GCs are very useful in a few cases. In particular if you have a graph data structure which can have cycles and holds no resources then a GC will save you a lot of work. As soon as you introduce cycles smart pointers and destructors stop being enough.
Personally I think OO programs should avoid having cycles in their dependency graphs anyway. If Foo requires Bar to work and Bar requires Foo, which one do you destroy first? Foo might use Bar in its destructor and viceversa. GC'd languages resolve this by saying "we'll destroy them in whatever order we want, don't count on your references being valid". Smart pointers can solve this by declaring one of those as a weak reference, thereby making it obvious which one gets destroyed first.
On the other hand if you're writing a compiler or some other graph-heavy program, having a free-form data structure with automatic GC where referents don't get destroyed while you hold them (no weak_ptrs) will save you a lot of trouble. The flip side is that you shouldn't let any of those objects hold onto external resources like open files, database connections, etc.
So... GC for PODs and smart_ptr for OO. The lack of a generic C++ GC does present a problem, I think.
Regarding the first comment, no, I really don't, unless the point is that this is what the code for "moving" would look like if implemented in older versions of C++.
Yes, that is what the code looks like without move constructors. That has nothing to do with C++11, and yes, it's really ugly. This that follows is the declaration (not implementation) of a move constructor.
If you’re implementing a class that supports moving, you can declare a move constructor and a move assignment operator like this: class Movable { Movable (Movable&&);//move constructor Movable&& operator=(Movable&&);//move assignment operator };
Ok, cool... But where is this used in the "moveswapstr" example? Does this make the "naiveswap" example automagically faster? Or is there some other syntax? It doesn't really say:
Now you can do Movable foo = bar(); and it'll call the move constructor rather than the copy constructor when constructing foo. The advantage is important. For example, in the case of a string or a vector you don't copy the contents with the copy constructor just to delete the original when the rvalue goes out of scope. There is a way to force the call to the move assignment, which you could use to force the naive swap to move data from one object to another rather than copy/destroy the data, so you end up with three lines of clean code (I don't recall the syntax now, but it's not that different)
The C++11 Standard Library uses move semantics extensively. Many algorithms and containers are now move-optimized.
...right... Still, unless I actually know what this means, it's useless.
Nope. For example, when vector grows its storage it currently copies all the objects from the old to the new storage and then destroys the old. Now it'll automatically notice the move constructors and move the data, leaving old objects empty. You get the performance advantage just by implementing a move constructor.
And since the standard library classes now have move constructors you get this for free for any vector<string> or vector<vector<foo>> or whatever without changing your code.
It looks like there's a lot of good stuff here, and the article is decently organized, but the actual writing leaves me balanced between "Did I miss something?" like the above, and enough confusion that I'm actually confident the author screwed up. For example:
In C++03, you must specify the type of an object when you declare it. Yet in many cases, an object’s declaration includes an initializer. C++11 takes advantage of this, letting you declare objects without specifying their types: auto x=0;//x has type int because 0 is int auto c='a';//char auto d=0.5;//double auto national_debt=14400000000000LL;//long long
Great! Awesome! Of course, this arguably should've been there to begin with, and the 'auto' in front of these variables is still annoying, coming from dynamically-typed languages. But hey, maybe I can write this:
But the only way to double your money is if you manage to convince other people that this is worthwhile.
Currently, bitcoins are worthless except as much as you can convince other people to buy them. You can't do much with them except to sell it back. It looks like people are trying to force a bubble to form
Banks and real state agents told everyone that they should buy an expensive house because they could make money by flipping it. That's what's happening now with bitcoin. That's what your comment suggested. It seems only useful for flipping.
(Ok, also useful for the old miners to make money from the gullible. See slashvertisements/spam that don't even try to convince you to flip, just that it's a thing/wave of the future and you should buy some)
Which is why you're seeing all the bitcoin stories spamming news sites lately.
Err, I guess I should put that in the form of a question...
Amir, what do you know about all these stories appearing on news sites lately? Are they a result of early adopters trying to monetize on their investment and realizing that the only way they can is if they get enough buy-in from popular opinion? Would you consider starting a new bitcoin database now that the code is stable and letting new mining start from scratch now that it's relatively well known and the code is stable? Or would that hurt your bottom line too?
Ooops, I guess it's just one question per post. Sorry, I guess this one won't get picked...
I've been against this wall before. There are a few things to consider: - In a university environment the "compute cluster" is not going to be in a data center far away, but rather in "lab" (read office) with 16 8-core machines, so the machines might actually be used locally either with a monitor for each grad student or a KVM switch for the single student/admin. For newbie admins it's easier to flip the KVM switch and click their way through the admin guis. - In a mixed Win/Linux environment, you're right, all you need is a XServer on the windows side, but the only freely available ones are (as of a year ago or so):
- An old version of MingW that hangs on the current Ubuntu and Debian desktops.
- Cygwin/X, which is a pain to set up. - You can also set up VNC, but the split VNC/unix passwords, painful setup to start x sessions upon a vnc conection, and IIRC having to give everyone a VNC number was a PITA. Not to mention performance differences. Then again, given the requirement, they're probably thinking of something like this. Bring up the X server with a default session and people can connect remotely, or something - Not all newbie admins know how to install the desktop environment (gedit, apps, etc) without also installing the X server. Even for those who do, they might just disable starting gdm on boot, so that X is still available if you need it with a simple startx. It won't take up much resources when it's down, and 1GB of disk space isn't much nowadays
Personally I access servers from either Linux or Cygwin, via ssh and X forwarding, but it's kind of hard to get it into windows people's heads that you use a server remotely without opening a "session" with desktop and start menu remotely. Also, even if the desktop environment isn't installed I usually install gedit for quick edits (I'm an emacs guy, but gedit is easier for the rest of the team, and for small one-line edits easier even for me).
Though a pet peeve of mine is that there isn't a quick util to bring up the machine's application menu from the command line. Basically, pop up Gnome's or KDE's app/start menu. Why do I have to wade through hundreds of.desktop files to figure out how to run the SAPGui app in my desktop remotely from my laptop? The data is there in a standard format, there's code for it, just not available from the command line.
