I sort of have to agree that the browser as a one stop shop is getting sort of untenable. Frankly, I have no desire to do my online banking with the same piece of software I explore random information on all day with computers around the world run by people I don't even know. But whats the solution, two browsers? Were things any better in the 90s when I would download random exe's to do small little tasks now handled by rich web apps? At some level the only solution to this is to use separate, incompatible systems to do different levels of tasks(even if they reside in the same case). And even then, spoofing for secrets would still be a problem.
Part of the reason DX10 never really took off was that only the highest end graphics cards supported it for years, and so software developers who used DX(far beyond just game writers) had to focus on supporting either just HW DX9 or both, to which the answer is pretty obvious. Because of the limited benefit you get from one version to the next on something like DX, this is a very bad trend. So by saturating the whole market with DX11 capable cards, hopefully this means that in a few years more apps will support DX beyond just 9, or even 8.
You can sue anyone who uses the patented technology. So you can sue all major users for royalties for each infringement(use) of the patent. The author and distributors would be most endangered by having users of the software legally assault him for a plethora of liabilities related to their being sued, but can also be sued for IP infringement himself. Unless you are someone like Microsoft with well known deep pockets, you would most likely be forced to settle the suit as you'd have no way to handle the legal Apocalypse that would await you if the rights holders decided to unleash it. This is actually what Microsoft threatened to do with their pile of patents they alleged Linux infringed upon; go after the [major] users, and totally discredit and overwhelm the major distributors of the product.
Strangely, they may have accomplished the first two. The allies at least realized that it was their tough provisions in Versailles that led to it being possibility for a rouge movement like the Nazi's to take power, leading to their friendlier approach after WWII to develop [West] Germany rather than punish it. So the Nazi's did help turn the economy around and make Germany a European power again, if only by their defeat.
This might even be relavant in this situation. This crusade on Apple may not have yielded anything productive in and of itself since Apple was in its [current] legal rights to protect their IP, but if Apple ever does become more popular in a given market and faces anti-trust litigation, this incident could be cited as evidence of Apple's unwillingness to allow any competition against it's platform.
Consider that the cost of 4 square miles of photovoltaic panels would probably be a measurable percent of US GDP. Even 0.4 square miles of them, which would generate the power of this plant, would be much much more expensive.
Also, this plant would still generate power under conditions that panels would not, albeit much less than its peak power.
The mystery of Balmer's hair is a dark secret only known to the executive staff of Microsoft and Bill Gates' mom. Doom awaits those who seek such knowledge.
I'm not really setting out to endorse him, but he is the only "luminary" in business right now one could consider that actually gave people actual products and didn't just find ways to push money around. To actually produce and still be a financial success is worth something, even if your contribution is just giving out music players to tweens. Far more than can be said for finance guys who gave out risky loans so they could buy new cars did for anyone, who the readers in this magazine no doubt also idolize.
They are not opposing this treater per se, but instead any treaty that would set exceptions to the status quo of copyrights. They view it as a threatening precedent to allow any exceptions to copyright law, because it might snowball into eventually allowing society to think about more radical change to copyright.
Are there Linux classes in Universities? CS students may use Linux extensively but they hardly have classes on particular OSes. They do usually have at least one Operating Systems class where they study the theory of OS design and may implement parts of an OS or an entire basic OS depending on the lab schedule.
That said, I bet the number of undergrad students studying CS intensive majors in the USA who have used zOS at all outside of work experience is countable, while most of them have probably used Linux even before attending college.
But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on. This model might offer greater usability. Also, it reduces two use modes to one, as people already use tabbed applications. It's worth experimenting with, at least.
Very insightful operation. A mesh network for cellular communications is impractical, we just do not have enough bandwidth to make it work and it would be impossible to regulate. And regulation of the spectrum is not a bunch of BS like other regulation, its a hard, physics rooted, necessity.
Also, its not as simple as it sounds. It takes a team of engineers to monitor and place towers is a geographic region for a carrier. Adding one can actually make reception WORSE in some areas if you don't know what you are doing. So again, if we have crappy cell networks using engineered structured networks that cost billions of dollars to run just imagine what you'd get out of a peer to peer long range communications scheme.(hint, crap)
The TOS for Xbox Live hardly counts as a shirk wrap license, they are literally a Terms of SERVICE that you pay for every month. Good luck contracting any service that exists in the world without any terms that define what the expectations of that service actually are. I don't think there exists a harder agreement in law other than literally exchanging payment for an object rather than a service.
