I hope it will spark a significant change in video game / VR content creation. Contemporary technology went great lengths in core engine / content display / etc. but costs of creating interactive 3D content / VR worlds is still prohibitive. That significant cost propably limits innovation: if production of a single title with decent graphics costs XXmm$, there is very little incentive to risk targeting other than usual/well tested audience (mostly teens) ?
I hope to see video game/VR industry equipping with tools lowering their costs to the point where high quality 3D content creation will be accessible / easy to use for small studios / artists, so they will be to use it to convey a wide range of stories just like film makers are doing it. Kinect is a good step in this direction.
Widely available inexpensive and easy to use content creation tools coupled with widely available 3D engines can transform this field into what film making is today (exluding MPAA). Kinect can do magic in this regard !
Space shuttle is propably the most complicated piece of technology ever developed. Over one million moving parts. It was created 30 years ago. Sometimes I think that in many fields technology has peaked back then...
MPEG-LA does not believe VP8 infringes any of their patents, so they tried building/buying up a patent portfolio specifically to go after VP8. This is clearly anti-competitive and propably illegal. I personally think it is an act of extortion and MPEG-LA executives should be charged under RICO laws. But I'm not a lawyer and US justice system seems to do more to cover corporate executives (knowingly) illegal activities than to ensure justice overall. It 2008 financial crisis fiasco does not show that clearly than I don't know what is.
Why so many UNIX admins try keep servers up as long as possible ? There is a valid reason to reboot your UNIX servers on regular basis and it's not about solving problems but rather about avoiding (potential) future problems.
While many Windows folks tend to reboot servers when there is a problem (and it seems to work for them sometimes), Linux/UNIX servers are quite contrary in this regard - these things often seem to work fine until reboot. And after reboot one often realizes that some things manually started or reconfigured while server was running does not work properly or server requires some additional (manual) work to make it work. There may be bugs in startup scripts (or missing links in rc?.d directories, or screwed dependencies), one can make some tweaks with some service without stopping it and then forget putting changes into configuration files etc. Of course, there are habits and tools to deal with it but you cannot be sure that everything works after reboots until you try it.
I advise rebooting servers at convenient moments on regular basis or after major reconfigurations just to make sure that every change is properly synced with configuration files and startup scripts.
You see, population growth happens mainly in poorest countries. Western countries got rid of this problem to the point the opposite social problem occurs. Maybe it's time to educate women how to avoid unplanned pregnancy and make anti-conception stuff affordable for them. It it's not too late. Properly thought out as a part of some bigger effort it would coincide with improvement in overall life conditions. Unfortunately, our lovely corporations want life conditions of so called 3-rd world countries to be as low as possible to get their natural resources for pennies on the dollar, so meaningful change won't happen soon.
I don't mind XML configuration file as long as it contains only things that are important and has little/no plumbing boilerplate. In most Java frameworks (especially in Spring) there are two things mixed into a single set of configuration files: items created once while developing application (for example Spring depencency injection bindings, Hibernate mappings etc. - let's call it plumbing) and factual configuration settings (for example: database URL, user and password for application). Mixing these two things is a major sin as plumbing and configuration have different characteristics.
Plumbing is like code. It is done while as part of application development and is tightly bound to development process - it should be easily testable, easy to refactor (IDEs should handle this - for example if you change name of some class/method, IDE refactoring features should also change it in all plumbing code). If possible - it should not change between development and production environments. That's why I prefer annotations rather than XML for binding everything into final application (eg. Guice over Spring). One notable exception I often is Hibernate and that's only because hibernate-annotations adds tons of additional JAR files and addidional complexity coming out of it doesn't justify convenience of using annotations instead of XML.
Configuration is a tool for administrators, not for developers. It should be as simple as possible and easy to change by hand. And yes, a generally prefer plain.properties files or YAML over XML, however as long as config file is simple enough and has no unnecessary overhead, I won't complain much about it. It is also important to keep major aspects of configuration separate (for example general server config vs. application specific config) and to keep application configuration separated from application itself (.war/.ear file).
So, in short: there are two things: "plumbing configuration" and real configuration. It is important to keep these two things separate and to keep real config as simple as possible.
It seems to boil down to definition of openess. That is "open" ? And this is not a " what is 'is' " type of question - this is relevant.
For me "open format" means being able to adopt, interoperate or reimplement format without unnecessary hurdles of any kind and then use it without restrictions. Open source or not. It's not just lack of documentation that limits openess. Other problems might be: too much documentation (eg. CORBA), patents or vendor changing format too frequently, lack of useful reference implementation etc. From this point of view H.264 is not open regardless how fancy documentation they provide and how many chairmen their standardizing commitee consisted of.
