I think it's a bit like in IT, nobody notices when it just works. More and more bad designs die on the drawing board because we run detailed simulations. For example if you buy a car today I expect the deformation zones have gone through plenty of simulated crashes. Perhaps you've even stepped that up another notch and let the computer try to design what the optimal deformation zone looks like within certain requirements. Thousands of adjustments times thousands of scenarios at different angles, speeds and vehicles or obstacles and each one an ugly finite element analysis. Engine flows, air resistance, weight distribution, road handling, stress and wear on parts are all possible to simulate long before you even get to the prototype stage. The more computing power which is at our disposal, the more "trivial" things we can use it for. For example I don't think it's long until we're out of the uncanny valley and have CGI figures indistinguishable from real actors.
I'm fairly sure we could operate some public transport on a for-profit basis, like for example bus service. The reason prices are normally set lower than this is:
a) Congestion - building bigger roads is expensive and in many times impossible because you'd have to demolish inner city buildings. Also parking space. b) Economic - Lower mobility in low income classes, children, students, disabled and elderly that can't drive would create great inefficiencies that would make the tax base poorer, eventually leading to less tax income c) Environment - More pollution leads to more health issues leads to less people working and at least here with universal healthcare also an increase in expenses.
Basically, you have the lines and prices that are commercially viable. Then we look at the benefits we'd get from operating more lines or at lower prices and pay them to run at a loss. It's a choice, not something that must be.
For commutes they're high density, a double train set is 500 passengers in one go. At least here in Europe trains are often the way for the suburbs to reach the inner city public transport (bus/tram/subway). As for long distance travel I'd favor trains over bus any day of the week. A train lets you get up and walk. The toilet is not extremely cramped. There's a cafeteria section where you can get some food and snacks. Sleeping cabins too, which can be a rather nice compared to flying in with a very, very early morning flight. They've added fairly advanced communications gear to get good wireless coverage entire way too.
The really major downside to trains is when they're not reliable. Any train that breaks down or derails is a beast to move and if the tracks are out there's no such thing as taking a detour. Avalanches, floods, rock slides, and signal failures are all far more complicated to handle than replacing the bus or grounding the airplane. Been there, done that... night train, had to get up at 3AM, bring everything to a bus to get by a flooded area, half an hour bus ride, then get back on a new train going the rest of the way. Very much not fun.
What about the once-flagship Nokia Lumia 900? Oh sure, nevermind; that phone will always be stuck at Windows Phone 7.5. As TFA says, only Windows Phone 8 will be upgraded. Pity those fools that trusted Microsoft and their %$#@! Windows Phone when they bought their new, first ever released (non-linux, non-symbian) Nokia Lumia, complete with new and shiny Windows Phone 7.5. It would be very interesting to learn the stats on those buyers' subsequent smartphone purchases, assuming that was possible.
And that's what this announcement is all about, keep on buying WP8 phones because they won't be obsoleted by Win10 like WP7.5 was. With enough weasel words that they don't actually promise anything.
Unless you're working with an established and already-polished game engine, all the art content for a game of this size has to be built far in advance of when the engine is fully ready to render it at full efficiency. By it's very nature, optimization is something that has to occur near the end of development for a game, since there's no way to optimize game features until they're largely finished and can approach performance issues holistically. The hardest thing about that is you have to make a very early prediction about how much your game will be able to render. It's extremely time-consuming to fix if it turns out your engine simply can't cope with the amount of artwork or game content it's being asked to process, as that artwork and game content has been in the pipeline for years.
That makes somewhat sense for where you're going to be at full tilt on not-as-yet released cards. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for old cards, both the hardware and current-gen engines have usually pushed it close to the max and you can't expect miraculous improvements there. In short, if you overshoot you're planning it poorly.
Don't forget that Intel is also marketing to its business customers, partners, suppliers and vendors what value Intel has to them today and in the future. They have a bit longer perspective than "Should I buy an iPad/Android/Windows tablet today?" they want to hear why they should invest in creating products and services based on Intel technology. Normal end users don't care about the nerd pr0n they want features and prices but for investments that's like driving using the rear view mirror. For example I bet a lot of Nokia's partners would love to have known about Elop's burning platform memo, for customers the choice was easy - simply not buy a Nokia phone. It's a bit harder for everyone supplying to, developing for or selling Nokia phones. Roadmaps, previews, demos and statements of intent are important. The question is, are you buying the story they're selling?
