What app? I have yet to use a Qt app on OS X which wasn't a complete clunker.
To be fair, our GUI demands are very modest. Project is LuxRender, a physically-based open-source renderer. The GUI is mostly just for visualization of the resulting render and tweaking tonemapping and other post-process parameters.
So, why you didn't contribute to fix this if you have access to the library source code?
We didn't have a dedicated developer on OSX, more like an enthusiastic user who could compile it but not so much code. Sometimes he could Google some workarounds other times we did a workaround in the blind.
In either case we did not feel comfortable hacking the wxWidgets internals, as we had no OSX experience or ability to debug.
With Qt this isn't an issue, as we mostly don't have to worry about stuff not working on OSX if it works on Windows and Linux.
Some users really want the perfect look of native widgets
Yeah, I get that. But given than the OSX offering from wxWidgets was pretty much broken on a constant basis, not-quite-native-but-functional Qt widgets won the day over broken-every-other-week wxWidgets.
I exaggerate slightly, but the lack of proper OSX support was the main driver to Qt for us.
1. Native widgets (especially important under OS X).
Ironically this is the reason we moved our cross-platform OSS app away from wxWidgets to Qt. The native widgets just didn't work properly and it was a pain to fix. We made the move some 4 years ago or so, and I can't say we've noticed we're missing something...
I use Crashplan - it doesn't need to be on all the time, and your neighbours computer doesn't need to be on all the time (the one that has your USB disk plugged into it).
Indeed! You have two options. Either via network or physical disk. If you do it via network, Crashplan will perform the backup when both PC's are online. If you need to restore you can copy the backup repository from your neighbor's computer onto a physical disk and restore from that at home.
Alternatively you can simply use a couple of USB disks, set up as two separate destinations for the backup set in Crashplan. Keep one at home and one at your neighbor. Once a week or whatever you swap them. Crashplan will automatically detect the disk when you plug it in and start syncing the backup.
The best part of this is that the data is encrypted in either case, and IIRC you can do all this using a free account. The paid options only matters if you also want to store the data in "the cloud".
Ummm... have nuetrinos actually been detected yet?
I seem to remember a LOT of attempts in a number of deep dark places around the planet, but can't remember any instance where anybody maintained that they'd actually detected a puppy.
Yes they have. Were you thinking of dark matter? If so, the latest results show nothing. A review paper from this summer discussing the hunt can be found here.
Jitsi, despite its being written written in java, is a better deal.
Does it support calling landlines across the globe? That's the primary use I and my family have for Skype. I couldn't find anything immediate on the Jitsi page.
A GPL-based project I contribute to wanted to become a member of the SFC, however it seems they have a large backlog of applications and are understaffed. It's been over 2.5 years since we've applied and we've yet to hear anything.
So, does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives?
We're not large, but could grow if we could get some framework for donations going. As such the financial side is our primary interest. We've decided against personal paypal accounts etc as we've had bad experience with this in the past, hence wanting something tied to the project.
Black holes are not particularly special; the event horizon isn't some solid barrier things crash into. It's merely the point of no return, beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.
That's the conventional view. However lately an argument has been presented which essentially says that if you pass the event horizon you'd burn up in a massive "firewall". And from what I gather, the argument has been very hard to dismiss...
My personal experience is, that I found Linux very easy to install and had no problems with driver issues.
While Linux has been easy to install (as in get up and running) for quite some time now, I've yet to install it without having to mess around with xorg.conf or install alternate drivers/software to get my hardware to work.
Main culprits have been wifi, gfx drivers (backlight support, hw video acceleration) and bluetooth.
I suppose it might be a bit more smooth on a desktop pc, but few people buy those these days.
Windows phone is actually pretty good...try it for a month and try to go back
No, it really isn't. - It doesn't save drafts when writing text messages. - It doesn't support sending files to other devices via Bluetooth (wtf?!). - You can only use Zune to transfer files to and from PC to the phone, fun when you're at a friend's and just want to give him those pictures you just took. - You can't see how much data you've transferred to know if you're above your monthly data plan limit.