Open source happens to be a pretty good benchmark of openness. Usually when it is possible to implement an open source implementation of a format and use it without restrictions, it may be considered as open. Unfortunately, latest Oracle/Java fiasco somewhat blurs this distinction.
Also, it's funny to see how big business is trying to redefine "openess" to fit their agendas. With all this OpenXML, OpenJDK and other encumbered crap with "Open" in its name, corporations succeeded in creating such a mess in what open means, that Mr. Goebbels should be proud of.
I don't believe that Facebook is worth the valuation financial media (and institutions) are touting today (>$50B). And I'm not sure Goldman intends to keep its investment in Facebook for a long time. I suppose they are trying to find as many suckers as they can, push Facebook through IPO with share price inflated several times, then sell their investment with profit to unsuspecting public, pension funds etc. (a.k.a. suckers), collect fees/profits on it and leave everyone with the bag. Watching banking sector overall and GS behavior in particular above scenario seems to be their standard business practice.
The hard one is separating them. And they are hard to separate because of very similiar chemical properties. Currently there is problably no functional rare earths separation facility outside of China and rare earths concentrate (mine output) has to be brought back to China and thus becomes subject of China export quotas. There is one facility in construction (in Malasia as far as I remember) but going to production will take a while. Chinese have driven everyone out of business and then bought remaining facilities and know-how. And no one in intervened - utter stupidity and incompetence of western leadership has surpassed levels of lack-of-self-preservation-instinct in this matter. We are totally dependent on Chinese and this year we learned about this the hard way. Chineese limited their export quotas by 70% and rare earths prices jumped several times. Of course, you can buy them cheaper for producing your widgets, you just need to move your production facility to China.
I just hope we get full rare earth production chain up and working as soon as possible, but it will propably take a few years.
Agree. I've seen Oracle reps behaving exactly like this. Luckily, I never had to deal with them directly, (just been an observer) and I hope I'll never have to.
But hey! Kicking out Oracle boxes and replacing them with, say, PostgreSQL (+adapting applications) seems to be a pretty good business for an independent consultant or a small company.
First, some idiot republican congressman (I forgot his name unfortunately). Then some idiot canadian professor (who happens to be senior advisor to canadian PM). Now Sarah Palin. Lie repeated hundreds of times becomes a truth. It looks like preparing ground for Assange elimination, so I wonder if he makes it to the next leak.
Now it seems that next leak will target corruption in a big US bank. I'm curious what really make all those folks so amok: already leaked diplomatic cables or a future leak of a BANK (propably BoA). Assuming that banks retain nearly absolute control of all political systems of the West my bet is that they'll try to stop it at all costs. But maybe I'm wrong. Let's wait and see...
IPhone is a huge chunk of their cashflow and their stock is now pumped up to the limits. In order to maintain price of their shares they need constant growth. I suppose they can't afford even a moderate margin loss on iPhone sales and Android has potential to cut quite deeply into their sales.
The capital deployed into a productive venture is a good thing. Speculative hot money pushed around various parts of the world does not accomplish anything except causing mayhem everywhere and enriching hot money pushers. And this is THE problem we suffer today. Too much hot money bumping around and too little capital willing to go into productive businesses (maybe except China).
Back to Ireland. They are now forced to do draconian austerity measures on everyone except the banksters and to accept "bailout" loan that will propably have ~7% interest attached to it (and it doesn't matter that they don't need any money until mid-2011 - "bailout" has been pushed down their throat anyway).
Over the course of this financial meltdown that has started in 2008 I see the same people that caused massive suffering of so many now 3-rd world countries (G. Soros, etc.) and it scares a hell of me. It seems that they are doing to as the same they did to so many other countries over the decades - just in a more outrageous way. In the past it was bankers pushing a country into massive debt by corrupting politicians into doing some, say, infrastructure projects that are far too expensive for such country (see most of South America, Indonesia etc.). Now I see some strange kind of "suicide bankers" bullying politicians using "whole economy will collapse if you won't bail us out" bullshit. So we end up giving outrageous sums of taxpayer money to those banks and then paying interest on it to the same bankers who got that money !! And then IMF comes in and forces crushing austerity measures on everyone except the bankers. This is the same kind of financial warfare they used in so many countries - just more sophiscated and effective.
In short: Bankers are doing the same thing to us they did to 3-rd world countries in prior decades. Expect life conditions worsening soon as we'll get "demodernized" by those corporate scumbags.
Granted that not only you learn a language but also grasp philosophies/patterns/paradigms/etc. behind it, it's a Good Thing (TM) to learn new languages on regular basis. You need, however, learn much more than mere language.
It's good to learn some assembly languages to see how machines work.
