I don't see much use for 1Gbps either, I rarely use the full capacity of my 100 Mbps. But there will probably come some use for 1 Gbps connections in the future, so it's always good to be ready. Who would have predicted 100 Mbps being (somewhat, here at least) common (or having a use) 10 years ago when we were waiting for DSL to get us out of the dial-up world.
Honestly, I'm sure that uses will naturally grow to fill the available pipe. It always happens. But, I'd have no idea what to do with that much bandwidth, either. I only have one machine with GigE capability right now, and no switches or routers that would handle it.
For web browsing, I think I'm more limited by latency right now than I am by raw bandwidth, and I only have 6 Mb down, and less than 1 Mb up. For big downloads like video, or ISO's, I think at a gigabit I'd probably be able to download a hell of a lot faster than I can watch it, or burn it, or whatever. Regardless, I'm sure it;d be fun trying to figure out a good use.:) I'd probably start doing absurd things like setting up a script to get every TV / movie torrent at my favorite sites, so I could watch a bit of something to decide if it is interesting, instead of looking it up and deciding if I want to download it.
It doesn't have to be a photo you posted... but someone else could have posted it and tagged you! You essentially have to start assuming that any digital photo taken of you will end up online with your name. Quite scary. Would be nice if there sere some sort of consent-based tagging, requiring your approval, but that's probably too complicated for Facebook to think about.
Indeed, I was thinking the same thing. Imagine, for example, that compumike and forkazoo decide to spend all day building a house with habitat for humanity. Exhausted, we finally head home. A daze on our faces from overwork, I decide to get a picture of compumike to celebrate an achievement in supporting the community. Using the facebook plugin for F-Spot (since I'm an advocate for intellectual freedom, I naturally use open source software for managing my photos!) I upload the day's photos. Most of them are of the construction, but only the one at the end of the day has compumike's face plainly visible. So, one of our common friends tags the photo, and comments, "ha ha, mikey luks totaly stoned! too much hippie lettuce, dude?" They say this because everybody who knows compumike knows that the thought of him being the slightest bit irresponsible is simply hilarious, and people find such friendly jabs amusing.
Now, somebody perusing compumike's profile on facebook looks at pictures of him, and sees a picture of him, with a comment indicating that he is a drug abuser. And, they move on to the next applicant.
Sure, it's an extreme example, but I think it bears some consideration. I think a social networking profile is absolutely fair game. OTOH, it needs to be understood in a context, and minor things shouldn't be considered demerits. Now, if every single photo in a profile was uploaded by the user themself, and shows them stabbing a kitten, and the profile lists kitten stabbing as their main activity, and every comment by the person's friends says "OMG, why did you stab a kitten in English class?" and "Dude, why did you even bring a kitten in your backpack to physics class, and why did you then stab it?"... Well, then you might want to actually check whether or not that's really the person's profile, rather than something put up by somebody trying the harm their reputation. (But, you still don't have reason to automatically assume that the person is insane and use the profile as a demerit in the application process.) Then, if it is theirs, you need to understand why they put it up. Is kitten stabbing actually a reference to a student film about kitten stabbers, which had significant dramatic and social-critique merit, for example?
For some reason, I only learned about that event in last last year. Ever since then, I've been deeply befuddled about why it isn't part of the curriculum of every American History course in the US.
I had always assumed that everyone paid for their interconnects, upstream and downstream, and thus the pipes were paid for.
In "peering" as described in the article. Does that mean the cost and monthly fees for the physical interconnect are free or does "peering" mean only the capacity used is free, but someone still pays for the physical plant.
Well, obviously somebody pays for the physical plant. It doesn't just magically appear in a shower of sparkles whenever two networks sign a peering agreement. But, each network just buys whatever equipment they need, and then they plug it together. It's just like if I decided I was going to run a cat. 5 cable to my neighbor's house. We'd basically have a peering arrangement where I could see his network, and he could see mine. He would own his switch, and I would own my switch. But, no money would change hands between us. I wouldn't pay for him to buy a switch so there is something for me to plug into. We would just each have the needed equipment. Maybe we would set up a two way redundant link, and each of us would buy an extra long cat 5 cable for the peering.
Peering between major networks is fundamentally the exact same thing as peering between home networks, or department networks on a school campus, or any other networks. The complexity of the networks being joined together may be different, and the equipment being used to do it may range from a ten dollar hub to a zillion dollar fiber optic monster, but the concept is the same.
When you sign up for Qwest DSL or whatever, it isn't like Qwest has a giant cable running from their building to THE INTERNET. The Internet is just a collection of networks. Some networks make you pay to connect. Others just connect between each other. That's the difference between transit and peering.