I think an ASM interpreter would actually be possible, but you would have to write a decent interpreter, namely with features like JIT(assembling!) for it to have performance on par with actually ASM programs. For example, NET is "interpreted" at a bytecode level with MSIL which is basically an intermediate assembly-like language. Also, at the end of the day, hand generated assembler only CAN be faster than C, there are no guarantees especially if your brain has a worse compiler than the one in your toolchain. I find this likely in the case of scripts that mostly do things like parse text and do many comparisons(ie, use up lots of simultaneous, related memory), as this is where your C compiler/interpreter will usually start to have a strong advantage over the human brain. Lastly, assembler doesn't really do you any good in these sorts of scenarios since you mostly are calling your framework code, and so doing a call foo vs. foo(); isn't really going to emit more efficient code.
I agree, but there is a big difference in terms of idealism vs. policy. If Global Warming and the associated damage it would cause to global ecosystems is a demonstrable threat, this would put governments well within their sovereign rights to protect their citizens and national security to begin regulation of even industry critical areas(ie, shrink the GDP) to prevent it. If it just comes down to environmentalism and public health, these are usually seen as tradeoff areas to be made by local governments when approving new industry in their jurisdictions and by private individuals who may choose to earn a livelihood in less than healthy conditions vs. not. Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness and all of that.
Only one of these guys said anything about not liking to use an IDE. I use IDEs to write assembler language for microcontrollers at work every day. Sure I could do it in an editor as well but I much prefer the graphical debugger and simulator of my IDEs as being able to see all the dozens control registers' and fuses' bits graphically during the execution of each instruction is easier for my mind to wrap itself around than my screen littered in hex or ones and zeros, at least sometimes. That said, my assembler's emitted machine code is no different than if it wrote it in Vim and then ran the command line based build tools, which are the same thing my GUI runs when I press the associated F-key.
So the IDEs really have nothing to do with the so called "designers" you see in Visual Studio. And yes, its true that no developer who was serious about maintaining a multi-year product could do it via the designers before, you just had no control over WTF was going on. Now with WPF and xaml you finally can use the designers in a maintainable fashion, but it's a bit too little, too late for most developers to care. You can write pure Windows code in C as a makefile project(so you have clear control over the build, even to the point of a different toolchain like GNU) just as well in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE as with Vim and the command prompt tools. It's just a matter of if the IDE at that point gets in the way more than it helps.
It is not in this case; this is not a trial, its an extradition hearing. Determining the graveness of the crime is not only material but to a large degree the purpose of extradition hearings.
But the real key to "C/C++" and associated complied languages that really makes them beat up higher level competition in my experience has less to do with the overhead of a GC or an interpreter, and more to do with how the platform the language is running on actually does things. Most C/C++ apps on a Windows machine for example end up having calls to entry points in the Windows API thrown into their binary code at least most of the time for basic tasks, meaning they are doing these tasks in the most efficient way possible on that platform. On Linux, its hard to do better than some of the standard C libraries for that platform. While, for a Java or.NET application on these platforms, you need a few cycles calling wrapper after wrapper to do this, the compiler doesn't just go down the header files for you and figure out what you are really trying to do. And of course, the way these languages store data like, Strings is rarely in a structure and alignment the OS/system services can use so that has to be done too.
And on languages like Ruby, now you have to spend millions of cycles of overhead just to get the code into a form the machine can begin to do this process for!
So really, the advantage of C/C++ has little to do with it being that much better than higher level languages, but more to do with the fact that 1) OSes and popular shipping libraries are set up to use C-style languages and assembly language programs to their full potential more than "managed" languages and interpreted languages.(usually often to their security and bugcount woes...) 2 ) C/C++ is generally more mature.
For proof of this, count the amount of time it takes for a Java app to do an FFT on a set of random numbers. Now do the same in C. Not much difference. Now try to draw a couple billion random points on the display in both. Note how the Java app takes longer and makes your machine break a sweat. Its becasue in the first example you mostly just have the overhead of the runtime and the GC, like in 2 you have dozens of extra cycles wasted on transforming your drawing code results into something call to the OS can use, and then figuring out how to call the OS to draw something on the screen.
In all fairness, police often can't think. Police officers are not mobile judges. If according to their department's policy, a certain report meets grounds for them to charge someone with a crime they have to. And the system is set up to make them usually play on the safe side...of making an arrest. To make matters worse, when it comes to stuff like suspected terrorism, most departments don't want to mess around and so pretty much if they have an accusation of such a crime and there is ANY evidence to back up the claim, to even Monty Python witch trial sketch standards, they feel its safer to let the courts deal with the problem.
