Dijkstra also advocated for proving the correctness of imperative code using the composition of a set of simple rules, and most programmers ignore that aspect of his work too.
The presented story has to make sense to the audience, and showing two characters interacting with an isolinear chip, data crystal or whatever hints at "she just gave him a futuristic floppy disc with the plans for Chekhov's Gun" more than claiming to have sent a sharing link via IM.
My handy real-world analogy for XOR is the light over a staircase in a home. There's a switch at the bottom, and another switch at the top, and both control the same light. Initially, they're both in the off position. You set the bottom switch, and the light turns on. You climb the stairs, set the top switch, and the light turns off although both switches are now in the "on" position. As long as one switch is in the "on" position and one switch in the "off" position, the light is on; otherwise, it's off.
Huh, maybe my electrician wired it up wrong in my office then. I’ve got two switches in the room but come to think of it they perform more like an AND gate than an XOR. In the living room there are two switches and those are definitely like an XOR.
The XOR light switch is a trick. And, even if you know it is possible, it is hard to figure it out without someone telling you. My uncle and cousin were doing their own electrical work and couldn’t figure it out.
I had seen the trick as a young kid and remembered it 30 years later: install the one of the switches backwards.
One switch takes in power and puts it on one of two wires running to the second switch. The second switch connects one of the two wires to the power wire going to the bulb.
If you don’t know the trick, you get an AND switch.
Exactly this. SQL is based on the relational algebra and that's well-defined, NULL along with other features of SQL work in an entirely regular and predictable way. The only time it's weird is when a developer decides that it should work the way Javascript (or whatever) NULLs work because that's the last time they saw the same word used in a programming language, in which case it's the assumption that's weird.
That's not the only time it is weird. There's even a whole book by one of the pioneers of the relational DB model, Date's "Database Technology: Nulls Considered Harmful" [1], covering many of the ways it is weird.
The part that’s weird with nulls is that it’s a trinary logic stuffed into a boolean algebra. The use of x = NULL instead of x IS NULL is pretty much always a mistake.
More importantly, x = value instead of (x = value and x IS NOT NULL) is almost always a mistake, and a stupidly subtle one at that. And for this curse, we get… nothing particularly useful from these semantics.
> The part that’s weird with nulls is that it’s a trinary logic stuffed into a boolean algebra.
It's a three-valued logic (though not trinary, which would use a base-3 number system) in a three-valued algebra: specifically, the relational algebra. The outcome of a logical test has three values: true, false, or NULL; this is distinct from Boole's algebra where outcomes have a continuous value between 0 and 1 inclusive.
AROS is also the basis of the ApolloOS fork that the Vampire accelerators people maintain to take advantage of their chips' features. https://www.apollo-computer.com/apolloos.php
It seems to me that the extra features on DVD were originally part of the marketing benefits driving people to adopt the format because the studios preferred it to VHS because of CSS and region-locking. Then they found they had painted themselves into a corner making all these extra features that people came to expect, until finally streaming let them get back to “just the movie”.
It was a good investment to get a modded player that ignored UOP and let you easily skip stuff. As for menus, most DVD remote controls had a button to directly start the movie without having to figure out the menu.
Region locking was more that US videos were 60hz ntsc and most of the rest of world was 50hz pal, and multi-region hardware was fairly rare
Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content
Many VHS were subbed instead. Sometimes two versions of a popular film were released, one dubbed and one with baked-in subs. This did limit the desire to copy between regions a bit, though not as much as you might think given how many people speak one of a few languages as a second language.
I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.
Region locking stops (or is designed to stop) someone, for example, in the USA buying a DVD sold in the UK market. The localization of the product on sale isn't relevant to the decision not to sell the product.
Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.
Only if trying to learn the language of Lithuania, or is an immigrant from Lithuania. I'm not sure how common those are, I expect the total market is around 10... This is a real problem for the language learning community - they are too small for the studios to worry about, but the studios are making a lot of content that would be very useful for learning if only someone could get it.
I used to read his books as exercises in critical analysis—how does he get from the data to these conclusions, and what does he ignore that doesn't fit his conclusions? Then I discovered that, as stated by Carl Sagan, von Däniken also relies on factual errors in his arguments.
If you add every single other church or shrine that's dedicated to St. Michael to the map, what's the straight line you can draw that contains the most of those locations?
In TFA he tries the geodesic line first before trying the various projections. It doesnt' really fit any of them because even with these extremely cherry-picked seven points, you can't retcon them into having been designed to be in a line when they weren't.
I think you may have misread the parent comment in the opposite way that comment misread the title. Isn't it a bit sad that System Verilog ended after a bit over two centuries?
