Out of everything I've tried (pretty much everything usable from C, C++, and C#), WPF is the best UI framework around. It is extremely flexible and can be very intimidating if you try to learn all the details too quickly, but the basics of it are easy. You should be able to pop out a good design pretty quickly. It's a shame that Mono has no plans to implement it, because everything else feels primitive in comparison.
If you don't mind dirtying your C++ with a less-than-modern design and ugly preprocessor hijinks, Qt can be a pretty solid framework. Works well on many platforms and is full of features. Has a lot of portable non-UI things too, but I haven't used much of it.
Python's UI stuff is simple but has a lot of features. Great for quick, portable apps. Easy integration with C++ if you need it.
I avoid wxWidgets. The last time I tried using it (about a year ago), I ended up very frustrated rooting around their code to find that it makes a bunch of stupid assumptions about things like DPI, default fonts, etc. that fall apart pretty easily.
I also avoid GTK, but mainly just because it always feels "off" on Windows.
Hmmm... Where do I start. The "Python UI stuff" that you are talking about is probably tk. It's worth noting that you can use tk from many other languages besides python, python wasn't the first language to support tk, and tk isn't the only "UI stuff" that you can use in python. (For example, most of the GUI python stuff I've written has used Qt, which you imply requires working in C++.) For bonus points, you can even try to import Qt, catch an exception if that fails, and use tk to do your UI if Qt is unavailable on the system where you are running. All in one script, extremely portable, and nicer looking than tk whenever possible.
As for Qt in C++, as an application developer, I don't really care if the build system is a bit wonky. When I put on my architect hat, I can certainly say that Qt is a giant monstrosity that is very different from anything I would have created on my own. But, that sort of philosophical issue doesn't really effect anything when you are making an app.
Re:The best way to avoid all that anxiety ...
on
Anxiety and IT?
·
· Score: 1
For the most part, things don't "come to a screeching halt" on their own, but it certainly happens in some cases. Cooling system breaks, and servers start to cook themselves. Power to the building does something wacky, and a spike makes it to the servers. A pipe bursts and floods the data center. Some of these things aren't directly monitorable in a way that will give you any warning. Sure, you can do a lot to make a robust infrastructure, (And it shocks me how little of that some people will accept!) but there's always going to be something that can "just go wrong" at any time. You simply don't have the resources, time, or budget to monitor every possible pipe fitting, capacitor, and asteroid.
So, having some concern over a possible kerplosion doesn't guarantee that appropriate measures haven't been taken. It just means it's very, very likely. It may also just mean that there isn't enough staff for most of the people to relax while somebody specific is on-call. (And they get a guarantee of the next holiday of.)
There is also the problem of applications that the guys responsible for aren't actually responsible for. IT gets handed horrible, broken, unclusterable applications with only one license all the time. There are real limits to what you can do to make something like that resilient, despite not having the authority to replace or fix it.
Why indeed?What reasonable motivation could he have to poll a well-established base of computer experts for advise? Could it be that an infrastructure is a hard thing to get perfectly right? Maybe up-front decisions made right will negate hours of work and wasted productivity down the line? Remember those security and infrastructure failings we've been so critical about all these years? Those clueless IT guys who screwed up royally and condemned employees and management to countless hardships? Maybe he doesn't want to end up in that position...
A good way to avoid ending up in that position is not to actively place yourself in that position. Don't bid for jobs you can't do. Don't agree to do jobs you can't do. Don't tell people you can do jobs you can't do.
The problem here isn't that he's asking slashdot. It's that he isn't asking slashdot with any apparent knowledge of the subject to support his questions There's no indication that he understands his clients actual needs, nor any indication that he could figure out any aspect of the job he is being paid to do, without slashdotters to get him started.
(*) It should be noted that the USG has steadfastly avoided violating the 3rd amendment, and should certainly be commended for its restraint in this matter.
This is false (unless "USG" specifically means the Federal government -- I would argue that state governments are just another level of the U.S. Gov't)
ObTopic: Demanding passwords is evil!
In a constitutional context like this, one would normally only be talking about the Federal government, since the US Constitution is the document that defines that Federal government, but doesn't define the state governments. There is a concept of "incorporation," but that isn't actually *written* in the constitution, so the actual applicability of it in any specific context is unpredictable.
Arm servers make sense in two places: the small and the giant. They fall down in the medium and large space.
In other words, my personal server currently runs a "low power" AMD Sempron. The CPU uses something like 40 Watts, and it is plenty fast enough for my needs. It makes my RAID work, and it serves stuff over NFS and Samba. There are only ever a few clients, and the CPU spends most days nearly idle. It's a small box with a small workload, and it would work just fine with an ARM CPU instead of an x86. (Assuming the hypothetical ARM system could physically connect my external RAID enclosure.) More CPU wouldn't hurt, and it would occasionally make a few things faster, but mostly putting a Xeon in this box would just make it louder.
