The FSF post didn't say either what terms of the license they thought Apple was violating, nor why they think distributing via the app store is any different than distributing via the post office.
The way copyright law defines distribution it essentially means transmit, like over radio and TV or down a wire. There's a very limited exception carved out for passing along transitory copies unaltered so each node on the Internet isn't liable for everything passing through just the source and potentially the sink. Moving a copy physically around never invokes copyright, which is why Apple is on the hook and the post office not. And Apple's software storing it on the user device leads to vicarious and contributory liability if they violate the reproduction right, since they're both materially contributing and profiting from it.
This is pretty much straight up copyright law, not the FSFs opinion. I haven't read up on exactly what beef they have with the app store's terms, but Apple's activity very clearly falls under copyright law.
Oh, how/. has fallen when this is modded up. It must be GPL-compatible, it must not be GPL. The FSF keeps a list of compatible licenses though the general theme is "like GPL or freer", like it doesn't have to be a copyleft license. If he doesn't want to introduce any new license headaches he could just use the modified BSD license which is pretty much as minimal as it gets. Whether it resolves his license problems are another matter, the GPL demands the whole project must be compatible and I'd guess that Apple's code is not. So the lawyer is right it doesn't matter, it's probably a violation either way.
Well even if we change the medium there'll still be a desire for professionally made content, no offence to YouTube ads but it's not likely to produce Game of Thrones or The Hobbit any time soon. That you're stuck with what your cable provider gives you is going the way of AOL though, everyone can use Spotify and once the bandwidth is sufficient you can get all your TV from anywhere too. The only reason we don't have streaming BluRay quality is will, better to pretend 5 Mbit is enough for HD. Oddly enough Netflix recommends 25 mbit for UHD, 5x the bandwidth for 4x the pixels, despite the audio track being the same. But the way things are going with fiber eventually that'll be like 128kbps vs 256kbps AAC, it's not significant.
I think Google has a really compelling argument that using the Java APIs in what has become the world's dominant personal computing platform's primary development toolset has increased the value of the Java APIs.
Unfortunately, that's not really how that swings. If you make for example a movie adaptation of a book it might drive book sales, but your use is primarily a replacement for a commercial opportunity to sell the movie rights. Sun/Oracle was selling Java ME licenses, Android was pretty clearly created to avoid those license terms. If we first assume the API is copyrighted, that does not seem like a typical fair use. The purpose is not interoperability with Java, it's to substitute it so the character of use is also against it and clearly they replicate a substantial amount of the API. The only factor that really speaks in favor of fair use is the nature of the work, which is purely descriptive and necessary to achieve the same functional operation.
Part of me want to agree a little bit with Oracle though, clearly designing an API is a creative effort. It's not merely stating a bunch of facts where somebody else designing an API would have to come up with something very, very similar. But the whole purpose of an API is to have a standardized way to interact with it, like being able to copyright where the brake pedal goes so nobody else can put it in the same spot and have it work in the same way. Like, I can't really think of a non-fair way to use an API which is why it shouldn't be copyrighted in the first place.
Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is.... developed by Google.
You forget the next Bill Gates (if he wants to be) after this ruling: Tim Berners-Lee. Any use of the HTTP protocol from 1991 to date is clearly derivative of the HTTP 1.0 protocol and since he owns the copyright which is life+70 he now can sue every website in existence for royalties.
Well you know they're not going to give up the ad revenue for free and how many people already complain it's too expensive? I don't exactly feel the market vibe would be positive. That said, online services aren't stuck with one service tier. They could offer some form of "first class" service, bump the price out of the "premium" class and offer simultaneous or near-cinema exclusives - preferably less insane than Prima Cinema ($35000 + $500/rental), like upper middle class not 1%ers. Of course cinemas would be blatantly opposed to the idea, they refuse to show anything also being aired.
As someone who arranged the lease on a VW eGolf today, 100 or 200 miles is plenty. As a commuter vehicle that's all you need.
As a commuter vehicle, even the Renault Twizy would serve my purpose. The problem is that with depreciation, insurance, parking and all those other costs it's not worth having two cars and having to pick up a rental every time I do something outside the commuter box is hassle, though it'd probably make economic sense. My ICE car covers 100% of my needs, except when it's so far that I'm flying. Somehow the cost/benefit - or rather saving/benefit isn't very compelling.