Also keep in mind these aren't admins accessing the servers. For example some might want to bring up R's graphical UI and do some work on it. Some of the programs/plugins might make use of the resources on the other machines, but some are just normal desktop programs. If their workstations are windows, they might end up connecting remotely and bringing up an IDE for developing their calculation/analysis routines anyway, serving dual purpose as compute cluster and simple workstations.
The start menu is a good way to see what is available and isn't in each remote machine. Whether the rest of the "session" framework is useful is another story.
I agree with both of your points, but I think you're missing the whole point of the article.
Let me give you an example. A few years ago I joined a team where most people stayed around for lunch (some lived close enough to go have lunch at home, or their spouses worked close enough to go eat with them, etc). So a lot of the time we'd have 5-10 people from a couple projects eating lunch together, but with one unbreakable rule: no talking about work. People would actually stop you if you brought up anything work related.
Now I'm an introvert, and most of the time I'd sit there and listen to them talk, but I did talk sometimes. The end result was that we stopped being "just those people I work with" and the whole "I'm here to work not to make friends" attitude lessened. I don't know if it helped improve our productivity, but the working environment was clearly improved.
We all were annoyed at our boss when meetings ran late, when we were asked to go to a stupid company get-togethers, but it was an us-against-them thing rather than a me-against-the-company thing. I don't know if that makes sense to you. For example, sometimes we'd skip the company's thing and go to one our houses and do something by ourselves.
Forced lunch-meetings are horrible, but having the company provide a (discounted) cafeteria, encouraging teams to eat together, etc. does help with interpersonal relationships. And if you intend to work with the same people for many years that's very important.
Well, at least they did place it on Tokyo. And the rest are actual nuclear plants but they missed a few.
An accurate map is on the last page of this report. 16 nuclear plants total, 12 of them active and unaffected. That's 40 nuclear reactors working safely, 8 safe even after the quake, and 6 at Fukushma Daiichi giving them trouble.
Those are the places I turn to when people start talking about normal media coverage. I just saw a CNN report that started out with clips of people saying that there was another explosion and that there was a fire on reactor 4. I went "shit" and checked. Turns out those were old clips from a few days ago when there were explosions and fires.
It looks to me like things are more or less under control. The cores should now be in cold shutdown putting out nominal heat. Barring another accident (explosion, earthquake, tsunami, pump propeller breaking up and tearing a hole through a pipe, etc.) they should have things sorted out in a week or two. Not to say it's not a mess. Food from fukushima might need to be thrown out for a week or two while cesium decays and there will be rolling blackouts until this stabilizes enough for workers to take a look at the other 3 nuclear plants and restart them. but still it won't be anywhere near the disaster the media makes it out to be.
As to the release of these pictures, while information is good and all, after this is all said and done TEPCO will still have to keep these power plants secure, and there are reactors just like these that will have to stay online until new ones are built. I understand Fukishima Daini and others use the same models. Handing high-res pictures of the facility to potential nuclear terrorists sounds like a bad idea, and the people who know what to censor are slightly busy at the moment.
I know that RTFA'ing is not well received around here, but in this case reading the second one would be a good thing.
First of all, the resolution only gives the different countries permission to defend civilians, not to depose Gaddafi.
Considering that the widespread and systematic attacks currently taking place in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya against the civilian population may amount to crimes against humanity... Analysis: These first two highlighted sections emphasise that this is all about defending the civilian population in Libya from attacks by its own government. One of the conditions for action set out by Nato countries has been "a demonstrable need" to intervene.... 1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians; Analysis: The overriding stated aim is to halt the fighting and to achieve a ceasefire. It does not explicitly call for the removal of Col Muammar Gaddafi though one can assume that this is what the countries promoting this resolution would like. Many of their leaders have said so quite explicitly.
Also, other countries are barred from putting in occupation forces and so on. Current attacks seem to be aimed at anti-air defenses so their forces can start enforcing a no-fly zone without having their planes shot down.
They'll probably target sites shelling other cities and so on.
Growing up is about "turning into something you're not". Otherwise you'd stay a child forever.
While the submitter does seem like a troll with his "unremarkable bits of plastic" thing, he does have a point that if everyone is giving them the same thing then (a) they are all trying to turn them into the same thing they are not (e.g. gun wielding/fire truck driving men) and (b) the children haven't had a chance to see if they even like anything else.
It's a risk thing too. You can give them the same thing as everyone else and they will thank you. Or you can give them a Rubik cube, a set of Lego, or something else and there's about even odds that they'll play with it for a day and forget about it, or they might start playing with it and you'll hear from their parents months later that they didn't drop it ever since.
These are children you're talking about. Give them a great big expensive toy and they'll end up playing with the box for hours instead.
I'm part of a team looking into moving our company to Linux in the long term. Some 3000+ workstations with windows XP, MS office, exchange, etc.
Currently we're looking at Ubuntu and servers in Debian. My assessment is: - You need directory services. Fedora Directory services (389 server) is hard to install on Debian/Ubuntu and has a lot of trouble with their two way AD replication. Other people who have worked with OpenLDAP report severe corruption when synchronizing multiple masters across unreliable links. Both arer a pain to set up windows clients for. - Both Ubuntu 9.10 and Macs can join Active Directory using Likewise Open. Ubuntu 10.04 included it in their main repository, adverrtised the integration and completely fucked it up. Most of the bugs are fixed in the PPA, but they haven't bothered to put the fixes in their supported repositories for the last 6 months, and the same bugs are in 10.10. Upgrading 9.10 -> 10.04 with break your configuration, unless you know enough to add the PPAs beforehand or a private repo. With the PPAs it works well, but single-sign-on doesn't work (worked in 9.10) and it has problems when working from home. - Some things aren't implemented. Windows can authenticate with Radius (WPA Enterprise, VPN, etc) with the machine's AD password. Ubuntu + Likewise doesn't have that capability, though it's relatively easy to script yourself. You have to log in and enter a password for the wireless, (hard if you need the wireless to log in) or set your password to be used for anyone who uses the computer (bad if you ever change your password) - Ubuntu has a bunch of embarrassing bugs that prevent me from just giving it to one of my users. The original OOo in 10.04 couldn't even join cells selected with the mouse. It's sad when MS's products have more quality than yours.
