Just as most programmers today wouldn't be able to work with punch cards and so on. They're specific, narrow skillsets. If you don't practice it, you don't have it. Doesn't reflect on the individual's capabilities or intelligence, merely on what they do most often.
Ebola is a gruesome disease, but it's only transmissible by contact with bodily fluids. That guy who coughed in his hand? Can't have transmitted it. That other one who farted? Nope. The one who touched you on the way out of the subway? Not enough either. You need to be in contact with someone who's symptomatic and whose bodily fluids come into close contact with you (often your hands, then you touching your eyes or something like that).
The obvious issue is that doctors are constantly in contact with infected bodily fluids. The last stages of the disease put out a lot of blood and other fluids. You only need one brief moment of inattention to get it when in those exceptional circumstances. Yet, only 16 cases have been reported among Doctors Without Borders. That's in spite of the absolutely horrendous sanitation and facilities available there. I'd say that on the contrary, those people are doing a splendid job and should be commended for actually going out there and trying to stop the problem at the source with the very real risk of dying from doing so.
Certainly beats sitting in one's basement calling them idiots.
If you bothered to RTFA (I know, the horror), you'd have seen that he was not symptomatic during his subway rides. Ebola is not contagious when it is asymptomatic. As soon as he began feeling ill, he isolated himself. When the symptoms worsened beyond that of a common cold, he contacted the authorities. The probability of him having infected anyone is close to nil.
What remote support tool are you using which doesn't work on 6.5Mbit/s? VNC and Windows' RDP both seem able to run on a toaster with dial-up. Telecommuting is basically Skype, which most certainly doesn't need more than 6.5Mbit/s. Remote backups are pretty much the only thing which'd be annoying due to how long it'd take to finish the backup, but strong deduplication and compression would significantly reduce bandwidth requirements.
It could be happenstance that the two events happened so close together (another poster in the comments here mentioned many other events which could be justifications for today's shooting), but assuming we are talking about Islamic radicals again, I could see them taking advantage of the scare caused by the first event, thinking that they might induce more panic by chaining the two. If that's the case, we might have to deal with more attacks, depending on how organized they actually are.
This comes a few months after we've heard that a fair few Canadian citizens were suspected of having participated in jihads with ISIS before coming back into the country.
Panic mode? Nah. Harper must be filled with glee right now, this is exactly the sort of excuse he needed to start cracking down on personal liberties in the name of fighting terrorism or being "tough on crime" so we jail those horrible monsters, alongside drug users, copyright infringers and other such nefarious criminals.
So medicine and biology, which are becoming female-dominated fields, use toys and not tools? Man, I wasn't aware that fMRI machine costing millions was a toy. I want one now.
You're telling me people are expected to dig up the reference card (assuming they know it exists), go through a terse set of pages looking for what you want, say, glVertex, not find it and then... assume it's deprecated? Wow, that's convenient and explicit. People will try to find confirmation, find that there is a reference page for it (without any version number) and think it was too obvious to be listed or something. Not because they're dumb and most certainly not because they should not be programming OpenGL. People have to start somewhere, and it's that very attitude you're displaying that means more people will choose DirectX instead.
Also documentation. Say what you will, D3D's docs are lightyears ahead of the messy, poorly-versioned documentation for OpenGL. Doesn't help that OpenGL kept backwards compatibility for so long that even fairly recent tutorials still use the horrendous immediate mode either, making tutorials for modern OpenGL harder to find. Meanwhile, Microsoft's SDKs have extensive tutorials and samples, and there's plenty of references to start from especially now that DirectX 10+ have slashed out all the crap accumulated from older versions.
Just use this as an example: search on Google for glVertex. First link goes to the official documentation. Nowhere on the page is it mentioned that this entire rendering system has been deprecated. Nowhere on the page can you see that the documentation is for OpenGL 2. There's a 2 in the URL, but changing it to a 3 or a 4 gives a 404 error. At least now some blessed soul made docs.gl, but the fact it's not even Khronos taking some time to fix their fucking documentation is absurd. You'll note though that even there, the docs for glVertex don't mention deprecation; the function just doesn't have an OpenGL 4 page.
Then there's debugging. Once you've used PIX or VS2012's built-in debugger, you really can't look back. Being able to save any frame, step through the entire rendering process event by event, and even go as far as debugging an individual pixel (down to what tried to write on the pixel, why the draw call did or didn't pass, and a way to put breakpoints in shader code using that pixel's input and output!) is just... It's unrivalled. Nothing from OpenGL even comes close to this.
D3D 10 was a significant break from both the API perspective and in terms of how it works underneath. D3D 10 was included with Vista but never made available for Windows XP (because it relied on kernel changes and a new driver model that couldn't be backported) so game developers took their time in moving to it.