Yes, companies that make one product do use products from competitors in some situations. Microsoft is a great example of this. Yes, they provide Windows, but you can also use Linux with Azure. There's nothing wrong with that. They're using a product that competes with Windows because that's what the Azure users want and need. It's the smart thing to do, for crying out loud.
Well, Windows doesn't run Linux applications but AMD CPUs do run the same software as Intel CPUs. That sort of thing matters. To use a car analogy, it's one thing to use a competitor's trucks because you don't make trucks even though they also have cars that compete with yours. It's another thing if your sales reps show up in a competitor's car. I'd wager the people at Samsung use Windows and Office, but I don't expect to see many Lumia phones. Last I heard AMD is still making desktop CPUs. Now they're making a desktop without their own desktop CPU. That's as clear a case of not eating your own dog food that you're going to get.
What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings
I guess nobody here at/. took the Nokia lesson. No matter how badly your product sucks, you never, ever admit that to the market. It doesn't matter if you got less credibility than the Iraqi information minister, it's still better than the alternative. Do you know how much ridicule they're going to get for this with funny fake ads with the "Intel inside" logo and jingle? It's brand suicide. The only plausible explanation is that AMD is in "screw tomorrow, we need sales NOW" mode. It's not a shocker if the market pairs an Intel CPU with an AMD dGPU if that makes sense, but if I was head of marketing at AMD I'd rather resign than have this to my name.
In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers way more heavily under high disk load then Windows desktop response. Something with the way Gnome and KDE are prioritized in the kernel loop I would expect. Run something in the background that is chewing up the disk and expect windows to draw very slowly.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
Well, in that respect what's the bandwidth between the user and the computer over the keyboard? If the primary purpose was communication and not implementation, you have a thousand tools for that which at best are equal to a meeting room with a whiteboard. They're trying to mash up the traditional system where you agree on what to build then go off to build it so that you're doing both at once all the time. To me it smells like jack of all trades, king of none where you need to deal with everything from high-level design to low-level implementation issues all the time. I guess it works if you have the right people, but then nearly every system works if you have the right people.
Okay, I didn't actually mean just typing but the headline was too short to explain. We have at least one, maybe two people in our group who actually produce fairly decent solutions but who are just s...l...o...w at ad hoc work. For example we're in a meeting discussing something, I can whip out a query in a minute to answer and he'll have to take it back to his office after the meeting and work on it for ten minutes to find the same. He's slow at typing. He's poor at using auto-complete. He constantly needs to reference documentation and diagrams.
The thing is though, he produces solutions that are actually good and work well, unlike some of the others who either make weird designs causing grief down the road or buggy code leading to fire fighting. If I was asked as the manager who I'd like to let go, he wouldn't be near the top of my list. But if I had to sit there fiddling my thumbs while he worked, I'd probably be ready to quit in less than a week. I'm guessing in pair programming he'd hand me the keyboard, but in "mob" programming I'm sure there'd be some enforced round robin system so the one holding the keyboard isn't dominating.
Have you seen the footage where it falls over? Then it hits hard, the remaining fuel sparks and it goes boom way past recovering anything but scrap metal. If they want something that's worth salvaging, it has to land smooth. Also the net wouldn't really help with the first 99%.
Well maybe, but it sounds like the right kind of candidates aren't showing up for the interview which makes it kinda hard to give them offers. Unless they're being overly up-front and present a low and narrow salary range, I'd look into other reasons why they're not attractive enough. If they are scaring them away, be less specific and say you're ready to offer competitive terms for the right candidate. Then you might at least get the right kind of people in the door and maybe sell them on the other benefits, or if not you'll at least know what kind of pay range is necessary.
When I schedule an interview with a prospective hire, I prepare the paperwork to make a job offer at the end of the interview. If they look solid, and everyone involved gives a thumbs up, I make the offer. More often then not, they accept on the spot. Others sleep on it, and call and accept the following day. But we lose a lot fewer good candidates that way.