Not only is this good publicity for Sony, but it boosts their sales numbers which makes the PS3 more attractive for planners at game dev houses scoping out which projects should target which consoles. That is small cash for big returns, as I'm guessing at this point Microsoft and Sony are far more concerned at winning game deals from each other than selling a few extra finished games.
1) MSN/Windows Live/Whatever MS is calling it this week search has always been the default search in IE since it had a default search feature. This is nothing new.
2) So has Google used its place as the default search in Firefox, which is well paid for by the way, to promote their search? Say it ain't so!
You do realize that everyone is stupid at birth, and then become enlightens through learning. We teach kids through structured education, which frankly is not really a time proven practice at all. If the education system isn't educating children and they are instead learning mostly from their parents, then that is only a sign that our education system is not doing its job.
This is bollocks. The Fine Arts have never been better. Actually put effort into scoping out your local art, design, drama, or classical music scene. Medium sized cities now enjoy facilities in these areas that used to be only confined a handful of places on Earth. And now many state University systems in the USA have fine arts programs on par with what would only be seen in world-class colleges. Also, compare University majors in the USA, and I think you will find there are many more students studying these topics than pure and applied science and mathematics.
often on Windows machines...for geeks. I reinstall my Windows installations historically about once a year. Recently its probably a bit longer than that. But I have colleagues who are on the same install/upgrade chain from about 2001. I have a Windows Server install back to 2003 that I've also used as a workstation that runs fantastically. I have had better uptime on my own personal systems than any web service I have ever used.(of course, coming with its own cavets)
Many web services didn't even exist then. Many more have been born and died in that time. I don't see how cloud computing is really a solution to longevity unless you really have faith in the current state of web service business models. Frankly, I think there will be a second bubble burst when people realize that internet advertising is not valuable or effective enough to sustain the entire advertising supported web.
Long term, hosting your own services is silly. We are about 1-2 years away from web service platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, etc making web services a more perfected medium by making TCO of one scalable. It would be much more efficient to have them centrally managed and on high uptime systems while not using up tons of idle resources. However, we geeks often look at what is possible with current technology and not what we can actually do TODAY. For 2009, I'm not so sure hosting your own personal server is so terrible for certain things. After all, only when you have the Database and Backups for your web apps are you really in control of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I sort of have to agree that the browser as a one stop shop is getting sort of untenable. Frankly, I have no desire to do my online banking with the same piece of software I explore random information on all day with computers around the world run by people I don't even know. But whats the solution, two browsers? Were things any better in the 90s when I would download random exe's to do small little tasks now handled by rich web apps? At some level the only solution to this is to use separate, incompatible systems to do different levels of tasks(even if they reside in the same case). And even then, spoofing for secrets would still be a problem.
I'm guessing millimeters per gallon is a more fitting unit in this case.
Part of the reason DX10 never really took off was that only the highest end graphics cards supported it for years, and so software developers who used DX(far beyond just game writers) had to focus on supporting either just HW DX9 or both, to which the answer is pretty obvious. Because of the limited benefit you get from one version to the next on something like DX, this is a very bad trend. So by saturating the whole market with DX11 capable cards, hopefully this means that in a few years more apps will support DX beyond just 9, or even 8.
You can sue anyone who uses the patented technology. So you can sue all major users for royalties for each infringement(use) of the patent. The author and distributors would be most endangered by having users of the software legally assault him for a plethora of liabilities related to their being sued, but can also be sued for IP infringement himself. Unless you are someone like Microsoft with well known deep pockets, you would most likely be forced to settle the suit as you'd have no way to handle the legal Apocalypse that would await you if the rights holders decided to unleash it. This is actually what Microsoft threatened to do with their pile of patents they alleged Linux infringed upon; go after the [major] users, and totally discredit and overwhelm the major distributors of the product.
Strangely, they may have accomplished the first two. The allies at least realized that it was their tough provisions in Versailles that led to it being possibility for a rouge movement like the Nazi's to take power, leading to their friendlier approach after WWII to develop [West] Germany rather than punish it. So the Nazi's did help turn the economy around and make Germany a European power again, if only by their defeat. This might even be relavant in this situation. This crusade on Apple may not have yielded anything productive in and of itself since Apple was in its [current] legal rights to protect their IP, but if Apple ever does become more popular in a given market and faces anti-trust litigation, this incident could be cited as evidence of Apple's unwillingness to allow any competition against it's platform.
Consider that the cost of 4 square miles of photovoltaic panels would probably be a measurable percent of US GDP. Even 0.4 square miles of them, which would generate the power of this plant, would be much much more expensive. Also, this plant would still generate power under conditions that panels would not, albeit much less than its peak power.