In the realm of giant workloads, you have jobs that can't possibly be done by a single machine, no matter the budget. You are looking at needing many hundreds of even the biggest machines you can get. If you have a job that parallelizes that well, doing it with 1000 x86 boxes or 4000 ARM boxes isn't that big of a difference. If the ARM boxes are smaller, cheaper, and lower power enough that it outweighs the fact that you need more of them, then it would be crazy to go with whizzy Xeon boxes instead of Arm. Buzzword enthusiasts will throw labels like "Cloud scale computing" at this sort of thing.
Where ARM falls down on the job is anything that can be done by a 4 core Xeon, up to a handful of 32 Core Xeons. That's a big chunk of what we normally think of as the Server market. ARM doesn't compete very well in this space. When people say that ARM is a ridiculous idea for servers, this middle segment of the market is generally what they are thinking of. A cluster of a dozen little ARM boxes competes rather poorly with a single machine with four Xeon sockets in terms of management overhead, and the amount of effort required to parallelise workloads, and the amount of bandwidth between distant cores. If you have an application that has an expensive per-machine license, that speaks in favor of a single big machine, etc.
So, small office that needs a little NAS server to stash under the secretary's desk? ARM can pwn the market. Giant research institution with some parallelisable code trying to figure out how molecules do something naughty during supernovas? ARM can pwn the market. "Enterprise" level IT in a smallish, but uncrowded data center with adequate, already provisioned power and cooling... ARM may well be suitable in some cases, but it's certianly not an easy sell.
And, relatively common cell phones have 1 GB of RAM. In two years or so, a cell phone with 4 GB of RAM will seem perfectly reasonable. At that point, 64 bit ARM stops being a data center/desktop issue, and is simply required to hold onto the existing ARM core market.
That actually happens a lot, though not exactly as you describe. in Terminator:Salvation, there is a long shot when the hero gets into a helicopter, flies it around, gets caught in a big explosion, crashes. and gets grabbed by a terminator robot. It's a giant, epic shot, and it's pretty awesome. It was also at least three shots stitched together with a lot of work by the VFX team. Children of men also had a few famous long shots that were stitched together from several source takes. Contact had a famous "into the mirror" long shot years ago that was more obviously impossible than some of the others, but the majority of the audience didn't realize it was impossible, so it just seems like a long, clever shot.
To be fair, while the opening shot of Touch Of Evil was amazing, the movie itself was a steaming pile of dog shit worse than if Oracle bought a movie studio is decided to shit out a film version of Java.
HTML and CSS can not accomplish what the ADA is demanding.
Think about screen reader technology for the blind. Today even the best of these can not even handle a mildly complex page. I've tried them out at a friends house.
So, people will be encouraged to stop making needlessly overcomplicated sites. It sounds like nothing of value will be lost.
They are crap.
Assuming you mean the sites that don't work well when spoken, then yes. Assuming you mean the readers, then I disagree.
But it doesn't stop at your content. You are also responsible for all the advertising on your site, even when you don't create that advertising. Why should you serve a page without advertising to the blind? If that's how you make money for your site, you need to serve the ads to everyone.
How do you serve music to the deaf? Hmmm mmmm dum de dumm ta ta de da mmmm de mmmm?
And how do you serve online game content to the guy typing with his one hand, or his feet.
If you think this is easy, why don't you try it. The tools don't yet exist to do this in any economical way. If enforced to the letter, this serves only to drive most product advertising and support services off the web, shut down thousands of hobby sites, and shutter eCommerce.
I doubt you'll actually get many complaints for lack of advertising, especially considering that isn't really your "content." I've never heard of an ADA case where a blind person complained that they couldn't read a posted advertising flyer on a bulletin board in a store. If it does mean that the horrible chain of dozens of domains and layers of Javascript for ads has to go away so you just serve your ads yourself, meh. I'm still having trouble finding a lot of problems with this. You serve music to the deaf the same way you do everybody else. They just won't listen to it. Wall-Mart sells music on CD's. Deaf people are allowed to buy them. WalMart doesn't have to have employees to interpretive dance on command for deaf people who want to buy a CD but can't hear it. How do you serve content to the guy with one hand? Same way as everybody else. He'll probably just suck at league play against people who can push more buttons faster.
ADA compliance isn't about making every cripple get to win the Super Bowl, and every blind person win an Academy award for cinematography. It's about making minimal reasonable accommodations so that a person can live their life to the extent that is sensible. The government is involved, so there will probably be a few inane edge cases, but the basic principle here seems sound.