It's good to learn C to get accustomed with low level things, pointer arithmetic, in-memory layout of code & data, OS internals and tons of other things. It's good to tinker and experiment with high performance C code, see how functions look disassembled. Try adding two matrixes row by row and then column by column and see performance differences etc.
It's good to learn C++ to get accustomed with it's metaprogramming facilities, learn how to implement semi-automatic memory management via smart pointers and how all these high level things interact with low level.
It's good to learn Java to get accustomed with that whole big world of objects, OOP patterns, TDD, exception handling strategies and tons of other things.
It's good to learn Scala to get smooth introduction into functional programming concepts (higher level functions, closures etc.) and see how it can be incorporated into traditional object oriented code and more interesting concurrency models (actor model for example).
It's good to learn Erlang to grasp functional programming even more, learn how to effectively use pattern matching, see the THE actor model implementation and learn about it's interesting error handling philosophy.
It's good to learn LISP to grasp it's macro system that still cannot be matched in any other language. See Common Lisp at work and Clojure for it's approach to parallelism, mutability and distinction between values and identities.
It's good to learn Haskell to see how to program in purely functional way and see monads in action.
Not that I'm in any way competent in all things above. Much of it (plus other things) is still on my TODO list. I'm still being surprised by new ideas showing blind spots of my ignorance on regular basis. I don't buy however that learning new languages doesn't matter anymore. It matters. It's important. Maybe we should choose new languages to learn more carefully, choose less but dig deeper.
For me Java/Oracle problem is more about platform than it is about language. In the old times there were platforms, like UNIX, Windows or Netware. OS/Hardware combo was a deployment platform. Now we have JVM,.NET and web browser - these are the new major platforms (plus niche things like Erlang BEAM, Parrot, Ruby/cPython interpreters, to some extend LLVM).
Let's take JVM as an example: you have defined instruction set (bytecode), well defined ABI (this one is much better than in conventional operating systems) and well defined set of standard services (standard libraries). You also have class loader which somewhat resembles dynamic linker functionality in the conventional OS. Oh, and there is a pretty damn good debugging/profiling/monitoring infrastructure built in. And from application programmer point of view JVM is pretty much like a OS. Programmer can use many languages to target this platform, not just Java. It is possible to implement almost any language on top of JVM (albeit some things have no practical sense, for example C/C++ with its pointer arithmetics).
Would Larry prove its intent to totally screw Java (I'm still not sure of it yet), we'd need to have another platform rather than another language. There are enough cool languages to choose from, but aside from JVM and CLR there are no viable, widely supported multi-language, multi-paradigm platforms. JVM is propably the best one available but as it ages, there are more and more shortcomings visible. Having enough support from companies and developers (and from Larry screwing up Java) one can design and implement a new VM addressing some additional things, like:
- native support for dynamic dispatch (albeit OpenJDK7 seems to support it in some way) - what I mean by that is trying to achieve performance somewhat comparable to statically typed programs (now we mostly compare to C implemented couterparts, eg. JRuby vs. Ruby, Jython vs. cPython etc.);
- support for big memory heaps - most VMs suck at this (except for Azul), so we have to slice server machines and run many instances of JVM on one machine, then cluster/farm these JVM which is both silly and troublesome;
- better support for massive concurrency - again, most JVMs suck at this and Java thread model isn't perfect and isn't suitable for everything;
- support for multiple independent garbage collector zones - some language may utilize this to mitigate concurrency/big memory heap problems (Erlang, anyone?); ability to use different garbage collection algorithms in different zones if it makes sense (ex. big heap as in Java vs. small heaps as in Erlang);
- ability to execute on multiple target devices at once - to utilize GPUs/APUs directly from bytecode (maybe with some limitations), without those crappy hacks we see today; it also applies to memory management that seems to be a horrible hack in current GPGPU solutions;
- better support for long running VM processes, mainly hot code loading (Sun JVM sucks at this but some other solutions like JRockit seem to do a better job), maybe some code versioning, better tools to administer / tinker with running VM process (similiar to what Erlang has);
There is more than 15 years since Java was published. There is about 10 years since Microsoft built its CLR. And there is a lot of new things that appeared (GPUs, huge memories, multicores) and lots of new knowledge we obtained since then (look at all these JS interpreters in modern browsers!). There is also a pretty good base to build on (LLVM, V8, BEAM, PyPy and tons of other projects). On top of such VM we can implement various languages (including Java), maybe even better than JVM.
With enough help from friendly enough companies (RedHat? Google?) we can propably do much better than JVM and leave Larry and his corporate cronies in the dust. As long as there is a good quality reference implementation we don't need to chase Java APIs nor we do need to beg for TCK access.