Maybe we'll start over looking at Fedora, I'd like to hear about people's experiences with their quality assurance.
All that aside, the other big points to watch: - Email is a problem. Web based solutions preclude you from having PSTs locally for personal history/backups (which is very common at my company). If you don't switch to a web based solution then Evolution is a mess with its exchange integration. The old connector only connects through OWA, and loses synchronization (says there are unread emails but won't show you them or download them, silently stops updating, etc) and crashes every once in a while. The MAPI connector has some weird issues with character encoding. You can use Thunderbird but you lose all the Gnome integration. And either you switch windows users to thunderbird too or support two different programs. You could install a Linux based email and calendaring server too, that can sync email, appointments and everything else with linux windows, macs and phones , but it's nontrivial. Just choosing the right combination of solutions is a big project. - Access and excel macros have to be rebuilt. A lot of people at our company use them. Every department seems to have a VBA expert building mini-applications and data analysis spreadsheets connected to our data warehouse that then become business-critical. This is not a problem until you want to switch. - MS Project. If your people use it and need it, there is just no good replacement. Serena Openproj is the closest, but it hasn't been updated in two years and has a bunch of bugs. Plus it's missing things like multi-project and a bunch of features our users need. - Custom apps: Our intranet won't show well under Firefox and we have a bunch of custom apps (VB and other languages). The former have to be redone anyway to update for a new IE, but the latter are a lot of work in our case.
A migration project is a big undertaking that probably won't be completely justified by cost. On the other hand I don't agree with just laying on your laurels and mindlessly updating to the latest MS offering. Do look into switching every once in a while. If things are good enough for you then switch, even if it takes a lot of work. You
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code needed to simulate a brain. I say "library" to differentiate from data, since a lot of our brain information comes from our experiences, i.e. library == instincts.
Actually he's right. The statement is pure bullshit.
Or maybe that's too much. Kurzweil just doesn't understand how Kolmorogrov complexity works.
Let's say the brain as a machine is the output of a process. How complicated is that process? The Kolmorogrov complexity of a string (or whatever) is the minimum size of the data that you have to give to a machine in order to produce the string. E.g. a string of 100 0s is simpler than a string of alternating 0s and 1s and simpler than encoding the first 100 digits of pi. Write code for each of those and you'll see the measure works (and it's actually a lower limit, but it's the closest concept...)
But the crucial point is that the size of this string depends on the kind of machine. The size of the input (program) for a Turing machine is very different than that for an actual computer.
So, yes. 800MB of code. But that's not the library code. The library that interprets that program is the egg that grows those 800MB of data into a human, together with all the laws of physics and chemistry involved in the process.
Take all the chromosomes encoding a whole human genome and drop it into a test tube of distilled water. Does it grow a brain? What if you put it into a chicken egg. What grows out? Putting those 800 MB into a computer doesn't do anything if you don't provide the equivalent of the egg. The bootstrap structure and the underlying architecture are as important as the code in understanding the whole system.
Myers is right. In order to understand the human brain directly from the genes you have to understand all chemistry that interacts with it, all the self replicating machinery provided by the mother and simulate that at a molecular level.
So the upper bound is NOT 800 MB. It's 800 MB plus the size of a codebase good enough to simulate every interaction at an atomic level plus a full 3D scan at an atomic level of the egg provided by the mother. Or simplified models of all those things, provided by the chemists and biologists out there, as Myers points out. (Plus data equivalent to a few years of training like we do with children)
Not saying that simulating the brain is necessarilly that hard, it's just that Kurzweil's pseudo-scientific measurement is just bullshit.
I once worked in a somewhat similar arrangement. We had L-shaped desks in a cross arrangement. Each person sat in one of the inside corners of the cross.
Pros: - It was easy to talk to each other. Cons: - It was harder to look at the person across from you over the monitors - If you ever wanted to show each other your code, one of you had to walk around the desk or roll around it in your chair.
That last one was the dealbreaker. It might be easier on a round table (but then each would have very little room for their stuff), but you'd have the same problem to talk to someone who is not right next to you: you'd still have to walk around your neighbors.
I'm currently working in another department with the same desks, but arranged as the outside of the square. Takes up about the same space but it is much easier to roll over to someone's desk and work with them. You can take your laptop if you want (and wifi permitting).
And let's face it, it's just as easy to turn around to talk to someone behind you as to someone next to you. And if they are wearing headphones they won't hear you either way. Add rolling chairs and anything but carpet and it's just as easy to take something to show them too. Even without the corner desks, you can set them up in two rows back to back and it still works.
You could add a small central table for quick meetings, but I prefer the back to back arrangement any day.
(And people tend not to slack off as much because someone might be looking over their shoulder:) )
Nope. One of his moves a few years ago was to set up the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) which absorbed a bunch of parties that supported him at one time and he's campaigned for people to see this as the only socialist party in existence. Of course he controls it and it would only propose him for president. Anyone leading another party is politically a nobody
There are other socialist politicians. Real socialists, even some that have been fighting for change for decades and are appalled at what Chavez is doing now. One of them said lately that Chavez is not a socialist but a communist, for example. There are, of course, people who were with Chavez but have fallen out of favor and might want to set themselves up as new socialists leaders, but without the PSUV's backing they are not getting anywhere.
So, no.
A lot of people love their dear leader and his personality more than the ideology. And a lot of people like socialism, but believe socialism is whatever Chavez says, or that letting the opposition get any foothold will make them lose "all they've fought for". Others think Chavez simply can do no wrong, whatever he does. All of them still insist on calling a 10 year old entrenched government "the revolution" and anyone who doesn't like whatever Chavez says is "against the process" (and some of them say it with a "they deserve death" attitude)
Bringing up that they could back another better socialist is a good way to make them face the fact that they love him more than the process or the ideology.