That's just what I can recall my sister complaining about. She's got fairly modest needs, and she deeply regrets getting a Lumia. And she's had it for many months now.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 and just about every time we're together I end up saying the phrase "wow, you really can't do that with your phone?" about something I consider basic stuff.
I'll grant you one thing, the UI looks kinda nice and for the most part it's responsive.
That paper is from 1996. The updated epilogue contains this quote:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image [...]
This just an old wives tale based on a few anecdotes. There is no evidence that animals can predict earthquakes. How could they?
The only conjecture I heard which didn't sound totally "out there" was that the animals sensed the changes in the electric field caused by the piezoelectric effect due to stress changes in the rocks before an earthquake.
Obviously I'm not seriously suggesting that we all travel at 150 MPH for safety reasons, but it's not a simple DANGER = k * SPEED equation.
The time you spend on the road depends linearly on the speed. However the kinetic energy of the car, the main factor w.r.t. the breaking distance, depends on the speed squared. Thus while you're somewhat less likely of being involved in an accident when you drive fast due to less exposure time, the results are probably significantly worse if an accident happens.
If you're doing 50 mph you will manage to come to a complete stop in about 180 feet[1]. At 60 mph initial speed, you'll be doing 35 mph after 180 feet.
Personally I'd prefer the risk of a daily slap on the wrist over a knock-out punch once a month.
RAII was superceded by the Java Garbage Collector.
Only for memory. There's a lot of other resources out there where the GC complicates things a lot. Files and mutexes to name some common ones. At least.Net has "using" which is a poor mans RAII, but it's still easy to mess up and have a lingering resource handle.
Note: operator overloading is very problematic, eg. does * mean 'inner product', "outer product", "element-wise multiplication", or some other weird operation that some developer decided to put in.
I admit I've only programmed in C++ for 6 years, so I'm a bit new. But I've not once come across any code which sounds like the mess you describe. On the other hand, the code which does use it is significantly more clear because of it.
Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious.
Not curious at all. And, as mentioned in previous posts, the shutdown has been planned for several years already. If the Higgs' energy was higher than the roughly 125 GeV it seems to have, LHC would have found it a lot sooner.
The reason for not shutting down earlier was that they wanted to be sure that if it wasn't found by the time they shut down, then the accumulated data would be sufficient to rule out the Higgs. They calculated that in order to do that, they had to run until the end of 2012.
In fact, the current run at LHC was extended after the Higgs discovery was made, for the sole reason of gathering more Higgs data.
The kernel changes sound good, similar to how Vista introduced a lot of good kernel changes. However none seem like it will significantly increase my productivity. And without installing 3rd party apps, the whole clusterfuck that is forced Metro significantly reduces my productivity. I know. I tried.
So, again, there's not really a whole lot of reasons to upgrade a desktop computer if you're a power user. This is in stark contrast to Windows 7 which I found to significantly increase my productivity compared to Windows XP.
The bottom line is, 8 works in the same ways as 7, just with some added complexity.
For me the bottom line is this: what does Windows 8 do that Windows 7 can't do, or can't do well? Besides playing some hypothetical DirectX 11.1+ only games.
Windows 7 was a major step forward compared to Windows XP and Vista. Windows 2000/XP was a major step forward compared to Windows 9x.
So in which positive ways are Windows 8 a step forward? Ok so they've increased performance a bit, but I got a beefy PC with SSD, so I doubt Windows 8 is considerably faster. And that's about it.
And yes I did use Windows 8. And I don't dislike it just because it's cool. I dislike it because it's forcing me to work in a way which just isn't productive for me. If there was an option to disable the metro stuff and having the Win7 start menu, I would probably find it quite nice. Instead they decided not to give me any choice...
The intended workflow is to pin your apps to the taskbar. I rarely go into the start screen on windows 8 not because its bad, but because Its not needed every time you want to launch a program.
Which is nice if you use a handful of applications. However some of us regularly use a lot more than that. Off the top of my head I can count 35 different applications I launch on a daily basis, most of them many times a day. I'm excluding all games and such.
Pinning 35 apps to the taskbar would take so much space there's hardly any left for the windows that are active, and so the windows would quickly become grouped, reducing efficiency significantly.