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Well, Oracle Solaris Express only exists because Open Solaris got killed. So, yeah. I think the hive mind pretty much called it on this one. Oracle has been actively, systematically destroying the good name of Sun. What's left is a stinky corpse stuffed full of medical waste that Oracle raped.
I dunno...maybe you plan things more than what I would guess most people do.
I've found that most of the time, at least with someone new you pick up...the mouths are occupied, clothing is flying off and you're going for the hole, and condoms really are a 2nd thought, if in fact you have one within reach.
You're not always in a bedroom when this hits, you know?
This is slashdot. Some of us have *plenty* of time to plan and prepare. Hell, I'll probably have condoms expire before I use them up. Do you know how long those things are good for?
Also, I don't understand why some guys complain so much about putting on a condom. First off, just make her do it. It's fun, and keeps both of you involved in the moment if you just think of it as a part of the process that you do together. Otherwise, if you do it yourself then either you don't do it often enough for it to actually be a bother in the grand scheme of things, or you do it often enough that you should probably suck less at it by now. If it really requires that much effort and concentration, just get a couple of boxes and practice solo until you can do it without taking so long you forget why you started. You were probably going to be playing with your dick that day anyway.
If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese. America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese. This is the country that invented spray on cheese. Everytime I talk about American cheese with Americans, they say, 'ah, but we do have good cheeses, you just have to look for them.' And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful, just bad. I don't know what it is. The US has contributed some fantastic music, movies, plays, inventions, economic theories, software and people to the world. Really great, great stuff.
But what you call cheese could kill a rhino at ten paces.
America certainly has a remarkable fascination with terrible cheese, and it's much harder to find good American cheese than good American beer. But, it does exist. America has the virtue of being a big enough country with enough immigrants from all over that we have at least a few people here and there who know how things should be done in almost any given subject. They just get massively outproduced by the crap makers pushing cheese-inspired "food style" post-modern "edible" yellow potentially-dairy vinyl.
But, yeah, most of the good cheese I've had has been imported.
As for beer, while Coors is the most well known beer from Colorado, I don't know anybody in Colorado who actually drinks it, because there are so many good local beers available that aren't Coors. (Fat Tire is pretty much the "standard" beer in Colorado.)
Basically, there's no difference in mechanism between selective breeding and evolution. It's just a difference in intent. The idea is that the people weren't specifically breeding the fish in the same way that people specifically bred cows and wheat and whatnot. In any case, the organisms most suited to their (human influenced) environment reproduced most successfully.
And you can plausibly argue three processor family switches if you count ARM. iOS is basically derived from OS-X. The sales model for iOS devices is different from the Mac, but the underlying technology is really not that different from what an ARM based OS-X Mac would be.
Also, X11 has been around since the Amiga was relevant.
I dunno what he did to make the server go airborne, but I do know that it must have been awesome.
Re:metaprogramming FTW!
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Basically, the stuff that you would reasonably use templates for in C++ can only be done with a bunch of duplicated code in C. Even in the C Standard Library (created by people who obviously know C very well), you see many very similar functions named with a suffix noting the data type that it takes or returns. They likely all have very similar implementations as well.
Mail servers forward only text email, stripping all MIME content. Useful in case of serious virus trouble.
Cell phone switches handle voice and SMS messages only. Maybe raw pictures on some platforms. No downloads, no "apps", no tethering, no IP.
Under severe overload conditions during a cyber-attack, the FCC should be able to order an advertising shutdown. All advertising servers must go offline until the emergency is over.
All this should be publicly tested occasionally, like the Emergency Broadcast System.
This would be enough to deal with serious overloads, outages, or viruses, but doesn't have censorship implications.
#1 - Can I have that now? #2 - So, in the event of a major telecoms emergency, make sure people can't download security updates for their phones? And make sure that I can't ssh into my servers to fix them from wherever I am ASAP? And make sure I have to tie up bandwidth voice calling 30 people instead of just sending an email explaining how to fix things? #3 - Advertising shutdown would mean that some sites that depend on advertising revenue to stay up would be at danger of collapse. Collapse is sometimes a suboptimal way to save things.
The regulators are not 'asleep at the wheel'. They are playing their historic role of do what the boss tells you, and if the boss doesn't tell you to bust one of the huge firms, you don't. If the regulators are incapable of protecting the small investors, then get rid of the regulators, but don't blame the technology. Your assumption that the market is more volatile today than ever before is weak. Take a look at the Dow in the 30s.
I've researched the Dow in the 30s. Yes, today's market really is more volatile in many ways. Nobody in the 1930's would have cared about shaving tens of microseconds off of trading time because the system operated on human-comprehensible time scales at that point. To pull off the sort of schemes modern HFT uses by exploiting a few microseconds, you would have needed hours in the market of the 1930's. Sure, it was full of speculators, but the market at that point was at least dominated by actual traders. Not just robots skimming off the top.
