Although I do find the C64 Mini an interesting project, is it really accurate to call it "Commodore's own"? Their Indiegogo page actually seems to confirm that:
"Disclaimer – Retro Games Ltd, THEC64(tm) are in no way associated with Commodore Holdings B.V. THEC64(tm) have not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Commodore Holdings B.V in any way and are not licensed to use the Commodore(R) name or 'Chicken Head' logo. The Commodore Roms, BIOS and THEC64(tm) form factor are officially licensed from Cloanto https://cloanto.com/"
As far as I was aware only the software is licensed, and it's nothing to do with Commodore Holdings B.V. who own the Commodore brand name?
There's a 3rd performance metric that I'd be more interested in seeing -
Set both clueless users and experienced (up to XP ideally) users some "typical" tasks to complete (copy a file, change some preference or other, configure network settings) and see how this compares to earlier windows versions/other OSes.
This means doing things like disabling a network adaptor for instance and then spending time trying to work out where the hell it disappeared to from the network connections window.
This is a far better indication as to the "worth" of the operating system imho than an utterly pointless "boot to desktop" or whatever. Those "boot time" stats are worthless as they're all (relatively) easy to overcome by the use of either SSD or (cache-derived) "instant on" solutions which will inevitably become mainstream in any case. What really matters is whether (for example wrt the UI) redesign actually makes the OS worse from a productivity perspective or better.
It'll take longer than you might think if the original code was written in AS2 and not AS3: There are several _critical_ shortcomings in AS3, most notably the inability to control timeline objects from code reliably as their creation order is somewhat haphazard, and often delayed by several frames from the creation request - this makes the ability to develop rich content extremely tricky using _flash_ and AS3 - the only real way is to manage the objects yourself, and that means forgetting about the timeline - in which case you're more accurately talking about _flex_ and not flash.
I, for one, would be much happier to have heard that Adobe had chosen to actually address some of the existing concerns with Flash 8/CS3/CS4 before rolling out yet another abomination incarnation of AS3 scattered across a wider range of devices:( [And no, they haven't addressed the issues afaik - they still exist with "No Priority" on their bugzilla database]
>> I fully support any foreign governments that choose to ignore the draconian DMCA.
I fully support any foreign government that chooses to acknowledge that US law is only pertinent within US jurisdiction, including and especially the draconian DMCA. I have nothing but total contempt for any foreign (or US) government which thinks that its laws apply globally.
I care greatly about iTunes when considering an MP3 player - if iTunes is a pre-requisite, it's not the device for me!
I make no apology for not wanting a music player/downloader whose setup file alone is in excess of 70 MiB, nor do I make apology for not wanting to have to run rings around myself to purchase MP3 music without DRM encumberance at a fair price.
The straw that breaks the camel's back, however, is the issue of interconnectivity - Choose an Apple device because you want to sync to iTunes? Now you can't easily (yes, I know it can be done, it's just not as simple as it ought to be) transfer those tracks from the iPod back into a "conventional" player, not to mention the awful renaming, filing and other unhelpful ways the tracks are transmogrified by iTunes. Buy your tracks on iTunes? Now you can't easily sync them with A.N.Other-Device.
The arrogance of Apple here is staggering. Yes, you can buy your music from us.... but we'll tell you how to play it. Yes, you can buy our player.... but we'll decide what you can do with it. And regardless of whether you buy player or music.... you'll have to install our crapware on your computer, whether you like it or not! Totally unacceptable, and one of the driving reasons why I won't buy an iPod or iPhone (although for the iPhone, there's many far more pressing reasons why not!), and why I won't be herded/goaded into buying my music tracks from iTunes - I'll always choose a service that allows purchase of plain-old-MP3s at a fair price without the need for many megabytes of bloatware, and without feeling like I must buy a single brand of player on which to play standard files.
If that music isn't available elsewhere, then I won't be buying it, plain and simple.
For full-blown development, I use Embarcadero (formerly CodeGear/Inprise/Borland) RadStudio - There's a free version "Turbo C++ Explorer" which is a full version with the caveat that you can't create/install custom components for the Visual Component Library (VCL).