It seems that you didn't program in either one of those languages. Differences in programmers' productivity are BIG. There are many languages better than Java, but none of them match the developing/maintaining/testing/refactoring capabilities of java related tools. The only tools coming close to it are their.NET clones^H^H^H^H^Hcounterparts.
Now it's Main Street vs Wall Street or people vs corporations. And thanks to Supreme Court corporations have now unlimited powers to funding campaigns of both politicians and judges. This is significant difference between previous elections and this one. Wall Street is clearly winning on all fronts and ordinary people are basically f**cked at this point. If Gulf oil spill / fraudclosure fiascos doesn't tell it clear enough, I don't know what will. And I have no idea what could be done to stop this process.
This is THE place where both companies are competing directly. All major vendors have moved from providing components (be it RDBMS, OS or hardware) to all-levels consulting and outsourcing services. IBM made this step long ago. Oracle and HP are also going this way for quite long time. This is big money and this is where Hurd is going to screw HP.
Don't kid yourself about "goodness" Hurd did to HP. It's exactly opposite. He temporarily upped HP's share price at a huge cost of future prospects. R&D has been axed by more than half (from around 6% of revenues to a little more than 2% since 1998 - courtesy of both Mark and Carly). To defend share price HP is now pursuing some $10B buyback program (that is 4-5 times their R&D budget). Morale inside is at the rock bottom, good engineers are treated like a crap (both axing salaries and lack of professional prospects/interesting projects) and are defecting. Crooky MBAs are taking over everything, so we see more and more corruption scandals with HP involved. Now with no CEO and a big mess/scandals at highest executive levels HP's decisions will (propably) be chaotic at best.
Now, after screwing HP from inside Hurd is going to screw them from his Oracle position by using his knowledge / business relation to wrestle outsourcing contracts from HP. Good work Mark, you've taken the COTY crown ("Crook Of The Year") from Lloyd Blankfein who held this glorious title since 2008.
At the end of this film Schmidt somewhat resembles those borgs in The City of Lost Children. Using some pictures from this film on Google stories on special occasions would be cool indeed.
So, they crammed everything in a small chip and made it a BGA package. From this point on it should be easy to design some little socket similiar to all those *SD cards and modify this chip to be a SATA drive fitting to such socket. I wonder why they didn't do it (yet). Has BGA such a great cost advantage over custom sockets or do they avoid competing with conventional disk drive producers ?
Then i WOULD be nervous. If Novell accepts bid from private equity firm, then we can say goodbye to them. Typical scenario in company takeover by private equity firms is extracting whatever capital company has by any means. In such scenario you can safely assume that Novell will be stripped out of things having some value (that can be easily sold), saddled with huge debt and private equity fund will extract all this capital via some form of (huge) dividend. Remaining carcass is typically sold to some fool investor who then sees it bankrupting. While I don't like Novell too much (after that Microsoft debacle), I'm also worried. I suppose that some of their patents will be sold to whoever offers better price. If it will be some patent troll , then we may see problems ahead. Private equity fund (a.k.a financial vulture) managers won't give a crap about it.
From what I read on Hercules pages, IBM knew about it for a very long time. They even published some info about Hercules in one of their redbooks and then mysteriously removed it. I wonder whether it is a good defence against their assertions, however, I am not a lawyer.
Last time I was playing with it (caliper/HP-UX), it was doing up to around 1 instruction per cycle on average. Not very impressive but also not very bad either. It was three years ago, so I doubt that compilers would improve dramatically since then. And it has about half a clock speed Xeons have.
Now, since we have Nehalem EX and similiar monsters available, there is not much left on performance/scalability front for all those RISC designs, no matter how cool those designs are. The only thing keeping them alive is their hard-to-break-big-iron designs and hard-to-break-big-iron (system) software. Vendors might struggle to port these things onto now conventional x86_64 designs as they risk losing significant income stream doing so. But in the long run most of these things will be dead or become niches. The only area RISC will still shine are energy constrained environments (ARM?) and maybe some manycore designs, like some forms of GPUs evolving in this direction. In other words, the original area where RISC thingies started.
Note that I'm not trashing RISC here - this was a pretty neat idea. It's just history showing a bitter sense of humor: memory bandwidth is now a bottleneck and x86 code is known to be compact.
In isolation, it makes the Apache crew look pretty retarded but we also don't know what else was going on at the time or anything about this location.
What makes apache crew quite a bit retarded are their comments. Those s**heads were begging for permission to shoot and enjoying it. "Come on... pick up a weapon" and begging for that wounded reporter to pick up his camera. That makes me sick. And there was no remorse at all: "it's their fault for bringing their children to the battle". What a mess. Have those idiots played too much Quake ?