As to the Putin scenario, he's not going to do that. Why would he back a constitutional reform whose only point was to allow him to run again in the next presidential elections?
He also managed to get the last opposition guy to run against him to flee the country, so there's no credible person to run against him from the opposition anyway. But that's a story for another post.
Actually, the venezuelan government has been trying to close Globovision for a while now, and one of the biggest problems is that they have NEVER advocated any kind of violence against the government, be it the president or anyone else. It would cost too much international support for them to close another oposition TV station without a good reason.
The other two big independent TV stations have been scared off enough that they don't dare play anything political. The only other one is VTV, the government's channel (and I don't mean Bush' Fox, I mean wholly owned by the government). They do play show like "La Hojilla" (The razor blade) that openly advocated a few times killing oposition as a legitimate means of defending "the revolution".
Not to mention Chavez himself sometimes applauding relatively violent acts in his defense.
Now, I won't say that Globovision is fair and balanced, but as far as I can tell they never outright lied about anything. I understand Fox news to be more radical and distorting than Globovision and yet I don't see the Fox owners being hounded for years and finally arrested like Zuloaga.
FWIW, it seems Zuloaga was released after appearing in court, with a prohibition against leaving the country. We'll see whether he'll fold and close Globovision or be thrown in jail on trumped up charges.
Time to claw things back and give Chavez a chance to reform the country, like a majority of the population say they want.
Disclaimer on my stance on the government: Chavez has been in power for 10 years. He's changed the constitution multiple times, tried out different reforms all while oil was at an all time high and money was flowing into the country like crazy. He's had a BIG chance to reform the country and It's all been a failure. Lately all he's doing helps the government more than the people.
Hell, we even have rolling blackouts now, when we used to export electricity. This is a situation that was predicted over a year ago, but 10 years of ignoring the power infrastructure have left its mark, and yet he blames it all on el niño and the previous governments.
If you want change, don't prop up the same old government. If you're a socialist, elect a different socialist president. If you're a capitalist, same thing. There's no reason to maintain Chavez in power for another 50 years.
The Import question was a long conversation in IRC actually. The conclusion is that it doesn't really add anything to split open and import, while save/export does.
Yes it is different from other programs, but the only one I can think of OOo, and the other formats (word, etc) do save enough info to keep your work.
Currently when you open a PNG, the export item becomes "Overwrite foo.png" so it's very obvious in the menu. After you export the menu gets overwrite foo.png, export to bar.png export to... plus the usual save and save to. The overwrite item goes away when you save to a XCF.
Yes very nonstandard, that's one of the things I dislike.
My biggest annoyance with all this is that when you type in foo.png in the save dialog it'll show a very unfriendly "You can use this dialog to save to the GIMP XCF format. Use File ->export to export to other file formats". The obvious thing to do would be to add an export button to that dialog or a "take me to the export dialog" so the user doesn't have to waste time navigating to the right directory again. But, in the words of the UI guy "we cannot allow the user to think of the save dialog as an unofficial way to export".
And yes, they now have a "UI expert" designing things. So it's not random developers coming up with weird things. Some of his ideas are good, but not down to the details IMHO. And he has a real NIH syndrome problem. Look at the export dialog, the adjustment layers and the non-MDI single window UI for examples.
Int his case I think the feature does make sense, but it does need some changes, liek the ones you suggest. The double save-path export offers does seem very useful for something like GImp.
I've been running SVN versions for a while now, and I was skeptical of the change too, but when I found out the reason why it makes perfect sense.
Let's say you're editing an image to put up in a web page. You have a.xcf with all the layers and data and a jpg you are putting up. In the old version you could save the jpg and then forget to update the xcf, so you'd lose data unknowingly (Say, you closed the Gimp and it didn't tell you you had a modified image).
The current version keeps track of whether a file has been saved and whether it has been exported. If you want to update the xcf you hit ctrl-s. If you want to reexport the jpg you hit ctrl-e. If you close Gimp it'll tell you you have unsaved changes even if you have exported the picture. Hitting export as a second time will place you in the directory you were exporting to (not necessarily the one you saved to). It's nice for repeated saving and testing (to web, blender, whatever) while keeping track of update to you XCF for you.
Yes, it is nonstandard but the Gimp is one of the few programs whose internal format is not what is published or used as part of a workflow, but still needs to keep up to date with your work.
Also note that the export dialog does do "Intelligent Save". You type in the file name you want and it'll guess the file type.
Either way don't worry about it too much. Current estimate is to release 2.8 in December 2010, but they'll probably cut some features before then.
Currently the projects being worked on git are: -Single window interface (Their own private kind of MDI, not anything standard) -Integrating the brush dynamic GSoC project -Adding a test suite -Including code to work on a XMP model (?) -Real dynamic hardness support for both generated and pixmap brushes -Some work on file format. It seems new features in 2.8 might require 2.8 to read, but that code isn't there yet
They also added simple layer groups so far, plus the usual bugfixes and improvements. I can't say I understand all the git comments though.
GEGL integration is not actually happening yet, and it'll take a year or two at least. Internal representatiuon when rendering will be floating point RGB but I remember hearing the buffers will be able to store (or Gimp will be able to read) any pixel format understood by babl.
Personally I don't much care for GEGL. It's Pulseaudio for graphics, and way too alpha to make it an integral part of Gimp.
Anyway don't hold your breath for more than 8-bits on Gimp. It'll be at least 2012 before it can be used for anything more than what you can do now.
Slashdot Mirror
someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays.
The should hire Linux Torvalds!
GCs are very useful in a few cases. In particular if you have a graph data structure which can have cycles and holds no resources then a GC will save you a lot of work. As soon as you introduce cycles smart pointers and destructors stop being enough.