Not only that, the Xbox 360 also used something that was fairly close to DirectX 9 (in the same way the Xbox One uses an API close to DirectX 11), so it made sense to reuse the 360 version for PC with a few tweaks here and there. Certainly much easier than rebuilding for the vastly different DirectX 10 API.
With the arrival of the new console generation, we're seeing a sudden (and very welcome!) shift to DirectX 10+ and 64-bit executables.
Speaking from experience as an ex-physics undergrad who still kept up with a few friends who went on into physics MScs and PhDs, I was surprised to hear that the most popular language at the time was Fortran (and usually not the 95 version...). A few lucky ones could use C++ or Python or even Fortran 95.
Matlab was used for undergrad lab courses (with the professors distributing old copies of the software gratis, not really mentioning whether it was legal or not!) and was... okay at it. Doing plots could get tricky with error bars and the language had a lot of idiosyncrasies, but it worked and since all provided code was in Matlab you didn't have much of a choice in the matter. The funny bit was that the lab techs and professors were not aware that Matlab had derivative functions, so they asked people to do it all manually (and still wanted them to do that when I told them about it, though I personally kept on using them!).
I'm a bit partial to Mathematica myself for certain things. The focus on functional programming is fun and very different from most languages, Matlab and Python included. The built-in libraries are ludicrously extensive, which helps speed up a lot of work. I wouldn't use it for performance-critical stuff or for applications that need to be run over and over, but for deriving math faster or prototyping something or generating really polished and diverse plots it's quite good.
Helps that my university has a site license though.
Is it that the language used is too harsh, or that today's society is just too much censored and purged from any form of negativity ? Creating thin-skinned irresponsible generations.
It's pretty much impossible in a tech company to have an opinion, not have to excuse oneself about having this opinion, and have a long and brilliant career in the company. Sometimes, this translate into worthless technical discussion where nobody is giving any counter argument. Those followers are generally also those getting promoted, but also the most incompetent. I might represent an utter minority, but I'm only giving negative feedback. What I'm being asked is to provide a technical analysis, not to be friend with my boss. It would seem that people are unable to be honest with one another.
I fully understand Linus' comment, it is sad to have to antagonize people and community, but on the other side, if you comply to every whim, you're not aiming for excellence, and stay mediocre. Compromise is the worst. While it is sad to see people unable to differentiate between a technical and personal attack, and the other way, some person making personal attack from technical point, we might just have to live with it.
All in all, I prefer to have enemies, and be true to my principle, rather than only have friends and keep compromising on my value.
Your post sounds like one giant false dilemma. You can be true to your principles without insulting or bashing people. You can have an opinion and express it firmly without rubbing it in the face of your colleagues until their skin bleeds. You can have disagreements without resorting to name-calling. You can do your work while being polite.
Also, "thin-skinned irresponsible generations"? Spoken like an old geezer alright.
Your comment is textbook what Americans say when they criticize Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone about how their population is not cooperating with the medical authorities. I find it highly ironic.
Ebola spreads through many more pathways than HIV. Ebola is far more deadly than HIV, which makes it a more dangerous disease overall. Worse, there is now empirical proof that despite the high mortality rate, Ebola can spread in large population centers. Previous outbreaks could be contained because they were restricted to small villages, where isolation was possible.
The biggest problem with Ebola is the incubation period: you can move an awful lot before you realize you are a carrier, and when you do realize that you are, you've generally been infectious for a while (the first symptoms being relatively similar to a flu). This makes tracing down all people you've had contact with exponentially harder. Then there's obviously the fact a lot of people are fucking stupid and will ignore medical advice for one reason or another, and the consequences be damned. The US has been lucky for that thus far, since the people who've contracted the disease on American soil have been fairly well-behaved (it's the CDC that cocked up).
Be careful sampling from forum threads. People who don't have any problem don't post. Generally speaking, I think you'll find that looking up any device will pop up a few problems. It's when a significant proportion of the devices manufactured exhibit that problem that you can say the device's design is bad or faulty. Thousands of failures due to the same issue can still only mean a sub-0.1% failure rate, which'd be stellar.
I'm not sure I'd call it a "big" win - this is still a pretty niche product. I'd say this might be Google testing the waters with x86 to see what'll happen.
So... you had a defective unit and, instead of doing the logical consumer thing and sending it in for a warranty-covered repair, you decided to keep it, problems and all, and then complain about it on internet forums.
I... This isn't talking about people buying drugs or something. This is about counterfeiting money or laundering money or downright stealing money. They're all reprehensible activities, I hope you will agree.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as most programmers today wouldn't be able to work with punch cards and so on. They're specific, narrow skillsets. If you don't practice it, you don't have it. Doesn't reflect on the individual's capabilities or intelligence, merely on what they do most often.