How does that work if there's multiple candidates? Do you simply hire the first one who passes the "thumbs-up" test or are you flexible enough you'll hire as many good people who shows up at the door? Most places I've worked for you get permission to hire a new person from up high, you get a round of candidates and pick one. If you give the first guy an offer, well you don't really have anything to offer the rest.
Little did I realize that would have been like emailing Bill Gates for help because a driver didn't install correctly on Windows.
Well it was 1995, while he was still studying at the university of Helsinki working on Linux 1.x, long before the dotcom money and any serious corporate interest in Linux, while Microsoft at the time was a $50 billion dollar company. So almost the same;)
From a user's perspective there's the applications and there's the rest, whether it's done in the kernel or in user mode is not really apparent or important, things like drivers, system daemons, windowing systems, graphics/multimedia and so on. Sometimes it's a division of labor, like pulseaudio with ALSA in the kernel or mesa with KMS in the kernel. While I know you're a practically oriented person, is there any parts where you feel that:
a) Really shouldn't be done in the kernel, but in practice we do b) Really should be done in the kernel, but in practice we don't c) Doesn't belong in the kernel, but if you had the time you'd like to change/improve.
Citation please? Because the last press release I saw from AMD on the subject said they were releasing docs as fast as the lawyer could sign off on them and that they hoped to replace their binary blob in the future with the FOSS driver. To that end they had gone so far as to hire a couple extra devs to work on the FOSS drivers to help them get closer to release parity.
Well no, not really. They're hoping to replace the base infrastructure on Linux with the open source "amdgpu" driver, but with separate open and closed source user mode drivers for OpenGL, multimedia and so on. It would get you up to release parity if all you need is a framebuffer and software fallback, but they are still planning to develop Mesa and Catalyst separately. They don't have any plans to give Intel a free high performance OpenGL engine or to let nVidia look at their game-specific optimizations.
And this is why we have boom-bust economics, we turn ripples in the water into huge waves. What's more there's really no underlying economic change, it flips when the rest of the market decide it's a flip. For example I remember one big investor who went broke on betting that the dotcom bubble would burst. Why? He was too early, the bubble just kept soaring and he couldn't hold his positions until it peaked. He was right about the underlying economics but as long as people kept believing the bubble kept growing.
These positive feedback loops can turn a relatively small change into a huge one, if you pay higher prices you want higher wages and the store pays higher wages it'll raise prices. You don't see a lot of them in microeconomics where your own actions don't change your own conditions much, but social economics is full of them. Greece for example is caught in a bad spiral now, when they cut spending they weaken the economy leading to less taxes leading to even greater needs for cuts. There's often no easy outs because the market is counteracting your actions, like swimming in quicksand.
It's in the nature of fanboys. But I was positively surprised by this card, I was expecting them to come in much more power hungry and hotter due to the liquid cooling. That this was like their 220W CPU stunt with the FX-9590, a 3-400W card just to match performance at the cost of everything else. Instead it's nearly a match on power (275W vs 250W), the cooling is quiet and while it adds a radiator it's shorter making cabling easier. For all the people who want to give AMD a fighting chance, this is a competitive offer that you don't have to excuse to buy.
That said, I wonder how much it'll add to AMDs bottom line as that $650 price tag is probably quite a lot less than they hoped for, availability at least for reviews is also reportedly slim. But still, this is probably the best launch AMD has had since 2013 and I hope they can push out the rest of the lineup and leave the 300 series behind as soon as possible. Particularly the R9 nano could hit a more mainstream market, the Fury/Fury X only support a small - but profitable - segment. They need high volume cards too though, according to the Steam survey the GTX 970 has been selling 3.5x the volume as the GTX 980.
And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
Playing devil's advocate here, for how long? Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 13 got way more exciting than expected. Apollo 17 was end of the line. In 2.5 years it went from "OMG we put a man on the moon" to "been there, done that... moving on". And that was when space travel was new and the astronauts were actually exploring. I'm sure you can find many ways the moon and Mars are different but it's still a rock in space, bigger and further away.
All the current mission plans basically say the area will be surveyed and a habitat built before they even arrive. You'll have cameras pointing up from the base to the lander and on their arrival, like a hotel awaiting guests. The nasty conditions on Mars will keep them from travelling far from the base, most likely they'll need to return every night and they'll get a lot more radiation exposure doing Marswalks so they might have to stay indoors a lot too.
