Let's do a quick exercise in Microsoftian design: The week has 168 hours.
Shall we assume the typical adult male has 4x 15-minute sexual intercourses per week ? It's probably pushing a bit, but fine, let's exaggerate. That'll be 1 hour per week.
Shall we assume the typical adult male urinates 8 times per day (once every 2 hours while awake), and each event lasts 1 minute ? That'll be 8 minutes per day, 56 minutes per week. Let's round things up and call it 1 hour. We're exaggerating anyway.
166/168 = 0.9880. On our typical adult male, the penis is idle and unused 98.8% of the time. If the human body was designed by the Windows 8 design team, we would be dickless.
Brazil provides huge tax breaks for products *assembled* in the country with local workforce, even if all the components are manufactred elsewhere. So the big manufacturers just import the component kits from China and assemble them here. This is true for Sony notebooks, the Xbox360 (recently started to be assembled here, and will start selling cheaper than the Wii for that alone), and the same goes for electronics such as phones, monitors, TVs, etc. Foxconn isn't starting up a facility out of nothing, the Sony vaio line is already assembled by them in Brazil.
Recently the legislation was changed to include tablets in the tax break law, and local assembly of ipads here will start soon. That is not a rumor and has been on the brazilian news for months, with official word from both the government and Foxconn. How much of the global market will be "served" from the brazilian output is the actual question. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire iPad 2 assembly transitioned to Brazil while the chinese sweatshops move to the iPad 3. With local economic treaties, it will be no surprise if the brazilian output of tablets starts serving the entire South America market right away.
Regarding the Argentinian coward's opinion on the quality of brazilian goods, there is no such perception of bad quality in the internal market, save for the automotive sector -- where the national industry is heavily protected and gets away with exorbitant profit margins on cars with considerably less features than cars from european and asian competitors.
This being FoxNews, it's debatable whether there is actually any Dan Olson who works on the FBI. If there is, it's hard to know what he really told FoxNews. Assuming the report is accurate, is interesting that "a bunch of responses" is "flooding the FBI's bandwidth".
I'm willing to bet that some retarded german politician will see a relation between "Duke Nukem Forever" and nuclear power and issue a ban on it before it's even released.
Ah, of course it would be unamerican to develop anything that had some practical use or used resources sparingly. Hooray for unapplicable tire-burning screech-parking robots!
After "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter", I'm pretty sure Quirk Books must already be working on a tale that involves Mr. Bookman (from Seinfeld, season 3) travelling back in time, terminator-style, to charge late fees on George Washington. That modifies the course of history. Last scene on the book, Bookman is back to the 20th century and the country formerly known as USA is now part of Canada. In the place of the Statue of Liberty, a huge green statue of Celine Dion greets the New Yorkers.
Mostly agreed. Still, it is possible to write a SIP endpoint based on a couple of well delimited RFCs (SIP, authentication, RTP), while even decoding the hierarchy of an H.323 message is a mess.
As for the culture of writing in a language developers can't read, and charging for access to standards: if it depended on the ITU the Internet would not exist and sending bits across continents would be considered an expensive technological miracle, much like international phone calls 30 years ago.
a) writing unreadable standards (such as G.711, the a-law, mu-law telephony codec)
b) retarded protocols (H.323, where messages are formatted according to an hierarchy defined in 3+ different standards, and call initiation sequences have so many alternatives that it is common to have two certified H.323 endpoints refuse to talk to each other. Implementing H.323 involves thousands of lines of code. While SIP (a non-ITU protocol) uses text headers similar to email and http, can be understood from a single RFC and can be correctly implemented in a few hundred lines.)
c) favoring patented cash troll codecs such as G.729 instead of similar patent-free ones. (Meanwhile, a lot of international phone traffic is performed in roughly-uncompressed G.711, using 10x the bandwidth because the licensing fees of G.729 are outrageous)
That's ITU for you, and these people should be forbidden from publishing any standard whatsoever.
World of Padman is an open source FPS, and has better looks, graphics and music than Nexuiz. Oh, and has a name that doesn't sound like cough medicine. http://www.worldofpadman.com/
This bat is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he'd be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-BAT!!
OpenOffice doesn't need gobs of RAM and CPU to run. It is just slow on ANY computer. I'm an admin of a computer lab with hardware ranging from 1 GHz P3 with 512 MB to Athlon64 X2 3800+ with 4 GB RAM. OpenOffice is still slow with 4 GB of RAM, and the OO user experience is the same on the P3 and on the A64 X2.
If only Microsoft released Word 6 (hell, even Word 2) and the Windows 3.1 True Type fonts in a freeware package guaranteed to run under a stock version of Wine, OO would die within a month.
