I had a Rio PMP-300 way back. 32Mb of flash memory and a parallel port interface that took ages to transfer music to. Lovely little piece of kit, though.
Recently I got a Rio Carbon Pearl, which I'm also very pleased with.
I think Rio's biggest problem was that they hardly did any marketing. They were never going to be able to seriously compete with the larger companies when nobody actually heard about their products.
Firstly, I doubt there's any correlation between Slashdot UID length and intelligence. The editors for instance have very low UIDs.
Secondly, it is natural to assume that the disussion about a post is actually about the article in question unless otherwise specified. It's a bit of a reach to suggest that one should google around every post just in case they're talking about a completely different (if related) situation without saying so.
Thirdly, you probably should have said "It's amazing that this crap was written in to law in the US" if you'd wished to be understood.
The difference between the UK and the US on this is that although there may be times that it would be useful to have a big vehicle for hauling things around, it would be a complete and utter pain in the arse the rest of the time.
The UK has a population density of 250 people per square kilometre compared to 32 in the US, and most of our city centres are many hundereds of years old, which basically means that our streets are quite a bit thinner than yours and there's more cars on 'em. Many people in cities (including myself) don't have off-street parking so it's a case of trying to find a space on the street fairly close to your house.
That coupled with a road tax related to engine size and petrol (sorry, gas) costing close to $6/gallon means that people just don't buy the behemoths that you see on US roads. The closest it tends to get are large 4x4s liketheseones that would be dwarfed by your American SUVs.
I've got a Toyota Corolla Verso, which has up to seven seats to fit my family of six, and yet is only 14 feet long and has a 1.8 litre engine. If need to haul stuff, I can put all the seats down which creates quite a large space in the back. If I need to haul something really big, I'll just hire a van. Sure, it'd be nice not to have to do that, but have something big for everyday driving? In London? Forget about it!
This is why the other poster's reluctance to learn Ruby troubles me. After you learn 4 or 5 lanuages, it starts to become easy.
To be fair I did explain that. Perhaps I simply don't have a particularly good memory, but I find that it's not the learning of the language that's tricky - the basics of a language can be picked up very quickly - it's the remembering all the standard library stuff that takes time. Starting with a new language I seem to spend a lot of my time flicking through the reference manuals.
Well, if Rails really is so much better than Django as you suggest, then perhaps it is worth looking at Rails instead. If it's only a little bit better though, I'd still be tempted to go with Django.
Nevertheless, all your points are good.
...but one of the most important attributes of a programmer, in my humble opinion, in is the willingness and even excitement for learning.
That's true, but there's more to learn than just languages. I've got interesting enough things to look at right now without another new language.
However, I've found your steadfast recommendation of Rails pretty interesting so I think I might go ahead and have a quick peek at it again, as well as Django.
You were saying that we shouldn't use [insert own language preference here] Rails-alike and should instead try Rails first.
I was saying that actually, I'd rather just stick with the one in my preferred language, as I'll be able to get going more quickly.
Now I'm not really sure what you're trying to say now. That I should try every new language I see? I have looked at Ruby, but to be honest if I was to devote some time to learning a new language I'd probably want to go with something a little less similar to the langauges I am already familiar with. In fact, I'd probably do as you did and have a look at Lisp. I've been meaning to do that for ages.
It's not that I balk at learning a new language, but if I've got the choice between:
a) Using something neat and b) Using something neat that also requires me to learn a new langauge
When my time is limited, I'm likely to go for option a).
I'm sure that Rails is spiffy 'n all, but I'd rather use a language that I'm already familiar with.
I realise at that point all the hacks will crawl out of the woodwork and tell me that any programmer worth his salt can pick up a language in no time, but that's not really true. Yes, any decent programmer should be able to get started with another language very quickly, but it takes some time to get used to the standard library that comes with a new language and it takes time and experience to get a handle on what the best way to handle a problem is in a particular language. When you start off with a new language (or even a new module or library), you spend an awful lot of time looking things up in the reference documentation.
I'd rather spend that time getting something done.