Ebola is a gruesome disease, but it's only transmissible by contact with bodily fluids. That guy who coughed in his hand? Can't have transmitted it. That other one who farted? Nope. The one who touched you on the way out of the subway? Not enough either. You need to be in contact with someone who's symptomatic and whose bodily fluids come into close contact with you (often your hands, then you touching your eyes or something like that).
The obvious issue is that doctors are constantly in contact with infected bodily fluids. The last stages of the disease put out a lot of blood and other fluids. You only need one brief moment of inattention to get it when in those exceptional circumstances. Yet, only 16 cases have been reported among Doctors Without Borders. That's in spite of the absolutely horrendous sanitation and facilities available there. I'd say that on the contrary, those people are doing a splendid job and should be commended for actually going out there and trying to stop the problem at the source with the very real risk of dying from doing so.
Certainly beats sitting in one's basement calling them idiots.
If you bothered to RTFA (I know, the horror), you'd have seen that he was not symptomatic during his subway rides. Ebola is not contagious when it is asymptomatic. As soon as he began feeling ill, he isolated himself. When the symptoms worsened beyond that of a common cold, he contacted the authorities. The probability of him having infected anyone is close to nil.
What remote support tool are you using which doesn't work on 6.5Mbit/s? VNC and Windows' RDP both seem able to run on a toaster with dial-up. Telecommuting is basically Skype, which most certainly doesn't need more than 6.5Mbit/s. Remote backups are pretty much the only thing which'd be annoying due to how long it'd take to finish the backup, but strong deduplication and compression would significantly reduce bandwidth requirements.
It could be happenstance that the two events happened so close together (another poster in the comments here mentioned many other events which could be justifications for today's shooting), but assuming we are talking about Islamic radicals again, I could see them taking advantage of the scare caused by the first event, thinking that they might induce more panic by chaining the two. If that's the case, we might have to deal with more attacks, depending on how organized they actually are.
This comes a few months after we've heard that a fair few Canadian citizens were suspected of having participated in jihads with ISIS before coming back into the country.
Panic mode? Nah. Harper must be filled with glee right now, this is exactly the sort of excuse he needed to start cracking down on personal liberties in the name of fighting terrorism or being "tough on crime" so we jail those horrible monsters, alongside drug users, copyright infringers and other such nefarious criminals.
So medicine and biology, which are becoming female-dominated fields, use toys and not tools? Man, I wasn't aware that fMRI machine costing millions was a toy. I want one now.
According to AnandTech's coverage, you need to turn off hardware encryption before running the tool.
Feels like they remembered the mantra but not that the last step was supposed to apply to competitors.
You're telling me people are expected to dig up the reference card (assuming they know it exists), go through a terse set of pages looking for what you want, say, glVertex, not find it and then... assume it's deprecated? Wow, that's convenient and explicit. People will try to find confirmation, find that there is a reference page for it (without any version number) and think it was too obvious to be listed or something. Not because they're dumb and most certainly not because they should not be programming OpenGL. People have to start somewhere, and it's that very attitude you're displaying that means more people will choose DirectX instead.
Also documentation. Say what you will, D3D's docs are lightyears ahead of the messy, poorly-versioned documentation for OpenGL. Doesn't help that OpenGL kept backwards compatibility for so long that even fairly recent tutorials still use the horrendous immediate mode either, making tutorials for modern OpenGL harder to find. Meanwhile, Microsoft's SDKs have extensive tutorials and samples, and there's plenty of references to start from especially now that DirectX 10+ have slashed out all the crap accumulated from older versions.
Just use this as an example: search on Google for glVertex. First link goes to the official documentation. Nowhere on the page is it mentioned that this entire rendering system has been deprecated. Nowhere on the page can you see that the documentation is for OpenGL 2. There's a 2 in the URL, but changing it to a 3 or a 4 gives a 404 error. At least now some blessed soul made docs.gl, but the fact it's not even Khronos taking some time to fix their fucking documentation is absurd. You'll note though that even there, the docs for glVertex don't mention deprecation; the function just doesn't have an OpenGL 4 page.
Then there's debugging. Once you've used PIX or VS2012's built-in debugger, you really can't look back. Being able to save any frame, step through the entire rendering process event by event, and even go as far as debugging an individual pixel (down to what tried to write on the pixel, why the draw call did or didn't pass, and a way to put breakpoints in shader code using that pixel's input and output!) is just... It's unrivalled. Nothing from OpenGL even comes close to this.
D3D 10 was a significant break from both the API perspective and in terms of how it works underneath. D3D 10 was included with Vista but never made available for Windows XP (because it relied on kernel changes and a new driver model that couldn't be backported) so game developers took their time in moving to it.
