I work at IBM Almaden Research Center. Before moving to the Bay Area, I was a Member of Technical Staff in the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where I worked on Operating Systems and Networking.
I'll bet he has credentials that you guys who can't admit that Mac OS X rules (:-) can only dream of.
in every company I've ever worked at this was the case
Does that give you pause to think that maybe there's a reason for it?
It could be that people are actually thinking about the customers, how the product is viewed in the market, and what the competition is coming out with.
It's possible that someone looks at sales and says "hey, we need to refresh our product line by late next year, or we're going to get creamed by the competition."
Or, "MS is rolling out an OS rev at such-and-such a time, and we need to have a product ready then to ride the wave of upgrades."
Or even "let's get another product out the door in a reasonable timeframe so we can make more money".
Sure, a lot of us would love to code for five years on a finely crafted piece of software, but there are few companies that are willing to just sit back and wait for the programmers to decide that they're done.
I'm definitely not saying that I'm all for artificially imposed deadlines that have no reason behind them.
I'm a programmer-turned-manager, and part of my job is to help the developers stay focused on shipping a product rather than rewriting this and tweaking that forever. Another part is to keep upper managment off my guys' backs so they can do their jobs.:-)
with iTunes, you get access to my entire music library
Only if you configure it that way -- I have my iTunes configured to only share a couple of playlists, including my Recently Played list, so friends can see what I've been listening to.
If I were posting flamebait, I'd say something about Apple leading the pack again, but I won't.:-)
I'm inclined towards the latter because of the size and speed
What, big-and-clunky, and slow?
The tablet devices I've seen are the pits. They're slow as molasses, the pen interface blows (try right-clicking on something), and they're heavy as heck.
ease of use of Windows CE
OK, sorry, I didn't realize you were joking...you should have added a couple of smileys.
On a modern processor this level of precalculation can result in slower execution than just working out the maths on the fly
I doubt that. Precalculating a table of cosine values isn't going to take an appreciable amount of time on modern hardware, and you can be sure that lookups are going to be much faster than calling any actual math routine, even on modern hardware.
Also, think about this: if the tables are built into the application, and if you replaced the lookups with calls to actual cosine routines, you run the risk of getting more bits of precision, or possibly even different answers within the precision of the tables. That could alter the gameplay or have other odd effects.
Most of the low-level game hacking I have experience with was on the TRS-80, in which there were no high-level math calls, so if you wanted cosine tables, you generated them with a calculator and wrote them into the application.
Oddly enough, many of the lessons I learned back then programming assembly language have served me well doing C++. In tight loops that matter performance-wise, never use multiplication or division (or mod) if you can get away with addition. Don't use multiple pointer dereferences in loops -- cache pointers. Don't put assignments in loops that can be done outside. Etc.
We picked up an original Roomba a couple of weeks ago in an Amazon Gold Box special. I shoulda known they'd come out with new models...but we still got a good deal.
Anyway, we have hardwood floors with oriental rugs. The Roomba does great on the rugs, and on the floor, but at the interface it chokes.
First, you have to tuck the fringe under the edge of the rugs because the Roomba's rollers will grab them. Fair enough; you have to be careful with a regular vacuum anyway.
But, our oriental rugs are fairly thick, and we have a foam pad under them which makes them even thicker, so when the Roomba goes from floor to rug, half the time it bounces off instead of climbing up onto the rug.
Worse yet, there's an 8" gap between the rug and the couch, and the roomba goes into that trench and has serious problems getting out.
Having said that, using the Roomba in places that it's better suited to is awesome -- set it up, go shopping, come back, and the floor's spotless. It rocks.
I've had to patch and put up to date almost a dozen systems in my free time these weeks. Not seeing one penny for that since they all belong to friends and family...:/
That's why I tell my family: If you want help with your computer, buy a Mac. I don't support PCs.
Just about everyone in my family has a Mac.