The mystery of Balmer's hair is a dark secret only known to the executive staff of Microsoft and Bill Gates' mom. Doom awaits those who seek such knowledge.
I'm not really setting out to endorse him, but he is the only "luminary" in business right now one could consider that actually gave people actual products and didn't just find ways to push money around. To actually produce and still be a financial success is worth something, even if your contribution is just giving out music players to tweens. Far more than can be said for finance guys who gave out risky loans so they could buy new cars did for anyone, who the readers in this magazine no doubt also idolize.
They are not opposing this treater per se, but instead any treaty that would set exceptions to the status quo of copyrights. They view it as a threatening precedent to allow any exceptions to copyright law, because it might snowball into eventually allowing society to think about more radical change to copyright.
Are there Linux classes in Universities? CS students may use Linux extensively but they hardly have classes on particular OSes. They do usually have at least one Operating Systems class where they study the theory of OS design and may implement parts of an OS or an entire basic OS depending on the lab schedule. That said, I bet the number of undergrad students studying CS intensive majors in the USA who have used zOS at all outside of work experience is countable, while most of them have probably used Linux even before attending college.
But Workspaces have been around for years and years and have never caught on. This model might offer greater usability. Also, it reduces two use modes to one, as people already use tabbed applications. It's worth experimenting with, at least.
JB Weld or other sufficient epoxy.
Very insightful operation. A mesh network for cellular communications is impractical, we just do not have enough bandwidth to make it work and it would be impossible to regulate. And regulation of the spectrum is not a bunch of BS like other regulation, its a hard, physics rooted, necessity.
Also, its not as simple as it sounds. It takes a team of engineers to monitor and place towers is a geographic region for a carrier. Adding one can actually make reception WORSE in some areas if you don't know what you are doing. So again, if we have crappy cell networks using engineered structured networks that cost billions of dollars to run just imagine what you'd get out of a peer to peer long range communications scheme.(hint, crap)
The TOS for Xbox Live hardly counts as a shirk wrap license, they are literally a Terms of SERVICE that you pay for every month. Good luck contracting any service that exists in the world without any terms that define what the expectations of that service actually are. I don't think there exists a harder agreement in law other than literally exchanging payment for an object rather than a service.
I think an ASM interpreter would actually be possible, but you would have to write a decent interpreter, namely with features like JIT(assembling!) for it to have performance on par with actually ASM programs. For example, NET is "interpreted" at a bytecode level with MSIL which is basically an intermediate assembly-like language. Also, at the end of the day, hand generated assembler only CAN be faster than C, there are no guarantees especially if your brain has a worse compiler than the one in your toolchain. I find this likely in the case of scripts that mostly do things like parse text and do many comparisons(ie, use up lots of simultaneous, related memory), as this is where your C compiler/interpreter will usually start to have a strong advantage over the human brain. Lastly, assembler doesn't really do you any good in these sorts of scenarios since you mostly are calling your framework code, and so doing a call foo vs. foo(); isn't really going to emit more efficient code.
I agree, but there is a big difference in terms of idealism vs. policy. If Global Warming and the associated damage it would cause to global ecosystems is a demonstrable threat, this would put governments well within their sovereign rights to protect their citizens and national security to begin regulation of even industry critical areas(ie, shrink the GDP) to prevent it. If it just comes down to environmentalism and public health, these are usually seen as tradeoff areas to be made by local governments when approving new industry in their jurisdictions and by private individuals who may choose to earn a livelihood in less than healthy conditions vs. not. Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness and all of that.
Only one of these guys said anything about not liking to use an IDE. I use IDEs to write assembler language for microcontrollers at work every day. Sure I could do it in an editor as well but I much prefer the graphical debugger and simulator of my IDEs as being able to see all the dozens control registers' and fuses' bits graphically during the execution of each instruction is easier for my mind to wrap itself around than my screen littered in hex or ones and zeros, at least sometimes. That said, my assembler's emitted machine code is no different than if it wrote it in Vim and then ran the command line based build tools, which are the same thing my GUI runs when I press the associated F-key.
So the IDEs really have nothing to do with the so called "designers" you see in Visual Studio. And yes, its true that no developer who was serious about maintaining a multi-year product could do it via the designers before, you just had no control over WTF was going on. Now with WPF and xaml you finally can use the designers in a maintainable fashion, but it's a bit too little, too late for most developers to care. You can write pure Windows code in C as a makefile project(so you have clear control over the build, even to the point of a different toolchain like GNU) just as well in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE as with Vim and the command prompt tools. It's just a matter of if the IDE at that point gets in the way more than it helps.
