeah, it would be nice if there were a way to declare automatic (in the C sense) objects in GC languages.
The next version of C++/CLI--the replacement for ugly old Managed C++ in.NET--is supposed to do this (actually, this version was supposed to, but I guess the feature slipped). It'll still be based on finalizers and IDisposable, but the syntax should be the same as automatic destruction.
Oh god, my mom had a Performa 630CD, and thanks to that thing, I've never been able to get over the belief that pre-OS-X Macs are unstable piles of crap. It would lock up hard at least twice a day when I was using it, and the power button was hidden all the way in back.
Christian fundementalist for example, will absolutely go apoplectic hearing "ass" or "Fuck" or "dick" on television.
Changing these to "behind" "sex" and "penis" is their form of political correctness.
All too true.
"Political correctness" is just a new term... a politically correct term, if you will... for "euphemism". It's the idea that although it's still OK to talk about certain things, it's not OK to use certain phrases to describe it.
If you think the differences lie only in looks, then you are revealing a rather stark lack of knowledge about OS X and, well, operating system design in general.. sounds more like you're just repeating a mantra that you heard from others, which makes you no less "biased" than me.
Indeed it would... if that were the case. Since it isn't, should I expect an apology?
It puzzles me how people like you can stand there and actively defend mediocrity. (Is it that you feel you have to defend your own personal choices? I mean, you presumably use Windows, so saying "Windows is a poor choice" implies *you* made a poor choice, perhaps you are rationalising your choice?)
Nope. I've been using Linux for about 10 years. I've owned Macs. I've used OS X, but admittedly not for very long. I hated Windows as much as any Slashbot... until XP came out, which convinced me that MS had finally gotten something right. (See, I don't even spell MS with a dollar sign anymore.)
"You should buy Windows, even though it looks worse, and you'll need to install anti-virus which slow down your PC, and you'll be cleaning spyware every other week, etc. etc., this is the right choice!"
I've never gotten a spyware infestation, even though I used IE until last year. Nothing about MacOS's design makes spyware or viruses inherently any less of a problem than on Windows - blame the browser and the user's behavior, not the OS.
Look, you claimed Windows isn't nice enough for people to use. The fact that most Windows users don't find it unusable proves otherwise, and I maintain that only a zealot claims Windows isn't nice enough to use. Whether there are better operating systems out there is another debate.
Developers can still "hide" options from users who don't understand context menus; the context menus in a Mac app are just accessed differently. So eliminating the right button still doesn't force anyone to come up with a better UI.
IMO, accessing a context menu by holding down the button or ctrl+clicking is less intuitive than right-clicking, not more.
They just want a computer that is NICE TO USE and is not overly expensive. Read that part in caps again... PCs just do not fit the bill (certainly neither Windows nor Linux), Mac Mini does.
Your bias is showing. Windows is nice enough for most people to use. It's only a relatively small group of zealots who think otherwise. OS X looks a little cooler than Windows XP, but that's like saying Anna Kournikova looks a little hotter than Heidi Klum - most guys would happily settle for either.
One caveat (and possible source for your confusion) is that when declaring a true multidimensional array you must know the dimensions at compile time. You cannot for example declare x[width][height]
Material property, what is that? A car, a house, a real estate? So if you own real estate, and you grow crops on it? Who owns the crops? You! Right? If under the earth on your real estate is ore, or oil, and you dig it out, who owns it? You! Right? If you take mud from your ground and form a statuett who owns it? You! Right?
And now the quantum leap: if you write a story.... who owns it?
No one.
The story is not a physical object; it can be used by more than one person at the same time. It doesn't need to be owned by anyone.
See, ownership is a concept that only applies to things that are scarce - things that can only be used by one person at a time. If there's only one car, two people can't drive it to two destinations simultaneously. If you make one statue out of mud, it can go in your living room or mine, but not both. The whole concept of ownership is there so that we can all live peacefully while we're surrounded by objects that we can't all use at once... someone has to decide how they're going to be used, and that person is the owner.
On the other hand, the concept of ownership is wholly unnecessary when we're talking about things that can be used by more than one person in different ways at the same time. If you and I discover a CD in the road, and I want to listen to it while you want to send it to your friend, we're gonna have a problem... but if you and I discover an MP3 file on the internet, there is no problem. I can listen to it and you can email it to your buddies, and neither of our actions will disturb the other. Which one of us owns the file, you ask? Why would anyone need to own it?
OK, so it's a peer to peer voice chat program. Fine. How is that any better than the voice chat available in IPARTY, or Visual IRC, or AIM, or dozens of other apps? Why is sending audio over a P2P network any better than sending it directly from my computer to yours with plain old TCP/UDP?