My only reaction to this article is "Duh". We use echolocation every single day, most people are too 'blind' to actually consciously process it.
No. To use echolocation would imply that you're making the sound yourself trying to find where it reflects back to you and people generally don't do that. Even in pitch dark most will try using their night vision or feel their way around rather than making noises to nobody in particular. Picking out the direction a sound is coming from or noticing obstacles altering the sound is not the same.
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Because more often than not it's true? Market power corrupts, monopoly power corrupts absolutely. Or maybe you should say it's more of a latent behavior in profit-maximizing companies, they simply lack the means to be a market bully until they're successful. Or you're seeing a company in the early phases of an "entice, entrap, exploit" strategy where they act nice and friendly until they got you locked in good and bleed you dry. You might call it good turned evil, they'll call it return on investment and a success. And a tool is a tool, Google used Mozilla to break the IE monopoly and it might have been good for open source and web standards but they were a pawn in a corporate play. And pawns get sacrificed when the goal is in sight, they're not your friends for life.
Of course there are companies that really do stick to making good products and services that the customers like and are happy and willing to pay for, but most sooner or later turn to the dark side. Particularly if they see a downturn in business and is facing cut bonuses and lost jobs, very few businesses go nobly down the drain. And almost anything can be excused with "it's a free market and we're only charging what the market is willing to bear", or at least that's what you say out loud even if you know they had absolutely no real choice in the matter. Particularly in business to business there's absolutely no hesitation or shame in grabbing as much of the other company's money as you can.
If the book is a masterpiece then the fans will be up in arms over the slightest change, if it's only decent to begin with well who cares? The Lord of the Rings is a grand epic, the Hobbit is just a children's story about a dragon's treasure. If they can make a decent trilogy out of it, I don't care so much if they follow the book or not. So the worse the book is, the more I hope they take the opportunity to make a good movie of it. Because of course they'll milk it.
Try to create a computer hardware brand called Windows, advertise your new Windows machine and tell me how many seconds it lasts until you have Microsoft's lawyers on your ass. The criteria is commercial confusion and a system called Gnome is very confusingly similar to a point of sale system using GNOME the desktop environment. Me, not knowing too much of POS systems would probably think that's a GNOME spin-off. If they complain about their shitty Gnome system, I might say "Yeah should have gone with KDE". That is exactly the sort of thing trademark law is designed to avoid.
Then, over in a tiny little corner, you've got the Linux users with a gamer-grade PC, no OS but Linux, no console, and pockets lined with cash earmarked for games if only publishers'd release them on their OS of choice! Except it's "user", not "users". Yeah, that one guy standing in the corner. That's the market: people that want to buy games, want more than the (mostly Indie) games that have been released for Linux already, but won't (or can't) switch to a platform that has a larger selection.
I think it's actually narrower than that, most people who use Linux exclusively do it because of ideological, economical or because you find it the best tool for the job.
The ideologists aren't going to buy closed-source, commercial DRM-wrapped games. If you picked Linux to save money you aren't very likely to waste it playing games. And using Linux for gaming is pretty much the opposite of being pragmatic.
The only real counterargument is if you consider there's a broad selection and more games than time to play them. You could play any one of these five games but you're going to buy the one that runs on Linux because that's convenient and you can play it on any machine you own. If you want to play *that* particular AAA title there aren't really any substitutes though.
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
vs
I'm creating a kick-ass OS that'll totally blow minix and gnu/hurd out of the water and I'm offering a lifetime license for only $5-75 for early adopers on Kickstarter
Mars One has as much substance as a MLM pyramid scheme, lots of hype and glossy marketing which not only siphons away funds that could have gone to serious projects but will likely backfire on everyone else when the bubble bursts. There's a difference between thinking outside the box and not really trying, particularly using other people's money.
I've found tests to be mostly useless when it comes to finding bugs, if you could think of the test you'd also make sure the code handles it. What they're invaluable for is testing regressions, so many times doing a seemingly innocent change would break things. Sadly I've found that for anything other than a one man project they are just positive proof, yes you broke something and not negative proof, no you didn't break anything. Just like comments you can never be sure they're really correct and complete, in fact the more likely someone wrote an ugly hack you'll inadvertently break the less likely there'll be tests for it.