Somehow I don't think you understand what compatible means. If you plug x86 code into this chip and it works, then it's x86 compatible. The specifics of how all that happens once those instructions flow into the silicon is irrelevant for this particular discussion.
If a software solution like binary translation counts as x86 compatible, then every CPU architecture ever made is x86 compatible, since it could run an emulator. Consequently, you definition of x86 compatible has no meaning above and beyond Turing machine. IMHO, any x86 compatible chip must imply actual hardware relating specifically to x86, or there wasn't any reason to mention x86 in the first place.
Without dismissing your points, I don't think they outweigh the value of the parent poster's suggestion. What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
Depends on the subject of the book. Standard ISO C, Algorithms and Design Patterns, Computer Architecture, 68k/MIPS assembly, and Operating System Fundamentals are all subjects that would be served perfectly well by a 4 year old text. Direct3D is much more fluid than any of those things, and an ancient version is basically useless. However, they are all "Computer" texts. Does preparation for a career in computers mean Sys Admin, Programmer, or guy who works at Best Buy recommending video card upgrades?
IMO, given the volatility of some types of information, and the fact that many of your kids who will be most interested in an advanced course will go to college and not apply anything you teach them on the job for another four years, finding a current text seems like you are just doing it wrong. Finding a timeless subject may prove vastly more valuable.
(and, cue the xkcd "you are doing it wrong" strip about voting machines with antivirus... ):)
Encouraging web browsers to ignore security irregularities and allow users to access sites that handle private information *without* bringing it to the user's attention is just irresponsible.
Thankfully, there is a reasonable middle ground between "treat as an error" and "don't bring it to the user's attention"
IMO, something like the FF3 persistent "do you want to remember this password" bar would make a good starting point as far as UI. Don't force the user to click or interact with the warning, just have it up there, and they can dismiss it if they want.
"Information is being sent over a securely encrypted link, but you should be aware that the identity of this site has not been independently confirmed. Do you want to trust this site?" |Trust| |Don't Trust| |X (Close)|
That way, I can poke around the website, make sure I seem to be where I expect, and then hit trust. Then, FF would cache the cert, and warn me if it changes in case of a MITM. If I click that I distrust, I'll get an additional jumbo bigletters warning if I ever run across the same cert, reminding me that I had decided to distrust it.
This doesn't hurt usability of sites that can't or won't get CA certs (for example, shared hosts. Or, hypothetical Chinese dissident groups who want to publish reports about government corruption, and want to avoid having a CA confirm any identities.) And, it still makes sure users know something unusual is happening.
It has seemed very strange to me seeing all the hype about global warming and such since I was young, yet seeing years like these recent ones where we are hitting some pretty long cold stretches, this year particularly. Are we or are we not actually having "global warming"?
Well, first off, don't think of climate as something that can really be measured on a scale of less than about 20 years. For climate, 20 years is planck time. Solar sunspot cycles take about that much time, so fluctuations shorter than that are just "in the noise" for climate. That's the difference between climate and weather. Weatherman says it'll be a rainy afternoon. Climateman says it'll be a rainy century. Having a solid ten year stretch without a single drop of rain can still bear out a rainy climate on the avergage over a century.
Second, whenever your hear "warming," substitute "climate change." As you trap more of the sun's energy, you do see an overall increase in temperature, so global warming is literally correct in a big view. But, the big picture can be very subtle and the local view can be very different. Warming isn't so much about each and every day being slightly warmer - it's about adding energy to a system. Think in terms of nuclear bombs, for example. Imagine an underwater test of a fusion device. It'd be a fucking huge amount of energy dumped into the ocean. But, how much would the temperature of the whole Pacific ocean rise from a single multimegaton fusion powered death device? Only a teeny, tiny, probably immeasurable fraction of a piece of a part of a degree.
So, when scientists say, "the average temperature will rise by one degree in the next century," don't think of it in terms of every day will be one degree warmer. Think of it in terms of a lot of nuclear bombs worth of energy being added into the potentially unstable systems that result in weather, and probably knocking some processes out of whack compared to what we are used to. Some places may see a many degree rise in temperature, but the overall average is much smaller. That means some places, and some years, you see a many degree drop in temperature to even out the slightly high average.
So, don't look at a day, don't look at a place, don't look at a year. Try to think in terms of subtler changes over much longer periods. Then, it'll start to make more sense. The controversy over global climate change isn't a result of failure of science. It's a result of failure of science to effectively communicate.
Personally, I think the broadband penetration number ("our rank has fallen to #22") is a bit of a red herring because the US is far less densely populated than most other countries and thus perfect broadband penetration is not feasible. And while I'm all for net neutrality, that issue alone is not going to determine who I vote for.
Yeah, population density explains it. That's why a typical Canadian broadband connection is faster that a typical broadband connection in the US (or any particular part of the US, regardless of population density.)