The sad thing about that is that no matter what equipment is in use, you actually need people willing to use it. And it seems that they achieved this by having some half brained chicken sh*ts enjoying shooting people even being comfortably out of range of their perceived enemies and not seeing any indications of those people attacking anyone (or anything). With such attitude they can carpet bomb any country in the world for any reason and still be proud of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope it will spark a significant change in video game / VR content creation. Contemporary technology went great lengths in core engine / content display / etc. but costs of creating interactive 3D content / VR worlds is still prohibitive. That significant cost propably limits innovation: if production of a single title with decent graphics costs XXmm$, there is very little incentive to risk targeting other than usual/well tested audience (mostly teens) ?
I hope to see video game/VR industry equipping with tools lowering their costs to the point where high quality 3D content creation will be accessible / easy to use for small studios / artists, so they will be to use it to convey a wide range of stories just like film makers are doing it. Kinect is a good step in this direction.
Widely available inexpensive and easy to use content creation tools coupled with widely available 3D engines can transform this field into what film making is today (exluding MPAA). Kinect can do magic in this regard !
Space shuttle is propably the most complicated piece of technology ever developed. Over one million moving parts. It was created 30 years ago. Sometimes I think that in many fields technology has peaked back then ...
MPEG-LA does not believe VP8 infringes any of their patents, so they tried building/buying up a patent portfolio specifically to go after VP8. This is clearly anti-competitive and propably illegal. I personally think it is an act of extortion and MPEG-LA executives should be charged under RICO laws. But I'm not a lawyer and US justice system seems to do more to cover corporate executives (knowingly) illegal activities than to ensure justice overall. It 2008 financial crisis fiasco does not show that clearly than I don't know what is.
Why so many UNIX admins try keep servers up as long as possible ? There is a valid reason to reboot your UNIX servers on regular basis and it's not about solving problems but rather about avoiding (potential) future problems.
While many Windows folks tend to reboot servers when there is a problem (and it seems to work for them sometimes), Linux/UNIX servers are quite contrary in this regard - these things often seem to work fine until reboot. And after reboot one often realizes that some things manually started or reconfigured while server was running does not work properly or server requires some additional (manual) work to make it work. There may be bugs in startup scripts (or missing links in rc?.d directories, or screwed dependencies), one can make some tweaks with some service without stopping it and then forget putting changes into configuration files etc. Of course, there are habits and tools to deal with it but you cannot be sure that everything works after reboots until you try it.
I advise rebooting servers at convenient moments on regular basis or after major reconfigurations just to make sure that every change is properly synced with configuration files and startup scripts.
You see, population growth happens mainly in poorest countries. Western countries got rid of this problem to the point the opposite social problem occurs. Maybe it's time to educate women how to avoid unplanned pregnancy and make anti-conception stuff affordable for them. It it's not too late. Properly thought out as a part of some bigger effort it would coincide with improvement in overall life conditions. Unfortunately, our lovely corporations want life conditions of so called 3-rd world countries to be as low as possible to get their natural resources for pennies on the dollar, so meaningful change won't happen soon.
I don't mind XML configuration file as long as it contains only things that are important and has little/no plumbing boilerplate. In most Java frameworks (especially in Spring) there are two things mixed into a single set of configuration files: items created once while developing application (for example Spring depencency injection bindings, Hibernate mappings etc. - let's call it plumbing) and factual configuration settings (for example: database URL, user and password for application). Mixing these two things is a major sin as plumbing and configuration have different characteristics.
Plumbing is like code. It is done while as part of application development and is tightly bound to development process - it should be easily testable, easy to refactor (IDEs should handle this - for example if you change name of some class/method, IDE refactoring features should also change it in all plumbing code). If possible - it should not change between development and production environments. That's why I prefer annotations rather than XML for binding everything into final application (eg. Guice over Spring). One notable exception I often is Hibernate and that's only because hibernate-annotations adds tons of additional JAR files and addidional complexity coming out of it doesn't justify convenience of using annotations instead of XML.
Configuration is a tool for administrators, not for developers. It should be as simple as possible and easy to change by hand. And yes, a generally prefer plain .properties files or YAML over XML, however as long as config file is simple enough and has no unnecessary overhead, I won't complain much about it. It is also important to keep major aspects of configuration separate (for example general server config vs. application specific config) and to keep application configuration separated from application itself (.war/.ear file).
So, in short: there are two things: "plumbing configuration" and real configuration. It is important to keep these two things separate and to keep real config as simple as possible.
It seems to boil down to definition of openess. That is "open" ? And this is not a " what is 'is' " type of question - this is relevant.