Personally I think OO programs should avoid having cycles in their dependency graphs anyway. If Foo requires Bar to work and Bar requires Foo, which one do you destroy first? Foo might use Bar in its destructor and viceversa. GC'd languages resolve this by saying "we'll destroy them in whatever order we want, don't count on your references being valid". Smart pointers can solve this by declaring one of those as a weak reference, thereby making it obvious which one gets destroyed first.
On the other hand if you're writing a compiler or some other graph-heavy program, having a free-form data structure with automatic GC where referents don't get destroyed while you hold them (no weak_ptrs) will save you a lot of trouble. The flip side is that you shouldn't let any of those objects hold onto external resources like open files, database connections, etc.
So... GC for PODs and smart_ptr for OO. The lack of a generic C++ GC does present a problem, I think.
Second, here's the newer, better syntax:
Regarding the first comment, no, I really don't, unless the point is that this is what the code for "moving" would look like if implemented in older versions of C++.
Yes, that is what the code looks like without move constructors. That has nothing to do with C++11, and yes, it's really ugly.
This that follows is the declaration (not implementation) of a move constructor.
Ok, cool... But where is this used in the "moveswapstr" example? Does this make the "naiveswap" example automagically faster? Or is there some other syntax? It doesn't really say:
Now you can do
Movable foo = bar();
and it'll call the move constructor rather than the copy constructor when constructing foo. The advantage is important. For example, in the case of a string or a vector you don't copy the contents with the copy constructor just to delete the original when the rvalue goes out of scope. There is a way to force the call to the move assignment, which you could use to force the naive swap to move data from one object to another rather than copy/destroy the data, so you end up with three lines of clean code (I don't recall the syntax now, but it's not that different)
The C++11 Standard Library uses move semantics extensively. Many algorithms and containers are now move-optimized.
...right... Still, unless I actually know what this means, it's useless.
Nope. For example, when vector grows its storage it currently copies all the objects from the old to the new storage and then destroys the old. Now it'll automatically notice the move constructors and move the data, leaving old objects empty. You get the performance advantage just by implementing a move constructor.
And since the standard library classes now have move constructors you get this for free for any vector<string> or vector<vector<foo>> or whatever without changing your code.
It looks like there's a lot of good stuff here, and the article is decently organized, but the actual writing leaves me balanced between "Did I miss something?" like the above, and enough confusion that I'm actually confident the author screwed up. For example:
Great! Awesome! Of course, this arguably should've been there to begin with, and the 'auto' in front of these variables is still annoying, coming from dynamically-typed languages. But hey, maybe I can write this:
But the only way to double your money is if you manage to convince other people that this is worthwhile.
Currently, bitcoins are worthless except as much as you can convince other people to buy them. You can't do much with them except to sell it back. It looks like people are trying to force a bubble to form
Banks and real state agents told everyone that they should buy an expensive house because they could make money by flipping it. That's what's happening now with bitcoin. That's what your comment suggested. It seems only useful for flipping.
(Ok, also useful for the old miners to make money from the gullible. See slashvertisements/spam that don't even try to convince you to flip, just that it's a thing/wave of the future and you should buy some)
Which is why you're seeing all the bitcoin stories spamming news sites lately.
Err, I guess I should put that in the form of a question...
Amir, what do you know about all these stories appearing on news sites lately? Are they a result of early adopters trying to monetize on their investment and realizing that the only way they can is if they get enough buy-in from popular opinion? Would you consider starting a new bitcoin database now that the code is stable and letting new mining start from scratch now that it's relatively well known and the code is stable? Or would that hurt your bottom line too?
Ooops, I guess it's just one question per post. Sorry, I guess this one won't get picked...
I've been against this wall before. There are a few things to consider:
- In a university environment the "compute cluster" is not going to be in a data center far away, but rather in "lab" (read office) with 16 8-core machines, so the machines might actually be used locally either with a monitor for each grad student or a KVM switch for the single student/admin. For newbie admins it's easier to flip the KVM switch and click their way through the admin guis.
- In a mixed Win/Linux environment, you're right, all you need is a XServer on the windows side, but the only freely available ones are (as of a year ago or so):
- An old version of MingW that hangs on the current Ubuntu and Debian desktops.
- Cygwin/X, which is a pain to set up.
- You can also set up VNC, but the split VNC/unix passwords, painful setup to start x sessions upon a vnc conection, and IIRC having to give everyone a VNC number was a PITA. Not to mention performance differences. Then again, given the requirement, they're probably thinking of something like this. Bring up the X server with a default session and people can connect remotely, or something
- Not all newbie admins know how to install the desktop environment (gedit, apps, etc) without also installing the X server. Even for those who do, they might just disable starting gdm on boot, so that X is still available if you need it with a simple startx. It won't take up much resources when it's down, and 1GB of disk space isn't much nowadays
Personally I access servers from either Linux or Cygwin, via ssh and X forwarding, but it's kind of hard to get it into windows people's heads that you use a server remotely without opening a "session" with desktop and start menu remotely. Also, even if the desktop environment isn't installed I usually install gedit for quick edits (I'm an emacs guy, but gedit is easier for the rest of the team, and for small one-line edits easier even for me).
Though a pet peeve of mine is that there isn't a quick util to bring up the machine's application menu from the command line. Basically, pop up Gnome's or KDE's app/start menu. Why do I have to wade through hundreds of .desktop files to figure out how to run the SAPGui app in my desktop remotely from my laptop? The data is there in a standard format, there's code for it, just not available from the command line.
Also keep in mind these aren't admins accessing the servers. For example some might want to bring up R's graphical UI and do some work on it. Some of the programs/plugins might make use of the resources on the other machines, but some are just normal desktop programs. If their workstations are windows, they might end up connecting remotely and bringing up an IDE for developing their calculation/analysis routines anyway, serving dual purpose as compute cluster and simple workstations.
The start menu is a good way to see what is available and isn't in each remote machine. Whether the rest of the "session" framework is useful is another story.
I agree with both of your points, but I think you're missing the whole point of the article.
