But as far as MS breaking the Wintel relationship to pursue ARM-based netbooks, I don't see it happening unless something drastic happens.
The problem for Microsoft is they've already been there and done that. NT 4 had versions for non-Intel architectures but nobody was interested. Worse, if an ARM XP or Vista did appear nothing would run natively on it except.NET apps. Microsoft would probably have to implement x86 emulation because vendors wouldn't bother to target the device.
More likely is that Microsoft would be pushing some version of Windows CE. This would be a good fit except it would mean that anyone expecting a full desktop experience is completely screwed. All the apps would be the cut down sort seen in PDAs and phones. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, but then again maybe it would.
Linux is in much better shape to deal with multiple architectures. Most of the source is already portable. It wouldn't escape entirely unscathed since some binary (and source) content like Flash player, Sun Java, WINE and some emulators mightn't work, but (memory / CPU speed permitting0 you could almost have a full Linux desktop experience no matter what the architecture was.
I work for a company which has development groups in lots of countries including India. For reasons that might have sounded great in theory, they farmed off a lot of maintenance development to India - hey it's 1/3rd the price!
As a principal / architect I would often be tasked with overseeing their work, or trying to direct their solutions. That experience was incredibly frustrating for multiple reasons:
a) Cultural differences. Indian developers were the most passive bunch I have ever worked with. They never took the initiative on anything, never offered alternative or better ways to do something, never took time to understand *why* they were asked to do something. Basically if a requirement or design said X they would implement X even if it was ambiguous or nonsensical from a business or coding point of view. Other groups in other countries would push back and the process would improve. This meant the devs had to be closely supervised and all changes reviewed and approved. Tasks took 2-3 times as long to complete which negated any cost savings and also pushed out roll-out times. b) Language issues. Email was fine. Phone communications were a complete nightmare. Many Indians simply couldn't be understood on the phone. Verbal communication is a critical skill for any programmer. I recognize English is not their first language but its still a requirement and many other countries manage it just fine. c) Revolving door development. Turnover in India was crippling and every fix or update was handled by different people. This made it impossible to imbue business knowledge, or good coding standards or common practice. Development took longer and the code rapidly becomes a mess of hacks and unsafe techniques.
I'm not saying work can't be farmed out but there has to be a core team of long-term developers. Developers who have business knowledge, developers who will speak out when some requirement is bullshit, developers who have some vested interest in the quality of their code. If you treat developers as an interchangeable commodity you will get back complete shit for your efforts and quality will go down the tubes.
There is no question that Java is a far more bankable skill than C/C++ these days. But at the same time if you don't learn C/C++ you could easily lose site of the low level stuff - OS intricacies, defensive programming etc. Java hides that stuff. And sometimes its just useful to know what's going on underneath.
However Java by itself is generally useless. Most Java apps these days make use of a plethora of tools, specifications and libraries - Ant, Maven, Java Server Pages, JDBC, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Tiles, iBatis, log4j etc. etc. Just knowing the language is nice and all but it probably won't mean you're ready for real world development. C++ is even worse since every OS does things completely differently and even the compiler and C++ standard libraries might have their own quirks.
My own view is that most programming languages are just so much stuff. It's not the language that matters as much as how suitable it is to a task and what tools / libraries exist to achieve that task. Suitability is a nebulous term but it really depends on requirements. If speed is critical or its a low level thing then C++ might make a good fit. If the stability is critical or database / network latency is a speed limiter use something more high level. In all cases I would argue that maintainability is paramount - most commercial code WILL have to be bug fixed or updated at some point and its easy to write code in any language which is unreadable shit.
Maybe the answer is to augment what the class teaches you with your own programming. Think of a useful app that you can write to exercise your knowledge of the language, then go grab the tools and write it. Free toolchains exist for C++, C, Java,.NET, Python and most other languages. And buy the book Code Complete and take heed of what it says of writing good quality code.
The thing is rundll32.exe does what it says on the tin - it runs DLLs. It should be quite feasible to hook LoadLibrary() in Win32 API so that whenever it's called, the system checks if the DLL being resolved is on the whitelist or it isn't. This would include checking the DLL to see if its digitally signed and matches what fingerprint of what is expected of course. If it isn't then you flip the UAC controls on the rundll32.exe process into regular mode. If it is on the whitelist then rundll32.exe continues to run as a whitelist app.