It's a win-win for me, since the amount of support you have to do for a Mac user is virtually nil -- they just work.:-)
TheYopy is based on an eye-pleasingclamshell design.With the screen down the Yopy is about thesame depthas a paperback book, making it about twice as thick as the normal PDA.
This is just too large. PDAs have been shrinking in size over the past five years or so, and this thing's just too big.
Along with the lack of software, I see it as another linux hobbyist device.
That would be billions of dollars to Open Source to compensate for an unlevel playing field until it is leveled.
Gee, the open source "movement" is going nowhere fast, so let's just take money from a company that is apparently successful at making products that people actually buy. Sure, that's a good idea.
OK, enough sarcasm. OK, maybe a little more: why don't we just tax Microsoft and give the money to Apple? That would level an unlevel playing field too. Or why don't we just mandate that Windows XP cost $25? What other aspects of Microsoft don't we like that we can "fix"?
Open source software is all well and good -- it's a pleasant hobby that keeps off the streets a lot of programmers with nothing else to do. But if it can't compete with commercial software, don't punish people who are actually making a living providing products to real customers.
I am about as anti-Microsoft as they come, but give me a frickin' break. Tax them to support open source? What a waste of money. I'd rather tax Microsoft and give the money to homeless people.
Anyway, as I was going to bed last night, I got to wonder about the CRLF (DOS) vs CR (Unix) vs LF (Macs) incompatibility.
You've got that backwards. Macs use the carriage return, decimal 13 (0x0D) as their line break character. Unix uses the line feed, decimal 10 (0x0A). DOS (and therefore Windows) uses the asinine CR-LF combination, which is also the standard marker for line and command endings in most text-based internet protocols, such as SMTP.
For those youngsters not in the know, these "control" characters really did control things. On a paper teletype machine, a carriage return would move the print head back to the left side of the carriage. A line feed would advance the roller one line. The combination of the two would prepare the teletype for printing another line, so in a way Windows does it right.
In reality, using two characters to mark an end of line is a major pain in the ass. I wish everyone would standardize on using just an LF.
I've seen a lot of non-U.S. people whining (not you, dadragon -- your post was almost constructive) about Apple deserting them or treating them as second-class customers, etc.
The reason behind this most likely has to do with what rights that the record companies they're dealing with have. Many contracts are structured such that a company has rights to sell each cut/album in certain countries.
Keeping that info straight, trying to (loosely) enforce it, and keeping the buying interface clean isn't easy.
No doubt Apple will get there, but I'm glad they rolled out the service now (but I live in the U.S.:-) instead of waiting until they had the rights nailed down so they could address the Burundian market as well as all the others.
I really don't think this is so impossible. You'd have 39 (27 regular and 12 thin) standard configurations, and I'd bet only 5 or so would be really popular
Is this so crazy?
Let's pretend that this is a stunningly great idea to have 39 "standard" configurations of which maybe 5 would sell. Oddly enough, nobody's doing anything like this.
What are the chances that everyone else is crazy, and you're the only sane one with this great idea?
Let the police forces test this technology first. They have the largest problem of having guns taken from them and being shot with their own weapons. If the technology is really ready for the average user, then let the police use them first.
My prediction: that'll never happen.
This law isn't about safety, it's about making guns harder to get for Joe Average.
In Massachusetts, new guns have to pass a drop test and a bunch of other "safety" rules before they can be purchased. Guess what? The police are using the "unsafe" Glocks and other guns that ordinary peepul aren't allowed to buy.
This is just bullshit, particularly in the home of the American Revolution.
I was going to politic, but why bother? If you can't spell "want" correctly, I'm not sure college will help.
In general, however, I would highly recommend going to college, at the best one you can get into. That can set the tone for your entire career.
Skipping college or going to an el-cheapo one can save you money now, but in the long run going to a good university is probably the best investment you can make.
If all you want to be is a sysadmin until you're sixty years old, looked down upon by snot-nosed college grads one-third your age, go ahead.