Let me give you an example. A few years ago I joined a team where most people stayed around for lunch (some lived close enough to go have lunch at home, or their spouses worked close enough to go eat with them, etc). So a lot of the time we'd have 5-10 people from a couple projects eating lunch together, but with one unbreakable rule: no talking about work. People would actually stop you if you brought up anything work related.
Now I'm an introvert, and most of the time I'd sit there and listen to them talk, but I did talk sometimes. The end result was that we stopped being "just those people I work with" and the whole "I'm here to work not to make friends" attitude lessened. I don't know if it helped improve our productivity, but the working environment was clearly improved.
We all were annoyed at our boss when meetings ran late, when we were asked to go to a stupid company get-togethers, but it was an us-against-them thing rather than a me-against-the-company thing. I don't know if that makes sense to you. For example, sometimes we'd skip the company's thing and go to one our houses and do something by ourselves.
Forced lunch-meetings are horrible, but having the company provide a (discounted) cafeteria, encouraging teams to eat together, etc. does help with interpersonal relationships. And if you intend to work with the same people for many years that's very important.
Well, at least they did place it on Tokyo. And the rest are actual nuclear plants but they missed a few.
An accurate map is on the last page of this report. 16 nuclear plants total, 12 of them active and unaffected. That's 40 nuclear reactors working safely, 8 safe even after the quake, and 6 at Fukushma Daiichi giving them trouble.
Actually, they still do, but it's just the highlights and don't do much explanations:
Japans Atomic Industrial Forum has better presentations, aparently from TEPCO data:
World nuclear news has some explanations of the events, as does MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub
Those are the places I turn to when people start talking about normal media coverage. I just saw a CNN report that started out with clips of people saying that there was another explosion and that there was a fire on reactor 4. I went "shit" and checked. Turns out those were old clips from a few days ago when there were explosions and fires.
It looks to me like things are more or less under control. The cores should now be in cold shutdown putting out nominal heat. Barring another accident (explosion, earthquake, tsunami, pump propeller breaking up and tearing a hole through a pipe, etc.) they should have things sorted out in a week or two. Not to say it's not a mess. Food from fukushima might need to be thrown out for a week or two while cesium decays and there will be rolling blackouts until this stabilizes enough for workers to take a look at the other 3 nuclear plants and restart them. but still it won't be anywhere near the disaster the media makes it out to be.
As to the release of these pictures, while information is good and all, after this is all said and done TEPCO will still have to keep these power plants secure, and there are reactors just like these that will have to stay online until new ones are built. I understand Fukishima Daini and others use the same models. Handing high-res pictures of the facility to potential nuclear terrorists sounds like a bad idea, and the people who know what to censor are slightly busy at the moment.
I know that RTFA'ing is not well received around here, but in this case reading the second one would be a good thing.
First of all, the resolution only gives the different countries permission to defend civilians, not to depose Gaddafi.
Considering that the widespread and systematic attacks currently taking place in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya against the civilian population may amount to crimes against humanity... ...
Analysis: These first two highlighted sections emphasise that this is all about defending the civilian population in Libya from attacks by its own government. One of the conditions for action set out by Nato countries has been "a demonstrable need" to intervene.
1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;
Analysis: The overriding stated aim is to halt the fighting and to achieve a ceasefire. It does not explicitly call for the removal of Col Muammar Gaddafi though one can assume that this is what the countries promoting this resolution would like. Many of their leaders have said so quite explicitly.
Also, other countries are barred from putting in occupation forces and so on. Current attacks seem to be aimed at anti-air defenses so their forces can start enforcing a no-fly zone without having their planes shot down.
They'll probably target sites shelling other cities and so on.
Growing up is about "turning into something you're not". Otherwise you'd stay a child forever.
While the submitter does seem like a troll with his "unremarkable bits of plastic" thing, he does have a point that if everyone is giving them the same thing then (a) they are all trying to turn them into the same thing they are not (e.g. gun wielding/fire truck driving men) and (b) the children haven't had a chance to see if they even like anything else.
It's a risk thing too. You can give them the same thing as everyone else and they will thank you. Or you can give them a Rubik cube, a set of Lego, or something else and there's about even odds that they'll play with it for a day and forget about it, or they might start playing with it and you'll hear from their parents months later that they didn't drop it ever since.
These are children you're talking about. Give them a great big expensive toy and they'll end up playing with the box for hours instead.
I'm part of a team looking into moving our company to Linux in the long term. Some 3000+ workstations with windows XP, MS office, exchange, etc.
Currently we're looking at Ubuntu and servers in Debian. My assessment is:
- You need directory services. Fedora Directory services (389 server) is hard to install on Debian/Ubuntu and has a lot of trouble with their two way AD replication. Other people who have worked with OpenLDAP report severe corruption when synchronizing multiple masters across unreliable links. Both arer a pain to set up windows clients for.
- Both Ubuntu 9.10 and Macs can join Active Directory using Likewise Open. Ubuntu 10.04 included it in their main repository, adverrtised the integration and completely fucked it up. Most of the bugs are fixed in the PPA, but they haven't bothered to put the fixes in their supported repositories for the last 6 months, and the same bugs are in 10.10. Upgrading 9.10 -> 10.04 with break your configuration, unless you know enough to add the PPAs beforehand or a private repo. With the PPAs it works well, but single-sign-on doesn't work (worked in 9.10) and it has problems when working from home.
- Some things aren't implemented. Windows can authenticate with Radius (WPA Enterprise, VPN, etc) with the machine's AD password. Ubuntu + Likewise doesn't have that capability, though it's relatively easy to script yourself. You have to log in and enter a password for the wireless, (hard if you need the wireless to log in) or set your password to be used for anyone who uses the computer (bad if you ever change your password)
- Ubuntu has a bunch of embarrassing bugs that prevent me from just giving it to one of my users. The original OOo in 10.04 couldn't even join cells selected with the mouse. It's sad when MS's products have more quality than yours.
Maybe we'll start over looking at Fedora, I'd like to hear about people's experiences with their quality assurance.