I've also extensively used Dev-C++ in the past - whilst I do like it, it often crashes, especially when performing Code Completion lookups on large projects. That said, the exception handling is fairly robust and I've never yet lost anything due to it crashing.
The C/C++ support in NetBeans is excellent - Code Completion works well, and the environment is very comfortable to work with. It also produces Makefiles for you enabling you to build your project easily outside of the IDE. I've never tried the Eclipse plugins for C++ as I find Eclipse too cumbersome to use - it has way too many features, often presented at the "top level" of the UI where the features you actually want are buried in nested menus/dialogs as opposed to pretty much all other IDEs I've used where the features you need are found comfortably to hand. YMMV of course.
Lately, I've taken to using Code::Blocks - It's by far my new preferred "small and simple" IDE. It's a fairly small footprint, available for both Linux and Window (possibly Mac too?), and most significantly for me doesn't require a Java install. I'm not convinced that it's easy to reliably generate Makefiles from it, but I haven't really tried all that hard. The Code Completion is good, as are the Symbol Browser (Class navigation) and GDB integration, and there's a number of plugins available to perform other tasks including profiling and suchlike.
Macs are the main competition to Windows, not Linux.
While this may be true, I would like to think that schools who "go down the Mac road" would be held accountable for that decision by those who finance them. I can't conceive of any justification for purchasing significantly over-priced hardware (in comparison to the relatively cheaper and virtually identical vanilla PC hardware).
Whether you like it or not, Microsoft pretty well dominates the commercial sector. Training people to use Mac products, whilst arguably an improvement over a Microsoft-lock-in, isn't going to be either the most appropriate use of funding and in one fell swoop limits the sheer quantity of available software to run on the chosen OS (although that's arguably a good point!)
The issue of cost (or more correctly value-for-money) leaves only one clear candidate, and that's Linux. As with Mac, the choice of software is limited - whilst Linux has (far too big) a selection of software available, I'd argue that the quality of much of the software (outside of the "key" mainstream apps) is somewhat limited: That said, Linux has more than enough (as does Mac) high-quality, feature-rich mainstream apps (such as Firefox for web browsing, a port of Adobe Flash, a plethora of Multimedia apps, OpenOffice, The GIMP etc.) but delivered in a value-for-money fashion (i.e. most of this software is free and well-supported by the community).
I'm not grumbling per se - I use Linux myself (Linux Mint if you must know), and am an advocate for Linux where possible. However, although Linux has matured over the years, it is still not quite (imho) "ready for the desktop". There are a number of design fragmentation issues that need to be resolved (choice of desktop manager, multimedia software, configuration toolset etc.) - most end users simply don't care what desktop manager or MP3 player they are using, as long as that software is stable and of good-quality both from a performance and appearance perspective, simple-to-use (i.e. intuitive), compatible with most (if not all) other software (in the case of desktop managers, for instance), and of sufficient caliber to insulate them from the intricacies of the underlying OS (eg by including adequate configuration applications, plugins, codecs or whatever).
For me, though, It's good to see each and every instance where Linux is gaining a foothold - not "just" because it's Linux, but because it represents an informed choice of a value-for-money OS, and also because it goes one step further to aiding in the catch-22 of "Linux for the desktop": Increased market penetration will (hopefully) lead to improvements, and improvements will lead to increased market penetration. As a parent in the UK, It would be nice to see Linux gain a significant share in schools here too: As a taxpayer, I am effectively contributing to their funding and take great exception at the amounts of money being spent on proprietary technologies that are, frankly, unnecessary. The money would be greatly appreciated and of use in other areas, and Linux is a credible solution to liberate these funds.
I'd be real interested in this myself. As I am only a hobbyist in this regard, anything >$0 is too much for me to spend on this right now. gEDA is real interesting for basic EDA stuff, but without wishing to sound ungrateful, I found it too disjointed and unstable for my taste - perhaps that has changed since I last tried it?