#1 is OK in my opinion, since it simply tries to prevent a person from having genetic conditions for their entire lives. #2 would be terrible if used, though, and could just create a bunch of Michael Jordans as babies. It does not save people's lives, it simply makes everyone else worse off in comparison, and is the type of thing used in Gattaca.
Oh, no! This situation was shown as "bad" in a movie! We must stop it from happening in real life!
Seriously, I have a healthy daughter and another kid on the way. If I could choose their genes such that they were not susceptible to allergies, cancer, bronchitis, obesity, mental disorders, bad teeth, goofy looks, bowleggedness, etc. I'd do it in a second.
Would I choose a clone of Michael Jordan? Probably not. Would I choose the best genes I can give my children? In a split second.
Gattaca was a good movie, but I view it not so much as a warning, but as an indicator that the human spirit is not measured in genes (which I'm not so sure of) and that people can triumph over whatever system tries to keep them down.
Gene selection will happen. It makes just too much sense.
If the U.S. outlaws it, two things will happen: rich people will go to other countries to pick their kids' genes; the healthcare costs of the U.S. will skyrocket while the costs in other countries nosedive.
There's a term for companies that have rock-solid, long-term, unswerving development plans: bankrupt.
I'm a techie-turned-manager with a half-dozen programmers under me. Yes, we end up putting projects on the back burner in favor of other projects, then moving them back to the front burner. It's life.
Our customer base is changing, the market is changing, OSes are changing, etc. That means that you change, or die.
If you don't like it, go back to government and find a nice stable 20-year old contract doing software maintenance. It's nice and safe and unchanging.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but a sound like this deserves a little /. time!
Also see The Page describing the scream.
I work at IBM Almaden Research Center. Before moving to the Bay Area, I was a Member of Technical Staff in the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where I worked on Operating Systems and Networking.
I'll bet he has credentials that you guys who can't admit that Mac OS X rules (:-) can only dream of.
Does that give you pause to think that maybe there's a reason for it?
It could be that people are actually thinking about the customers, how the product is viewed in the market, and what the competition is coming out with.
It's possible that someone looks at sales and says "hey, we need to refresh our product line by late next year, or we're going to get creamed by the competition."
Or, "MS is rolling out an OS rev at such-and-such a time, and we need to have a product ready then to ride the wave of upgrades."
Or even "let's get another product out the door in a reasonable timeframe so we can make more money".
Sure, a lot of us would love to code for five years on a finely crafted piece of software, but there are few companies that are willing to just sit back and wait for the programmers to decide that they're done.
I'm definitely not saying that I'm all for artificially imposed deadlines that have no reason behind them.
I'm a programmer-turned-manager, and part of my job is to help the developers stay focused on shipping a product rather than rewriting this and tweaking that forever. Another part is to keep upper managment off my guys' backs so they can do their jobs. :-)
Only if you configure it that way -- I have my iTunes configured to only share a couple of playlists, including my Recently Played list, so friends can see what I've been listening to.
If I were posting flamebait, I'd say something about Apple leading the pack again, but I won't. :-)
I think the main reason why WiFi isn't standard on average PDA is this: it's useless!
Surfing the net on a screen three inches across is just not nearly as fun as surfing the net on anything larger.
Any time I'm near a wireless hotspot, I'll either be in my home or office, where I'll have either a desktop or laptop, or I'll be carrying my laptop.
My Palm handheld is good for a lot of things, but surfing is not one of them. Or doing email.
What, big-and-clunky, and slow?
The tablet devices I've seen are the pits. They're slow as molasses, the pen interface blows (try right-clicking on something), and they're heavy as heck.
ease of use of Windows CE
OK, sorry, I didn't realize you were joking...you should have added a couple of smileys.
I doubt that. Precalculating a table of cosine values isn't going to take an appreciable amount of time on modern hardware, and you can be sure that lookups are going to be much faster than calling any actual math routine, even on modern hardware.