Looking at the post from the fellow in Romania, I think it's interesting that HDTV is normal here is the US, but basically doesn't exist in Romania, while the reverse is true for fast Internet. It's not a matter of technology level, or wealth. It's just a matter of priorities. Romania invested in a key enabling technology that has impacts in education, the economy, and individual political empowerment. The US invested in American Idol with extra pixels. And, this makes me sad. I know we could do better, and I just don't understand why we as a society choose not to.
Boost is created and used by a highly vocal minority of C++ supergeeks. You can play with the definition of "modern", but it's only been in the recent past that Boost even compiled on more than the bleeding edge platforms. Most of the C++ projects I've worked on professionally are still worrying about whether to allow non-trivial use of templates or how to avoid screwing up exceptions, never mind trying to fight through the mess that is getting Boost installed and running these days and spending time getting lawyers to review the licensing terms.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't think boost is everywhere. I mean, I used to. I thought I was the only one who wasn't using it, and that I must be missing out horribly. My projects were working fine, and I didn't really need boost, so I just accepted I was the only one not using it. Over time, I started to have the odd belief that I and everyone I talked to were the only ones not madly in love with template metaprogramming, and we (myself and everyone I know) were somehow simple minded abominations who just weren't clever enough to see how everything needed to be done with templates.
That said, the threading API is conveniently portable to all the platforms I am likely to target with it, and saves me having to worry about platform specific details. So, I am slowly starting to move more and more in the boost direction.
They weren't 'seized'. They asked for them, and they were given to them by the person responsible for them. He or she could have said no.
Part of the issue is that the FBI has an enourmously imbalanced amount of power in any FBI - some_guy interaction. So, most people wouldn't just say no to the FBI. They wouldn't because they don't want to get the fucking FBI annoyed at them. They wouldn't because they aren't sure if they are allowed to. They wouldn't because they don't want to deal with the hassle of dealing with the FBI a second time when they show up with a warrant. They wouldn't because they don't want to be known as unpatriotic. Whatever. The simple fact is that there are plenty of people who wouldn't say no to the FBI.
Consequently, the FBI has a responsibility to use their power correctly, gently, and in an absurdly by the book way, in order to avoid even the appearance of abusing that authority. IMHO, that means always getting a warrant instead of going on extrajudicial fishing expeditions.
The librarian is not to blame. Sure, he surrendered what I assume is actually public property to somebody without any need to do so, and adversely effected the available resources at the library. But, the real problem is that FBI agents can go around saying, "Hey, give me this just because I say so. Nobody has double checked me to see if this request is appropriate or related to a case, because I have no warrant. Give it to me anyway." I doubt that abuse of this is widespread, but IMHO, the possibility of it has to be seen as completely unacceptable.
Does this thing run the VM as some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS or does it piggyback the other OS's on a parent OS.
It's not a hypervisor. It's basically just an application that you run under your real OS.
If It's a hypervisor like thing where all the OS's' are symmetric then I guess it must be getting in the way of my "normal" OS and limiting it to single core?
If it's not a hypervisor/symmetric VM and one OS is the master, Do all the OS's have full access to the hardware functions. So for example if I my mac is the master OS, and I set up a firewall set, does the windows OS have to go through the mac's firewall (and thus be protected better) or does it have direct access to the ports itself. If the latter who negotiates the conflicts when both want the CD or audio port.
The main OS treats it as an ordinary application. The primary OS firewall will effect hosted machines, for example, and as far as audio, as long as your primary OS can deal with multiple applications playing sound, then it's a non issue. Otherwise, it happens as any other conflict would. Generally, first to open the device wins.
Finally, are the VMs portabel from machine to machine. Or even platform to platform.
So If I create a VM on one machine, save it's state and open it on another machine, does it just run? (even the network settings?) What if the second machine was say an AMD and the first an Intel. What if the first host was a mac and the second host a linux machine?
Yes, you can move the VM images around. Part of the whole point of the VM is that it is running on the virtual hardware, and doesn't have the ability to know what the physical hardware is.
Is there any way to force a process to run over 2 cores at 100%?
No. Some apps are only trying to do one thing at a time. Giving them the resources to do two things at once won't change that. It'd be like giving you two cars and telling you to get someplace twice as fast.
If not...how would 300,000 cores help unless you are running 300,000 processes, or an app that you know will scale over that many cores?
The preceding was in fact a serious question.
You only bother to buy a beast like that if you have code that will scale to that many cores. That's easy because you won't be using just off the shelf code. A lot of the code that runs on that machine probably won't get run on anything else unmodified. When you are writing your code for a specific machine, it's more natural that you would take care to make it run well on that machine.