I'd add that I'm talking as if its an on or off thing, but its quite possible that the "whitelist" is really a more liberal security policy than the default that allow certain apps to access certain resources and do certain things without bugging the user. Other instances where the whitelist permissions might get flipped? If the app opens a socket, or reads from an untrusted file, or reads from a registry entry outside of its regular policy.
Obviously its a tough nut to crack and a whitelist demands very serious consideration but it should be feasible to identify certain core apps whose behaviour is well defined and whitelist them. SELinux is a similar but not quite analogous concept on Linux - it restricts apps using a policy too and some apps need greater access than others. The biggest issue is getting the policies right. There was a time when Fedora was practically unusable with SELinux enabled because making policies is quite tricky.
Unfortunately it's not a bug, or even a design flaw. Microsoft's in the position of trying to placate as many customers as they can. They tried doing security the "correct" way with Vista, only for the loudmouths of the world to run around telling everyone else that Vista sucked because they kept getting "those damned prompts." Hell, Apple even got in on the action and made TV advertisements about it lambasting Microsoft for doing security right*. So Microsoft does something about it: they scale back the security and scale up the convenience.
Fortunately Vista probably shook the tree pretty hard so the number of "offending" new / unpatched applications in general use would be fairly low now. For example apps that read the registry will know not to do stupid stuff like ask for read/write access when they only need read access and so on. Obviously legacy apps could trigger annoying alerts, which is why I think MS should allow admins / power users to be able train or customize UAC if they wish.
I have no problem with a whitelist either but it should be extremely selective and throw some kind of switch if the app loads any untrusted DLL. For example, I have no issue if rundll32.exe is whitelisted so long as loading an untrusted DLL causes it to revert to the default UAC policy behaviour.
That science, which is the systematic and empirical study of the natural world, can prove the non-existence of a supernatural entity. ("Supernatural" being, by definition, outside of the purview of science.)
And you will point out exactly where Dawkins said any such thing. Please.
You can no more prove that a god doesn't exist than that a magical space bicycle that farts planet size strawberries doesn't exist.
So please highlight exactly where Dawkins makes this fundamental mistake in logic that you seem to think he has made.
The hideously slow refresh rate and the dreaded screen "reset" need to be fixed before epaper screens will be viable for anything but static content. It's nice to have some kind of interactivity and perhaps a touch screen could have limited uses such as simple note taking, or soft buttons. But as the video demonstrates, it would be intolerable for much more until epaper fixes its underlying issue.
the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)
I would have thought that from a publisher's standpoint that the Kindle being proprietary and tied to a store is a VERY bad thing. It might not seem so in the short term, but in the long term if the device took off it would be. Amazon will become like Apple, using its mass market reach to impose intolerable terms and conditions on publishers. Books and media are content, and I would expect publishers to have as many people paying to read that content as possible through any delivery mechanism. Tying yourself to one outlet is suicidal in the long term.
I wonder why publishers don't sit down together and produce their own open platform reader format and infrastructure for managing keys and content. It's probably the only thing that will drag e-books out of the sewer its in at the moment. Consumers should have the confidence of being able to buy books from any store and read them on any device which implements the format. It's the sort of thing that needs to happen for e-books to stand any chance of mass adoption.
I conclude from your ignorant comments that have zero experience of cross-platform development. For if you did you would instantly recognize why I cited QT.
As you are a bit slow on the uptake, I will elaborate. QT is an abstraction layer for developing GUI applications. If you program a GUI to QT's APIs then porting from Windows to Linux to OS X in any combination is relatively trivial. Even though each platform has vastly different native APIs. Even if the app uses custom widgets (say for some complex rendering), porting is confined to just that specific code not the general mass of the application. Abstraction means the details of each platform are largely hidden. Mozilla uses abstraction to share the vast majority of its code across platforms.
Likewise with game programming. It is no different from any other kind of programming. It goes through requirements, technical specifications, development, QA testing, bug fixing and release. Abstraction is as critical to proper cross-platform game development as it is to other ventures. Furthermore, any game company with any sense will license or develop reusable middleware APIs that keep the hardware as hidden as possible for subsequent titles. The more platform neutral code and the more reusable components with suitable abstraction that is used, the cheaper, easier to develop and the higher quality of the end product.