Also, think about this: if the tables are built into the application, and if you replaced the lookups with calls to actual cosine routines, you run the risk of getting more bits of precision, or possibly even different answers within the precision of the tables. That could alter the gameplay or have other odd effects.
Most of the low-level game hacking I have experience with was on the TRS-80, in which there were no high-level math calls, so if you wanted cosine tables, you generated them with a calculator and wrote them into the application.
Oddly enough, many of the lessons I learned back then programming assembly language have served me well doing C++. In tight loops that matter performance-wise, never use multiplication or division (or mod) if you can get away with addition. Don't use multiple pointer dereferences in loops -- cache pointers. Don't put assignments in loops that can be done outside. Etc.
We picked up an original Roomba a couple of weeks ago in an Amazon Gold Box special. I shoulda known they'd come out with new models...but we still got a good deal.
Anyway, we have hardwood floors with oriental rugs. The Roomba does great on the rugs, and on the floor, but at the interface it chokes.
First, you have to tuck the fringe under the edge of the rugs because the Roomba's rollers will grab them. Fair enough; you have to be careful with a regular vacuum anyway.
But, our oriental rugs are fairly thick, and we have a foam pad under them which makes them even thicker, so when the Roomba goes from floor to rug, half the time it bounces off instead of climbing up onto the rug.
Worse yet, there's an 8" gap between the rug and the couch, and the roomba goes into that trench and has serious problems getting out.
Having said that, using the Roomba in places that it's better suited to is awesome -- set it up, go shopping, come back, and the floor's spotless. It rocks.
That's why I tell my family: If you want help with your computer, buy a Mac. I don't support PCs.
Just about everyone in my family has a Mac.
It's a win-win for me, since the amount of support you have to do for a Mac user is virtually nil -- they just work. :-)
TheYopy is based on an eye-pleasingclamshell design.With the screen down the Yopy is about thesame depthas a paperback book, making it about twice as thick as the normal PDA.
This is just too large. PDAs have been shrinking in size over the past five years or so, and this thing's just too big.Along with the lack of software, I see it as another linux hobbyist device.
Gee, the open source "movement" is going nowhere fast, so let's just take money from a company that is apparently successful at making products that people actually buy. Sure, that's a good idea.
OK, enough sarcasm. OK, maybe a little more: why don't we just tax Microsoft and give the money to Apple? That would level an unlevel playing field too. Or why don't we just mandate that Windows XP cost $25? What other aspects of Microsoft don't we like that we can "fix"?
Open source software is all well and good -- it's a pleasant hobby that keeps off the streets a lot of programmers with nothing else to do. But if it can't compete with commercial software, don't punish people who are actually making a living providing products to real customers.
I am about as anti-Microsoft as they come, but give me a frickin' break. Tax them to support open source? What a waste of money. I'd rather tax Microsoft and give the money to homeless people.
You've got that backwards. Macs use the carriage return, decimal 13 (0x0D) as their line break character. Unix uses the line feed, decimal 10 (0x0A). DOS (and therefore Windows) uses the asinine CR-LF combination, which is also the standard marker for line and command endings in most text-based internet protocols, such as SMTP.
For those youngsters not in the know, these "control" characters really did control things. On a paper teletype machine, a carriage return would move the print head back to the left side of the carriage. A line feed would advance the roller one line. The combination of the two would prepare the teletype for printing another line, so in a way Windows does it right.
In reality, using two characters to mark an end of line is a major pain in the ass. I wish everyone would standardize on using just an LF.
The problem is that this also netted Visa/MC around $40,000 in processing fees
Nah, I'm sure Apple's negotiated a flat-fee transaction cost. You know, all the credit cards you can charge for a flat fee per month.
I've heard you can do this, but you have to sell something like 200K every 18 hours. :-)
Apple Canada, are you listening???
I've seen a lot of non-U.S. people whining (not you, dadragon -- your post was almost constructive) about Apple deserting them or treating them as second-class customers, etc.