Okay, I'm sure you've gotten this joke a statistically significant number of times, but have you done any metrics on how many people ask you... "Longevity research? De Grey? Dorian Gray?" per month? Does this joke get weaker over time, or stronger? Can you give us some sort of picture of the phenomenon?
More to the point : how long do you think this joke can last? Can this joke be made to last for as much as 1000 years? Have there been any recent advances in extending the lifespan of a joke?
I can't tell if you're making fun of Extreme Programming proper, the way it is defined here: Fowler tract.
It strikes me as pretty cool... Just an unfortunate name.
I was making fun of extreme programming. Honestly, I don't have a problem with it. It is just one of those things that, if you investigate the core philosophy, is all eminently reasonable, and is something that evolved to address real world concerns. OTOH, if you move beyond the core philosophy and talk to some of the narrow minded ideologues and idiotic buzzwordologists, then extreme programming can move from something perfectly reasonable to being something perfectly in need of being made fun of!:)
My only real issue is all the hype that surrounds "XP" and "agile development" such that some of the virtue gets lost of the noise of "exciting" and "new." If I could pull off that kind of buzz for Xtreme Classless Proceduralism, I'm sure that PHB's everywhere would be lining up around the block to learn new and exciting ways to force their developers to upgrade to my special 800 dollar version of vi, so that they can code in new and exciting C.
Which reminds me, I also need to figure out someway to write a book about a paradigm called "Write Once, Run Once" to promote development of incredibly unreliable code.
Indeed, I can't help but think this is like a preview ad for an upcoming story on thedailywtf.com, where it all ends with some developer being forced to port an Occam runtime to his blackberry before he is allowed to rewrite "fortune" in Occam, so his boss can have his blackberry tell him pithy sayings every day, because the whole corporation decided the standardize on a platform that somebody's cousin's uncle's brother's hairdresser said was really up and coming. (And, they offer consulting services for...)
That said, it really depends on the situation. If absolutely everything is done in a new language, for no good reason other than developer whim of the day, and there really are a great many different groups working on different projects, then "soft standards" could be extremely beneficial.
If your company can dramatically narrow down it's list of preferred languages to C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby, and if you have a good reason to use something else, pitch it to your manager first, and he'll probably be fine with it, then maybe it really is time to think about some standards. (Even if the Mac port will still involve some Objective C...)
Look forward to my upcoming book on the subject: Development 2.0 : Practical Perfection With The "DeCISt" Paradigm in the Enterprise.
Seriously, a year or so ago, a friend of mine and I were just about ready to write a book about the benefits of procedural programming in C using a simple text editor, and then just buzzword the shit out of it and hype it up like Xtreme Programming and such, and pretend it was a new revelation. For the life of me, I can't remember what we were going to call it. Something like the Post Object Paradigm, or Modern Objectless Development, or some such shit. We would have made millions if we weren't lazy asses.
The worst part is, here in Québec people keep calling them "Site internet" because they seem to fear the english word "Web" in "Site Web".
Stupid Office de la langue française,
The good news is that Web sites are at Internet sites. Internet site isn't strictly a wrong word, it just also applies to sites that serve only FTP, but no HTTP, and so forth. It's just a less specific term.
You're absolutely right, every solution that our politicians are offering is just "more government", even though it's never been shown to solve anything.
An election is a job interview. When you elect a lawmaker, you are picking somebody for the profession of making laws. Naturally, if a person is good at that profession, he will make as many laws as possible. Every two, four, or six years, he has to re-interview for his job, so he wants to be able to get in front of people and explain what a good job he did making laws.
Lawmakers offer "more government" because a careful (s)election process proved that the majority of people thought that person actually would be good at making more government. It's the whole point.
Of course, if I ever run for office, I'll pledge to be incompetant at the job.
I only found out that Mandy was male when I tried to grope her.
You should have payed attention to the fact that "Lola" was listed as her favorite song in her profile, (and read her blog post about anally raping unsuspecting men).
Why not simply have a law where you must drive with "due care and attention". This covers everything from texting to putting on your make-up. No need to mention everything specifically. No need to create new laws for new technology.
Well, I tend to consider eating and talking perfectly reasonable to do while driving. Thus, my definition of due care and attention includes those things. Other people would naturally disagree with me. So, if I argue I was complying with the law by having a paper towel in my lap so I could drop my food at a moment's notice and dedicate myself fully to driving if there was a change in circumstance... But, the cop takes a hard line approach and says any eating while you drive is failing to use due care... Well, that probably doesn't play out well for me even if I believed I was complying perfectly with the law. Some degree of vagueness if correct in a law, because it should cover a range of situations. OTOH, a clear law prevents annoying cops from applying it to anybody they think isn't absolutely perfect.