I work as Lead Software Dev for an online gaming company, and use ActionScript daily for my job (as well as other languages of course). We have found that we *cannot* use AS3 which is a real pity as it's much quicker and improved over AS2 (strict typing etc) due to 2 major bugs:
First of all, there's an issue when dynamically loading images. No matter _how hard_ you try to dispose of allocated memory (Manual delete, NULL pointer, force GC etc etc) it does not free the previously allocated memory. Whopping memory leak. Furthermore, it's no longer possible to reference objects on the timeline until the frame _after_ they first get instantiated. Or the next one. Maybe. Or even the next one - all depends what mood the player is in. Sure, there's events you can hook in to to make sure you wait until the object's properly instantiated, but that kinda defeats the object of having a _time_line. So for us, AS3 is a bust until they can fix these issues.
Back OT, as for Silverlight - I've yet to see this running anything meaningful at more than a crawl. Even looking at some of the most basic of UI widget sets implemented in Silverlight is a painfully slow experience, so that's not going to cut it for me either. Anybody have any links to either "meaningful" Silverlight content (i.e. more than just "hello world"), or a UI widget set implemented in Silverlight that's usable real-time I'd be interested to check them out...
Well a quick glance at PeerGuardian shows me 774,128,775 IP's being blocked (Ad's, Spyware, Government and Anti-P2P). That's a nice little reserve of Candidates-For-Reissue for when our backs are against the wall imho;)
DT
Many of the PopCap games (and similar) I have played where colour is significant have overlays shown (as an option) which aid me just fine, and I'm sure a similar thing would work here, even though that's assuming that the original would be unusable by someone colour blind.
The one thing that really used to irritate me was Teletext (before it faded into obsolescence) - Being unable to tell the difference between Green and Yellow, and Cyan and White made for trying times, especially when some insensitive clod chose green and yellow as two of the "fastext" colours. Oh, and chose blue for the cyan option (which looks white to me!).
I have no problem wiring a plug; only occasional problems wiring more complex items (whereby I am forced to use direct lighting to make the colour distinctions); and no problem with traffic lights. Only where I must choose between two shades that differ by red hue alone (or near enough) do I have problems. I know that red-green colour blindness is not the only kind, but it often feels like colour blindness is not considered when designing new products/websites etc. and I find that disappointing for lack of such a simple consideration.
Re:What about the mentalty of their customers ?
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Sony to Buy Gracenote
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I've voted with my feet too, actually. I don't own a PS3, nor a PSP, despite actually quite fancying a PSP for emulation purposes. My own decision was "triggered" by the Lik-Sang suefest, but the rootkit debacle certainly wasn't forgotten in my decision. I'm sure they couldn't care less, but I'd rather "go without" than fund such corporate shenanigans. Sidenote: Creative Labs, of course, recently joined my "no buy" list.
Each to their own though, naturally.
I'm not sure if I'm missing what you're saying here, but I certainly DO have the means to implement projects from OpenCores - All it takes (in my case, anyway) is a relatively inexpensive FPGA Development Board (The Spartan-3E Starter Kit fwiw) and freely-downloadable VHDL compiler/synthesizer/etc (eg Xilinx ISE).
I certainly understand the sentiment behind your comments (and linked post) - for sure, manufacturing product whether that be injection moulding or PCB fabrication or whatever is beyond the means of most "little guys", but FPGA development is well and truly within the grasp of us all financially imho.
Tony
Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. Am I the only one that finds a comment like this deeply ironic? "We", as consumers, are expected to suffer the barrage of DRM-infested files (i.e. files protected using proprietary methodologies e.g. CSS, PVP, AACS, Protected WMV/WMA), delivered using proprietary file formats (e.g. Windows Media, RealMedia et al), yet those pimping such products find it so inconvenient to deal with multiple "IP Protection" systems.
The argument that no one wants a proprietary system with sole beneficiary is certainly at the forefront of the BBC's "iPlayer" debacle, and indeed that to me doesn't appear either "responsible" of the company concerned, or "open" (as opposed to proprietary), so much so that Linux and MAC users are effectively "locked out" (and yeah, I know they offer some lame-ass Flash alternative, but that doesn't cut it imho).