For me "open format" means being able to adopt, interoperate or reimplement format without unnecessary hurdles of any kind and then use it without restrictions. Open source or not. It's not just lack of documentation that limits openess. Other problems might be: too much documentation (eg. CORBA), patents or vendor changing format too frequently, lack of useful reference implementation etc. From this point of view H.264 is not open regardless how fancy documentation they provide and how many chairmen their standardizing commitee consisted of.
Open source happens to be a pretty good benchmark of openness. Usually when it is possible to implement an open source implementation of a format and use it without restrictions, it may be considered as open. Unfortunately, latest Oracle/Java fiasco somewhat blurs this distinction.
Also, it's funny to see how big business is trying to redefine "openess" to fit their agendas. With all this OpenXML, OpenJDK and other encumbered crap with "Open" in its name, corporations succeeded in creating such a mess in what open means, that Mr. Goebbels should be proud of.
I don't believe that Facebook is worth the valuation financial media (and institutions) are touting today (>$50B). And I'm not sure Goldman intends to keep its investment in Facebook for a long time. I suppose they are trying to find as many suckers as they can, push Facebook through IPO with share price inflated several times, then sell their investment with profit to unsuspecting public, pension funds etc. (a.k.a. suckers), collect fees/profits on it and leave everyone with the bag. Watching banking sector overall and GS behavior in particular above scenario seems to be their standard business practice.
The hard one is separating them. And they are hard to separate because of very similiar chemical properties. Currently there is problably no functional rare earths separation facility outside of China and rare earths concentrate (mine output) has to be brought back to China and thus becomes subject of China export quotas. There is one facility in construction (in Malasia as far as I remember) but going to production will take a while. Chinese have driven everyone out of business and then bought remaining facilities and know-how. And no one in intervened - utter stupidity and incompetence of western leadership has surpassed levels of lack-of-self-preservation-instinct in this matter. We are totally dependent on Chinese and this year we learned about this the hard way. Chineese limited their export quotas by 70% and rare earths prices jumped several times. Of course, you can buy them cheaper for producing your widgets, you just need to move your production facility to China.
I just hope we get full rare earth production chain up and working as soon as possible, but it will propably take a few years.
Agree. I've seen Oracle reps behaving exactly like this. Luckily, I never had to deal with them directly, (just been an observer) and I hope I'll never have to.
But hey! Kicking out Oracle boxes and replacing them with, say, PostgreSQL (+adapting applications) seems to be a pretty good business for an independent consultant or a small company.
He made it the list of potential candidates. Don't forget to rate him. It might make prosecuting him into oblivion a bit harder.
First, some idiot republican congressman (I forgot his name unfortunately). Then some idiot canadian professor (who happens to be senior advisor to canadian PM). Now Sarah Palin. Lie repeated hundreds of times becomes a truth. It looks like preparing ground for Assange elimination, so I wonder if he makes it to the next leak.
Now it seems that next leak will target corruption in a big US bank. I'm curious what really make all those folks so amok: already leaked diplomatic cables or a future leak of a BANK (propably BoA). Assuming that banks retain nearly absolute control of all political systems of the West my bet is that they'll try to stop it at all costs. But maybe I'm wrong. Let's wait and see...
IPhone is a huge chunk of their cashflow and their stock is now pumped up to the limits. In order to maintain price of their shares they need constant growth. I suppose they can't afford even a moderate margin loss on iPhone sales and Android has potential to cut quite deeply into their sales.
The capital deployed into a productive venture is a good thing. Speculative hot money pushed around various parts of the world does not accomplish anything except causing mayhem everywhere and enriching hot money pushers. And this is THE problem we suffer today. Too much hot money bumping around and too little capital willing to go into productive businesses (maybe except China).
Back to Ireland. They are now forced to do draconian austerity measures on everyone except the banksters and to accept "bailout" loan that will propably have ~7% interest attached to it (and it doesn't matter that they don't need any money until mid-2011 - "bailout" has been pushed down their throat anyway).
Over the course of this financial meltdown that has started in 2008 I see the same people that caused massive suffering of so many now 3-rd world countries (G. Soros, etc.) and it scares a hell of me. It seems that they are doing to as the same they did to so many other countries over the decades - just in a more outrageous way. In the past it was bankers pushing a country into massive debt by corrupting politicians into doing some, say, infrastructure projects that are far too expensive for such country (see most of South America, Indonesia etc.). Now I see some strange kind of "suicide bankers" bullying politicians using "whole economy will collapse if you won't bail us out" bullshit. So we end up giving outrageous sums of taxpayer money to those banks and then paying interest on it to the same bankers who got that money !! And then IMF comes in and forces crushing austerity measures on everyone except the bankers. This is the same kind of financial warfare they used in so many countries - just more sophiscated and effective.