I see your point concerning users who don't have a legit copy of Windows and don't want to use a bootleg, but if you want good 3D, wouldn't you be better off dual-booting?
Absolutely. But, many of us don't feel like bothering to reboot just to play a video game or whatever, so WINE vs. VM is the main comparison if either will be a serviceable solution.
If you have a torrent downloading under Linux, which you want to kill time playing a game until it completes, or something, then rebooting into windows would stop whatever you were waiting for. Just an example. Personally, I never download lots of Doctor Who torrents and then play Moon Project while waiting for episodes to finish... Erm, never mind.
When I first started using GNU/Linux in 1999, I knew that if I wanted to run Windows apps, the best way to go about it was to dual-boot. Now, it appears that the most convenient way to run Windows apps is to run Windows in a virtual machine. Since both dual-booting and virtualization appear to be more convenient ways to run Windows apps than WINE, where does WINE fit in?
WINE fits in for people who don't have a copy of Windows, people who don't want to bother to boot up a full VM just to run one small app, and with anything 3D. Right now, the virtualisation options on Linux don't offer worthwhile 3D support. By offering mediocre 3D support, WINE wins. For things like gaming, WINE is currently a suboptimal solution, but better than my experiences with VM's. I recently played through a few games of Moon Prject on Ubuntu. The visuals were a little off, and rather slow, but it worked well enough to be perfectly enjoyable.
Take a look at anything LightWave, Maya, 3Dsmax, Softimage, Blender, etc spits out of its render engines, or visual effects in recent movies... granted, that's (as stated a few times in the discussion) years away... but, I don't think anyone is arguing against RayTracing.
None of the programs you mentioned is a pure ray tracer. All of them can be used to make images which involve ray tracing, but a lot of great work has been done in those programs without tracing any rays. So, probably not the best example. RenderMan, for example, only added support for tracing rays relatively recently. In most production renderers, you will have simple scan-line style rasterisation done for initial view determination, and rays will only be traced for secondary rays on materials, and shadow hit testing on some lights.
Coming from a background in animation (which did involve dealing with scenes that involved ray tracing), and some OpenGL programming, these discussions are interesting, but it is strange how heated the debates get, and how people start citing rather nonsensical examples of things.
If you want to cite an example of a fully ray traced scene, mention anything that came out of POV Ray. It's a pure ray tracer.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I'm sure that uses will naturally grow to fill the available pipe. It always happens. But, I'd have no idea what to do with that much bandwidth, either. I only have one machine with GigE capability right now, and no switches or routers that would handle it.
For web browsing, I think I'm more limited by latency right now than I am by raw bandwidth, and I only have 6 Mb down, and less than 1 Mb up. For big downloads like video, or ISO's, I think at a gigabit I'd probably be able to download a hell of a lot faster than I can watch it, or burn it, or whatever. Regardless, I'm sure it;d be fun trying to figure out a good use. :) I'd probably start doing absurd things like setting up a script to get every TV / movie torrent at my favorite sites, so I could watch a bit of something to decide if it is interesting, instead of looking it up and deciding if I want to download it.
Indeed, I was thinking the same thing. Imagine, for example, that compumike and forkazoo decide to spend all day building a house with habitat for humanity. Exhausted, we finally head home. A daze on our faces from overwork, I decide to get a picture of compumike to celebrate an achievement in supporting the community. Using the facebook plugin for F-Spot (since I'm an advocate for intellectual freedom, I naturally use open source software for managing my photos!) I upload the day's photos. Most of them are of the construction, but only the one at the end of the day has compumike's face plainly visible. So, one of our common friends tags the photo, and comments, "ha ha, mikey luks totaly stoned! too much hippie lettuce, dude?" They say this because everybody who knows compumike knows that the thought of him being the slightest bit irresponsible is simply hilarious, and people find such friendly jabs amusing.
Now, somebody perusing compumike's profile on facebook looks at pictures of him, and sees a picture of him, with a comment indicating that he is a drug abuser. And, they move on to the next applicant.
Sure, it's an extreme example, but I think it bears some consideration. I think a social networking profile is absolutely fair game. OTOH, it needs to be understood in a context, and minor things shouldn't be considered demerits. Now, if every single photo in a profile was uploaded by the user themself, and shows them stabbing a kitten, and the profile lists kitten stabbing as their main activity, and every comment by the person's friends says "OMG, why did you stab a kitten in English class?" and "Dude, why did you even bring a kitten in your backpack to physics class, and why did you then stab it?" ... Well, then you might want to actually check whether or not that's really the person's profile, rather than something put up by somebody trying the harm their reputation. (But, you still don't have reason to automatically assume that the person is insane and use the profile as a demerit in the application process.) Then, if it is theirs, you need to understand why they put it up. Is kitten stabbing actually a reference to a student film about kitten stabbers, which had significant dramatic and social-critique merit, for example?