Sun will propose an encryption scheme, it will be rejected, and Sun will release an open source alpha version of it, written in slow and unusable form, then make a press release about how their rejected product will replace something that isn't an encryption scheme at all *cough* Fortress *cough*
The major issue with Eiffel was the lack of APIs (or bindings) for useful stuff when the language appeared. The bindings came too late. My point in comparing Fortress to Eiffel was pointing out that Fortress may be closer to Eiffel than to Fortran, and the press release from Sun mentions Fortran alone.
Fortress may be wonderful for the scientific part, but I do hope Sun finds a way to keep the GUI/OS-interaction code in some other language (Java is reasonable), making it possible to build applications from Fortress and non-Fortress parts. Treating mouse and other UI events with that math notation won't be fun, even for the most devout Mathematician.
I didn't see in the specs (I skimmed through it quickly, could be my fault) how Fortress is meant to parallelize computations more efficiently. From all I saw, I assume each method runs atomically in a single thread and parallelization of methods is be based on the contracts.
I am a Perl programmer, and I don't think Perl is that unreadable. In fact, I agree with most of its design. I am happy that now we can point the finger at something else when someone complains about "weird syntax" and "too many operators".
I've seen this a couple of days before and bothered to skim through the specifications carefully hidden in the depths of Sun's site. I am not pleased with what I saw. Summarizing:
It seems that the only Fortran-esque side of Fortress is that it is aimed at scientific computing and number-crunching. Other than that, the programming paradigm of Fortress is based on object orientation and programming-by-contract. If Java smelled like Smalltalk, Fortress smells like Eiffel.
Fortress has focus on three basic things:
1) programming by contract (pre-conditions and post-conditions of a method)
2) Numerical and dimensional correctness
3) Keeping the programming language as close to mathematical notation as possible.
1) means that people will write more to achieve the same thing with some guarantee of correctness. Much like Java's enforcement of exception handling, an be easily misused.
2) means that Sun bothered to include kelvin, Pascal, meter, second, Newton and every Physical unit you can think of as language keywords, that all parameters should specify what unit they're in, and that the language will do some effort to prevent errors arising from adding oranges and bananas, or precision errors from summing milligrams to some hundreds of kilograms.
3) means that Fortress will make Perl look readable. Good part of the language specification deals on how the editor should render the source code onscreen. The logical AND operator is the upward-pointing wedge symbol of math. The logical OR operator is the downward-poiting wedge symbol. The Integer type is that special-font Z, and a real is that special-font R. The specification deals on how to represent these in an ASCII file, using a meta-language similar to TeX (but incompatible with).
Programming Fortress on anything other than Sun's own IDE will most likely be unfeasible. Think of every math operator you've seen. If you have experience with TeX/LaTeX, think of those 4 pages from symbols.dvi with all symbols you could use. Those are the Fortress operators. Sun has finally come with something mor unreadable and with more operators than Perl. And the operators aren't even ASCII, they're untypeable. The bitwise AND and OR operators are a weird thing I had never seen before (after 5 years of engineering, and 5 years as graduate student in CompSci).
That said, Fortress may even succeed as a niche programming language. But I still have two concerns left:
How will non-scientific code look on it ? Surely Fortress programs will want to open windows, and dialog boxes, access files and the network. The math-oriented syntax has all it takes to make UI programming uglier than C+Xlib.
Sun claims that Fortress is aimed at High Performance Computing. Sun released an alpha interpreter of Fortress, which is written in Java. What kind of sick language designer writes an interpreter in Java to demonstrate something related to High Performance computing ?
They are experimenting with the injection of nanofibers that react with the heart tissue to make it more resilient after infarction (heart attack). In particular, they show that a particular kind of nanofiber leads to the desired results, while the other similar kind of nanofiber doesn't. It is a perfectly valid research work that identifies a factor that could be used in humans both for prevention and treatment of heart attacks, but it's not the first research like this and if the ZD guy who posted it thinks it's the closest we've got to Fantastic Voyage, he's got a huge stack of medical books and papers to read.
Fantastic Voyage is originally a book by Asimov, who already wrote a sequel (Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain). The link between TFA and Asimov's novel is faint, if not null. People with interest in Medical research shouldn't be getting their feeds from ZD Net. And while we're at it, the past participle of show is shown.
Call it Grand SimLawsuit Kong: The Phantom Menace, make sure to leave Rockstar, Maxis, Nintendo and Lucasarts out of the loop, and wait for the free publicity.
Slashdot Mirror
To properly prove this design to be unsinkable, they should hire Francesco Schettino to captain it.
If giving a cheap flash drive full of crap is your idea of a nice Christmas gift, then the best gift you can give to your family and friends is dying.
Let's do a quick exercise in Microsoftian design: The week has 168 hours.
Shall we assume the typical adult male has 4x 15-minute sexual intercourses per week ? It's probably pushing a bit, but fine, let's exaggerate. That'll be 1 hour per week.