You pay a full $40 for the game, and then you have to pay $5 each to download "song packs" from Xbox Live if you want the old songs that are included in every other version of the game for free.
I'd say that generally, one does not critically analyze a song by inclduing samples of it in another song; or produce a scholarly work using one piece of video clip in another video art [my emph.]. Those that do do that are generally creating another, derivative, commerical work that requires permission of the parent copyright holder.
Then again, maybe you think Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" was a critical analysis of Queen's original "Under Pressure".
A critical analysis is a derivative, commercial work too. You can write a book review without quoting the book, and you can reply to a post without quoting the original post (that's what the "Parent" link is for), just as you can make a rap song without sampling the beat or bass line from an older rock song.
That means including a quote in your critical analysis is just a way to make your own work more appealing, by taking advantage of someone else's prior work without diminishing it.
And--this is key--there's nothing wrong with doing that, whether you're a programmer, a book reviewer, or a lame white rapper.
It was all a big misunderstanding... apparently some people didn't realize that embryonic stem cells come from fertilized eggs in fertility clinics that are just going to be thrown away anyway.
Luckily, as you note, they've all realized their mistake, and now we can all get on to doing research and improving the quality of life for people with serious diseases.... I wish. *sob*
PC software is written around certain assumptions, for example: moving data from one place to another is slow, so you load everything into RAM before you need to work with it, then load all your graphics data into video RAM before you need to display it, etc.
The PS2, and I suspect most other consoles, doesn't work that way. It has a few processors running in parallel, and MASSIVE bandwidth, and you don't need a lot of temporary storage because it's easy to just pass data from one chip to another as you work with it.
Porting PC software to the PS2 without dramatically restructuring it will result in obvious problems, since the PC software relies on a lot of temporary storage. Porting PS2 software to the PC will also result in problems, not because the PC is a poor design, but because it's just different from the PS2.
In contrast, the stickers are entirely driven by religion. The 'open mindedness' argument fails because other scientific theories given the same treatment. Where is the warning that electrons and gravity are 'only theories'?
Exactly. This is what the people who say "but, but, the stickers just point out a fact about the book!" are missing: CONTEXT. The stickers single out evolution for special treatment.
Biology textbooks are full of theories - theories about how germs cause disease, how DNA encodes the blueprint for a living creature, and so on. But what a surprise: there's no sticker on the front cover of the textbook saying "The germ theory of disease is a THEORY, not a FACT, and it should be critically examined." The reason they chose to treat evolution differently from all these other theories is obvious, and it has to do with religion.
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I doubt that you got a signal inside a brick building using xm.
:(
Both XM and Sirius have repeaters on the ground for urban areas where buildings can block the signal. I've listened to XM in parking garages in San Francisco, and listened to Sirius underground in Portland.
No Sirius repeaters in Spokane, though.
Because then people realize that having sattelite radio is stupid when you can have have 2+ weeks worth of songs that are replayable, searchable, and pauseable.
Yeah, that's what I used to think. Then I realized it was a pain to have to choose between (1) listening to the same 2+ weeks worth of songs forever, and (2) spending all my time looking for good new music.
Now, in exchange for $12.95 a month, a bunch of professionals pick out good music for me in any genre I can think of, and I get 4 channels of political talk, 2 channels of comedy, and all kinds of other news/talk/entertainment programming.
The biggest problem with Sirius is that is has a terrible signal -- on my last two vacations we rented cars with Sirius systems, and were regularly frustrated by not getting a signal when driving in forests, under light cloud cover, fog around the San Francisco bay, or clear skys in Napa Valley. XM radio on the other hand, has an excellent signal - I have used it inside of brick buildings with no trouble.
That's because XM has terrestrial repeaters around San Francisco. Try listening to it in a parking garage in SF and marvel at how well it works... that's not because XM's satellite has the power to transmit through concrete, it's because XM put antennas on the ground nearby.
I suspect you haven't taken your XM radio to the same forests you visited on vacation - XM has more repeaters than Sirius, but they aren't in the middle of nowhere. If all you have is the sky, Sirius is more likely to work than XM (because of the higher angle of their figure-eight orbit), which is why XM has so many repeaters in the first place.
Does anyone know why they would do something so stupid as having sattelites in LEO and not geo-stationary?
;)
Because it's not really stupid.
Thanks to those elliptical orbits, Sirius usually has a satellite visible at a higher angle in the sky than XM. That means better reception and less need for ground repeaters in light urban areas.
It also means you're more likely to be able to see two satellites at once, which is how the buffering works.
Ever drive under a bridge while listening to Sirius and notice the music not stop? That's because one satellite is on a 4 second delay, so your tuner fills its buffer with one stream and plays the other. If the signal is interrupted, you can still listen to the buffered data until you reacquire the signal. But with satellites at fixed lower angles, you're more likely to lose the signal from one of them, making buffering impossible.