For some reason, I only learned about that event in last last year. Ever since then, I've been deeply befuddled about why it isn't part of the curriculum of every American History course in the US.
Well, obviously somebody pays for the physical plant. It doesn't just magically appear in a shower of sparkles whenever two networks sign a peering agreement. But, each network just buys whatever equipment they need, and then they plug it together. It's just like if I decided I was going to run a cat. 5 cable to my neighbor's house. We'd basically have a peering arrangement where I could see his network, and he could see mine. He would own his switch, and I would own my switch. But, no money would change hands between us. I wouldn't pay for him to buy a switch so there is something for me to plug into. We would just each have the needed equipment. Maybe we would set up a two way redundant link, and each of us would buy an extra long cat 5 cable for the peering.
Peering between major networks is fundamentally the exact same thing as peering between home networks, or department networks on a school campus, or any other networks. The complexity of the networks being joined together may be different, and the equipment being used to do it may range from a ten dollar hub to a zillion dollar fiber optic monster, but the concept is the same.
When you sign up for Qwest DSL or whatever, it isn't like Qwest has a giant cable running from their building to THE INTERNET. The Internet is just a collection of networks. Some networks make you pay to connect. Others just connect between each other. That's the difference between transit and peering.
If a software solution like binary translation counts as x86 compatible, then every CPU architecture ever made is x86 compatible, since it could run an emulator. Consequently, you definition of x86 compatible has no meaning above and beyond Turing machine. IMHO, any x86 compatible chip must imply actual hardware relating specifically to x86, or there wasn't any reason to mention x86 in the first place.
Depends on the subject of the book. Standard ISO C, Algorithms and Design Patterns, Computer Architecture, 68k/MIPS assembly, and Operating System Fundamentals are all subjects that would be served perfectly well by a 4 year old text. Direct3D is much more fluid than any of those things, and an ancient version is basically useless. However, they are all "Computer" texts. Does preparation for a career in computers mean Sys Admin, Programmer, or guy who works at Best Buy recommending video card upgrades?
IMO, given the volatility of some types of information, and the fact that many of your kids who will be most interested in an advanced course will go to college and not apply anything you teach them on the job for another four years, finding a current text seems like you are just doing it wrong. Finding a timeless subject may prove vastly more valuable.
(and, cue the xkcd "you are doing it wrong" strip about voting machines with antivirus... ) :)
Thankfully, there is a reasonable middle ground between "treat as an error" and "don't bring it to the user's attention"
IMO, something like the FF3 persistent "do you want to remember this password" bar would make a good starting point as far as UI. Don't force the user to click or interact with the warning, just have it up there, and they can dismiss it if they want.
"Information is being sent over a securely encrypted link, but you should be aware that the identity of this site has not been independently confirmed. Do you want to trust this site?" |Trust| |Don't Trust| |X (Close)|
That way, I can poke around the website, make sure I seem to be where I expect, and then hit trust. Then, FF would cache the cert, and warn me if it changes in case of a MITM. If I click that I distrust, I'll get an additional jumbo bigletters warning if I ever run across the same cert, reminding me that I had decided to distrust it.
This doesn't hurt usability of sites that can't or won't get CA certs (for example, shared hosts. Or, hypothetical Chinese dissident groups who want to publish reports about government corruption, and want to avoid having a CA confirm any identities.) And, it still makes sure users know something unusual is happening.
Well, first off, don't think of climate as something that can really be measured on a scale of less than about 20 years. For climate, 20 years is planck time. Solar sunspot cycles take about that much time, so fluctuations shorter than that are just "in the noise" for climate. That's the difference between climate and weather. Weatherman says it'll be a rainy afternoon. Climateman says it'll be a rainy century. Having a solid ten year stretch without a single drop of rain can still bear out a rainy climate on the avergage over a century.
Second, whenever your hear "warming," substitute "climate change." As you trap more of the sun's energy, you do see an overall increase in temperature, so global warming is literally correct in a big view. But, the big picture can be very subtle and the local view can be very different. Warming isn't so much about each and every day being slightly warmer - it's about adding energy to a system. Think in terms of nuclear bombs, for example. Imagine an underwater test of a fusion device. It'd be a fucking huge amount of energy dumped into the ocean. But, how much would the temperature of the whole Pacific ocean rise from a single multimegaton fusion powered death device? Only a teeny, tiny, probably immeasurable fraction of a piece of a part of a degree.