I'd never actually tried google maps in IE before, but it's actually better than google maps in Firefox; The zoom is interactive, and the route is drawn much quicker in IE as well.
I'd always assumed that it was the same for both browsers.
There's still a need for a C++-like language - one without automatic garbage collection, raw memory access and the like. Sure, there's lots of other cool languages about now (C#, Java, Python) that are much better for many purposes, but there still is a need for C++, especially as there is still so much legacy code written in it.
Yes, lots of people will be moving from C++ to one of these more modern languages. This is a good thing, but there's no reason why C++ shouldn't evolve while still maintaining its C++-ness.
Just because C++ use is declining isn't a bad thing, and I don't see any sign that Stroustrup is denying its decline. I'd be interested to hear what kind of changes you think he could realistically make to the language to reverse the decline - it seems to me that you'd like something more like Java or C# - in which case why not just stick with Java or C#?
The date on it is the 8th of June - a mere day after the attacks happened. The idea that in the space of a day (when they will have mainly be trying to cope with the aftermath of the bombs) they will have already decided to go for millimetre-wave scanning is ridiculous.
This is what I believe actually happened:
1) A reporter for the Times wanted a story, and knew about the Qnetix stuff 2) The reporter spoke to a London Underground spokesperson and pressed them about whether they would consider using new scanning technologies. They probably mentioned the Qnetix tech. 3) The spokesperson replied vaguely that they might be interested in scanning technology. 4) The reporter then speaks to Qnetix, getting some facts and figures, after pumping them with the idea that 'apparently London Underground are considering your systems'... 5) The reporter writes up this article.
London Underground has enough trouble keeping financially viable as it is. They'll have enough problems with reduced passenger numbers as it is without putting more people off with their 'X-Ray specs see-you-naked-through-your-clothing' technology.
Oh...and it's a State run service. So it's not going to be particularly resistant to things like, say, intelligence service requests for private user information, because it's the State which provides most of the money which the council runs on. Such things aren't likely I'd say to be *overtly* used to influence behaviour in such cases, but you know as well as I do it has a significant influence and is most certainly a conflict of interest - where the people who might ask for information just happen to also be rather closely involved with the people who give you funding.
In the UK our personal data is 'protected' by the Data Protection Act, which puts stiff limits on what can be done with our personal data. However, recently diabolical measures were bought in in the name of 'anti-terrorism' which defanged the act somewhat and hugely increased the amount to which government departments can share our data.
So yes, they probably can now share information with the police and other agencies about users, but it won't be some back-handed thing. They've been given that power explicitly by the government.
They should get royalties, just like everybody else who worked on the game, but the royalties should be proportional to the value they added to the game. The best way to do this would be to use a weighted sum of the hours spent working on it.
As a few hours work by a voice artist produces a greater effect than a few hours work by a programmer, let's say that the voice artist gets ten times the hour-royalties of a programmer. That seems fair enough.
Of course, this still won't result in much for the voice artist as it'll be their five hours ( x 10) versus at least 3000 for a programmer...
Well, you'd have thought that, but it seems that the import market for the PSP is actually quite large. HMV (A large music/dvd/games retailer in the UK) has actually started selling accessories for the PSP already, even though the PSP won't be launched over here until September. This suggests to me that there's actually quite a lot of imported PSPs floating around.
Certainly I imagine that a good proportion of early adoption types will have bought a PSP before it has been officially released - it'll be 179.99 pounds over here, and you can get an import one for that price. What's more, if you get a US PSP you'll be able to order region 1 UMDs for it before they get released over here and for about half the price. It just makes sense.
Gmail is not free. They show ads, and I pay for the service by having to see them.
So, does that mean you pay billboard owners when you drive past them as well?
Software that is in "beta" for over a year is not in beta
It is still in beta because they don't feel that they've got it into its final incarnation yet. They'll stop calling it beta once they've stopped making the kind of changes that have been causing you problems. That's why they call it beta - they don't yet want to give the kind of guarantee of stability that you would expect from non-beta software. You have evidently chosen to ignore this.