All that aside, the other big points to watch:
- Email is a problem. Web based solutions preclude you from having PSTs locally for personal history/backups (which is very common at my company). If you don't switch to a web based solution then Evolution is a mess with its exchange integration. The old connector only connects through OWA, and loses synchronization (says there are unread emails but won't show you them or download them, silently stops updating, etc) and crashes every once in a while. The MAPI connector has some weird issues with character encoding. You can use Thunderbird but you lose all the Gnome integration. And either you switch windows users to thunderbird too or support two different programs. You could install a Linux based email and calendaring server too, that can sync email, appointments and everything else with linux windows, macs and phones , but it's nontrivial. Just choosing the right combination of solutions is a big project.
- Access and excel macros have to be rebuilt. A lot of people at our company use them. Every department seems to have a VBA expert building mini-applications and data analysis spreadsheets connected to our data warehouse that then become business-critical. This is not a problem until you want to switch.
- MS Project. If your people use it and need it, there is just no good replacement. Serena Openproj is the closest, but it hasn't been updated in two years and has a bunch of bugs. Plus it's missing things like multi-project and a bunch of features our users need.
- Custom apps: Our intranet won't show well under Firefox and we have a bunch of custom apps (VB and other languages). The former have to be redone anyway to update for a new IE, but the latter are a lot of work in our case.
A migration project is a big undertaking that probably won't be completely justified by cost. On the other hand I don't agree with just laying on your laurels and mindlessly updating to the latest MS offering. Do look into switching every once in a while. If things are good enough for you then switch, even if it takes a lot of work. You
More like 2s
I mean, that's just unnatural.
PZ Myers threw a red herring there. What Kurzweil says is pretty reasonable, he used the total amount of information in the genome to get an upper limit estimate of the amount of library code needed to simulate a brain. I say "library" to differentiate from data, since a lot of our brain information comes from our experiences, i.e. library == instincts.
Actually he's right. The statement is pure bullshit.
Or maybe that's too much. Kurzweil just doesn't understand how Kolmorogrov complexity works.
Let's say the brain as a machine is the output of a process. How complicated is that process? The Kolmorogrov complexity of a string (or whatever) is the minimum size of the data that you have to give to a machine in order to produce the string. E.g. a string of 100 0s is simpler than a string of alternating 0s and 1s and simpler than encoding the first 100 digits of pi. Write code for each of those and you'll see the measure works (and it's actually a lower limit, but it's the closest concept...)
But the crucial point is that the size of this string depends on the kind of machine. The size of the input (program) for a Turing machine is very different than that for an actual computer.
So, yes. 800MB of code. But that's not the library code. The library that interprets that program is the egg that grows those 800MB of data into a human, together with all the laws of physics and chemistry involved in the process.
Take all the chromosomes encoding a whole human genome and drop it into a test tube of distilled water. Does it grow a brain? What if you put it into a chicken egg. What grows out? Putting those 800 MB into a computer doesn't do anything if you don't provide the equivalent of the egg. The bootstrap structure and the underlying architecture are as important as the code in understanding the whole system.
Myers is right. In order to understand the human brain directly from the genes you have to understand all chemistry that interacts with it, all the self replicating machinery provided by the mother and simulate that at a molecular level.
So the upper bound is NOT 800 MB. It's 800 MB plus the size of a codebase good enough to simulate every interaction at an atomic level plus a full 3D scan at an atomic level of the egg provided by the mother. Or simplified models of all those things, provided by the chemists and biologists out there, as Myers points out. (Plus data equivalent to a few years of training like we do with children)
Not saying that simulating the brain is necessarilly that hard, it's just that Kurzweil's pseudo-scientific measurement is just bullshit.
She pushes the mouse as she clicks?
I once worked in a somewhat similar arrangement. We had L-shaped desks in a cross arrangement. Each person sat in one of the inside corners of the cross.
Pros:
- It was easy to talk to each other.
Cons:
- It was harder to look at the person across from you over the monitors
- If you ever wanted to show each other your code, one of you had to walk around the desk or roll around it in your chair.
That last one was the dealbreaker. It might be easier on a round table (but then each would have very little room for their stuff), but you'd have the same problem to talk to someone who is not right next to you: you'd still have to walk around your neighbors.
I'm currently working in another department with the same desks, but arranged as the outside of the square. Takes up about the same space but it is much easier to roll over to someone's desk and work with them. You can take your laptop if you want (and wifi permitting).
And let's face it, it's just as easy to turn around to talk to someone behind you as to someone next to you. And if they are wearing headphones they won't hear you either way. Add rolling chairs and anything but carpet and it's just as easy to take something to show them too. Even without the corner desks, you can set them up in two rows back to back and it still works.
You could add a small central table for quick meetings, but I prefer the back to back arrangement any day.
(And people tend not to slack off as much because someone might be looking over their shoulder :) )
Also, fuck you. I'll work wherever the hell I feel like, thank you very much.
Pity I don't have mod points. I'd mod you up just for that.
Nope. One of his moves a few years ago was to set up the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) which absorbed a bunch of parties that supported him at one time and he's campaigned for people to see this as the only socialist party in existence. Of course he controls it and it would only propose him for president. Anyone leading another party is politically a nobody
There are other socialist politicians. Real socialists, even some that have been fighting for change for decades and are appalled at what Chavez is doing now. One of them said lately that Chavez is not a socialist but a communist, for example. There are, of course, people who were with Chavez but have fallen out of favor and might want to set themselves up as new socialists leaders, but without the PSUV's backing they are not getting anywhere.
So, no.
A lot of people love their dear leader and his personality more than the ideology. And a lot of people like socialism, but believe socialism is whatever Chavez says, or that letting the opposition get any foothold will make them lose "all they've fought for". Others think Chavez simply can do no wrong, whatever he does. All of them still insist on calling a 10 year old entrenched government "the revolution" and anyone who doesn't like whatever Chavez says is "against the process" (and some of them say it with a "they deserve death" attitude)
Bringing up that they could back another better socialist is a good way to make them face the fact that they love him more than the process or the ideology.