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll want to send humans eventually. But when we do, they won't seem very essential to the process no matter how you play it. It will mostly be the robots enabling the humans to live there, not that the humans will provide the better bang for the buck. We could have sent up many complete Hubble telescopes for the cost of the Shuttle program, the repairs only made sense because the program already existed and was a sunk cost. For the foreseeable future that will probably be true of Mars rovers too.
Click to play will protect you against most exploits, since they usually depend on either a) redirects to random malware page or b) infecting ad banners. Sadly there's a lot of decent content built on last decade's technology. And some that are adopting that tech today, but I can't really say more....
Yes that's the workaround but often "x" is actually SUM(something something) that you have to duplicate unless you can use a CTE, then the contents of x changes and you end up with "CASE WHEN x 0 THEN y / x' END" where x and x' aren't actually the same thing and suddenly x' is 0 when x is not.
The same way I think SQL could use an alternative equality/inequality operator that treats NULL as a value, in certain cases a = b OR (a IS NULL and b IS NULL) is exactly what I'm trying to do and ISNULL(a,x) = ISNULL(b,x) where x is some value that can't happen otherwise is terrible for indexes and such. Not in general but occasionally a $= b or a @= b or a %= b or whatever operator would be great.
So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.
And a very frustrating aspect for all the developers familiar with C# / ObjectiveC / Swift / C++ / Java / VB whose job it was to port traditional applications to be web applications. And YMMV but in my experience object oriented programming is a pretty good model for GUI front-ends, all the windows and dialogs with their menus, toolbars, buttons and so on have a ton of state and fire events like a button saying "I just got clicked" or a dialog saying "The user just closed me". Many people have wasted thousands of hours trying to fake it in Javascript.
Slashdot Mirror
The FSF post didn't say either what terms of the license they thought Apple was violating, nor why they think distributing via the app store is any different than distributing via the post office.
The way copyright law defines distribution it essentially means transmit, like over radio and TV or down a wire. There's a very limited exception carved out for passing along transitory copies unaltered so each node on the Internet isn't liable for everything passing through just the source and potentially the sink. Moving a copy physically around never invokes copyright, which is why Apple is on the hook and the post office not. And Apple's software storing it on the user device leads to vicarious and contributory liability if they violate the reproduction right, since they're both materially contributing and profiting from it.
This is pretty much straight up copyright law, not the FSFs opinion. I haven't read up on exactly what beef they have with the app store's terms, but Apple's activity very clearly falls under copyright law.
Oh, how /. has fallen when this is modded up. It must be GPL-compatible, it must not be GPL. The FSF keeps a list of compatible licenses though the general theme is "like GPL or freer", like it doesn't have to be a copyleft license. If he doesn't want to introduce any new license headaches he could just use the modified BSD license which is pretty much as minimal as it gets. Whether it resolves his license problems are another matter, the GPL demands the whole project must be compatible and I'd guess that Apple's code is not. So the lawyer is right it doesn't matter, it's probably a violation either way.
Well even if we change the medium there'll still be a desire for professionally made content, no offence to YouTube ads but it's not likely to produce Game of Thrones or The Hobbit any time soon. That you're stuck with what your cable provider gives you is going the way of AOL though, everyone can use Spotify and once the bandwidth is sufficient you can get all your TV from anywhere too. The only reason we don't have streaming BluRay quality is will, better to pretend 5 Mbit is enough for HD. Oddly enough Netflix recommends 25 mbit for UHD, 5x the bandwidth for 4x the pixels, despite the audio track being the same. But the way things are going with fiber eventually that'll be like 128kbps vs 256kbps AAC, it's not significant.
I think Google has a really compelling argument that using the Java APIs in what has become the world's dominant personal computing platform's primary development toolset has increased the value of the Java APIs.
Unfortunately, that's not really how that swings. If you make for example a movie adaptation of a book it might drive book sales, but your use is primarily a replacement for a commercial opportunity to sell the movie rights. Sun/Oracle was selling Java ME licenses, Android was pretty clearly created to avoid those license terms. If we first assume the API is copyrighted, that does not seem like a typical fair use. The purpose is not interoperability with Java, it's to substitute it so the character of use is also against it and clearly they replicate a substantial amount of the API. The only factor that really speaks in favor of fair use is the nature of the work, which is purely descriptive and necessary to achieve the same functional operation.