Hmm, I have been burned by smartphones in the past - too big and chunky, slow, complicated to use for simple tasks, fragile touch screens, proprietary-only interfaces and connectors,... Have they actually got better? What I want to know about any new smartphone is:
- Is it possible to access ALL functions without using touch-screen/stylo? - Can you connect to it using a simply USB cable? - Can it connect to my wirewless router? - Can I attach an external standard keyboard? - And of course, is basic functionality available without having to go through three layers of menus?
Finally, if it runs Linux, can I ssh to it over a simple, standard wireless connection?
I can't speak for every phone out there, but I have an n900, so I can answer with regard to that. Not specifcially advertising my phone, I'm sure there are others that do just as well on your criteria.
- Connection - Standard USB Micro B cable. It's mot USB Mini, but rather Micro, which is slightly less common. - I've never had a problem connecting to any of my own wireless hardware. - No way to directly connect a USB keyboard, as the device USB port doesn't support host mode. No idea about Bluetooth. (Never tried a bluetooth keyboard, so I have no idea if it would work.) You could technically VNC into the phone via a machine with a full keyboard and use it that way, if it were really important. - What constitutes "basic functionality" is debatable. I don't find things particularly hidden. From the desktop, making a call for me is generally one tap to get into the phone app, one tap on the name of a contact in my recent calls list, and one tap on the "cellular call" button. If I am in another app instead of at the desktop with the phone app icon on it, that'll be some extra tapping. If I want to call somebody who isn't on my list of recent contacts, that'll be some extra tapping to find them in the phone book. The "Start menu" screen does require tapping through an "expose" screen, which sometimes feels a little inefficient, but isn't bothersome in practice. - SSH to the phone doesn't work right out of the box. You have to install the ssh server package, but that just takes a second, and doesn't require any "heroic" efforts to root the phone or reflash firmware or do jailbreaking. It's pretty much exactly like installing openssh-server on a Debian box. I can't ssh into it over 3G because T-Mobile seems to block any server ports open on the phone. But, over wifi it works without any issues. The phone can also present itself as a USB ethernet adapter to a PC, so you can ssh to it over USB as well as the wireless. In addition to an ssh server, as I mentioned you can do a VNC server. Since the phone runs X11, you can also do display forwarding if that suits you. Run an app on the phone, but have the display for that specific app redirected over SSH or classic xauth stuff to your desktop with a full keyboard. The other way around works, too. I've run apps on my server that I had the UI forwarded to my phone. It's not always super practical, but it can be fun.
Considering any modern OS ships with encryption software by default, it'll be almost impossible to use any computer at all. Any common web browser will support HTTPS, for example. Windows and OS-X boxes will have ssh support. Windows boxes ship with encrypted NTFS support, etc. One would have to use something like an old DOS machine to find one with absolutely no software that could be considered encryption software on it. Technically, even getting a new computer and using it for a few minutes to remove the software would violate the order. (and make the machine useless for most any sort of work.) Even MS Word supports some encryption related DRMy features.
I really really love how you guys make suggestions for how the carriers should do it based on your little home network experience.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never engineered a cellular network. Even so, your assumption that my experience is based on my "little home network," seems surprising to me. It's neither based on anything, nor is it accurate. You'd do well to consider that people from a wide range of backgrounds frequent forums like this one, and a subset of them may well have technical knowledge that goes past the walls of their own apartment.
Remember, the networks in question a coexisting with technology that goes all the way back to 1980s, no one back then thought a user might be wanting to push a GB of data through a single handset.
Well, certainly. But, it was always known to be a publicly accessible medium. Cellular technology has been constantly upgraded since the classic analog networks of the 1980's, and if the upgrades didn't take security seriously, it was because of executive level decisions, not just engineering level impossibilities.
Well it is high time to start aggressively campaigning for an amendment to the DMCA setting out substantive penalties for false claims with significant payments to the party who were defamed and who had their constitutional rights to free speech infringed.
There are penalties. Nobody enforces them. Adding more text to the law won't help if nobody cares what it says now. It's just one of many examples of how the concept of teh rule of law has become fundamentally broken. It's a symptom of a much more serious issue than just needing a new paragraph in a bad law. It's an indicator of a desperate need for broad, immediate, systemic reforms in the USA that go far beyond IP law.
Intel's latest round of integrated GPUs is actually supposed to be pretty good, to the point that on lower end computers (like MacBooks) it may not be necessary to include even a low-end GPU.
I've been hearing that Intel's latest graphics are finally pretty good for over a decade. At this point, they could release a graphics chip so amazing that each polygon gives me twenty dollars and a blowjob, and I'd still make a careful point of never using Intel graphics, no matter the cost. It's like the boy who cried wolf. Eventually it just doesn't matter if the story becomes true.