I just cannot phantom why Microsoft didn't give us the option. Metro might be nice on the desktop for some people, and perhaps on a tablet. But why force us? I would have upgraded if I could have kept my start menu, so a lost sale here. Great move MS.
Hmm... My UPS shows how much is being drawn from it, and it has been a while since I've checked, but without using the graphics card at all except for rendering the desktop, and using about 70-80% of my CPU, it's pulling 450+ watts. I suspect if I loaded a game up, it would add another 200 watts on top of that.
Not sure what rig you had, but my when I ran my i7 860 + AMD 4870 full tilt (prime95 in background and playing Battlefield Bad Company 2) it drew about 360-370w, measured with a kill-a-watt-like meter at the socket.
While the 51% in the second application is indeed disappointing, it must be noted that we are comparing a $160 processor to a $290 processor.
True, however if you're planning on using the FX in a rendering farm or similar, then the Intel CPU is definitely more bang for the buck. Not just the CPU itself but you'll be able to use less machines in the farm to get the same performance, which would be a huge saving. Using the LuxRender data, 10 i7 2600k boxes would give you the same rendering power as 17 FX-8150 boxes! I've assumed FPU performance scales similar to the PassMark score there, which I think is reasonable.
So that's 7 more motherboards, RAM sticks and PSUs compared to using Intel. And then there's the power drain...
So yeah, for anything FPU intensive the FX series could end up being an expensive investment. Which is sad, I'd really like to buy AMD gear.
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What app? I have yet to use a Qt app on OS X which wasn't a complete clunker.
To be fair, our GUI demands are very modest. Project is LuxRender, a physically-based open-source renderer. The GUI is mostly just for visualization of the resulting render and tweaking tonemapping and other post-process parameters.
So, why you didn't contribute to fix this if you have access to the library source code?
We didn't have a dedicated developer on OSX, more like an enthusiastic user who could compile it but not so much code. Sometimes he could Google some workarounds other times we did a workaround in the blind.
In either case we did not feel comfortable hacking the wxWidgets internals, as we had no OSX experience or ability to debug.
With Qt this isn't an issue, as we mostly don't have to worry about stuff not working on OSX if it works on Windows and Linux.
Some users really want the perfect look of native widgets
Yeah, I get that. But given than the OSX offering from wxWidgets was pretty much broken on a constant basis, not-quite-native-but-functional Qt widgets won the day over broken-every-other-week wxWidgets.
I exaggerate slightly, but the lack of proper OSX support was the main driver to Qt for us.
1. Native widgets (especially important under OS X).
Ironically this is the reason we moved our cross-platform OSS app away from wxWidgets to Qt. The native widgets just didn't work properly and it was a pain to fix. We made the move some 4 years ago or so, and I can't say we've noticed we're missing something...
I use Crashplan - it doesn't need to be on all the time, and your neighbours computer doesn't need to be on all the time (the one that has your USB disk plugged into it).
Indeed! You have two options. Either via network or physical disk. If you do it via network, Crashplan will perform the backup when both PC's are online. If you need to restore you can copy the backup repository from your neighbor's computer onto a physical disk and restore from that at home.
Alternatively you can simply use a couple of USB disks, set up as two separate destinations for the backup set in Crashplan. Keep one at home and one at your neighbor. Once a week or whatever you swap them. Crashplan will automatically detect the disk when you plug it in and start syncing the backup.
The best part of this is that the data is encrypted in either case, and IIRC you can do all this using a free account. The paid options only matters if you also want to store the data in "the cloud".
Ummm ... have nuetrinos actually been detected yet?
I seem to remember a LOT of attempts in a number of deep dark places around the planet, but can't remember any instance where anybody maintained that they'd actually detected a puppy.
Yes they have. Were you thinking of dark matter? If so, the latest results show nothing. A review paper from this summer discussing the hunt can be found here.
Jitsi, despite its being written written in java, is a better deal.
Does it support calling landlines across the globe? That's the primary use I and my family have for Skype. I couldn't find anything immediate on the Jitsi page.
Thank you for the reply, we're really looking forward to this.