The reason behind this most likely has to do with what rights that the record companies they're dealing with have. Many contracts are structured such that a company has rights to sell each cut/album in certain countries.
Keeping that info straight, trying to (loosely) enforce it, and keeping the buying interface clean isn't easy.
No doubt Apple will get there, but I'm glad they rolled out the service now (but I live in the U.S. :-) instead of waiting until they had the rights nailed down so they could address the Burundian market as well as all the others.
I really don't think this is so impossible. You'd have 39 (27 regular and 12 thin) standard configurations, and I'd bet only 5 or so would be really popular
Is this so crazy?
Let's pretend that this is a stunningly great idea to have 39 "standard" configurations of which maybe 5 would sell. Oddly enough, nobody's doing anything like this.
What are the chances that everyone else is crazy, and you're the only sane one with this great idea?
Hey, you develop for Microsoft software, you get what you deserve. :-)
Let the police forces test this technology first. They have the largest problem of having guns taken from them and being shot with their own weapons. If the technology is really ready for the average user, then let the police use them first.
My prediction: that'll never happen.
This law isn't about safety, it's about making guns harder to get for Joe Average.
In Massachusetts, new guns have to pass a drop test and a bunch of other "safety" rules before they can be purchased. Guess what? The police are using the "unsafe" Glocks and other guns that ordinary peepul aren't allowed to buy.
This is just bullshit, particularly in the home of the American Revolution.
Wrong -- it proves that it does work. None of those 100K books were cracked PDFs.
What it does show is that books on paper are unsecure. This is news?
Once we got past fawning :-) we asked him who he read.
One of the names he named was John Stith.
All of us said Who?
I've since read all of Stith's stuff, and it's good. Despite his web site. :-)
Which means that licensees can swap out the Graffiti input mechanism for an alternative, such as biometrics.
Wow, so instead of writing characters to input text, I can do it with my fingerprint, retina pattern, heart rate, etc.? That's so cool!
[For the humor-impaired, that's a joke]
In general, however, I would highly recommend going to college, at the best one you can get into. That can set the tone for your entire career.
Skipping college or going to an el-cheapo one can save you money now, but in the long run going to a good university is probably the best investment you can make.
If all you want to be is a sysadmin until you're sixty years old, looked down upon by snot-nosed college grads one-third your age, go ahead.
That's OK -- /. spelt his name wrong. :-)
It's Cory Doctorow, not Doctrow.
Oh, no! This situation was shown as "bad" in a movie! We must stop it from happening in real life!
Seriously, I have a healthy daughter and another kid on the way. If I could choose their genes such that they were not susceptible to allergies, cancer, bronchitis, obesity, mental disorders, bad teeth, goofy looks, bowleggedness, etc. I'd do it in a second.
Would I choose a clone of Michael Jordan? Probably not. Would I choose the best genes I can give my children? In a split second.
Gattaca was a good movie, but I view it not so much as a warning, but as an indicator that the human spirit is not measured in genes (which I'm not so sure of) and that people can triumph over whatever system tries to keep them down.
Gene selection will happen. It makes just too much sense.
If the U.S. outlaws it, two things will happen: rich people will go to other countries to pick their kids' genes; the healthcare costs of the U.S. will skyrocket while the costs in other countries nosedive.
There's a term for companies that have rock-solid, long-term, unswerving development plans: bankrupt.
I'm a techie-turned-manager with a half-dozen programmers under me. Yes, we end up putting projects on the back burner in favor of other projects, then moving them back to the front burner. It's life.
Our customer base is changing, the market is changing, OSes are changing, etc. That means that you change, or die.
If you don't like it, go back to government and find a nice stable 20-year old contract doing software maintenance. It's nice and safe and unchanging.
The Hardy Boys: The Castle Conundrum.
Nancy Drew: The Case of the Lost Song
Ebooks rule.