And yes messing around is quite sufficient for me to conclude that SPU programming is straightforward. It's a cross-between multi-threading, shader programming and a bit of high level assembly thrown in. All of which any competent game programmer should already have plenty of experience. The hardest part of SPU programming is nothing to do with the hardware, but in ensuring the game is designed up front to take advantage of them. That means ensuring animation, shading, physics, collision detection, decompression, sound mixing etc. are sufficiently abstract that the general body of code doesn't care one way or another if the underlying implementation is running on a PS3 or a 360, and then setting about writing optimized versions of these systems for each platform. And then reusing them for the next game.
I've read quite a few articles on SPU programming and even messed around a bit in YDL. It doesn't strike me as especially hard at all. In fact, anyone who is clued into multi-threaded programming, or into shader programming shouldn't have any trouble whatsoever figuring it out. I would hope that most games developers these days would be competent enough to work it through. The PS3 SDK toolchain is also GNU based so it might be "hard" if you lived your life in DevStudio, but in itself its not hard. It seems to me as bizarre to claim its hard as claiming Linux is hard because it uses different APIs and tools from MS Windows.
The key to proper multi-platform development is proper abstraction. e.g. QT supports multiple platforms with minimal differences, and something like 95% of Firefox code is common to all platforms. Hard coding to one particular platform is just asking for trouble.
But it's still a weird comment from Sony. Maybe the guy is talking about their general behaviour of setting very stringent system requirements at launch and then loosening them up over time. For example when the PS3 first landed the OS reserved itself something highly conservative such as 90Mb of runtime memory. But with each subsequent release they freed up more and more space so games have more and more to play with. Likewise the PSP locked down the higher clock speeds but unlocked them later.
The problem I see here for Eircom, is once they cave into one group, what is their defence against other groups who wish to block sites? What if Scientology decides it wants Eircom to block Xenu.net and uses the same lame excuse that it might enable sharing of copyright materials? Or what about blocking usenet (and all conduits to obtain it) for all the potentially infringing or defamatory stuff there?
Once they go down the road of blocking sites they can no longer make the perfectly reasonable defence that they're a service provider, not a censor. It *is* a slippery slope and only harm will come from it. If all ISPs give in, then the next thing will happen is the government will "helpfully" step in with a national firewall and force all providers to go through it. Internet access will become as repressive as it is in Australia or other countries that think they can control people by restricting what they can see.
I'd add that sites like the pirate bay are service providers too. It may well be that most of their content is copyright infringing, but not all of it. Furthermore, they just host tracker files so Eircom isn't even preventing piracy by shutting off that site. It wouldn't surprise me either if distributed search, trackers and crypto make it extremely difficult for Eircom to EVER shut off piracy or say with certainty who is downloading the latest Ubuntu and who is just downloading the latest copy of Windows.
By the way, does anyone know a decent and affordable VPN service in the US I can subscribe to?
Exactly. Apple devices are supposedly easy to use, but this absolutely is not the case with batteries. One would expect them to come up with some elegant invisible clip that comes loose with an intuitive movement, or perhaps some thumb size screws that reveal a hidden compartment. Something that hides the battery yet makes it accessible. After all, lots of small devices have replaceable batteries.
Instead Apple seal their units shut, or make it ridiculously difficult to remove batteries without special tools. On top of that they launch a battery replacement program which is expensive and couched in scary clauses about possibly not getting your original device back.
It's quite obvious they seal batteries in to encourage people to dump their otherwise functioning devices for a new model.
Easy to me means AT MOST undoing a few clips or standard screws. Having to dismantle the whole underside of your laptop and calling it easy is simply ridiculous. Especially when we're talking about Apple, a company which likes to promote ease of use.
Let's face facts here. Apple deliberately makes its batteries difficult to replace because they know that doing so increases the liklihood that someone will buy a new device rather than bother changing the existing one. To compound this, they offer a battery replacement service which is both expensive and doesn't even say you will receive your old device back.
I'm sure this is great for their business but it is a cynical tactic and one I wish that someone like the EU would stamp on. All consumer devices could easily feature removeable batteries without significantly impacting on their form factor or functionality.
The issue is this. Libraries such as jpeg, zlib, nspr, cairo etc. can be linked into the binary or referenced by shared library. On Windows, all these libs are compiled and linked statically into a single executable. On Linux they are usually linked to the system libraries. This alone can put up to a 20% performance penalty on calls.