How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites? I suppose the crux of the matter (to me, anyway) is that provided the "industry standard" in question is neither proprietary nor beneficial to one company, who cares how they attempt to control their "IP". If the "real" question is "Would an industry standard restore freedom of speech (and in particular limit censorship)" then I fail to see how this will be the case. Certainly not for as long as these media companies are allowed to ride roughshod over the DMCA, and fail to recognize the true nature of copyright legislation (in particular Fair Use).
Back on-topic, so the media moguls want a "universal, standard copyright filtering mechanism". Cry me a river! I'd love many things - Net Neutrality, an end to worthless "Disease Ridden Media [DRM]", World Peace, and so on... The media industry appears to love nothing more than to turn a blind eye to the phenomenon that is "Teh InterWeb" and try to milk old business practice for all it's worth, then want to cry foul because they've missed the boat, failed to embrace what should have been one of the most powerful distribution channels ever created, treated (the majority of) their consumers like criminals, and now they magically expect, nay demand, a "universal copyright protector". Damn, I'd bet there's a lot of software houses out there who would love such an invention to protect their products - maybe they could even petition ISP's to filter all traffic using such an algorithm to prevent software piracy? Pur-lease!
Well, I guess that would be why Adobe Flash (Design Standard) is to cost $1199 (+ tax where applicable?) and £895 (excl tax). That's $1793 at current rates - Some 50% more than the US price.;)
"getting there just deserts" doesn't make any sense. You're right, it doesn't make sense: It might make more sense if "their" were to be spelt correctly (as it was by the gp).
In any case, "deserts" is the correct form for this phrase.
There's also a nice article in the Sept 30 issue of New Scientist (although this article is related to the study of bridging time-continuum in order to effectively "modify" the past).
Although the article isn't a "teleportation" article, it does provide a fairly in-depth explanation of the principle and implications of entanglement. The article then takes this one step further by suggesting that if the two paths that the entangled photons took were then themselves split, but splitting the second path an additional length (using fibre optic cable), the two paths would take different time periods to complete, however by using photon detectors, it would be possible to determine which of the 2 sub-paths the entangled photons took, in spite of the fact that the 2nd entangled photon had not yet made that "choice" yet, effectively providing some form of "clairvoyance";)
Using a crystal, [Univ of Innsbruck, Austria, researcher Birgit Dopfer] converted one laser beam into two so that photons in one beam were entangled with those in the other, and each pair was matched up by a circuit known as a coincidence detector. One beam passed through a double slit to a photon detector, while the other passed through a lens to a movable detector which could sense a photon in two different positions.
The movable detector is key, because in one position it effectively images the slits and measures each photon as a particle, while in the other it captures only a wave-like interference pattern. Dopfer showed that measuring a photon as a wave or a particle forced its twin in the other beam to be measured in the same way.
To use this set-up to send a signal [through time], it needs to work without a coincidence circuit. Inspired by Raymond Jensen at Notre Dame University in Indiana, [John] Cramer then proposed passing each beam through a double slit, not only to give the experimenter the choice of measuring photons as waves or particles, but also to help track photon pairs. The double slits should filter out most unentangled photons and either block or let pass both members of an entangled pair, at least in theory. So a photon arriving at one detector should have its twin appear at the other.
[snippety snip]
His extra twist is to run the photons you choose how to measure through several km of coiled-up fibre-optic cable, thereby delaying them by microseconds. This delay means that the other beam will arrive at its detector before you make your choice. However, since the rules of quantum mechanics are indifferent to the timings of measurements, the state of the other beam should correspond to how you choose to measure the delayed beam. The effect of your choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it! That's the idea anyway.
"Counterfeits are not made to the same standard as originals, if they were made to the same standards then the counterfeiters wouldn't be trying to pass off their goods as fakes, they would be making claims that their products were better."
If you were ripping off a "no-name" brand and trying to present it as the same "no-name", then sure, this would certainly be the case, but if you're trying to rip off say a genuine Toshiba laptop, or Motorola cell battery, then isn't it going to be difficult to convince consumers that your product is better than the manufacturer's own named brand? [although I guess your comments re. warranty kind of highlight that] After all, as a consumer why would you accept that a "SuperTosh" is better than a Toshiba? One brand you have heard of (and either inherently trust or distrust as a result), and the other you have never heard of (so should automatically be somewhat cautious about).