Part of me want to agree a little bit with Oracle though, clearly designing an API is a creative effort. It's not merely stating a bunch of facts where somebody else designing an API would have to come up with something very, very similar. But the whole purpose of an API is to have a standardized way to interact with it, like being able to copyright where the brake pedal goes so nobody else can put it in the same spot and have it work in the same way. Like, I can't really think of a non-fair way to use an API which is why it shouldn't be copyrighted in the first place.
Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is .... developed by Google.
You forget the next Bill Gates (if he wants to be) after this ruling: Tim Berners-Lee. Any use of the HTTP protocol from 1991 to date is clearly derivative of the HTTP 1.0 protocol and since he owns the copyright which is life+70 he now can sue every website in existence for royalties.
Well you know they're not going to give up the ad revenue for free and how many people already complain it's too expensive? I don't exactly feel the market vibe would be positive. That said, online services aren't stuck with one service tier. They could offer some form of "first class" service, bump the price out of the "premium" class and offer simultaneous or near-cinema exclusives - preferably less insane than Prima Cinema ($35000 + $500/rental), like upper middle class not 1%ers. Of course cinemas would be blatantly opposed to the idea, they refuse to show anything also being aired.
As someone who arranged the lease on a VW eGolf today, 100 or 200 miles is plenty. As a commuter vehicle that's all you need.
As a commuter vehicle, even the Renault Twizy would serve my purpose. The problem is that with depreciation, insurance, parking and all those other costs it's not worth having two cars and having to pick up a rental every time I do something outside the commuter box is hassle, though it'd probably make economic sense. My ICE car covers 100% of my needs, except when it's so far that I'm flying. Somehow the cost/benefit - or rather saving/benefit isn't very compelling.
Yes, companies that make one product do use products from competitors in some situations. Microsoft is a great example of this. Yes, they provide Windows, but you can also use Linux with Azure. There's nothing wrong with that. They're using a product that competes with Windows because that's what the Azure users want and need. It's the smart thing to do, for crying out loud.
Well, Windows doesn't run Linux applications but AMD CPUs do run the same software as Intel CPUs. That sort of thing matters. To use a car analogy, it's one thing to use a competitor's trucks because you don't make trucks even though they also have cars that compete with yours. It's another thing if your sales reps show up in a competitor's car. I'd wager the people at Samsung use Windows and Office, but I don't expect to see many Lumia phones. Last I heard AMD is still making desktop CPUs. Now they're making a desktop without their own desktop CPU. That's as clear a case of not eating your own dog food that you're going to get.
What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings
I guess nobody here at /. took the Nokia lesson. No matter how badly your product sucks, you never, ever admit that to the market. It doesn't matter if you got less credibility than the Iraqi information minister, it's still better than the alternative. Do you know how much ridicule they're going to get for this with funny fake ads with the "Intel inside" logo and jingle? It's brand suicide. The only plausible explanation is that AMD is in "screw tomorrow, we need sales NOW" mode. It's not a shocker if the market pairs an Intel CPU with an AMD dGPU if that makes sense, but if I was head of marketing at AMD I'd rather resign than have this to my name.
In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers way more heavily under high disk load then Windows desktop response. Something with the way Gnome and KDE are prioritized in the kernel loop I would expect. Run something in the background that is chewing up the disk and expect windows to draw very slowly.
They're both pretty awful, I was updating a laptop I recently bought for travel (firesale before Win10, will update for free), 2GB to update on a 5400 rpm spinning rust disk. Oh. My. God. Fortunately it got 8GB of RAM, so most things run well once loaded into memory. I wanted some space for a media collection on the go, but boy will I miss an SSD as boot drive.
Well, in that respect what's the bandwidth between the user and the computer over the keyboard? If the primary purpose was communication and not implementation, you have a thousand tools for that which at best are equal to a meeting room with a whiteboard. They're trying to mash up the traditional system where you agree on what to build then go off to build it so that you're doing both at once all the time. To me it smells like jack of all trades, king of none where you need to deal with everything from high-level design to low-level implementation issues all the time. I guess it works if you have the right people, but then nearly every system works if you have the right people.