I'm sure its not the only reason for slowdown but it must be a significant contributing factor. Now, in general I don't think it matters too much. There are advantages to using shared libs - lower disk footprint, sharing executable code pages across processes etc. But that comes at a price.
It may also be that other factors come into play such as the raw rendering and event processing speed of WINE vs GTK (+ theme engine).
By default Firefox for Linux uses shared system libraries rather than statically linking them altogether as the Windows version does. That's bound to have an impact on performance because code and data pages will be all over the place.
Type "about:buildconfig" into the browser and it will tell you its build settings.
The issue is that this ignorant view may be perpetuated in America. I have never heard anyone in Europe utter such crap.
That's not quite true. Britain has its fair share of lunatics. Fortunately they remain well and truly at the fringes where they belong rather than having the influence to inflict their mindfuckery on others.
People saying Darwinism probably do so with a specific context in mind, or because they're idiot creationists. Creationists probably think if they refer to it as Darwinism that it sounds more like some kind of philosophical following / religion with a measure of doubt rather than the cold hard fact that evolution really is.
It's expensive, horrifically proprietary and the books aren't exactly cheap either.
Format support is unchanged since version 1 meaning you get text, a couple of other text-only formats, Amazon's format or nothing. Too bad if you have stuff in PDF, HTML, MS Word etc because you can't read those either without sending them off to Amazon for inspection (oops conversion), who will promptly mangle the layout into their own format. Good luck trying to read your OReilly book after conversion. Good luck trying to convince the boss to store confidential docs on the device. And Amazon will charge you if you actually want it sent to back to the device.
Price-wise, the thing is a rip-off considering you're locked into a single provider with such lousy support for other formats. The books aren't great value either - a fact that Amazon knows all too well since they compare prices to hardback LIST prices rather than to what the Amazon sells the same paperback for. Even if they're a few dollars cheaper you still forfeit the right to loan, swap, sell or trade books with others.
At least the iPod had excellent ripping and playback support for MP3 and unencrypted AAC. In other words, it was a decent device even if you NEVER went to the iTMS. That's the way to do things. If you make your store accessible, affordable and seamless, you shouldn't be worried about whether people will use it or not because they will.
Well boo hoo for you. Chances are since you're posting on Slashdot that you knew WAY before the general population. Chances are you don't even need a voucher at all and you're not on the breadline.
Besides which you're talking out of your backside. A cursory glance at Amazon.com shows they have plenty of voucher eligible converters in stock.
Televisions have included digital tuners for years. DTV boxes are cheap and plentiful. If somebody at this late stage hasn't bothered to either redeem a coupon or take the massive $40 hit to buy the decoder box after years of warnings, then tough shit. At worst it only means waiting a couple of days for a store to get new stock in. I swear that some people will never be ready for anything and you've just got to set a cutoff and stick to it. If people still manage to ignore the warning and get their service cutoff then its their own fault.
I think I would be a bit more enthusiastic about their products if I worked for them. As I said, they do work and otherwise stay the hell out of the way, which I suppose means they work well enough. I just can't get too excited about a router. The modem is pretty good though and has lots of configuration options and a nice web front end.
I don't own any Belkin products except for an 8-way power adapter but really are they that bad a brand? I would have thought a company with the visibility of Belkin would be producing fairly decent equipment which did what it said. No more, no less. They shouldn't need paid shills to boost their products with phony reviews. Shame on them. And if by chance their kit was bad, then there must be far more surreptitious ways to jack up ratings than to publicly pay people on one of Amazon's own services to do so.
Anyway my experience is mostly of Netgear and so far I don't have any complaints about the router or the wifi/firewall/adsl modem that I purchased from them. Everything works exactly as intended which all right by me.
Active desktop in its first incarnation (i.e. Windows 95-98 era) stank because it stank. If you looked at the code, it was a mess of VBScript, JavaScript and a whole crap load of random ActiveX controls strung together with really ugly code. That might have been forgivable if it all worked without a hitch, but it didn't. The implementation was unstable and meant that when one part went down, the whole lot went down. The user experience was generally awful too not helped by the hyper-link-like-icons and single-click-to-launch behaviour. Ironically KDE stole that behaviour and tainted itself in the process.
I don't see blaming JavaScript for that. JavaScript uses whatever bindings are exposed by the executable it runs against. They can be awful or elegant. JS is just the runtime glue sitting on top of a foundation which can either be solid or rotten. In itself JS is an extremely powerful scripting language.