As a slightly related issue, is this difficulty in marketing for an "unheard of" company making hardware so severe that it would drive them to market counterfeit goods, or is it plain greed (or both? lol)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes indeed - it's a rather sad and grubby state of affairs for the brand that (mostly) proved to be the most formative in my computing adolescence.
Is it fair, therefore, to say that Cloanto remains, for all intents and purposes, the primary licensee of the Commodore products (sans Brand/Logo)?
"Disclaimer – Retro Games Ltd, THEC64(tm) are in no way associated with Commodore Holdings B.V. THEC64(tm) have not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Commodore Holdings B.V in any way and are not licensed to use the Commodore(R) name or 'Chicken Head' logo. The Commodore Roms, BIOS and THEC64(tm) form factor are officially licensed from Cloanto https://cloanto.com/"
As far as I was aware only the software is licensed, and it's nothing to do with Commodore Holdings B.V. who own the Commodore brand name?
Let me guess: Your advice here to "other's" (sic) was just your attempt at irony?
There's a 3rd performance metric that I'd be more interested in seeing -
Set both clueless users and experienced (up to XP ideally) users some "typical" tasks to complete (copy a file, change some preference or other, configure network settings) and see how this compares to earlier windows versions/other OSes.
This means doing things like disabling a network adaptor for instance and then spending time trying to work out where the hell it disappeared to from the network connections window.
This is a far better indication as to the "worth" of the operating system imho than an utterly pointless "boot to desktop" or whatever. Those "boot time" stats are worthless as they're all (relatively) easy to overcome by the use of either SSD or (cache-derived) "instant on" solutions which will inevitably become mainstream in any case. What really matters is whether (for example wrt the UI) redesign actually makes the OS worse from a productivity perspective or better.
It'll take longer than you might think if the original code was written in AS2 and not AS3: There are several _critical_ shortcomings in AS3, most notably the inability to control timeline objects from code reliably as their creation order is somewhat haphazard, and often delayed by several frames from the creation request - this makes the ability to develop rich content extremely tricky using _flash_ and AS3 - the only real way is to manage the objects yourself, and that means forgetting about the timeline - in which case you're more accurately talking about _flex_ and not flash.
:( [And no, they haven't addressed the issues afaik - they still exist with "No Priority" on their bugzilla database]
I, for one, would be much happier to have heard that Adobe had chosen to actually address some of the existing concerns with Flash 8/CS3/CS4 before rolling out yet another abomination incarnation of AS3 scattered across a wider range of devices
$10k? Surely it means $10k per CPU-C (Copy Published of Unverifiable Claim) ;)
I'll get my coat...
>> I fully support any foreign governments that choose to ignore the draconian DMCA.
I fully support any foreign government that chooses to acknowledge that US law is only pertinent within US jurisdiction, including and especially the draconian DMCA. I have nothing but total contempt for any foreign (or US) government which thinks that its laws apply globally.
DT
I care greatly about iTunes when considering an MP3 player - if iTunes is a pre-requisite, it's not the device for me!
I make no apology for not wanting a music player/downloader whose setup file alone is in excess of 70 MiB, nor do I make apology for not wanting to have to run rings around myself to purchase MP3 music without DRM encumberance at a fair price.
The straw that breaks the camel's back, however, is the issue of interconnectivity - Choose an Apple device because you want to sync to iTunes? Now you can't easily (yes, I know it can be done, it's just not as simple as it ought to be) transfer those tracks from the iPod back into a "conventional" player, not to mention the awful renaming, filing and other unhelpful ways the tracks are transmogrified by iTunes. Buy your tracks on iTunes? Now you can't easily sync them with A.N.Other-Device.
The arrogance of Apple here is staggering. Yes, you can buy your music from us.... but we'll tell you how to play it. Yes, you can buy our player.... but we'll decide what you can do with it. And regardless of whether you buy player or music.... you'll have to install our crapware on your computer, whether you like it or not! Totally unacceptable, and one of the driving reasons why I won't buy an iPod or iPhone (although for the iPhone, there's many far more pressing reasons why not!), and why I won't be herded/goaded into buying my music tracks from iTunes - I'll always choose a service that allows purchase of plain-old-MP3s at a fair price without the need for many megabytes of bloatware, and without feeling like I must buy a single brand of player on which to play standard files.