In short: Bankers are doing the same thing to us they did to 3-rd world countries in prior decades. Expect life conditions worsening soon as we'll get "demodernized" by those corporate scumbags.
It's good to learn some assembly languages to see how machines work.
It's good to learn C to get accustomed with low level things, pointer arithmetic, in-memory layout of code & data, OS internals and tons of other things. It's good to tinker and experiment with high performance C code, see how functions look disassembled. Try adding two matrixes row by row and then column by column and see performance differences etc.
It's good to learn C++ to get accustomed with it's metaprogramming facilities, learn how to implement semi-automatic memory management via smart pointers and how all these high level things interact with low level.
It's good to learn Java to get accustomed with that whole big world of objects, OOP patterns, TDD, exception handling strategies and tons of other things.
It's good to learn Scala to get smooth introduction into functional programming concepts (higher level functions, closures etc.) and see how it can be incorporated into traditional object oriented code and more interesting concurrency models (actor model for example).
It's good to learn Erlang to grasp functional programming even more, learn how to effectively use pattern matching, see the THE actor model implementation and learn about it's interesting error handling philosophy.
It's good to learn LISP to grasp it's macro system that still cannot be matched in any other language. See Common Lisp at work and Clojure for it's approach to parallelism, mutability and distinction between values and identities.
It's good to learn Haskell to see how to program in purely functional way and see monads in action.
Not that I'm in any way competent in all things above. Much of it (plus other things) is still on my TODO list. I'm still being surprised by new ideas showing blind spots of my ignorance on regular basis. I don't buy however that learning new languages doesn't matter anymore. It matters. It's important. Maybe we should choose new languages to learn more carefully, choose less but dig deeper.
Let's take JVM as an example: you have defined instruction set (bytecode), well defined ABI (this one is much better than in conventional operating systems) and well defined set of standard services (standard libraries). You also have class loader which somewhat resembles dynamic linker functionality in the conventional OS. Oh, and there is a pretty damn good debugging/profiling/monitoring infrastructure built in. And from application programmer point of view JVM is pretty much like a OS. Programmer can use many languages to target this platform, not just Java. It is possible to implement almost any language on top of JVM (albeit some things have no practical sense, for example C/C++ with its pointer arithmetics).
Would Larry prove its intent to totally screw Java (I'm still not sure of it yet), we'd need to have another platform rather than another language. There are enough cool languages to choose from, but aside from JVM and CLR there are no viable, widely supported multi-language, multi-paradigm platforms. JVM is propably the best one available but as it ages, there are more and more shortcomings visible. Having enough support from companies and developers (and from Larry screwing up Java) one can design and implement a new VM addressing some additional things, like:
- native support for dynamic dispatch (albeit OpenJDK7 seems to support it in some way) - what I mean by that is trying to achieve performance somewhat comparable to statically typed programs (now we mostly compare to C implemented couterparts, eg. JRuby vs. Ruby, Jython vs. cPython etc.);
- support for big memory heaps - most VMs suck at this (except for Azul), so we have to slice server machines and run many instances of JVM on one machine, then cluster/farm these JVM which is both silly and troublesome;
- better support for massive concurrency - again, most JVMs suck at this and Java thread model isn't perfect and isn't suitable for everything;
- support for multiple independent garbage collector zones - some language may utilize this to mitigate concurrency/big memory heap problems (Erlang, anyone?); ability to use different garbage collection algorithms in different zones if it makes sense (ex. big heap as in Java vs. small heaps as in Erlang);
- ability to execute on multiple target devices at once - to utilize GPUs/APUs directly from bytecode (maybe with some limitations), without those crappy hacks we see today; it also applies to memory management that seems to be a horrible hack in current GPGPU solutions;
- better support for long running VM processes, mainly hot code loading (Sun JVM sucks at this but some other solutions like JRockit seem to do a better job), maybe some code versioning, better tools to administer / tinker with running VM process (similiar to what Erlang has);
There is more than 15 years since Java was published. There is about 10 years since Microsoft built its CLR. And there is a lot of new things that appeared (GPUs, huge memories, multicores) and lots of new knowledge we obtained since then (look at all these JS interpreters in modern browsers!). There is also a pretty good base to build on (LLVM, V8, BEAM, PyPy and tons of other projects). On top of such VM we can implement various languages (including Java), maybe even better than JVM.
With enough help from friendly enough companies (RedHat? Google?) we can propably do much better than JVM and leave Larry and his corporate cronies in the dust. As long as there is a good quality reference implementation we don't need to chase Java APIs nor we do need to beg for TCK access.
