DISQUS

Nvidia's PureVideo decodes MPEG2 and H.264, which are the two dominant HD encodings. MPEG2 is used in ATSC and QAM TV, while H.264 is used for some European HD broadcast, Blu-ray, and... Apple's videos.

You say, "We’re not talking about your taste in clothes or furniture. We’re talking about a way of working that can be right or wrong," but all we got from Steve was his personal take on things. I don't know about you, but I like to avoid black/white dichotomies unless there's some pretty solid evidence that they exist. Where can we find that evidence? All I see in Software Engineering textbooks is evidence *for* modeling and analysis of designs, though certainly the wisdom regarding the amount of it and the time at which you should do it seems to be changing.

So, I hear there's this new aircraft that had its avionics system contracted out to some Agile developers writing in the new ECMAScript draft language that Steve is so fond of. Normally with these kinds of things, there's a lot of modeling and static analysis of code, but this shop realizes that's the old-school n00b way of writing programs, and since there's no room for "depends on the situation" reasoning when making development tool choices, they had to toss that analysis like the garbage it is. I have these tickets for the maiden flight, but I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable about it. How about you take them instead? No?

Since Steve's offered his anecdotes, I'll offer one of my own. I was writing a first-order logic resolution engine in Scheme, which is, incidentally, one of my favorite languages and usually the first software tool I reach for. I made pretty good progress, but when I neared the end of the project, I was actually wishing for some static typing, because I kept ending up having to run a bunch of tests to find what were essentially type mismatches, and the error messages were quite uninformative, e.g. "Couldn't apply 'car' to ..." kind of stuff.

Fast forward to now, when I am implementing a compiler in Haskell. I have to invest a little bit of effort to define some types up front, though I certainly haven't rigorously modeled everything, and you really have to do a bit of this even if you're in a dynamically typed language. Now, as I work on implementing parsing, I get nice error messages telling me where I've used the wrong types at compile time. These include what the type I'm erroneously using is as well as the expected type, which I find very helpful in figuring out why the code is wrong. And there's pretty much no notational overhead, since most of the static typing is done by inference, and Haskell tends to be terse anyway. And when I do change the type of the data I'm passing around, and I miss updating a couple of spots of code, I get notified of it immediately instead of when I happen to tickle those bits in my testing.

Anyway, since this isn't a matter of personal preference, I guess I should discard what I've written so far and port it to Scheme or Python or something suitably 'dynamic'. I'll definitely end up working faster and more productively then!

Well, you did say that it was "worth the read" and "especially nice if you're a dynamic language aficionado". I apologize if you don't actually endorse his message, but I think I could be forgiven for interpreting your commentary that way.

All the static vs. dynamic arguments going around the internet create a lot of heat without much light, and I guess I was disappointed that you, as a professor of programming languages, didn't take the opportunity to present the link to this particular rant with a bit of an alternative perspective, or at least a caveat that you didn't agree 100%.

Anyway, perhaps you *do* agree with him, in which case I'm not sure why you responded to me as you did. Either way, I'm sorry if I sounded overly critical or jumped to an unfounded conclusion.

"People who approach programming differently than I do are insecure n00bs"

That's a great attitude for a professor to endorse in a public forum. Steve's rant is nothing more than hot air attempting to justify his personal preferences at the expense of others. It makes you feel good because his preferences are the same as yours. The fact remains, however, that there's no real meat; it's just the evisceration of a straw man.

Dynamic languages and agile methodologies (whatever those vague terms mean today) are great, but so are modeling tools and static program analysis. Different tools for different jobs, etc. No one needs to be called insecure or a 'n00b'.

One might make a comparison between strong & static type guarantees and your digital identity research. Sometimes it's okay to play fast and loose with identity, but other times you really want to be able to verify who you're dealing with. So it is with data types.

I've noticed that some channels stay in the same HD mode no matter what they're showing, so anything that wasn't originally shot in that format gets upconverted. I imagine that's what is happening here.

BYU does have some HD programming. They used to have a dedicated subchannel for it (which usually displayed an info screen, since there was very little actual programming), but sometime in the past few months they combined it with the Create channel. For a few hours every day, it switches to HD content.

You might want to take a look at this before you send your iPhone back: http://macapper.com/2007/09/11/download-iphone-...>

You're still thinking in terms of features. Markets aren't won by feature lists. Geeks like features, but the vast majority of the consumer market is non-geek. The iPod is a very straightforward product that's always had an innovative, easy-to-use interface without too many features. It's also dripping with style, and it's well-marketed. Cell phones that happen to play music are just that--cell phones that happen to play music. Though some cell phones have some nice exterior styling, their user interfaces are pretty much universally clunky and nearly unusable. There's also nothing like that iTunes + iTMS + simple syncing synergy in the cell phone market, but that's only a piece of a well-engineered and constantly tuned system designed to keep people buying iPods and music and videos, and it's working remarkably well. Phones that play music have no appeal beyond all the also-ran mp3 players, and probably considerably less due to the awful interfaces.

The #1 complaint I hear about cell phones is that they're hard to use and have too many bells and whistles that clutter the interface and are difficult to navigate. This is not a big deal to a geek who is used to navigating bizarre control structures or a teenager with more free time than is good for them, but the average person is just annoyed by the clutter.

The iPhone brings the qualities that made the iPod successful to the cell phone market, and it's clear now that it's not going to bomb. Whether it's going to be a huge long-term success is still up in the air, but clearly it's doing okay now and iPods aren't being neglected either.

Heh, came across this while following links after writing my previous comment. Funny, calling the iPhone a failure and claiming you were right after just a couple of days. In your iPhone-related posts, you consistently miss the point of the iPod and iPhone. Unless the latest crop of music-playing cell phones is radically different from all the other phones I've used, they are decidedly not like an iPod, haven't been hurting the iPod's market, and won't hurt it in the future. This misunderstanding doesn't surprise me; geeks have been misunderstanding the iPod since it was first reviewed on Slashdot, where it was widely seen as a total flop.

I don’t see how anyone could be using these things!

Um, really? I don't use one, because I have no need for an expensive phone that ties me to a contract, but how many people do you think have a 64 bit Windows installed? More people run OS X than Vista in general at the moment, and I'm sure only a tiny fraction of the Vista users have a 64 bit version. Is there even a 64 bit XP?

Anyway, if you hate it so much without even having used it, you probably ought to send it back and buy something you'd actually like to use. Why support a product you hate?

And I can't imagine a Zune phone being any better. Good luck with that idea. :)