A GPL-based project I contribute to wanted to become a member of the SFC, however it seems they have a large backlog of applications and are understaffed. It's been over 2.5 years since we've applied and we've yet to hear anything.
So, does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives?
We're not large, but could grow if we could get some framework for donations going. As such the financial side is our primary interest. We've decided against personal paypal accounts etc as we've had bad experience with this in the past, hence wanting something tied to the project.
Black holes are not particularly special; the event horizon isn't some solid barrier things crash into. It's merely the point of no return, beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.
That's the conventional view. However lately an argument has been presented which essentially says that if you pass the event horizon you'd burn up in a massive "firewall". And from what I gather, the argument has been very hard to dismiss...
Not-quite-random links here and here.
My personal experience is, that I found Linux very easy to install and had no problems with driver issues.
While Linux has been easy to install (as in get up and running) for quite some time now, I've yet to install it without having to mess around with xorg.conf or install alternate drivers/software to get my hardware to work.
Main culprits have been wifi, gfx drivers (backlight support, hw video acceleration) and bluetooth.
I suppose it might be a bit more smooth on a desktop pc, but few people buy those these days.
Windows phone is actually pretty good...try it for a month and try to go back
No, it really isn't.
- It doesn't save drafts when writing text messages.
- It doesn't support sending files to other devices via Bluetooth (wtf?!).
- You can only use Zune to transfer files to and from PC to the phone, fun when you're at a friend's and just want to give him those pictures you just took.
- You can't see how much data you've transferred to know if you're above your monthly data plan limit.
That's just what I can recall my sister complaining about. She's got fairly modest needs, and she deeply regrets getting a Lumia. And she's had it for many months now.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 and just about every time we're together I end up saying the phrase "wow, you really can't do that with your phone?" about something I consider basic stuff.
I'll grant you one thing, the UI looks kinda nice and for the most part it's responsive.
If the refactor is done properly I don't think the OpenCL acceleration would be necessary.
Did you miss the APU part there? The future, at least according to AMD, is a weaksauce CPU glued to powerful compute units.
So using OpenCL for Calc would be similar to using the hardware video accelerator to make that i3 play back 1080p h264 content without sweating.
Meanwhile, IRC works just fine... and is supported by Pidgin from what I can recall.
That paper is from 1996. The updated epilogue contains this quote:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image [...]
This just an old wives tale based on a few anecdotes. There is no evidence that animals can predict earthquakes. How could they?
The only conjecture I heard which didn't sound totally "out there" was that the animals sensed the changes in the electric field caused by the piezoelectric effect due to stress changes in the rocks before an earthquake.
Something along those lines at least.
Obviously I'm not seriously suggesting that we all travel at 150 MPH for safety reasons, but it's not a simple DANGER = k * SPEED equation.
The time you spend on the road depends linearly on the speed. However the kinetic energy of the car, the main factor w.r.t. the breaking distance, depends on the speed squared. Thus while you're somewhat less likely of being involved in an accident when you drive fast due to less exposure time, the results are probably significantly worse if an accident happens.
If you're doing 50 mph you will manage to come to a complete stop in about 180 feet[1]. At 60 mph initial speed, you'll be doing 35 mph after 180 feet.
Personally I'd prefer the risk of a daily slap on the wrist over a knock-out punch once a month.
[1]: http://www.brake.org.uk/facts/speedscience.htm
RAII was superceded by the Java Garbage Collector.
Only for memory. There's a lot of other resources out there where the GC complicates things a lot. Files and mutexes to name some common ones. At least .Net has "using" which is a poor mans RAII, but it's still easy to mess up and have a lingering resource handle.
Note: operator overloading is very problematic, eg. does * mean 'inner product', "outer product", "element-wise multiplication", or some other weird operation that some developer decided to put in.
I admit I've only programmed in C++ for 6 years, so I'm a bit new. But I've not once come across any code which sounds like the mess you describe. On the other hand, the code which does use it is significantly more clear because of it.
offsetTangentPos = LocalToTangentMatrix * GlobalToLocalMatrix * (globalPos + offset);
is a lot clearer and closer to the math to me than
offsetTangentPos = Matrix.multiply(LocalToTangentMatrix, GlobalToLocalMatrix).transform(globalPos.add(offset));
I'm no C/C++ expert, but I think I'd list RAII, operator overloading (especially for math-oriented code) and templates.