Okay, I didn't actually mean just typing but the headline was too short to explain. We have at least one, maybe two people in our group who actually produce fairly decent solutions but who are just s...l...o...w at ad hoc work. For example we're in a meeting discussing something, I can whip out a query in a minute to answer and he'll have to take it back to his office after the meeting and work on it for ten minutes to find the same. He's slow at typing. He's poor at using auto-complete. He constantly needs to reference documentation and diagrams.
The thing is though, he produces solutions that are actually good and work well, unlike some of the others who either make weird designs causing grief down the road or buggy code leading to fire fighting. If I was asked as the manager who I'd like to let go, he wouldn't be near the top of my list. But if I had to sit there fiddling my thumbs while he worked, I'd probably be ready to quit in less than a week. I'm guessing in pair programming he'd hand me the keyboard, but in "mob" programming I'm sure there'd be some enforced round robin system so the one holding the keyboard isn't dominating.
Have you seen the footage where it falls over? Then it hits hard, the remaining fuel sparks and it goes boom way past recovering anything but scrap metal. If they want something that's worth salvaging, it has to land smooth. Also the net wouldn't really help with the first 99%.
Well maybe, but it sounds like the right kind of candidates aren't showing up for the interview which makes it kinda hard to give them offers. Unless they're being overly up-front and present a low and narrow salary range, I'd look into other reasons why they're not attractive enough. If they are scaring them away, be less specific and say you're ready to offer competitive terms for the right candidate. Then you might at least get the right kind of people in the door and maybe sell them on the other benefits, or if not you'll at least know what kind of pay range is necessary.
When I schedule an interview with a prospective hire, I prepare the paperwork to make a job offer at the end of the interview. If they look solid, and everyone involved gives a thumbs up, I make the offer. More often then not, they accept on the spot. Others sleep on it, and call and accept the following day. But we lose a lot fewer good candidates that way.
How does that work if there's multiple candidates? Do you simply hire the first one who passes the "thumbs-up" test or are you flexible enough you'll hire as many good people who shows up at the door? Most places I've worked for you get permission to hire a new person from up high, you get a round of candidates and pick one. If you give the first guy an offer, well you don't really have anything to offer the rest.
Little did I realize that would have been like emailing Bill Gates for help because a driver didn't install correctly on Windows.
Well it was 1995, while he was still studying at the university of Helsinki working on Linux 1.x, long before the dotcom money and any serious corporate interest in Linux, while Microsoft at the time was a $50 billion dollar company. So almost the same ;)
From a user's perspective there's the applications and there's the rest, whether it's done in the kernel or in user mode is not really apparent or important, things like drivers, system daemons, windowing systems, graphics/multimedia and so on. Sometimes it's a division of labor, like pulseaudio with ALSA in the kernel or mesa with KMS in the kernel. While I know you're a practically oriented person, is there any parts where you feel that:
a) Really shouldn't be done in the kernel, but in practice we do
b) Really should be done in the kernel, but in practice we don't
c) Doesn't belong in the kernel, but if you had the time you'd like to change/improve.
Citation please? Because the last press release I saw from AMD on the subject said they were releasing docs as fast as the lawyer could sign off on them and that they hoped to replace their binary blob in the future with the FOSS driver. To that end they had gone so far as to hire a couple extra devs to work on the FOSS drivers to help them get closer to release parity.
Well no, not really. They're hoping to replace the base infrastructure on Linux with the open source "amdgpu" driver, but with separate open and closed source user mode drivers for OpenGL, multimedia and so on. It would get you up to release parity if all you need is a framebuffer and software fallback, but they are still planning to develop Mesa and Catalyst separately. They don't have any plans to give Intel a free high performance OpenGL engine or to let nVidia look at their game-specific optimizations.
And this is why we have boom-bust economics, we turn ripples in the water into huge waves. What's more there's really no underlying economic change, it flips when the rest of the market decide it's a flip. For example I remember one big investor who went broke on betting that the dotcom bubble would burst. Why? He was too early, the bubble just kept soaring and he couldn't hold his positions until it peaked. He was right about the underlying economics but as long as people kept believing the bubble kept growing.