Anyway, JavaScript is already used in modern desktops. Windows & OS X use JS to drive their respective Sidebar / Dashboard widgets technologies for example. And of course a browser (practically a permanent fixture on most people's desktops) uses JS extensively - most of the UI is XUL, XBL, CSS and JavaScript.
I don't see much technical issue with GNOME or GTK supporting JS as an extension language. Obviously there is a directional level issue of fighting bloat and kitchen sink syndrome. Different runtimes are going to bog down system performance and affect disk / memory footprints. The core applications in GNOME should be heading in the same direction and not tossing in a mix of Mono, Python, JS, tk, Java or whatever the hell else is floating around there. Keep things tight and trim. Open Office is an example of an application which has seriously lost the plot in that regard and its easy to see the consequences too.
And good luck finding ANY MEP that represents your view if you're a Euro-sceptic. They don't exist.
MEPs are voted by the general public. If the general public wanted a Euro-sceptic MP they would vote one in. As it happens, UKIP gained 12 seats in the European parliament and the Mouvement pour la France has seats too. I'm quite sure there are Euro-sceptic MEPs representing other countries too. In other words there is a significant representation of Euro sceptics and your statement is complete bollocks.
And since you mention Libertas... for the benefit of bystanders, Libertas is a private group pushing a No vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treay. To that end they stuck up thousands of posters with scary (and often absurd) reasons that people should vote No. What is not known about Libertas is how they got their funding, but there are strong suspicions that it was from US defence contractors and other interests. The group's founder Declan Ganley also just happens to be CEO of a US defence contract firm. So here we have an individual with strong US military & financial links interfering with a national referendum and an EU treaty. If you think MEPs are corrupt and that Libertas is the shining light of purity you really have no clue at all.
You have to laugh in hindsight that the No vote was primarily driven by this organisation and the Socialist Workers Party. That's some unholy alliance. Somebody even (possibly another rabid No fringe group) stuck stickers all over Dublin saying to vote No because babies would be microchipped otherwise. What isn't so funny is that such tactics actually worked.
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The problem for Microsoft is they've already been there and done that. NT 4 had versions for non-Intel architectures but nobody was interested. Worse, if an ARM XP or Vista did appear nothing would run natively on it except .NET apps. Microsoft would probably have to implement x86 emulation because vendors wouldn't bother to target the device.
More likely is that Microsoft would be pushing some version of Windows CE. This would be a good fit except it would mean that anyone expecting a full desktop experience is completely screwed. All the apps would be the cut down sort seen in PDAs and phones. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, but then again maybe it would.
Linux is in much better shape to deal with multiple architectures. Most of the source is already portable. It wouldn't escape entirely unscathed since some binary (and source) content like Flash player, Sun Java, WINE and some emulators mightn't work, but (memory / CPU speed permitting0 you could almost have a full Linux desktop experience no matter what the architecture was.
I work for a company which has development groups in lots of countries including India. For reasons that might have sounded great in theory, they farmed off a lot of maintenance development to India - hey it's 1/3rd the price!
As a principal / architect I would often be tasked with overseeing their work, or trying to direct their solutions. That experience was incredibly frustrating for multiple reasons:
a) Cultural differences. Indian developers were the most passive bunch I have ever worked with. They never took the initiative on anything, never offered alternative or better ways to do something, never took time to understand *why* they were asked to do something. Basically if a requirement or design said X they would implement X even if it was ambiguous or nonsensical from a business or coding point of view. Other groups in other countries would push back and the process would improve. This meant the devs had to be closely supervised and all changes reviewed and approved. Tasks took 2-3 times as long to complete which negated any cost savings and also pushed out roll-out times.
b) Language issues. Email was fine. Phone communications were a complete nightmare. Many Indians simply couldn't be understood on the phone. Verbal communication is a critical skill for any programmer. I recognize English is not their first language but its still a requirement and many other countries manage it just fine.
c) Revolving door development. Turnover in India was crippling and every fix or update was handled by different people. This made it impossible to imbue business knowledge, or good coding standards or common practice. Development took longer and the code rapidly becomes a mess of hacks and unsafe techniques.
I'm not saying work can't be farmed out but there has to be a core team of long-term developers. Developers who have business knowledge, developers who will speak out when some requirement is bullshit, developers who have some vested interest in the quality of their code. If you treat developers as an interchangeable commodity you will get back complete shit for your efforts and quality will go down the tubes.