It seems that you didn't program in either one of those languages. Differences in programmers' productivity are BIG. There are many languages better than Java, but none of them match the developing/maintaining/testing/refactoring capabilities of java related tools. The only tools coming close to it are their .NET clones^H^H^H^H^Hcounterparts.
Now it's Main Street vs Wall Street or people vs corporations. And thanks to Supreme Court corporations have now unlimited powers to funding campaigns of both politicians and judges. This is significant difference between previous elections and this one. Wall Street is clearly winning on all fronts and ordinary people are basically f**cked at this point. If Gulf oil spill / fraudclosure fiascos doesn't tell it clear enough, I don't know what will. And I have no idea what could be done to stop this process.
Don't kid yourself about "goodness" Hurd did to HP. It's exactly opposite. He temporarily upped HP's share price at a huge cost of future prospects. R&D has been axed by more than half (from around 6% of revenues to a little more than 2% since 1998 - courtesy of both Mark and Carly). To defend share price HP is now pursuing some $10B buyback program (that is 4-5 times their R&D budget). Morale inside is at the rock bottom, good engineers are treated like a crap (both axing salaries and lack of professional prospects/interesting projects) and are defecting. Crooky MBAs are taking over everything, so we see more and more corruption scandals with HP involved. Now with no CEO and a big mess/scandals at highest executive levels HP's decisions will (propably) be chaotic at best.
Now, after screwing HP from inside Hurd is going to screw them from his Oracle position by using his knowledge / business relation to wrestle outsourcing contracts from HP. Good work Mark, you've taken the COTY crown ("Crook Of The Year") from Lloyd Blankfein who held this glorious title since 2008.
At the end of this film Schmidt somewhat resembles those borgs in The City of Lost Children. Using some pictures from this film on Google stories on special occasions would be cool indeed.
So, they crammed everything in a small chip and made it a BGA package. From this point on it should be easy to design some little socket similiar to all those *SD cards and modify this chip to be a SATA drive fitting to such socket. I wonder why they didn't do it (yet). Has BGA such a great cost advantage over custom sockets or do they avoid competing with conventional disk drive producers ?
Then i WOULD be nervous. If Novell accepts bid from private equity firm, then we can say goodbye to them. Typical scenario in company takeover by private equity firms is extracting whatever capital company has by any means. In such scenario you can safely assume that Novell will be stripped out of things having some value (that can be easily sold), saddled with huge debt and private equity fund will extract all this capital via some form of (huge) dividend. Remaining carcass is typically sold to some fool investor who then sees it bankrupting. While I don't like Novell too much (after that Microsoft debacle), I'm also worried. I suppose that some of their patents will be sold to whoever offers better price. If it will be some patent troll , then we may see problems ahead. Private equity fund (a.k.a financial vulture) managers won't give a crap about it.
From what I read on Hercules pages, IBM knew about it for a very long time. They even published some info about Hercules in one of their redbooks and then mysteriously removed it. I wonder whether it is a good defence against their assertions, however, I am not a lawyer.
Last time I was playing with it (caliper/HP-UX), it was doing up to around 1 instruction per cycle on average. Not very impressive but also not very bad either. It was three years ago, so I doubt that compilers would improve dramatically since then. And it has about half a clock speed Xeons have.
Now, since we have Nehalem EX and similiar monsters available, there is not much left on performance/scalability front for all those RISC designs, no matter how cool those designs are. The only thing keeping them alive is their hard-to-break-big-iron designs and hard-to-break-big-iron (system) software. Vendors might struggle to port these things onto now conventional x86_64 designs as they risk losing significant income stream doing so. But in the long run most of these things will be dead or become niches. The only area RISC will still shine are energy constrained environments (ARM?) and maybe some manycore designs, like some forms of GPUs evolving in this direction. In other words, the original area where RISC thingies started.
Note that I'm not trashing RISC here - this was a pretty neat idea. It's just history showing a bitter sense of humor: memory bandwidth is now a bottleneck and x86 code is known to be compact.
In isolation, it makes the Apache crew look pretty retarded but we also don't know what else was going on at the time or anything about this location.
What makes apache crew quite a bit retarded are their comments. Those s**heads were begging for permission to shoot and enjoying it. "Come on... pick up a weapon" and begging for that wounded reporter to pick up his camera. That makes me sick. And there was no remorse at all: "it's their fault for bringing their children to the battle". What a mess. Have those idiots played too much Quake ?
The sad thing about that is that no matter what equipment is in use, you actually need people willing to use it. And it seems that they achieved this by having some half brained chicken sh*ts enjoying shooting people even being comfortably out of range of their perceived enemies and not seeing any indications of those people attacking anyone (or anything). With such attitude they can carpet bomb any country in the world for any reason and still be proud of it.