So, when scientists say, "the average temperature will rise by one degree in the next century," don't think of it in terms of every day will be one degree warmer. Think of it in terms of a lot of nuclear bombs worth of energy being added into the potentially unstable systems that result in weather, and probably knocking some processes out of whack compared to what we are used to. Some places may see a many degree rise in temperature, but the overall average is much smaller. That means some places, and some years, you see a many degree drop in temperature to even out the slightly high average.
So, don't look at a day, don't look at a place, don't look at a year. Try to think in terms of subtler changes over much longer periods. Then, it'll start to make more sense. The controversy over global climate change isn't a result of failure of science. It's a result of failure of science to effectively communicate.
Yeah, population density explains it. That's why a typical Canadian broadband connection is faster that a typical broadband connection in the US (or any particular part of the US, regardless of population density.)
Looking at the post from the fellow in Romania, I think it's interesting that HDTV is normal here is the US, but basically doesn't exist in Romania, while the reverse is true for fast Internet. It's not a matter of technology level, or wealth. It's just a matter of priorities. Romania invested in a key enabling technology that has impacts in education, the economy, and individual political empowerment. The US invested in American Idol with extra pixels. And, this makes me sad. I know we could do better, and I just don't understand why we as a society choose not to.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't think boost is everywhere. I mean, I used to. I thought I was the only one who wasn't using it, and that I must be missing out horribly. My projects were working fine, and I didn't really need boost, so I just accepted I was the only one not using it. Over time, I started to have the odd belief that I and everyone I talked to were the only ones not madly in love with template metaprogramming, and we (myself and everyone I know) were somehow simple minded abominations who just weren't clever enough to see how everything needed to be done with templates.
That said, the threading API is conveniently portable to all the platforms I am likely to target with it, and saves me having to worry about platform specific details. So, I am slowly starting to move more and more in the boost direction.
Part of the issue is that the FBI has an enourmously imbalanced amount of power in any FBI - some_guy interaction. So, most people wouldn't just say no to the FBI. They wouldn't because they don't want to get the fucking FBI annoyed at them. They wouldn't because they aren't sure if they are allowed to. They wouldn't because they don't want to deal with the hassle of dealing with the FBI a second time when they show up with a warrant. They wouldn't because they don't want to be known as unpatriotic. Whatever. The simple fact is that there are plenty of people who wouldn't say no to the FBI.
Consequently, the FBI has a responsibility to use their power correctly, gently, and in an absurdly by the book way, in order to avoid even the appearance of abusing that authority. IMHO, that means always getting a warrant instead of going on extrajudicial fishing expeditions.
The librarian is not to blame. Sure, he surrendered what I assume is actually public property to somebody without any need to do so, and adversely effected the available resources at the library. But, the real problem is that FBI agents can go around saying, "Hey, give me this just because I say so. Nobody has double checked me to see if this request is appropriate or related to a case, because I have no warrant. Give it to me anyway." I doubt that abuse of this is widespread, but IMHO, the possibility of it has to be seen as completely unacceptable.
It's not a hypervisor. It's basically just an application that you run under your real OS.
The main OS treats it as an ordinary application. The primary OS firewall will effect hosted machines, for example, and as far as audio, as long as your primary OS can deal with multiple applications playing sound, then it's a non issue. Otherwise, it happens as any other conflict would. Generally, first to open the device wins.
Yes, you can move the VM images around. Part of the whole point of the VM is that it is running on the virtual hardware, and doesn't have the ability to know what the physical hardware is.
No. Some apps are only trying to do one thing at a time. Giving them the resources to do two things at once won't change that. It'd be like giving you two cars and telling you to get someplace twice as fast.
You only bother to buy a beast like that if you have code that will scale to that many cores. That's easy because you won't be using just off the shelf code. A lot of the code that runs on that machine probably won't get run on anything else unmodified. When you are writing your code for a specific machine, it's more natural that you would take care to make it run well on that machine.
More to the point : how long do you think this joke can last? Can this joke be made to last for as much as 1000 years? Have there been any recent advances in extending the lifespan of a joke?
I was making fun of extreme programming. Honestly, I don't have a problem with it. It is just one of those things that, if you investigate the core philosophy, is all eminently reasonable, and is something that evolved to address real world concerns. OTOH, if you move beyond the core philosophy and talk to some of the narrow minded ideologues and idiotic buzzwordologists, then extreme programming can move from something perfectly reasonable to being something perfectly in need of being made fun of! :)
My only real issue is all the hype that surrounds "XP" and "agile development" such that some of the virtue gets lost of the noise of "exciting" and "new." If I could pull off that kind of buzz for Xtreme Classless Proceduralism, I'm sure that PHB's everywhere would be lining up around the block to learn new and exciting ways to force their developers to upgrade to my special 800 dollar version of vi, so that they can code in new and exciting C.