However Java by itself is generally useless. Most Java apps these days make use of a plethora of tools, specifications and libraries - Ant, Maven, Java Server Pages, JDBC, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Tiles, iBatis, log4j etc. etc. Just knowing the language is nice and all but it probably won't mean you're ready for real world development. C++ is even worse since every OS does things completely differently and even the compiler and C++ standard libraries might have their own quirks.
My own view is that most programming languages are just so much stuff. It's not the language that matters as much as how suitable it is to a task and what tools / libraries exist to achieve that task. Suitability is a nebulous term but it really depends on requirements. If speed is critical or its a low level thing then C++ might make a good fit. If the stability is critical or database / network latency is a speed limiter use something more high level. In all cases I would argue that maintainability is paramount - most commercial code WILL have to be bug fixed or updated at some point and its easy to write code in any language which is unreadable shit.
Maybe the answer is to augment what the class teaches you with your own programming. Think of a useful app that you can write to exercise your knowledge of the language, then go grab the tools and write it. Free toolchains exist for C++, C, Java, .NET, Python and most other languages. And buy the book Code Complete and take heed of what it says of writing good quality code.
I'd add that I'm talking as if its an on or off thing, but its quite possible that the "whitelist" is really a more liberal security policy than the default that allow certain apps to access certain resources and do certain things without bugging the user. Other instances where the whitelist permissions might get flipped? If the app opens a socket, or reads from an untrusted file, or reads from a registry entry outside of its regular policy.
Obviously its a tough nut to crack and a whitelist demands very serious consideration but it should be feasible to identify certain core apps whose behaviour is well defined and whitelist them. SELinux is a similar but not quite analogous concept on Linux - it restricts apps using a policy too and some apps need greater access than others. The biggest issue is getting the policies right. There was a time when Fedora was practically unusable with SELinux enabled because making policies is quite tricky.
Fortunately Vista probably shook the tree pretty hard so the number of "offending" new / unpatched applications in general use would be fairly low now. For example apps that read the registry will know not to do stupid stuff like ask for read/write access when they only need read access and so on. Obviously legacy apps could trigger annoying alerts, which is why I think MS should allow admins / power users to be able train or customize UAC if they wish.
I have no problem with a whitelist either but it should be extremely selective and throw some kind of switch if the app loads any untrusted DLL. For example, I have no issue if rundll32.exe is whitelisted so long as loading an untrusted DLL causes it to revert to the default UAC policy behaviour.
And you will point out exactly where Dawkins said any such thing. Please.
You can no more prove that a god doesn't exist than that a magical space bicycle that farts planet size strawberries doesn't exist.
So please highlight exactly where Dawkins makes this fundamental mistake in logic that you seem to think he has made.
The hideously slow refresh rate and the dreaded screen "reset" need to be fixed before epaper screens will be viable for anything but static content. It's nice to have some kind of interactivity and perhaps a touch screen could have limited uses such as simple note taking, or soft buttons. But as the video demonstrates, it would be intolerable for much more until epaper fixes its underlying issue.
I would have thought that from a publisher's standpoint that the Kindle being proprietary and tied to a store is a VERY bad thing. It might not seem so in the short term, but in the long term if the device took off it would be. Amazon will become like Apple, using its mass market reach to impose intolerable terms and conditions on publishers. Books and media are content, and I would expect publishers to have as many people paying to read that content as possible through any delivery mechanism. Tying yourself to one outlet is suicidal in the long term.
I wonder why publishers don't sit down together and produce their own open platform reader format and infrastructure for managing keys and content. It's probably the only thing that will drag e-books out of the sewer its in at the moment. Consumers should have the confidence of being able to buy books from any store and read them on any device which implements the format. It's the sort of thing that needs to happen for e-books to stand any chance of mass adoption.
As you are a bit slow on the uptake, I will elaborate. QT is an abstraction layer for developing GUI applications. If you program a GUI to QT's APIs then porting from Windows to Linux to OS X in any combination is relatively trivial. Even though each platform has vastly different native APIs. Even if the app uses custom widgets (say for some complex rendering), porting is confined to just that specific code not the general mass of the application. Abstraction means the details of each platform are largely hidden. Mozilla uses abstraction to share the vast majority of its code across platforms.