Shall we assume the typical adult male urinates 8 times per day (once every 2 hours while awake), and each event lasts 1 minute ? That'll be 8 minutes per day, 56 minutes per week. Let's round things up and call it 1 hour. We're exaggerating anyway.
166/168 = 0.9880. On our typical adult male, the penis is idle and unused 98.8% of the time. If the human body was designed by the Windows 8 design team, we would be dickless.
Brazil provides huge tax breaks for products *assembled* in the country with local workforce, even if all the components are manufactred elsewhere. So the big manufacturers just import the component kits from China and assemble them here. This is true for Sony notebooks, the Xbox360 (recently started to be assembled here, and will start selling cheaper than the Wii for that alone), and the same goes for electronics such as phones, monitors, TVs, etc. Foxconn isn't starting up a facility out of nothing, the Sony vaio line is already assembled by them in Brazil.
Recently the legislation was changed to include tablets in the tax break law, and local assembly of ipads here will start soon. That is not a rumor and has been on the brazilian news for months, with official word from both the government and Foxconn. How much of the global market will be "served" from the brazilian output is the actual question. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire iPad 2 assembly transitioned to Brazil while the chinese sweatshops move to the iPad 3. With local economic treaties, it will be no surprise if the brazilian output of tablets starts serving the entire South America market right away.
Regarding the Argentinian coward's opinion on the quality of brazilian goods, there is no such perception of bad quality in the internal market, save for the automotive sector -- where the national industry is heavily protected and gets away with exorbitant profit margins on cars with considerably less features than cars from european and asian competitors.
This being FoxNews, it's debatable whether there is actually any Dan Olson who works on the FBI. If there is, it's hard to know what he really told FoxNews. Assuming the report is accurate, is interesting that "a bunch of responses" is "flooding the FBI's bandwidth".
I'm willing to bet that some retarded german politician will see a relation between "Duke Nukem Forever" and nuclear power and issue a ban on it before it's even released.
Ah, of course it would be unamerican to develop anything that had some practical use or used resources sparingly. Hooray for unapplicable tire-burning screech-parking robots!
1. The proper reference is the Blues Brothers movie, not James Bond.
2. Parking like this is stupid and wears down the tires unevenly and too fast.
3. Uneven pavement, potholes, wet pavement, oil puddle: pick your disaster.
Well, the city previously known as New York. In the alternate reality it could be Stinky River, Lotsofbridgestown, or the french equivalents of these.
After "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter", I'm pretty sure Quirk Books must already be working on a tale that involves Mr. Bookman (from Seinfeld, season 3) travelling back in time, terminator-style, to charge late fees on George Washington. That modifies the course of history. Last scene on the book, Bookman is back to the 20th century and the country formerly known as USA is now part of Canada. In the place of the Statue of Liberty, a huge green statue of Celine Dion greets the New Yorkers.
Mostly agreed. Still, it is possible to write a SIP endpoint based on a couple of well delimited RFCs (SIP, authentication, RTP), while even decoding the hierarchy of an H.323 message is a mess.
As for the culture of writing in a language developers can't read, and charging for access to standards: if it depended on the ITU the Internet would not exist and sending bits across continents would be considered an expensive technological miracle, much like international phone calls 30 years ago.
Hell, no! ITU has a known history of
a) writing unreadable standards (such as G.711, the a-law, mu-law telephony codec)
b) retarded protocols (H.323, where messages are formatted according to an hierarchy defined in 3+ different standards, and call initiation sequences have so many alternatives that it is common to have two certified H.323 endpoints refuse to talk to each other. Implementing H.323 involves thousands of lines of code. While SIP (a non-ITU protocol) uses text headers similar to email and http, can be understood from a single RFC and can be correctly implemented in a few hundred lines.)
c) favoring patented cash troll codecs such as G.729 instead of similar patent-free ones. (Meanwhile, a lot of international phone traffic is performed in roughly-uncompressed G.711, using 10x the bandwidth because the licensing fees of G.729 are outrageous)
That's ITU for you, and these people should be forbidden from publishing any standard whatsoever.
World of Padman is an open source FPS, and has better looks, graphics and music than Nexuiz. Oh, and has a name that doesn't sound like cough medicine. http://www.worldofpadman.com/
This bat is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he'd be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-BAT!!
OpenOffice doesn't need gobs of RAM and CPU to run. It is just slow on ANY computer. I'm an admin of a computer lab with hardware ranging from 1 GHz P3 with 512 MB to Athlon64 X2 3800+ with 4 GB RAM. OpenOffice is still slow with 4 GB of RAM, and the OO user experience is the same on the P3 and on the A64 X2.
If only Microsoft released Word 6 (hell, even Word 2) and the Windows 3.1 True Type fonts in a freeware package guaranteed to run under a stock version of Wine, OO would die within a month.