It is not in this case; this is not a trial, its an extradition hearing. Determining the graveness of the crime is not only material but to a large degree the purpose of extradition hearings.
But the real key to "C/C++" and associated complied languages that really makes them beat up higher level competition in my experience has less to do with the overhead of a GC or an interpreter, and more to do with how the platform the language is running on actually does things. Most C/C++ apps on a Windows machine for example end up having calls to entry points in the Windows API thrown into their binary code at least most of the time for basic tasks, meaning they are doing these tasks in the most efficient way possible on that platform. On Linux, its hard to do better than some of the standard C libraries for that platform. While, for a Java or .NET application on these platforms, you need a few cycles calling wrapper after wrapper to do this, the compiler doesn't just go down the header files for you and figure out what you are really trying to do. And of course, the way these languages store data like, Strings is rarely in a structure and alignment the OS/system services can use so that has to be done too.
And on languages like Ruby, now you have to spend millions of cycles of overhead just to get the code into a form the machine can begin to do this process for!
So really, the advantage of C/C++ has little to do with it being that much better than higher level languages, but more to do with the fact that 1) OSes and popular shipping libraries are set up to use C-style languages and assembly language programs to their full potential more than "managed" languages and interpreted languages.(usually often to their security and bugcount woes...) 2 ) C/C++ is generally more mature.
For proof of this, count the amount of time it takes for a Java app to do an FFT on a set of random numbers. Now do the same in C. Not much difference. Now try to draw a couple billion random points on the display in both. Note how the Java app takes longer and makes your machine break a sweat. Its becasue in the first example you mostly just have the overhead of the runtime and the GC, like in 2 you have dozens of extra cycles wasted on transforming your drawing code results into something call to the OS can use, and then figuring out how to call the OS to draw something on the screen.
In all fairness, police often can't think. Police officers are not mobile judges. If according to their department's policy, a certain report meets grounds for them to charge someone with a crime they have to. And the system is set up to make them usually play on the safe side...of making an arrest. To make matters worse, when it comes to stuff like suspected terrorism, most departments don't want to mess around and so pretty much if they have an accusation of such a crime and there is ANY evidence to back up the claim, to even Monty Python witch trial sketch standards, they feel its safer to let the courts deal with the problem.
Not only is this good publicity for Sony, but it boosts their sales numbers which makes the PS3 more attractive for planners at game dev houses scoping out which projects should target which consoles. That is small cash for big returns, as I'm guessing at this point Microsoft and Sony are far more concerned at winning game deals from each other than selling a few extra finished games.
1) MSN/Windows Live/Whatever MS is calling it this week search has always been the default search in IE since it had a default search feature. This is nothing new.
2) So has Google used its place as the default search in Firefox, which is well paid for by the way, to promote their search? Say it ain't so!
You do realize that everyone is stupid at birth, and then become enlightens through learning. We teach kids through structured education, which frankly is not really a time proven practice at all. If the education system isn't educating children and they are instead learning mostly from their parents, then that is only a sign that our education system is not doing its job.
This is bollocks. The Fine Arts have never been better. Actually put effort into scoping out your local art, design, drama, or classical music scene. Medium sized cities now enjoy facilities in these areas that used to be only confined a handful of places on Earth. And now many state University systems in the USA have fine arts programs on par with what would only be seen in world-class colleges. Also, compare University majors in the USA, and I think you will find there are many more students studying these topics than pure and applied science and mathematics.
often on Windows machines...for geeks. I reinstall my Windows installations historically about once a year. Recently its probably a bit longer than that. But I have colleagues who are on the same install/upgrade chain from about 2001. I have a Windows Server install back to 2003 that I've also used as a workstation that runs fantastically. I have had better uptime on my own personal systems than any web service I have ever used.(of course, coming with its own cavets) Many web services didn't even exist then. Many more have been born and died in that time. I don't see how cloud computing is really a solution to longevity unless you really have faith in the current state of web service business models. Frankly, I think there will be a second bubble burst when people realize that internet advertising is not valuable or effective enough to sustain the entire advertising supported web. Long term, hosting your own services is silly. We are about 1-2 years away from web service platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, etc making web services a more perfected medium by making TCO of one scalable. It would be much more efficient to have them centrally managed and on high uptime systems while not using up tons of idle resources. However, we geeks often look at what is possible with current technology and not what we can actually do TODAY. For 2009, I'm not so sure hosting your own personal server is so terrible for certain things. After all, only when you have the Database and Backups for your web apps are you really in control of anything.