Not only that, the Xbox 360 also used something that was fairly close to DirectX 9 (in the same way the Xbox One uses an API close to DirectX 11), so it made sense to reuse the 360 version for PC with a few tweaks here and there. Certainly much easier than rebuilding for the vastly different DirectX 10 API.
With the arrival of the new console generation, we're seeing a sudden (and very welcome!) shift to DirectX 10+ and 64-bit executables.
Speaking from experience as an ex-physics undergrad who still kept up with a few friends who went on into physics MScs and PhDs, I was surprised to hear that the most popular language at the time was Fortran (and usually not the 95 version...). A few lucky ones could use C++ or Python or even Fortran 95.
Matlab was used for undergrad lab courses (with the professors distributing old copies of the software gratis, not really mentioning whether it was legal or not!) and was... okay at it. Doing plots could get tricky with error bars and the language had a lot of idiosyncrasies, but it worked and since all provided code was in Matlab you didn't have much of a choice in the matter. The funny bit was that the lab techs and professors were not aware that Matlab had derivative functions, so they asked people to do it all manually (and still wanted them to do that when I told them about it, though I personally kept on using them!).
I'm a bit partial to Mathematica myself for certain things. The focus on functional programming is fun and very different from most languages, Matlab and Python included. The built-in libraries are ludicrously extensive, which helps speed up a lot of work. I wouldn't use it for performance-critical stuff or for applications that need to be run over and over, but for deriving math faster or prototyping something or generating really polished and diverse plots it's quite good.
Helps that my university has a site license though.
Part of capitalism is letting businesses fail as well as succeed.
Yeah, like banks and car manufacturers. Wait, did I get that wrong somehow?
Is it that the language used is too harsh, or that today's society is just too much censored and purged from any form of negativity ? Creating thin-skinned irresponsible generations.
It's pretty much impossible in a tech company to have an opinion, not have to excuse oneself about having this opinion, and have a long and brilliant career in the company. Sometimes, this translate into worthless technical discussion where nobody is giving any counter argument. Those followers are generally also those getting promoted, but also the most incompetent. I might represent an utter minority, but I'm only giving negative feedback. What I'm being asked is to provide a technical analysis, not to be friend with my boss. It would seem that people are unable to be honest with one another.
I fully understand Linus' comment, it is sad to have to antagonize people and community, but on the other side, if you comply to every whim, you're not aiming for excellence, and stay mediocre. Compromise is the worst. While it is sad to see people unable to differentiate between a technical and personal attack, and the other way, some person making personal attack from technical point, we might just have to live with it.
All in all, I prefer to have enemies, and be true to my principle, rather than only have friends and keep compromising on my value.
Your post sounds like one giant false dilemma. You can be true to your principles without insulting or bashing people. You can have an opinion and express it firmly without rubbing it in the face of your colleagues until their skin bleeds. You can have disagreements without resorting to name-calling. You can do your work while being polite.
Also, "thin-skinned irresponsible generations"? Spoken like an old geezer alright.
How's that "culture of strong language" working out for ya bud?
Your comment is textbook what Americans say when they criticize Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone about how their population is not cooperating with the medical authorities. I find it highly ironic.
Ebola spreads through many more pathways than HIV. Ebola is far more deadly than HIV, which makes it a more dangerous disease overall. Worse, there is now empirical proof that despite the high mortality rate, Ebola can spread in large population centers. Previous outbreaks could be contained because they were restricted to small villages, where isolation was possible.
The biggest problem with Ebola is the incubation period: you can move an awful lot before you realize you are a carrier, and when you do realize that you are, you've generally been infectious for a while (the first symptoms being relatively similar to a flu). This makes tracing down all people you've had contact with exponentially harder. Then there's obviously the fact a lot of people are fucking stupid and will ignore medical advice for one reason or another, and the consequences be damned. The US has been lucky for that thus far, since the people who've contracted the disease on American soil have been fairly well-behaved (it's the CDC that cocked up).
Be careful sampling from forum threads. People who don't have any problem don't post. Generally speaking, I think you'll find that looking up any device will pop up a few problems. It's when a significant proportion of the devices manufactured exhibit that problem that you can say the device's design is bad or faulty. Thousands of failures due to the same issue can still only mean a sub-0.1% failure rate, which'd be stellar.
I'm not sure I'd call it a "big" win - this is still a pretty niche product. I'd say this might be Google testing the waters with x86 to see what'll happen.
Huh? The Nexus 7, both variants, was manufactured by Asus.
So... you had a defective unit and, instead of doing the logical consumer thing and sending it in for a warranty-covered repair, you decided to keep it, problems and all, and then complain about it on internet forums.
That sounds smart.
Yeah, they totally aren't seeing a successful trend and following it.
I... This isn't talking about people buying drugs or something. This is about counterfeiting money or laundering money or downright stealing money. They're all reprehensible activities, I hope you will agree.