I can barely wait until someone performs the best criminal prank ever:
1. Wear a Snake mask
2. Rob the Kwik-E-Mart
3. Profit!!!!!
Sun will propose an encryption scheme, it will be rejected, and Sun will release an open source alpha version of it, written in slow and unusable form, then make a press release about how their rejected product will replace something that isn't an encryption scheme at all *cough* Fortress *cough*
The major issue with Eiffel was the lack of APIs (or bindings) for useful stuff when the language appeared. The bindings came too late. My point in comparing Fortress to Eiffel was pointing out that Fortress may be closer to Eiffel than to Fortran, and the press release from Sun mentions Fortran alone.
Fortress may be wonderful for the scientific part, but I do hope Sun finds a way to keep the GUI/OS-interaction code in some other language (Java is reasonable), making it possible to build applications from Fortress and non-Fortress parts. Treating mouse and other UI events with that math notation won't be fun, even for the most devout Mathematician.
I didn't see in the specs (I skimmed through it quickly, could be my fault) how Fortress is meant to parallelize computations more efficiently. From all I saw, I assume each method runs atomically in a single thread and parallelization of methods is be based on the contracts.
I am a Perl programmer, and I don't think Perl is that unreadable. In fact, I agree with most of its design. I am happy that now we can point the finger at something else when someone complains about "weird syntax" and "too many operators".
I've seen this a couple of days before and bothered to skim through the specifications carefully hidden in the depths of Sun's site. I am not pleased with what I saw. Summarizing:
It seems that the only Fortran-esque side of Fortress is that it is aimed at scientific computing and number-crunching. Other than that, the programming paradigm of Fortress is based on object orientation and programming-by-contract. If Java smelled like Smalltalk, Fortress smells like Eiffel.
Fortress has focus on three basic things:
1) programming by contract (pre-conditions and post-conditions of a method)
2) Numerical and dimensional correctness
3) Keeping the programming language as close to mathematical notation as possible.
1) means that people will write more to achieve the same thing with some guarantee of correctness. Much like Java's enforcement of exception handling, an be easily misused.
2) means that Sun bothered to include kelvin, Pascal, meter, second, Newton and every Physical unit you can think of as language keywords, that all parameters should specify what unit they're in, and that the language will do some effort to prevent errors arising from adding oranges and bananas, or precision errors from summing milligrams to some hundreds of kilograms.
3) means that Fortress will make Perl look readable. Good part of the language specification deals on how the editor should render the source code onscreen. The logical AND operator is the upward-pointing wedge symbol of math. The logical OR operator is the downward-poiting wedge symbol. The Integer type is that special-font Z, and a real is that special-font R. The specification deals on how to represent these in an ASCII file, using a meta-language similar to TeX (but incompatible with).
Programming Fortress on anything other than Sun's own IDE will most likely be unfeasible. Think of every math operator you've seen. If you have experience with TeX/LaTeX, think of those 4 pages from symbols.dvi with all symbols you could use. Those are the Fortress operators. Sun has finally come with something mor unreadable and with more operators than Perl. And the operators aren't even ASCII, they're untypeable. The bitwise AND and OR operators are a weird thing I had never seen before (after 5 years of engineering, and 5 years as graduate student in CompSci).
That said, Fortress may even succeed as a niche programming language. But I still have two concerns left:
How will non-scientific code look on it ? Surely Fortress programs will want to open windows, and dialog boxes, access files and the network. The math-oriented syntax has all it takes to make UI programming uglier than C+Xlib.
Sun claims that Fortress is aimed at High Performance Computing. Sun released an alpha interpreter of Fortress, which is written in Java. What kind of sick language designer writes an interpreter in Java to demonstrate something related to High Performance computing ?
MOD parent up.
They are experimenting with the injection of nanofibers that react with the heart tissue to make it more resilient after infarction (heart attack). In particular, they show that a particular kind of nanofiber leads to the desired results, while the other similar kind of nanofiber doesn't. It is a perfectly valid research work that identifies a factor that could be used in humans both for prevention and treatment of heart attacks, but it's not the first research like this and if the ZD guy who posted it thinks it's the closest we've got to Fantastic Voyage, he's got a huge stack of medical books and papers to read.
Fantastic Voyage is originally a book by Asimov, who already wrote a sequel (Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain). The link between TFA and Asimov's novel is faint, if not null. People with interest in Medical research shouldn't be getting their feeds from ZD Net. And while we're at it, the past participle of show is shown.
Call it Grand SimLawsuit Kong: The Phantom Menace, make sure to leave Rockstar, Maxis, Nintendo and Lucasarts out of the loop, and wait for the free publicity.
This is nature's way of telling the guy that anyone who plays a videogame for 20 hours straight DOES NOT HAVE A LIFE.