Slightly less severe, but still fresh in my mind: "ATi finally has decent drivers."
nVidia has "Great performance while using very little power this time." They are the graphics vendor that I come closest to trusting, but frankly they all make the same claims every year and it gets a little boring.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of everything I've tried (pretty much everything usable from C, C++, and C#), WPF is the best UI framework around. It is extremely flexible and can be very intimidating if you try to learn all the details too quickly, but the basics of it are easy. You should be able to pop out a good design pretty quickly. It's a shame that Mono has no plans to implement it, because everything else feels primitive in comparison.
If you don't mind dirtying your C++ with a less-than-modern design and ugly preprocessor hijinks, Qt can be a pretty solid framework. Works well on many platforms and is full of features. Has a lot of portable non-UI things too, but I haven't used much of it.
Python's UI stuff is simple but has a lot of features. Great for quick, portable apps. Easy integration with C++ if you need it.
I avoid wxWidgets. The last time I tried using it (about a year ago), I ended up very frustrated rooting around their code to find that it makes a bunch of stupid assumptions about things like DPI, default fonts, etc. that fall apart pretty easily.
I also avoid GTK, but mainly just because it always feels "off" on Windows.
Hmmm... Where do I start. The "Python UI stuff" that you are talking about is probably tk. It's worth noting that you can use tk from many other languages besides python, python wasn't the first language to support tk, and tk isn't the only "UI stuff" that you can use in python. (For example, most of the GUI python stuff I've written has used Qt, which you imply requires working in C++.) For bonus points, you can even try to import Qt, catch an exception if that fails, and use tk to do your UI if Qt is unavailable on the system where you are running. All in one script, extremely portable, and nicer looking than tk whenever possible.
As for Qt in C++, as an application developer, I don't really care if the build system is a bit wonky. When I put on my architect hat, I can certainly say that Qt is a giant monstrosity that is very different from anything I would have created on my own. But, that sort of philosophical issue doesn't really effect anything when you are making an app.
For the most part, things don't "come to a screeching halt" on their own, but it certainly happens in some cases. Cooling system breaks, and servers start to cook themselves. Power to the building does something wacky, and a spike makes it to the servers. A pipe bursts and floods the data center. Some of these things aren't directly monitorable in a way that will give you any warning. Sure, you can do a lot to make a robust infrastructure, (And it shocks me how little of that some people will accept!) but there's always going to be something that can "just go wrong" at any time. You simply don't have the resources, time, or budget to monitor every possible pipe fitting, capacitor, and asteroid.
So, having some concern over a possible kerplosion doesn't guarantee that appropriate measures haven't been taken. It just means it's very, very likely. It may also just mean that there isn't enough staff for most of the people to relax while somebody specific is on-call. (And they get a guarantee of the next holiday of.)
There is also the problem of applications that the guys responsible for aren't actually responsible for. IT gets handed horrible, broken, unclusterable applications with only one license all the time. There are real limits to what you can do to make something like that resilient, despite not having the authority to replace or fix it.
But the fact that there is no fence makes it a reasonable assumption that trick or treaters can come on your property to come up to your door.
Why indeed?What reasonable motivation could he have to poll a well-established base of computer experts for advise? Could it be that an infrastructure is a hard thing to get perfectly right? Maybe up-front decisions made right will negate hours of work and wasted productivity down the line? Remember those security and infrastructure failings we've been so critical about all these years? Those clueless IT guys who screwed up royally and condemned employees and management to countless hardships? Maybe he doesn't want to end up in that position...
A good way to avoid ending up in that position is not to actively place yourself in that position. Don't bid for jobs you can't do. Don't agree to do jobs you can't do. Don't tell people you can do jobs you can't do.
The problem here isn't that he's asking slashdot. It's that he isn't asking slashdot with any apparent knowledge of the subject to support his questions There's no indication that he understands his clients actual needs, nor any indication that he could figure out any aspect of the job he is being paid to do, without slashdotters to get him started.
>Giant research institution with some parallelisable code trying to figure out how molecules do something naughty during supernovas?
ARM is competitive with x86 in terms of FLOPS per anything? I don't think so, Tim.
That leaves only the ultra low end for ARM.
Yeah, ARM does well per Watt and per square meter.
(*) It should be noted that the USG has steadfastly avoided violating the 3rd amendment, and should certainly be commended for its restraint in this matter.
This is false (unless "USG" specifically means the Federal government -- I would argue that state governments are just another level of the U.S. Gov't)
ObTopic: Demanding passwords is evil!
In a constitutional context like this, one would normally only be talking about the Federal government, since the US Constitution is the document that defines that Federal government, but doesn't define the state governments. There is a concept of "incorporation," but that isn't actually *written* in the constitution, so the actual applicability of it in any specific context is unpredictable.