Likewise with game programming. It is no different from any other kind of programming. It goes through requirements, technical specifications, development, QA testing, bug fixing and release. Abstraction is as critical to proper cross-platform game development as it is to other ventures. Furthermore, any game company with any sense will license or develop reusable middleware APIs that keep the hardware as hidden as possible for subsequent titles. The more platform neutral code and the more reusable components with suitable abstraction that is used, the cheaper, easier to develop and the higher quality of the end product.
And yes messing around is quite sufficient for me to conclude that SPU programming is straightforward. It's a cross-between multi-threading, shader programming and a bit of high level assembly thrown in. All of which any competent game programmer should already have plenty of experience. The hardest part of SPU programming is nothing to do with the hardware, but in ensuring the game is designed up front to take advantage of them. That means ensuring animation, shading, physics, collision detection, decompression, sound mixing etc. are sufficiently abstract that the general body of code doesn't care one way or another if the underlying implementation is running on a PS3 or a 360, and then setting about writing optimized versions of these systems for each platform. And then reusing them for the next game.
In summary, grow the hell up.
The key to proper multi-platform development is proper abstraction. e.g. QT supports multiple platforms with minimal differences, and something like 95% of Firefox code is common to all platforms. Hard coding to one particular platform is just asking for trouble.
But it's still a weird comment from Sony. Maybe the guy is talking about their general behaviour of setting very stringent system requirements at launch and then loosening them up over time. For example when the PS3 first landed the OS reserved itself something highly conservative such as 90Mb of runtime memory. But with each subsequent release they freed up more and more space so games have more and more to play with. Likewise the PSP locked down the higher clock speeds but unlocked them later.
I've seen this email before and both times I considered Bill Gates to be doing the right thing. If he thinks something sucks why shouldn't he say so?
Once they go down the road of blocking sites they can no longer make the perfectly reasonable defence that they're a service provider, not a censor. It *is* a slippery slope and only harm will come from it. If all ISPs give in, then the next thing will happen is the government will "helpfully" step in with a national firewall and force all providers to go through it. Internet access will become as repressive as it is in Australia or other countries that think they can control people by restricting what they can see.
I'd add that sites like the pirate bay are service providers too. It may well be that most of their content is copyright infringing, but not all of it. Furthermore, they just host tracker files so Eircom isn't even preventing piracy by shutting off that site. It wouldn't surprise me either if distributed search, trackers and crypto make it extremely difficult for Eircom to EVER shut off piracy or say with certainty who is downloading the latest Ubuntu and who is just downloading the latest copy of Windows.
By the way, does anyone know a decent and affordable VPN service in the US I can subscribe to?
Instead Apple seal their units shut, or make it ridiculously difficult to remove batteries without special tools. On top of that they launch a battery replacement program which is expensive and couched in scary clauses about possibly not getting your original device back.
It's quite obvious they seal batteries in to encourage people to dump their otherwise functioning devices for a new model.
Let's face facts here. Apple deliberately makes its batteries difficult to replace because they know that doing so increases the liklihood that someone will buy a new device rather than bother changing the existing one. To compound this, they offer a battery replacement service which is both expensive and doesn't even say you will receive your old device back.
I'm sure this is great for their business but it is a cynical tactic and one I wish that someone like the EU would stamp on. All consumer devices could easily feature removeable batteries without significantly impacting on their form factor or functionality.
I'm sure its not the only reason for slowdown but it must be a significant contributing factor. Now, in general I don't think it matters too much. There are advantages to using shared libs - lower disk footprint, sharing executable code pages across processes etc. But that comes at a price.
It may also be that other factors come into play such as the raw rendering and event processing speed of WINE vs GTK (+ theme engine).
By default Firefox for Linux uses shared system libraries rather than statically linking them altogether as the Windows version does. That's bound to have an impact on performance because code and data pages will be all over the place. Type "about:buildconfig" into the browser and it will tell you its build settings.
That's not quite true. Britain has its fair share of lunatics. Fortunately they remain well and truly at the fringes where they belong rather than having the influence to inflict their mindfuckery on others.
People saying Darwinism probably do so with a specific context in mind, or because they're idiot creationists. Creationists probably think if they refer to it as Darwinism that it sounds more like some kind of philosophical following / religion with a measure of doubt rather than the cold hard fact that evolution really is.