Man, that was easy. I wonder why you couldn't beat us in those wars we had, way back when.
Yes, I'm sure your blinding display of internet debating skill is directly related to the courage, spirit and vision of your forebears when they fought against the British...
Having said that, I wonder what the result of the upcoming USA vs England football (sorry, 'soccer') tonight will be... Our manager is fielding a rather young and inexperienced squad today and it'll be rather embarassing if you beat us...
I agree with you that the Revolution will be about twice as powerful as the Xbox, which fits with what Nintendo have been saying (2-3 times as powerful as GameCube). However, the Xbox 360 is obviously considerably more powerful than that - have a look: 0.73 Ghz vs 3.2Ghz CPU - just from the clock speed alone the CPU is over four times as fast, and that's not counting the fact that the Xbox 360 has three cores with two hardware threads each, so at the very minimum I'd say we're talking an order of magnitude more powerful than the Xbox CPU.
It is true that both the Xbox 360 and the Revolution will contain ATI-produced chips, but it's too soon to know how they will compare as ATI produces a large range of chips. I very much doubt they'll be the same.
I'm not sure what point you're making about PS2 third-party titles, as the PS2 has vast numbers of AAA third party games. Don't misunderstand me - the Nintendo first-party games are great, but there's not really enough of them to support a console. If (as I suggest) the Revolution doesn't match up to the Xbox 360 and PS3, then it's not going to attract nearly as many cross-platform games as it won't be able to handle the games that are designed for the other two. It seems more likely to get multi-format games that have been targeted at Xbox and PS2 than Xbox 360 and PS3, and multi-format games are important for publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a Rio PMP-300 way back. 32Mb of flash memory and a parallel port interface that took ages to transfer music to. Lovely little piece of kit, though.
Recently I got a Rio Carbon Pearl, which I'm also very pleased with.
I think Rio's biggest problem was that they hardly did any marketing. They were never going to be able to seriously compete with the larger companies when nobody actually heard about their products.
Firstly, I doubt there's any correlation between Slashdot UID length and intelligence. The editors for instance have very low UIDs.
Secondly, it is natural to assume that the disussion about a post is actually about the article in question unless otherwise specified. It's a bit of a reach to suggest that one should google around every post just in case they're talking about a completely different (if related) situation without saying so.
Thirdly, you probably should have said "It's amazing that this crap was written in to law in the US" if you'd wished to be understood.
I think it was reasonable to assume that the law you were talking about was the law mentioned in TFA, as you didn't mention otherwise.
It's a proposed law. There's lots of opportunities for it to be thoroughly mauled before it gets into the statute books.
Well, I can understand you disagreeing with me, but I didn't expect to be hated...
The difference between the UK and the US on this is that although there may be times that it would be useful to have a big vehicle for hauling things around, it would be a complete and utter pain in the arse the rest of the time.
The UK has a population density of 250 people per square kilometre compared to 32 in the US, and most of our city centres are many hundereds of years old, which basically means that our streets are quite a bit thinner than yours and there's more cars on 'em. Many people in cities (including
myself) don't have off-street parking so it's a case of trying to find a space on the street fairly close to your house.
That coupled with a road tax related to engine size and petrol (sorry, gas) costing close to $6/gallon means that people just don't buy the behemoths that you see on US roads. The closest it tends to get are large 4x4s like these ones that would be dwarfed by your American SUVs.
I've got a Toyota Corolla Verso, which has up to seven seats to fit my family of six, and yet is only 14 feet long and has a 1.8 litre engine. If need to haul stuff, I can put all the seats down which creates quite a large space in the back. If I need to haul something really big, I'll just hire a van. Sure, it'd be nice not to have to do that, but have something big for everyday driving? In London? Forget about it!
To be fair I did explain that. Perhaps I simply don't have a particularly good memory, but I find that it's not the learning of the language that's tricky - the basics of a language can be picked up very quickly - it's the remembering all the standard library stuff that takes time. Starting with a new language I seem to spend a lot of my time flicking through the reference manuals.
Nevertheless, all your points are good.