Arm servers make sense in two places: the small and the giant. They fall down in the medium and large space.
In other words, my personal server currently runs a "low power" AMD Sempron. The CPU uses something like 40 Watts, and it is plenty fast enough for my needs. It makes my RAID work, and it serves stuff over NFS and Samba. There are only ever a few clients, and the CPU spends most days nearly idle. It's a small box with a small workload, and it would work just fine with an ARM CPU instead of an x86. (Assuming the hypothetical ARM system could physically connect my external RAID enclosure.) More CPU wouldn't hurt, and it would occasionally make a few things faster, but mostly putting a Xeon in this box would just make it louder.
In the realm of giant workloads, you have jobs that can't possibly be done by a single machine, no matter the budget. You are looking at needing many hundreds of even the biggest machines you can get. If you have a job that parallelizes that well, doing it with 1000 x86 boxes or 4000 ARM boxes isn't that big of a difference. If the ARM boxes are smaller, cheaper, and lower power enough that it outweighs the fact that you need more of them, then it would be crazy to go with whizzy Xeon boxes instead of Arm. Buzzword enthusiasts will throw labels like "Cloud scale computing" at this sort of thing.
Where ARM falls down on the job is anything that can be done by a 4 core Xeon, up to a handful of 32 Core Xeons. That's a big chunk of what we normally think of as the Server market. ARM doesn't compete very well in this space. When people say that ARM is a ridiculous idea for servers, this middle segment of the market is generally what they are thinking of. A cluster of a dozen little ARM boxes competes rather poorly with a single machine with four Xeon sockets in terms of management overhead, and the amount of effort required to parallelise workloads, and the amount of bandwidth between distant cores. If you have an application that has an expensive per-machine license, that speaks in favor of a single big machine, etc.
So, small office that needs a little NAS server to stash under the secretary's desk? ARM can pwn the market. Giant research institution with some parallelisable code trying to figure out how molecules do something naughty during supernovas? ARM can pwn the market. "Enterprise" level IT in a smallish, but uncrowded data center with adequate, already provisioned power and cooling... ARM may well be suitable in some cases, but it's certianly not an easy sell.
And, relatively common cell phones have 1 GB of RAM. In two years or so, a cell phone with 4 GB of RAM will seem perfectly reasonable. At that point, 64 bit ARM stops being a data center/desktop issue, and is simply required to hold onto the existing ARM core market.
That actually happens a lot, though not exactly as you describe. in Terminator:Salvation, there is a long shot when the hero gets into a helicopter, flies it around, gets caught in a big explosion, crashes. and gets grabbed by a terminator robot. It's a giant, epic shot, and it's pretty awesome. It was also at least three shots stitched together with a lot of work by the VFX team. Children of men also had a few famous long shots that were stitched together from several source takes. Contact had a famous "into the mirror" long shot years ago that was more obviously impossible than some of the others, but the majority of the audience didn't realize it was impossible, so it just seems like a long, clever shot.
Hehe, you probably thought you were joking...
To be fair, while the opening shot of Touch Of Evil was amazing, the movie itself was a steaming pile of dog shit worse than if Oracle bought a movie studio is decided to shit out a film version of Java.
HTML and CSS can not accomplish what the ADA is demanding.
Think about screen reader technology for the blind. Today even the best of these can not even handle a mildly complex page. I've tried them out at a friends house.
So, people will be encouraged to stop making needlessly overcomplicated sites. It sounds like nothing of value will be lost.
They are crap.
Assuming you mean the sites that don't work well when spoken, then yes. Assuming you mean the readers, then I disagree.
But it doesn't stop at your content. You are also responsible for all the advertising on your site, even when you don't create that advertising. Why should you serve a page without advertising to the blind? If that's how you make money for your site, you need to serve the ads to everyone.
How do you serve music to the deaf? Hmmm mmmm dum de dumm ta ta de da mmmm de mmmm?
And how do you serve online game content to the guy typing with his one hand, or his feet.
If you think this is easy, why don't you try it. The tools don't yet exist to do this in any economical way. If enforced to the letter, this serves only to drive most product advertising and support services off the web, shut down thousands of hobby sites, and shutter eCommerce.
I doubt you'll actually get many complaints for lack of advertising, especially considering that isn't really your "content." I've never heard of an ADA case where a blind person complained that they couldn't read a posted advertising flyer on a bulletin board in a store. If it does mean that the horrible chain of dozens of domains and layers of Javascript for ads has to go away so you just serve your ads yourself, meh. I'm still having trouble finding a lot of problems with this. You serve music to the deaf the same way you do everybody else. They just won't listen to it. Wall-Mart sells music on CD's. Deaf people are allowed to buy them. WalMart doesn't have to have employees to interpretive dance on command for deaf people who want to buy a CD but can't hear it. How do you serve content to the guy with one hand? Same way as everybody else. He'll probably just suck at league play against people who can push more buttons faster.