If that music isn't available elsewhere, then I won't be buying it, plain and simple.
DT.
For full-blown development, I use Embarcadero (formerly CodeGear/Inprise/Borland) RadStudio - There's a free version "Turbo C++ Explorer" which is a full version with the caveat that you can't create/install custom components for the Visual Component Library (VCL).
I've also extensively used Dev-C++ in the past - whilst I do like it, it often crashes, especially when performing Code Completion lookups on large projects. That said, the exception handling is fairly robust and I've never yet lost anything due to it crashing.
The C/C++ support in NetBeans is excellent - Code Completion works well, and the environment is very comfortable to work with. It also produces Makefiles for you enabling you to build your project easily outside of the IDE. I've never tried the Eclipse plugins for C++ as I find Eclipse too cumbersome to use - it has way too many features, often presented at the "top level" of the UI where the features you actually want are buried in nested menus/dialogs as opposed to pretty much all other IDEs I've used where the features you need are found comfortably to hand. YMMV of course.
Lately, I've taken to using Code::Blocks - It's by far my new preferred "small and simple" IDE. It's a fairly small footprint, available for both Linux and Window (possibly Mac too?), and most significantly for me doesn't require a Java install. I'm not convinced that it's easy to reliably generate Makefiles from it, but I haven't really tried all that hard. The Code Completion is good, as are the Symbol Browser (Class navigation) and GDB integration, and there's a number of plugins available to perform other tasks including profiling and suchlike.
While this may be true, I would like to think that schools who "go down the Mac road" would be held accountable for that decision by those who finance them. I can't conceive of any justification for purchasing significantly over-priced hardware (in comparison to the relatively cheaper and virtually identical vanilla PC hardware).
Whether you like it or not, Microsoft pretty well dominates the commercial sector. Training people to use Mac products, whilst arguably an improvement over a Microsoft-lock-in, isn't going to be either the most appropriate use of funding and in one fell swoop limits the sheer quantity of available software to run on the chosen OS (although that's arguably a good point!)
The issue of cost (or more correctly value-for-money) leaves only one clear candidate, and that's Linux. As with Mac, the choice of software is limited - whilst Linux has (far too big) a selection of software available, I'd argue that the quality of much of the software (outside of the "key" mainstream apps) is somewhat limited: That said, Linux has more than enough (as does Mac) high-quality, feature-rich mainstream apps (such as Firefox for web browsing, a port of Adobe Flash, a plethora of Multimedia apps, OpenOffice, The GIMP etc.) but delivered in a value-for-money fashion (i.e. most of this software is free and well-supported by the community).
I'm not grumbling per se - I use Linux myself (Linux Mint if you must know), and am an advocate for Linux where possible. However, although Linux has matured over the years, it is still not quite (imho) "ready for the desktop". There are a number of design fragmentation issues that need to be resolved (choice of desktop manager, multimedia software, configuration toolset etc.) - most end users simply don't care what desktop manager or MP3 player they are using, as long as that software is stable and of good-quality both from a performance and appearance perspective, simple-to-use (i.e. intuitive), compatible with most (if not all) other software (in the case of desktop managers, for instance), and of sufficient caliber to insulate them from the intricacies of the underlying OS (eg by including adequate configuration applications, plugins, codecs or whatever).
For me, though, It's good to see each and every instance where Linux is gaining a foothold - not "just" because it's Linux, but because it represents an informed choice of a value-for-money OS, and also because it goes one step further to aiding in the catch-22 of "Linux for the desktop": Increased market penetration will (hopefully) lead to improvements, and improvements will lead to increased market penetration. As a parent in the UK, It would be nice to see Linux gain a significant share in schools here too: As a taxpayer, I am effectively contributing to their funding and take great exception at the amounts of money being spent on proprietary technologies that are, frankly, unnecessary. The money would be greatly appreciated and of use in other areas, and Linux is a credible solution to liberate these funds.