Which reminds me, I also need to figure out someway to write a book about a paradigm called "Write Once, Run Once" to promote development of incredibly unreliable code.
Indeed, I can't help but think this is like a preview ad for an upcoming story on thedailywtf.com, where it all ends with some developer being forced to port an Occam runtime to his blackberry before he is allowed to rewrite "fortune" in Occam, so his boss can have his blackberry tell him pithy sayings every day, because the whole corporation decided the standardize on a platform that somebody's cousin's uncle's brother's hairdresser said was really up and coming. (And, they offer consulting services for...)
That said, it really depends on the situation. If absolutely everything is done in a new language, for no good reason other than developer whim of the day, and there really are a great many different groups working on different projects, then "soft standards" could be extremely beneficial.
If your company can dramatically narrow down it's list of preferred languages to C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby, and if you have a good reason to use something else, pitch it to your manager first, and he'll probably be fine with it, then maybe it really is time to think about some standards. (Even if the Mac port will still involve some Objective C...)
Developer Centric Individualized Standardisation.
Look forward to my upcoming book on the subject:
Development 2.0 : Practical Perfection With The "DeCISt" Paradigm in the Enterprise.
Seriously, a year or so ago, a friend of mine and I were just about ready to write a book about the benefits of procedural programming in C using a simple text editor, and then just buzzword the shit out of it and hype it up like Xtreme Programming and such, and pretend it was a new revelation. For the life of me, I can't remember what we were going to call it. Something like the Post Object Paradigm, or Modern Objectless Development, or some such shit. We would have made millions if we weren't lazy asses.
Egad man, what evil genius dreampt up this beast? Seriously, this is awesome -- a whole new level of hierarchy for my zillion tab wikipedia benders.
The good news is that Web sites are at Internet sites. Internet site isn't strictly a wrong word, it just also applies to sites that serve only FTP, but no HTTP, and so forth. It's just a less specific term.
An election is a job interview. When you elect a lawmaker, you are picking somebody for the profession of making laws. Naturally, if a person is good at that profession, he will make as many laws as possible. Every two, four, or six years, he has to re-interview for his job, so he wants to be able to get in front of people and explain what a good job he did making laws.
Lawmakers offer "more government" because a careful (s)election process proved that the majority of people thought that person actually would be good at making more government. It's the whole point.
Of course, if I ever run for office, I'll pledge to be incompetant at the job.
You should have payed attention to the fact that "Lola" was listed as her favorite song in her profile, (and read her blog post about anally raping unsuspecting men).
Well, I tend to consider eating and talking perfectly reasonable to do while driving. Thus, my definition of due care and attention includes those things. Other people would naturally disagree with me. So, if I argue I was complying with the law by having a paper towel in my lap so I could drop my food at a moment's notice and dedicate myself fully to driving if there was a change in circumstance... But, the cop takes a hard line approach and says any eating while you drive is failing to use due care... Well, that probably doesn't play out well for me even if I believed I was complying perfectly with the law. Some degree of vagueness if correct in a law, because it should cover a range of situations. OTOH, a clear law prevents annoying cops from applying it to anybody they think isn't absolutely perfect.
Absolutely. But, many of us don't feel like bothering to reboot just to play a video game or whatever, so WINE vs. VM is the main comparison if either will be a serviceable solution.
If you have a torrent downloading under Linux, which you want to kill time playing a game until it completes, or something, then rebooting into windows would stop whatever you were waiting for. Just an example. Personally, I never download lots of Doctor Who torrents and then play Moon Project while waiting for episodes to finish... Erm, never mind.
WINE fits in for people who don't have a copy of Windows, people who don't want to bother to boot up a full VM just to run one small app, and with anything 3D. Right now, the virtualisation options on Linux don't offer worthwhile 3D support. By offering mediocre 3D support, WINE wins. For things like gaming, WINE is currently a suboptimal solution, but better than my experiences with VM's. I recently played through a few games of Moon Prject on Ubuntu. The visuals were a little off, and rather slow, but it worked well enough to be perfectly enjoyable.
None of the programs you mentioned is a pure ray tracer. All of them can be used to make images which involve ray tracing, but a lot of great work has been done in those programs without tracing any rays. So, probably not the best example. RenderMan, for example, only added support for tracing rays relatively recently. In most production renderers, you will have simple scan-line style rasterisation done for initial view determination, and rays will only be traced for secondary rays on materials, and shadow hit testing on some lights.
Coming from a background in animation (which did involve dealing with scenes that involved ray tracing), and some OpenGL programming, these discussions are interesting, but it is strange how heated the debates get, and how people start citing rather nonsensical examples of things.
If you want to cite an example of a fully ray traced scene, mention anything that came out of POV Ray. It's a pure ray tracer.