ADA compliance isn't about making every cripple get to win the Super Bowl, and every blind person win an Academy award for cinematography. It's about making minimal reasonable accommodations so that a person can live their life to the extent that is sensible. The government is involved, so there will probably be a few inane edge cases, but the basic principle here seems sound.
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Well, Oracle Solaris Express only exists because Open Solaris got killed. So, yeah. I think the hive mind pretty much called it on this one. Oracle has been actively, systematically destroying the good name of Sun. What's left is a stinky corpse stuffed full of medical waste that Oracle raped.
You forgot SPARC.
The handful of people who haven't are doing their best.
I dunno...maybe you plan things more than what I would guess most people do.
I've found that most of the time, at least with someone new you pick up...the mouths are occupied, clothing is flying off and you're going for the hole, and condoms really are a 2nd thought, if in fact you have one within reach.
You're not always in a bedroom when this hits, you know?
This is slashdot. Some of us have *plenty* of time to plan and prepare. Hell, I'll probably have condoms expire before I use them up. Do you know how long those things are good for?
Also, I don't understand why some guys complain so much about putting on a condom. First off, just make her do it. It's fun, and keeps both of you involved in the moment if you just think of it as a part of the process that you do together. Otherwise, if you do it yourself then either you don't do it often enough for it to actually be a bother in the grand scheme of things, or you do it often enough that you should probably suck less at it by now. If it really requires that much effort and concentration, just get a couple of boxes and practice solo until you can do it without taking so long you forget why you started. You were probably going to be playing with your dick that day anyway.
America certainly has a remarkable fascination with terrible cheese, and it's much harder to find good American cheese than good American beer. But, it does exist. America has the virtue of being a big enough country with enough immigrants from all over that we have at least a few people here and there who know how things should be done in almost any given subject. They just get massively outproduced by the crap makers pushing cheese-inspired "food style" post-modern "edible" yellow potentially-dairy vinyl.
But, yeah, most of the good cheese I've had has been imported.
As for beer, while Coors is the most well known beer from Colorado, I don't know anybody in Colorado who actually drinks it, because there are so many good local beers available that aren't Coors. (Fat Tire is pretty much the "standard" beer in Colorado.)
Basically, there's no difference in mechanism between selective breeding and evolution. It's just a difference in intent. The idea is that the people weren't specifically breeding the fish in the same way that people specifically bred cows and wheat and whatnot. In any case, the organisms most suited to their (human influenced) environment reproduced most successfully.
And you can plausibly argue three processor family switches if you count ARM. iOS is basically derived from OS-X. The sales model for iOS devices is different from the Mac, but the underlying technology is really not that different from what an ARM based OS-X Mac would be.
Also, X11 has been around since the Amiga was relevant.
I dunno what he did to make the server go airborne, but I do know that it must have been awesome.
Basically, the stuff that you would reasonably use templates for in C++ can only be done with a bunch of duplicated code in C. Even in the C Standard Library (created by people who obviously know C very well), you see many very similar functions named with a suffix noting the data type that it takes or returns. They likely all have very similar implementations as well.
Mail servers forward only text email, stripping all MIME content. Useful in case of serious virus trouble.
Cell phone switches handle voice and SMS messages only. Maybe raw pictures on some platforms. No downloads, no "apps", no tethering, no IP.
Under severe overload conditions during a cyber-attack, the FCC should be able to order an advertising shutdown. All advertising servers must go offline until the emergency is over.
All this should be publicly tested occasionally, like the Emergency Broadcast System.
This would be enough to deal with serious overloads, outages, or viruses, but doesn't have censorship implications.
#1 - Can I have that now?
#2 - So, in the event of a major telecoms emergency, make sure people can't download security updates for their phones? And make sure that I can't ssh into my servers to fix them from wherever I am ASAP? And make sure I have to tie up bandwidth voice calling 30 people instead of just sending an email explaining how to fix things?
#3 - Advertising shutdown would mean that some sites that depend on advertising revenue to stay up would be at danger of collapse. Collapse is sometimes a suboptimal way to save things.
Your plan is a bit meh, at best.
The regulators are not 'asleep at the wheel'. They are playing their historic role of do what the boss tells you, and if the boss doesn't tell you to bust one of the huge firms, you don't. If the regulators are incapable of protecting the small investors, then get rid of the regulators, but don't blame the technology. Your assumption that the market is more volatile today than ever before is weak. Take a look at the Dow in the 30s.