DT
I'd be real interested in this myself. As I am only a hobbyist in this regard, anything >$0 is too much for me to spend on this right now. gEDA is real interesting for basic EDA stuff, but without wishing to sound ungrateful, I found it too disjointed and unstable for my taste - perhaps that has changed since I last tried it?
I work as Lead Software Dev for an online gaming company, and use ActionScript daily for my job (as well as other languages of course). We have found that we *cannot* use AS3 which is a real pity as it's much quicker and improved over AS2 (strict typing etc) due to 2 major bugs:
First of all, there's an issue when dynamically loading images. No matter _how hard_ you try to dispose of allocated memory (Manual delete, NULL pointer, force GC etc etc) it does not free the previously allocated memory. Whopping memory leak. Furthermore, it's no longer possible to reference objects on the timeline until the frame _after_ they first get instantiated. Or the next one. Maybe. Or even the next one - all depends what mood the player is in. Sure, there's events you can hook in to to make sure you wait until the object's properly instantiated, but that kinda defeats the object of having a _time_line. So for us, AS3 is a bust until they can fix these issues.
Back OT, as for Silverlight - I've yet to see this running anything meaningful at more than a crawl. Even looking at some of the most basic of UI widget sets implemented in Silverlight is a painfully slow experience, so that's not going to cut it for me either. Anybody have any links to either "meaningful" Silverlight content (i.e. more than just "hello world"), or a UI widget set implemented in Silverlight that's usable real-time I'd be interested to check them out...
DT
Well a quick glance at PeerGuardian shows me 774,128,775 IP's being blocked (Ad's, Spyware, Government and Anti-P2P). That's a nice little reserve of Candidates-For-Reissue for when our backs are against the wall imho ;)
DT
I'm red-green colour blind.
Many of the PopCap games (and similar) I have played where colour is significant have overlays shown (as an option) which aid me just fine, and I'm sure a similar thing would work here, even though that's assuming that the original would be unusable by someone colour blind.
The one thing that really used to irritate me was Teletext (before it faded into obsolescence) - Being unable to tell the difference between Green and Yellow, and Cyan and White made for trying times, especially when some insensitive clod chose green and yellow as two of the "fastext" colours. Oh, and chose blue for the cyan option (which looks white to me!).
I have no problem wiring a plug; only occasional problems wiring more complex items (whereby I am forced to use direct lighting to make the colour distinctions); and no problem with traffic lights. Only where I must choose between two shades that differ by red hue alone (or near enough) do I have problems. I know that red-green colour blindness is not the only kind, but it often feels like colour blindness is not considered when designing new products/websites etc. and I find that disappointing for lack of such a simple consideration.
I've voted with my feet too, actually. I don't own a PS3, nor a PSP, despite actually quite fancying a PSP for emulation purposes. My own decision was "triggered" by the Lik-Sang suefest, but the rootkit debacle certainly wasn't forgotten in my decision. I'm sure they couldn't care less, but I'd rather "go without" than fund such corporate shenanigans. Sidenote: Creative Labs, of course, recently joined my "no buy" list. Each to their own though, naturally.
I'm not sure if I'm missing what you're saying here, but I certainly DO have the means to implement projects from OpenCores - All it takes (in my case, anyway) is a relatively inexpensive FPGA Development Board (The Spartan-3E Starter Kit fwiw) and freely-downloadable VHDL compiler/synthesizer/etc (eg Xilinx ISE). I certainly understand the sentiment behind your comments (and linked post) - for sure, manufacturing product whether that be injection moulding or PCB fabrication or whatever is beyond the means of most "little guys", but FPGA development is well and truly within the grasp of us all financially imho. Tony
The argument that no one wants a proprietary system with sole beneficiary is certainly at the forefront of the BBC's "iPlayer" debacle, and indeed that to me doesn't appear either "responsible" of the company concerned, or "open" (as opposed to proprietary), so much so that Linux and MAC users are effectively "locked out" (and yeah, I know they offer some lame-ass Flash alternative, but that doesn't cut it imho). How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites? I suppose the crux of the matter (to me, anyway) is that provided the "industry standard" in question is neither proprietary nor beneficial to one company, who cares how they attempt to control their "IP". If the "real" question is "Would an industry standard restore freedom of speech (and in particular limit censorship)" then I fail to see how this will be the case. Certainly not for as long as these media companies are allowed to ride roughshod over the DMCA, and fail to recognize the true nature of copyright legislation (in particular Fair Use).