Just the first time Symantec has admitted it, I guess.
See the link in my sig blatantly pimping a software product? A while back, that product was compressed with UPX to make the download faster - UPX did a much better job of compressing the executable than either ZIP or Inno Setup. Things were good.
But that had to stop when I got mysterious complaints from users who said their computer would freeze for a minute or so each time they ran my program. Even stranger, their computer froze in exactly the same way when they installed the program. Turns out these users were all running Norton AntiVirus, and when NAV scans some (but not all) executables compressed with UPX, it just sucks. CPU time, that is. I searched the web and found some other reports of the same problem with other compressed apps.
I reported it to Symantec, and what did they tell me? Why, I must be mistaken! There's no incompatibility between NAV and UPX! Go away.
So I'm pleasantly surprised that they're actually admitting that a problem with UPX exists, even if it might not be the same one I encountered. Maybe once everyone has upgraded, I can go back to compressing the software I distribute.
Matsushita declined to say whether it thinks any other software vendors may be infringing its patent.
r fect--* *sputter* *choke*
Gee, do you think there might be any other software out there that uses a help icon? *cough* *coughwindowsmacoswordexcelaccesspowerpointwordpe
But yeah, it would be nice if there were a way to declare automatic (in the C sense) objects in GC languages.
.NET--is supposed to do this (actually, this version was supposed to, but I guess the feature slipped). It'll still be based on finalizers and IDisposable, but the syntax should be the same as automatic destruction.
The next version of C++/CLI--the replacement for ugly old Managed C++ in
Oh god, my mom had a Performa 630CD, and thanks to that thing, I've never been able to get over the belief that pre-OS-X Macs are unstable piles of crap. It would lock up hard at least twice a day when I was using it, and the power button was hidden all the way in back.
supposedly apple did that so circuit city would have the 6315, sears would have the 6312, etc. and each could say they had an "unbeatable" price.
You can see the same principle at work today with (for example) eMachines. Some of them even have the store's initials as part of the model number.
Christian fundementalist for example, will absolutely go apoplectic hearing "ass" or "Fuck" or "dick" on television.
Changing these to "behind" "sex" and "penis" is their form of political correctness.
All too true.
"Political correctness" is just a new term... a politically correct term, if you will... for "euphemism". It's the idea that although it's still OK to talk about certain things, it's not OK to use certain phrases to describe it.
If you think the differences lie only in looks, then you are revealing a rather stark lack of knowledge about OS X and, well, operating system design in general .. sounds more like you're just repeating a mantra that you heard from others, which makes you no less "biased" than me.
Indeed it would... if that were the case. Since it isn't, should I expect an apology?
It puzzles me how people like you can stand there and actively defend mediocrity. (Is it that you feel you have to defend your own personal choices? I mean, you presumably use Windows, so saying "Windows is a poor choice" implies *you* made a poor choice, perhaps you are rationalising your choice?)
Nope. I've been using Linux for about 10 years. I've owned Macs. I've used OS X, but admittedly not for very long. I hated Windows as much as any Slashbot... until XP came out, which convinced me that MS had finally gotten something right. (See, I don't even spell MS with a dollar sign anymore.)
"You should buy Windows, even though it looks worse, and you'll need to install anti-virus which slow down your PC, and you'll be cleaning spyware every other week, etc. etc., this is the right choice!"
I've never gotten a spyware infestation, even though I used IE until last year. Nothing about MacOS's design makes spyware or viruses inherently any less of a problem than on Windows - blame the browser and the user's behavior, not the OS.
Look, you claimed Windows isn't nice enough for people to use. The fact that most Windows users don't find it unusable proves otherwise, and I maintain that only a zealot claims Windows isn't nice enough to use. Whether there are better operating systems out there is another debate.
Developers can still "hide" options from users who don't understand context menus; the context menus in a Mac app are just accessed differently. So eliminating the right button still doesn't force anyone to come up with a better UI.
IMO, accessing a context menu by holding down the button or ctrl+clicking is less intuitive than right-clicking, not more.
Vanilla, you say? Finally, this proves Jesus was white! Take that, anthropologists!
They just want a computer that is NICE TO USE and is not overly expensive. Read that part in caps again ... PCs just do not fit the bill (certainly neither Windows nor Linux), Mac Mini does.
Your bias is showing. Windows is nice enough for most people to use. It's only a relatively small group of zealots who think otherwise. OS X looks a little cooler than Windows XP, but that's like saying Anna Kournikova looks a little hotter than Heidi Klum - most guys would happily settle for either.