As to the Putin scenario, he's not going to do that. Why would he back a constitutional reform whose only point was to allow him to run again in the next presidential elections?
He also managed to get the last opposition guy to run against him to flee the country, so there's no credible person to run against him from the opposition anyway. But that's a story for another post.
Sorry, I didn't mean a TV Show like a sitcom or whatever. La Hojilla was a news/opinion show with a guy discussing the day's events, and so on.
It never pretended to be fiction, or fiction pretending to be reality, or anything like that.
Actually, the venezuelan government has been trying to close Globovision for a while now, and one of the biggest problems is that they have NEVER advocated any kind of violence against the government, be it the president or anyone else. It would cost too much international support for them to close another oposition TV station without a good reason.
The other two big independent TV stations have been scared off enough that they don't dare play anything political. The only other one is VTV, the government's channel (and I don't mean Bush' Fox, I mean wholly owned by the government). They do play show like "La Hojilla" (The razor blade) that openly advocated a few times killing oposition as a legitimate means of defending "the revolution".
Not to mention Chavez himself sometimes applauding relatively violent acts in his defense.
Now, I won't say that Globovision is fair and balanced, but as far as I can tell they never outright lied about anything. I understand Fox news to be more radical and distorting than Globovision and yet I don't see the Fox owners being hounded for years and finally arrested like Zuloaga.
FWIW, it seems Zuloaga was released after appearing in court, with a prohibition against leaving the country. We'll see whether he'll fold and close Globovision or be thrown in jail on trumped up charges.
Time to claw things back and give Chavez a chance to reform the country, like a majority of the population say they want.
Disclaimer on my stance on the government: Chavez has been in power for 10 years. He's changed the constitution multiple times, tried out different reforms all while oil was at an all time high and money was flowing into the country like crazy. He's had a BIG chance to reform the country and It's all been a failure. Lately all he's doing helps the government more than the people.
Hell, we even have rolling blackouts now, when we used to export electricity. This is a situation that was predicted over a year ago, but 10 years of ignoring the power infrastructure have left its mark, and yet he blames it all on el niño and the previous governments.
If you want change, don't prop up the same old government. If you're a socialist, elect a different socialist president. If you're a capitalist, same thing. There's no reason to maintain Chavez in power for another 50 years.
The Import question was a long conversation in IRC actually. The conclusion is that it doesn't really add anything to split open and import, while save/export does.
Yes it is different from other programs, but the only one I can think of OOo, and the other formats (word, etc) do save enough info to keep your work.
Currently when you open a PNG, the export item becomes "Overwrite foo.png" so it's very obvious in the menu. After you export the menu gets overwrite foo.png, export to bar.png export to... plus the usual save and save to. The overwrite item goes away when you save to a XCF.
Yes very nonstandard, that's one of the things I dislike.
My biggest annoyance with all this is that when you type in foo.png in the save dialog it'll show a very unfriendly "You can use this dialog to save to the GIMP XCF format. Use File ->export to export to other file formats". The obvious thing to do would be to add an export button to that dialog or a "take me to the export dialog" so the user doesn't have to waste time navigating to the right directory again. But, in the words of the UI guy "we cannot allow the user to think of the save dialog as an unofficial way to export".
And yes, they now have a "UI expert" designing things. So it's not random developers coming up with weird things. Some of his ideas are good, but not down to the details IMHO. And he has a real NIH syndrome problem. Look at the export dialog, the adjustment layers and the non-MDI single window UI for examples.
Int his case I think the feature does make sense, but it does need some changes, liek the ones you suggest. The double save-path export offers does seem very useful for something like GImp.
I've been running SVN versions for a while now, and I was skeptical of the change too, but when I found out the reason why it makes perfect sense.
Let's say you're editing an image to put up in a web page. You have a .xcf with all the layers and data and a jpg you are putting up. In the old version you could save the jpg and then forget to update the xcf, so you'd lose data unknowingly (Say, you closed the Gimp and it didn't tell you you had a modified image).
The current version keeps track of whether a file has been saved and whether it has been exported. If you want to update the xcf you hit ctrl-s. If you want to reexport the jpg you hit ctrl-e. If you close Gimp it'll tell you you have unsaved changes even if you have exported the picture. Hitting export as a second time will place you in the directory you were exporting to (not necessarily the one you saved to). It's nice for repeated saving and testing (to web, blender, whatever) while keeping track of update to you XCF for you.
Yes, it is nonstandard but the Gimp is one of the few programs whose internal format is not what is published or used as part of a workflow, but still needs to keep up to date with your work.
Also note that the export dialog does do "Intelligent Save". You type in the file name you want and it'll guess the file type.
Either way don't worry about it too much. Current estimate is to release 2.8 in December 2010, but they'll probably cut some features before then.
Which can then be merged into a 3d copy?
(Avatar with Blue/Red glasses!, oh wait, you lose half the Navi)
The massive rewrite is not in progress yet.
Currently the projects being worked on git are:
-Single window interface (Their own private kind of MDI, not anything standard)
-Integrating the brush dynamic GSoC project
-Adding a test suite
-Including code to work on a XMP model (?)
-Real dynamic hardness support for both generated and pixmap brushes
-Some work on file format. It seems new features in 2.8 might require 2.8 to read, but that code isn't there yet
They also added simple layer groups so far, plus the usual bugfixes and improvements. I can't say I understand all the git comments though.
GEGL integration is not actually happening yet, and it'll take a year or two at least. Internal representatiuon when rendering will be floating point RGB but I remember hearing the buffers will be able to store (or Gimp will be able to read) any pixel format understood by babl.
Personally I don't much care for GEGL. It's Pulseaudio for graphics, and way too alpha to make it an integral part of Gimp.
Anyway don't hold your breath for more than 8-bits on Gimp. It'll be at least 2012 before it can be used for anything more than what you can do now.
Isn't there an Emacs XKCD search script?