Back on-topic, so the media moguls want a "universal, standard copyright filtering mechanism". Cry me a river! I'd love many things - Net Neutrality, an end to worthless "Disease Ridden Media [DRM]", World Peace, and so on... The media industry appears to love nothing more than to turn a blind eye to the phenomenon that is "Teh InterWeb" and try to milk old business practice for all it's worth, then want to cry foul because they've missed the boat, failed to embrace what should have been one of the most powerful distribution channels ever created, treated (the majority of) their consumers like criminals, and now they magically expect, nay demand, a "universal copyright protector". Damn, I'd bet there's a lot of software houses out there who would love such an invention to protect their products - maybe they could even petition ISP's to filter all traffic using such an algorithm to prevent software piracy? Pur-lease!
Well, I guess that would be why Adobe Flash (Design Standard) is to cost $1199 (+ tax where applicable?) and £895 (excl tax). That's $1793 at current rates - Some 50% more than the US price. ;)
There's also a nice article in the Sept 30 issue of New Scientist (although this article is related to the study of bridging time-continuum in order to effectively "modify" the past).
;)
Although the article isn't a "teleportation" article, it does provide a fairly in-depth explanation of the principle and implications of entanglement. The article then takes this one step further by suggesting that if the two paths that the entangled photons took were then themselves split, but splitting the second path an additional length (using fibre optic cable), the two paths would take different time periods to complete, however by using photon detectors, it would be possible to determine which of the 2 sub-paths the entangled photons took, in spite of the fact that the 2nd entangled photon had not yet made that "choice" yet, effectively providing some form of "clairvoyance"
Using a crystal, [Univ of Innsbruck, Austria, researcher Birgit Dopfer] converted one laser beam into two so that photons in one beam were entangled with those in the other, and each pair was matched up by a circuit known as a coincidence detector. One beam passed through a double slit to a photon detector, while the other passed through a lens to a movable detector which could sense a photon in two different positions.
The movable detector is key, because in one position it effectively images the slits and measures each photon as a particle, while in the other it captures only a wave-like interference pattern. Dopfer showed that measuring a photon as a wave or a particle forced its twin in the other beam to be measured in the same way.
To use this set-up to send a signal [through time], it needs to work without a coincidence circuit. Inspired by Raymond Jensen at Notre Dame University in Indiana, [John] Cramer then proposed passing each beam through a double slit, not only to give the experimenter the choice of measuring photons as waves or particles, but also to help track photon pairs. The double slits should filter out most unentangled photons and either block or let pass both members of an entangled pair, at least in theory. So a photon arriving at one detector should have its twin appear at the other.
[snippety snip]
His extra twist is to run the photons you choose how to measure through several km of coiled-up fibre-optic cable, thereby delaying them by microseconds. This delay means that the other beam will arrive at its detector before you make your choice. However, since the rules of quantum mechanics are indifferent to the timings of measurements, the state of the other beam should correspond to how you choose to measure the delayed beam. The effect of your choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it! That's the idea anyway.
"Counterfeits are not made to the same standard as originals, if they were made to the same standards then the counterfeiters wouldn't be trying to pass off their goods as fakes, they would be making claims that their products were better."
If you were ripping off a "no-name" brand and trying to present it as the same "no-name", then sure, this would certainly be the case, but if you're trying to rip off say a genuine Toshiba laptop, or Motorola cell battery, then isn't it going to be difficult to convince consumers that your product is better than the manufacturer's own named brand? [although I guess your comments re. warranty kind of highlight that] After all, as a consumer why would you accept that a "SuperTosh" is better than a Toshiba? One brand you have heard of (and either inherently trust or distrust as a result), and the other you have never heard of (so should automatically be somewhat cautious about). As a slightly related issue, is this difficulty in marketing for an "unheard of" company making hardware so severe that it would drive them to market counterfeit goods, or is it plain greed (or both? lol)