That's true, but there's more to learn than just languages. I've got interesting enough things to look at right now without another new language.
However, I've found your steadfast recommendation of Rails pretty interesting so I think I might go ahead and have a quick peek at it again, as well as Django.
It wasn't a complaint.
You were saying that we shouldn't use [insert own language preference here] Rails-alike and should instead try Rails first.
I was saying that actually, I'd rather just stick with the one in my preferred language, as I'll be able to get going more quickly.
Now I'm not really sure what you're trying to say now. That I should try every new language I see? I have looked at Ruby, but to be honest if I was to devote some time to learning a new language I'd probably want to go with something a little less similar to the langauges I am already familiar with. In fact, I'd probably do as you did and have a look at Lisp. I've been meaning to do that for ages.
It's not that I balk at learning a new language, but if I've got the choice between:
a) Using something neat
and
b) Using something neat that also requires me to learn a new langauge
When my time is limited, I'm likely to go for option a).
Why doesn't this happen in the Windows world?
Where do you think the first scroll wheels appeared?
I'm sure that Rails is spiffy 'n all, but I'd rather use a language that I'm already familiar with.
I realise at that point all the hacks will crawl out of the woodwork and tell me that any programmer worth his salt can pick up a language in no time, but that's not really true. Yes, any decent programmer should be able to get started with another language very quickly, but it takes some time to get used to the standard library that comes with a new language and it takes time and experience to get a handle on what the best way to handle a problem is in a particular language. When you start off with a new language (or even a new module or library), you spend an awful lot of time looking things up in the reference documentation.
I'd rather spend that time getting something done.
I'd never actually tried google maps in IE before, but it's actually better than google maps in Firefox; The zoom is interactive, and the route is drawn much quicker in IE as well.
I'd always assumed that it was the same for both browsers.
Sometimes the map and satellite data don't quite line up...
I think you're missing the point.
There's still a need for a C++-like language - one without automatic garbage collection, raw memory access and the like. Sure, there's lots of other cool languages about now (C#, Java, Python) that are much better for many purposes, but there still is a need for C++, especially as there is still so much legacy code written in it.
Yes, lots of people will be moving from C++ to one of these more modern languages. This is a good thing, but there's no reason why C++ shouldn't evolve while still maintaining its C++-ness.
Just because C++ use is declining isn't a bad thing, and I don't see any sign that Stroustrup is denying its decline. I'd be interested to hear what kind of changes you think he could realistically make to the language to reverse the decline - it seems to me that you'd like something more like Java or C# - in which case why not just stick with Java or C#?
thinking outside the box is not encoraged
I like this post. You've done a lot of spelling outside the box.
I'm sorry - this story just doesn't add up.
The date on it is the 8th of June - a mere day after the attacks happened. The idea that in the space of a day (when they will have mainly be trying to cope with the aftermath of the bombs) they will have already decided to go for millimetre-wave scanning is ridiculous.
This is what I believe actually happened:
1) A reporter for the Times wanted a story, and knew about the Qnetix stuff
2) The reporter spoke to a London Underground spokesperson and pressed them about whether they would consider using new scanning technologies. They probably mentioned the Qnetix tech.
3) The spokesperson replied vaguely that they might be interested in scanning technology.
4) The reporter then speaks to Qnetix, getting some facts and figures, after pumping them with the idea that 'apparently London Underground are considering your systems'...
5) The reporter writes up this article.
London Underground has enough trouble keeping financially viable as it is. They'll have enough problems with reduced passenger numbers as it is without putting more people off with their 'X-Ray specs see-you-naked-through-your-clothing' technology.
Just ain't gonna happen.
Please don't confuse 'intelligent' with 'atheist'. There are many intelligent theists just as there are many stupid atheists.
I'm an atheist.
Oh...and it's a State run service. So it's not going to be particularly resistant to things like, say, intelligence service requests for private user information, because it's the State which provides most of the money which the council runs on. Such things aren't likely I'd say to be *overtly* used to influence behaviour in such cases, but you know as well as I do it has a significant influence and is most certainly a conflict of interest - where the people who might ask for information just happen to also be rather closely involved with the people who give you funding.