I've researched the Dow in the 30s. Yes, today's market really is more volatile in many ways. Nobody in the 1930's would have cared about shaving tens of microseconds off of trading time because the system operated on human-comprehensible time scales at that point. To pull off the sort of schemes modern HFT uses by exploiting a few microseconds, you would have needed hours in the market of the 1930's. Sure, it was full of speculators, but the market at that point was at least dominated by actual traders. Not just robots skimming off the top.
... Android ... N900 ...
Hmm, I have been burned by smartphones in the past - too big and chunky, slow, complicated to use for simple tasks, fragile touch screens, proprietary-only interfaces and connectors, ... Have they actually got better? What I want to know about any new smartphone is:
- Is it possible to access ALL functions without using touch-screen/stylo?
- Can you connect to it using a simply USB cable?
- Can it connect to my wirewless router?
- Can I attach an external standard keyboard?
- And of course, is basic functionality available without having to go through three layers of menus?
Finally, if it runs Linux, can I ssh to it over a simple, standard wireless connection?
I can't speak for every phone out there, but I have an n900, so I can answer with regard to that. Not specifcially advertising my phone, I'm sure there are others that do just as well on your criteria.
- Connection - Standard USB Micro B cable. It's mot USB Mini, but rather Micro, which is slightly less common.
- I've never had a problem connecting to any of my own wireless hardware.
- No way to directly connect a USB keyboard, as the device USB port doesn't support host mode. No idea about Bluetooth. (Never tried a bluetooth keyboard, so I have no idea if it would work.) You could technically VNC into the phone via a machine with a full keyboard and use it that way, if it were really important.
- What constitutes "basic functionality" is debatable. I don't find things particularly hidden. From the desktop, making a call for me is generally one tap to get into the phone app, one tap on the name of a contact in my recent calls list, and one tap on the "cellular call" button. If I am in another app instead of at the desktop with the phone app icon on it, that'll be some extra tapping. If I want to call somebody who isn't on my list of recent contacts, that'll be some extra tapping to find them in the phone book. The "Start menu" screen does require tapping through an "expose" screen, which sometimes feels a little inefficient, but isn't bothersome in practice.
- SSH to the phone doesn't work right out of the box. You have to install the ssh server package, but that just takes a second, and doesn't require any "heroic" efforts to root the phone or reflash firmware or do jailbreaking. It's pretty much exactly like installing openssh-server on a Debian box. I can't ssh into it over 3G because T-Mobile seems to block any server ports open on the phone. But, over wifi it works without any issues. The phone can also present itself as a USB ethernet adapter to a PC, so you can ssh to it over USB as well as the wireless. In addition to an ssh server, as I mentioned you can do a VNC server. Since the phone runs X11, you can also do display forwarding if that suits you. Run an app on the phone, but have the display for that specific app redirected over SSH or classic xauth stuff to your desktop with a full keyboard. The other way around works, too. I've run apps on my server that I had the UI forwarded to my phone. It's not always super practical, but it can be fun.
Considering any modern OS ships with encryption software by default, it'll be almost impossible to use any computer at all. Any common web browser will support HTTPS, for example. Windows and OS-X boxes will have ssh support. Windows boxes ship with encrypted NTFS support, etc. One would have to use something like an old DOS machine to find one with absolutely no software that could be considered encryption software on it. Technically, even getting a new computer and using it for a few minutes to remove the software would violate the order. (and make the machine useless for most any sort of work.) Even MS Word supports some encryption related DRMy features.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never engineered a cellular network. Even so, your assumption that my experience is based on my "little home network," seems surprising to me. It's neither based on anything, nor is it accurate. You'd do well to consider that people from a wide range of backgrounds frequent forums like this one, and a subset of them may well have technical knowledge that goes past the walls of their own apartment.
Well, certainly. But, it was always known to be a publicly accessible medium. Cellular technology has been constantly upgraded since the classic analog networks of the 1980's, and if the upgrades didn't take security seriously, it was because of executive level decisions, not just engineering level impossibilities.
There are penalties. Nobody enforces them. Adding more text to the law won't help if nobody cares what it says now. It's just one of many examples of how the concept of teh rule of law has become fundamentally broken. It's a symptom of a much more serious issue than just needing a new paragraph in a bad law. It's an indicator of a desperate need for broad, immediate, systemic reforms in the USA that go far beyond IP law.
I've been hearing that Intel's latest graphics are finally pretty good for over a decade. At this point, they could release a graphics chip so amazing that each polygon gives me twenty dollars and a blowjob, and I'd still make a careful point of never using Intel graphics, no matter the cost. It's like the boy who cried wolf. Eventually it just doesn't matter if the story becomes true.
Slightly less severe, but still fresh in my mind: "ATi finally has decent drivers."
nVidia has "Great performance while using very little power this time." They are the graphics vendor that I come closest to trusting, but frankly they all make the same claims every year and it gets a little boring.