So, uh, what brand of record player do you use in your car? I tried a Technics, but for some reason it kept skipping whenever I hit a bump...
One caveat (and possible source for your confusion) is that when declaring a true multidimensional array you must know the dimensions at compile time. You cannot for example declare x[width][height]
I'm pretty sure GCC lets you do that, doesn't it?
Material property, what is that? A car, a house, a real estate? So if you own real estate, and you grow crops on it? Who owns the crops? You! Right?
.... who owns it?
If under the earth on your real estate is ore, or oil, and you dig it out, who owns it? You! Right?
If you take mud from your ground and form a statuett who owns it? You! Right?
And now the quantum leap: if you write a story
No one.
The story is not a physical object; it can be used by more than one person at the same time. It doesn't need to be owned by anyone.
See, ownership is a concept that only applies to things that are scarce - things that can only be used by one person at a time. If there's only one car, two people can't drive it to two destinations simultaneously. If you make one statue out of mud, it can go in your living room or mine, but not both. The whole concept of ownership is there so that we can all live peacefully while we're surrounded by objects that we can't all use at once... someone has to decide how they're going to be used, and that person is the owner.
On the other hand, the concept of ownership is wholly unnecessary when we're talking about things that can be used by more than one person in different ways at the same time. If you and I discover a CD in the road, and I want to listen to it while you want to send it to your friend, we're gonna have a problem... but if you and I discover an MP3 file on the internet, there is no problem. I can listen to it and you can email it to your buddies, and neither of our actions will disturb the other. Which one of us owns the file, you ask? Why would anyone need to own it?
OK, so it's a peer to peer voice chat program. Fine. How is that any better than the voice chat available in IPARTY, or Visual IRC, or AIM, or dozens of other apps? Why is sending audio over a P2P network any better than sending it directly from my computer to yours with plain old TCP/UDP?
... is the worst of both worlds.
You pay a full $40 for the game, and then you have to pay $5 each to download "song packs" from Xbox Live if you want the old songs that are included in every other version of the game for free.
Nintendo pretty much LIVES on their first and second parties alone, while if it weren't for third parties, what would Sony be left with?
The first party is the manufacturer; the second party is the user. How many GameCube users write their own games?
I'd say that generally, one does not critically analyze a song by inclduing samples of it in another song; or produce a scholarly work using one piece of video clip in another video art [my emph.]. Those that do do that are generally creating another, derivative, commerical work that requires permission of the parent copyright holder.
Then again, maybe you think Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" was a critical analysis of Queen's original "Under Pressure".
A critical analysis is a derivative, commercial work too. You can write a book review without quoting the book, and you can reply to a post without quoting the original post (that's what the "Parent" link is for), just as you can make a rap song without sampling the beat or bass line from an older rock song.
That means including a quote in your critical analysis is just a way to make your own work more appealing, by taking advantage of someone else's prior work without diminishing it.
And--this is key--there's nothing wrong with doing that, whether you're a programmer, a book reviewer, or a lame white rapper.
I'm sure you would have no problem accepting the limitations of real property rights too - namely that you can sell said property once and only once.
Exactly. Copyright is about having your cake and eating it too.
It was all a big misunderstanding... apparently some people didn't realize that embryonic stem cells come from fertilized eggs in fertility clinics that are just going to be thrown away anyway.
... I wish. *sob*
Luckily, as you note, they've all realized their mistake, and now we can all get on to doing research and improving the quality of life for people with serious diseases.
PC software is written around certain assumptions, for example: moving data from one place to another is slow, so you load everything into RAM before you need to work with it, then load all your graphics data into video RAM before you need to display it, etc.
The PS2, and I suspect most other consoles, doesn't work that way. It has a few processors running in parallel, and MASSIVE bandwidth, and you don't need a lot of temporary storage because it's easy to just pass data from one chip to another as you work with it.
Porting PC software to the PS2 without dramatically restructuring it will result in obvious problems, since the PC software relies on a lot of temporary storage. Porting PS2 software to the PC will also result in problems, not because the PC is a poor design, but because it's just different from the PS2.
In contrast, the stickers are entirely driven by religion. The 'open mindedness' argument fails because other scientific theories given the same treatment. Where is the warning that electrons and gravity are 'only theories'?
Exactly. This is what the people who say "but, but, the stickers just point out a fact about the book!" are missing: CONTEXT. The stickers single out evolution for special treatment.
Biology textbooks are full of theories - theories about how germs cause disease, how DNA encodes the blueprint for a living creature, and so on. But what a surprise: there's no sticker on the front cover of the textbook saying "The germ theory of disease is a THEORY, not a FACT, and it should be critically examined." The reason they chose to treat evolution differently from all these other theories is obvious, and it has to do with religion.