Sure operator overloading and templates can be abused, but when used with moderation I find they make it much easier to write clear, concise code.
Just when they get a whiff of the Higgs they shut down. Curious.
Not curious at all. And, as mentioned in previous posts, the shutdown has been planned for several years already. If the Higgs' energy was higher than the roughly 125 GeV it seems to have, LHC would have found it a lot sooner.
The reason for not shutting down earlier was that they wanted to be sure that if it wasn't found by the time they shut down, then the accumulated data would be sufficient to rule out the Higgs. They calculated that in order to do that, they had to run until the end of 2012.
In fact, the current run at LHC was extended after the Higgs discovery was made, for the sole reason of gathering more Higgs data.
The kernel changes sound good, similar to how Vista introduced a lot of good kernel changes. However none seem like it will significantly increase my productivity. And without installing 3rd party apps, the whole clusterfuck that is forced Metro significantly reduces my productivity. I know. I tried.
So, again, there's not really a whole lot of reasons to upgrade a desktop computer if you're a power user. This is in stark contrast to Windows 7 which I found to significantly increase my productivity compared to Windows XP.
The bottom line is, 8 works in the same ways as 7, just with some added complexity.
For me the bottom line is this: what does Windows 8 do that Windows 7 can't do, or can't do well? Besides playing some hypothetical DirectX 11.1+ only games.
Windows 7 was a major step forward compared to Windows XP and Vista. Windows 2000/XP was a major step forward compared to Windows 9x.
So in which positive ways are Windows 8 a step forward? Ok so they've increased performance a bit, but I got a beefy PC with SSD, so I doubt Windows 8 is considerably faster. And that's about it.
And yes I did use Windows 8. And I don't dislike it just because it's cool. I dislike it because it's forcing me to work in a way which just isn't productive for me. If there was an option to disable the metro stuff and having the Win7 start menu, I would probably find it quite nice. Instead they decided not to give me any choice...
The intended workflow is to pin your apps to the taskbar. I rarely go into the start screen on windows 8 not because its bad, but because Its not needed every time you want to launch a program.
Which is nice if you use a handful of applications. However some of us regularly use a lot more than that. Off the top of my head I can count 35 different applications I launch on a daily basis, most of them many times a day. I'm excluding all games and such.
Pinning 35 apps to the taskbar would take so much space there's hardly any left for the windows that are active, and so the windows would quickly become grouped, reducing efficiency significantly.
I just cannot phantom why Microsoft didn't give us the option. Metro might be nice on the desktop for some people, and perhaps on a tablet. But why force us? I would have upgraded if I could have kept my start menu, so a lost sale here. Great move MS.
Hmm... My UPS shows how much is being drawn from it, and it has been a while since I've checked, but without using the graphics card at all except for rendering the desktop, and using about 70-80% of my CPU, it's pulling 450+ watts. I suspect if I loaded a game up, it would add another 200 watts on top of that.
Not sure what rig you had, but my when I ran my i7 860 + AMD 4870 full tilt (prime95 in background and playing Battlefield Bad Company 2) it drew about 360-370w, measured with a kill-a-watt-like meter at the socket.
While the 51% in the second application is indeed disappointing, it must be noted that we are comparing a $160 processor to a $290 processor.
True, however if you're planning on using the FX in a rendering farm or similar, then the Intel CPU is definitely more bang for the buck. Not just the CPU itself but you'll be able to use less machines in the farm to get the same performance, which would be a huge saving. Using the LuxRender data, 10 i7 2600k boxes would give you the same rendering power as 17 FX-8150 boxes! I've assumed FPU performance scales similar to the PassMark score there, which I think is reasonable.
So that's 7 more motherboards, RAM sticks and PSUs compared to using Intel. And then there's the power drain...
So yeah, for anything FPU intensive the FX series could end up being an expensive investment. Which is sad, I'd really like to buy AMD gear.