Format support is unchanged since version 1 meaning you get text, a couple of other text-only formats, Amazon's format or nothing. Too bad if you have stuff in PDF, HTML, MS Word etc because you can't read those either without sending them off to Amazon for inspection (oops conversion), who will promptly mangle the layout into their own format. Good luck trying to read your OReilly book after conversion. Good luck trying to convince the boss to store confidential docs on the device. And Amazon will charge you if you actually want it sent to back to the device.
Price-wise, the thing is a rip-off considering you're locked into a single provider with such lousy support for other formats. The books aren't great value either - a fact that Amazon knows all too well since they compare prices to hardback LIST prices rather than to what the Amazon sells the same paperback for. Even if they're a few dollars cheaper you still forfeit the right to loan, swap, sell or trade books with others.
At least the iPod had excellent ripping and playback support for MP3 and unencrypted AAC. In other words, it was a decent device even if you NEVER went to the iTMS. That's the way to do things. If you make your store accessible, affordable and seamless, you shouldn't be worried about whether people will use it or not because they will.
Well boo hoo for you. Chances are since you're posting on Slashdot that you knew WAY before the general population. Chances are you don't even need a voucher at all and you're not on the breadline. Besides which you're talking out of your backside. A cursory glance at Amazon.com shows they have plenty of voucher eligible converters in stock.
Televisions have included digital tuners for years. DTV boxes are cheap and plentiful. If somebody at this late stage hasn't bothered to either redeem a coupon or take the massive $40 hit to buy the decoder box after years of warnings, then tough shit. At worst it only means waiting a couple of days for a store to get new stock in. I swear that some people will never be ready for anything and you've just got to set a cutoff and stick to it. If people still manage to ignore the warning and get their service cutoff then its their own fault.
I think I would be a bit more enthusiastic about their products if I worked for them. As I said, they do work and otherwise stay the hell out of the way, which I suppose means they work well enough. I just can't get too excited about a router. The modem is pretty good though and has lots of configuration options and a nice web front end.
Anyway my experience is mostly of Netgear and so far I don't have any complaints about the router or the wifi/firewall/adsl modem that I purchased from them. Everything works exactly as intended which all right by me.
I don't see blaming JavaScript for that. JavaScript uses whatever bindings are exposed by the executable it runs against. They can be awful or elegant. JS is just the runtime glue sitting on top of a foundation which can either be solid or rotten. In itself JS is an extremely powerful scripting language.
Anyway, JavaScript is already used in modern desktops. Windows & OS X use JS to drive their respective Sidebar / Dashboard widgets technologies for example. And of course a browser (practically a permanent fixture on most people's desktops) uses JS extensively - most of the UI is XUL, XBL, CSS and JavaScript.
I don't see much technical issue with GNOME or GTK supporting JS as an extension language. Obviously there is a directional level issue of fighting bloat and kitchen sink syndrome. Different runtimes are going to bog down system performance and affect disk / memory footprints. The core applications in GNOME should be heading in the same direction and not tossing in a mix of Mono, Python, JS, tk, Java or whatever the hell else is floating around there. Keep things tight and trim. Open Office is an example of an application which has seriously lost the plot in that regard and its easy to see the consequences too.
MEPs are voted by the general public. If the general public wanted a Euro-sceptic MP they would vote one in. As it happens, UKIP gained 12 seats in the European parliament and the Mouvement pour la France has seats too. I'm quite sure there are Euro-sceptic MEPs representing other countries too. In other words there is a significant representation of Euro sceptics and your statement is complete bollocks.
And since you mention Libertas... for the benefit of bystanders, Libertas is a private group pushing a No vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treay. To that end they stuck up thousands of posters with scary (and often absurd) reasons that people should vote No. What is not known about Libertas is how they got their funding, but there are strong suspicions that it was from US defence contractors and other interests. The group's founder Declan Ganley also just happens to be CEO of a US defence contract firm. So here we have an individual with strong US military & financial links interfering with a national referendum and an EU treaty. If you think MEPs are corrupt and that Libertas is the shining light of purity you really have no clue at all.
You have to laugh in hindsight that the No vote was primarily driven by this organisation and the Socialist Workers Party. That's some unholy alliance. Somebody even (possibly another rabid No fringe group) stuck stickers all over Dublin saying to vote No because babies would be microchipped otherwise. What isn't so funny is that such tactics actually worked.