In the UK our personal data is 'protected' by the Data Protection Act, which puts stiff limits on what can be done with our personal data. However, recently diabolical measures were bought in in the name of 'anti-terrorism' which defanged the act somewhat and hugely increased the amount to which government departments can share our data.
So yes, they probably can now share information with the police and other agencies about users, but it won't be some back-handed thing. They've been given that power explicitly by the government.
They should get royalties, just like everybody else who worked on the game, but the royalties should be proportional to the value they added to the game. The best way to do this would be to use a weighted sum of the hours spent working on it.
As a few hours work by a voice artist produces a greater effect than a few hours work by a programmer, let's say that the voice artist gets ten times the hour-royalties of a programmer. That seems fair enough.
Of course, this still won't result in much for the voice artist as it'll be their five hours ( x 10) versus at least 3000 for a programmer...
Well, you'd have thought that, but it seems that the import market for the PSP is actually quite large. HMV (A large music/dvd/games retailer in the UK) has actually started selling accessories for the PSP already, even though the PSP won't be launched over here until September. This suggests to me that there's actually quite a lot of imported PSPs floating around.
Certainly I imagine that a good proportion of early adoption types will have bought a PSP before it has been officially released - it'll be 179.99 pounds over here, and you can get an import one for that price. What's more, if you get a US PSP you'll be able to order region 1 UMDs for it before they get released over here and for about half the price. It just makes sense.
Bite me, you lymie.
It's spelled 'Limey'.
Gmail is not free. They show ads, and I pay for the service by having to see them.
So, does that mean you pay billboard owners when you drive past them as well?
Software that is in "beta" for over a year is not in beta
It is still in beta because they don't feel that they've got it into its final incarnation yet. They'll stop calling it beta once they've stopped making the kind of changes that have been causing you problems. That's why they call it beta - they don't yet want to give the kind of guarantee of stability that you would expect from non-beta software. You have evidently chosen to ignore this.
Man, that was easy. I wonder why you couldn't beat us in those wars we had, way back when.
Yes, I'm sure your blinding display of internet debating skill is directly related to the courage, spirit and vision of your forebears when they fought against the British...
Having said that, I wonder what the result of the upcoming USA vs England football (sorry, 'soccer') tonight will be... Our manager is fielding a rather young and inexperienced squad today and it'll be rather embarassing if you beat us...
Whine Whine Bitch Bitch
Oh no! I'm using a free email service that is still in beta and it doesn't work perfectly for me!
Whine Whine! Bitch Bitch!
Firstly, it's already very simple for people to go between the UK and the US. It'd be hard to make it any simpler
Well, one easy way to make it simpler would be to remove the need to fingerprint all UK non-US citizens on the way in...
I agree with you that the Revolution will be about twice as powerful as the Xbox, which fits with what Nintendo have been saying (2-3 times as powerful as GameCube). However, the Xbox 360 is obviously considerably more powerful than that - have a look: 0.73 Ghz vs 3.2Ghz CPU - just from the clock speed alone the CPU is over four times as fast, and that's not counting the fact that the Xbox 360 has three cores with two hardware threads each, so at the very minimum I'd say we're talking an order of magnitude more powerful than the Xbox CPU.
It is true that both the Xbox 360 and the Revolution will contain ATI-produced chips, but it's too soon to know how they will compare as ATI produces a large range of chips. I very much doubt they'll be the same.
I'm not sure what point you're making about PS2 third-party titles, as the PS2 has vast numbers of AAA third party games. Don't misunderstand me - the Nintendo first-party games are great, but there's not really enough of them to support a console. If (as I suggest) the Revolution doesn't match up to the Xbox 360 and PS3, then it's not going to attract nearly as many cross-platform games as it won't be able to handle the games that are designed for the other two. It seems more likely to get multi-format games that have been targeted at Xbox and PS2 than Xbox 360 and PS3, and multi-format games are important for publishers.
*heh*
Insightful my arse.