These positive feedback loops can turn a relatively small change into a huge one, if you pay higher prices you want higher wages and the store pays higher wages it'll raise prices. You don't see a lot of them in microeconomics where your own actions don't change your own conditions much, but social economics is full of them. Greece for example is caught in a bad spiral now, when they cut spending they weaken the economy leading to less taxes leading to even greater needs for cuts. There's often no easy outs because the market is counteracting your actions, like swimming in quicksand.
It's in the nature of fanboys. But I was positively surprised by this card, I was expecting them to come in much more power hungry and hotter due to the liquid cooling. That this was like their 220W CPU stunt with the FX-9590, a 3-400W card just to match performance at the cost of everything else. Instead it's nearly a match on power (275W vs 250W), the cooling is quiet and while it adds a radiator it's shorter making cabling easier. For all the people who want to give AMD a fighting chance, this is a competitive offer that you don't have to excuse to buy.
That said, I wonder how much it'll add to AMDs bottom line as that $650 price tag is probably quite a lot less than they hoped for, availability at least for reviews is also reportedly slim. But still, this is probably the best launch AMD has had since 2013 and I hope they can push out the rest of the lineup and leave the 300 series behind as soon as possible. Particularly the R9 nano could hit a more mainstream market, the Fury/Fury X only support a small - but profitable - segment. They need high volume cards too though, according to the Steam survey the GTX 970 has been selling 3.5x the volume as the GTX 980.
And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
Playing devil's advocate here, for how long? Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 13 got way more exciting than expected. Apollo 17 was end of the line. In 2.5 years it went from "OMG we put a man on the moon" to "been there, done that... moving on". And that was when space travel was new and the astronauts were actually exploring. I'm sure you can find many ways the moon and Mars are different but it's still a rock in space, bigger and further away.
All the current mission plans basically say the area will be surveyed and a habitat built before they even arrive. You'll have cameras pointing up from the base to the lander and on their arrival, like a hotel awaiting guests. The nasty conditions on Mars will keep them from travelling far from the base, most likely they'll need to return every night and they'll get a lot more radiation exposure doing Marswalks so they might have to stay indoors a lot too.
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll want to send humans eventually. But when we do, they won't seem very essential to the process no matter how you play it. It will mostly be the robots enabling the humans to live there, not that the humans will provide the better bang for the buck. We could have sent up many complete Hubble telescopes for the cost of the Shuttle program, the repairs only made sense because the program already existed and was a sunk cost. For the foreseeable future that will probably be true of Mars rovers too.
Click to play will protect you against most exploits, since they usually depend on either a) redirects to random malware page or b) infecting ad banners. Sadly there's a lot of decent content built on last decade's technology. And some that are adopting that tech today, but I can't really say more....
You can.
CASE WHEN x 0 THEN y / x END
Yes that's the workaround but often "x" is actually SUM(something something) that you have to duplicate unless you can use a CTE, then the contents of x changes and you end up with "CASE WHEN x 0 THEN y / x' END" where x and x' aren't actually the same thing and suddenly x' is 0 when x is not.
The same way I think SQL could use an alternative equality/inequality operator that treats NULL as a value, in certain cases a = b OR (a IS NULL and b IS NULL) is exactly what I'm trying to do and ISNULL(a,x) = ISNULL(b,x) where x is some value that can't happen otherwise is terrible for indexes and such. Not in general but occasionally a $= b or a @= b or a %= b or whatever operator would be great.
Let's say I have have product sales like 4,6,0,5 and want % changes:
6/4-1 = 0.5 = +50% ok
0/6-1 = -1 = -100% ok
5/0-1 = -1 = -100% epic fail
Though I really wish you could get NULL when doing a divide by 0 in a database instead of an error.
So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.
And a very frustrating aspect for all the developers familiar with C# / ObjectiveC / Swift / C++ / Java / VB whose job it was to port traditional applications to be web applications. And YMMV but in my experience object oriented programming is a pretty good model for GUI front-ends, all the windows and dialogs with their menus, toolbars, buttons and so on have a ton of state and fire events like a button saying "I just got clicked" or a dialog saying "The user just closed me". Many people have wasted thousands of hours trying to fake it in Javascript.