Unlike the US system, I believe Italian authorities are free to refile this if they don't like the appeals court ruling?
I can't speak with 100% certainty of Italy, but generally here in Europe they can not refile. However the trial process is not ended until neither side wants to appeal or the appeal possibilities are exhausted. That means you can get acquitted at trial court and the prosecutor appeals, acquitted at appeals court and the prosecutor appeals, the supreme court might say the law was applied wrong and remand it back to the appeals court where you're ultimately convicted. I guess the idea is that a higher court will do a more thorough review and thus its judgement is more valid than the lower court, even if it's to your disadvantage. If you get acquitted and the appeal limit which here is two weeks expires then that is final even if they find the murder weapon with your prints on it three weeks later.
I'll use a gun analogy since that'll probably appeal to US folks. The first trial is like a hip shot, asking both parties "Are you both in agreement with this ruling?" and if both agree then okay. Second trial they take a good aim and ask "Are you still disputing this ruling?" and if yes they put a sniper rifle on a bench and say "This is going to hit so dead center as possible, final ruling. No more appeals." as opposed to the US system where if you can fool one judge once you're off the hook, no matter how ill considered and legally unsound that judgement was. I think we still acquit more people than in the US, there you get really slammed for using your day in court instead of taking the plea bargain, even if you don't really think you're guilty.
Farming equipment gave us farmers with weaker muscles and fatter bellies. However, it did give us more food.
This. That modern developers suck at assembler is a bad thing assumes there's a reason you'd want them doing assembler in the first place. If a farmer's tractor breaks down he doesn't get out and start shoveling, he calls for a tractor repairman which specializes in that sort of thing. If you call a low level library from a high level language and it crashes, check the documentation again. If you're still sure you're doing it right, the efficient thing to do might be to file a bug and let someone used to poking around in C/ASM take a look at it. It's specialization at work and it might not make sense for one person to know the whole stack top to bottom. Or at least that person would be a guru and companies aren't full of those.
It doesn't take poking around at the lowest level to find a hard problem. If you haven't had user requirements that make you feel like you're playing twister trying to fulfill all the requirements at once you can't have worked much on complex projects at all. And for each new round you have to hit another new requirement, screw the initial specification. Or when you realize the whole stack is built wrong for what their real requirements are and you have to unravel and reassemble it differently. Having modules and glue code might not be glamorous but when you're chasing a moving target being agile beats having built the greatest system nobody wants anymore.
There's a name for the effect, which I can't recall
Nostalgia? We remember the good times, dismiss the bad times and being smart is usually linked to a good time like an achievement, praise or victory. The moments you were being dumb and naive were usually embarrassing and awkward, unless they went as far as to be emotionally scarring they're likely to just quietly fade away. I can recall a few episodes that really burned, if I interpolate I probably said a lot of not so very bright things in between too.
If you see your action as independent of or an example for everyone else's, then yes. Those that throw litter out the window aren't looking out and thinking "oh, there's room for one more can out there". But if you feel your good action is being used to counter the overall goal, then it's different. For example say you go to a restaurant and think the service was excellent and want to give a big tip, only to discover that the others are just limping in with the minimum to make the total a modest tip. Your generosity has simply been exploited to support their greed, it didn't end up serving the goal. Are you still going to put in anything extra next time?
You alone deciding not to cheat in a system with rampant cheating won't bring you closer to the goal of a fair evaluation based on merit, it'll only screw yourself over because the cheaters won't stop just because you do. If I get punched by a bully, I don't have a problem with throwing a punch back. That is solving problems through violence. Not because I think violence is a good way to solve problems. Not because I wouldn't support a crackdown on punching. But until such time that someone can really solve the bullying problem, I'm not going to be the punching bag. Let the bully find someone else who doesn't punch back. It doesn't solve the problem, but it solves my problem. So yeah, I think it's easy to find a justification to fight fire with fire.
My guess is he complained in the wrong way like being about his health. If he had raised it a conscience issue and that he was a conscious objector to eating products made of or from animals they'd have bent over backwards quite quickly, Sweden is so politically correct to anyone being offended they'd have complied instantly.
Read TFA. They optimise for a specific category of algorithm, that is branch heavy (although comparatively light in computed branches), has strong locality of reference, is either single-threaded or has shared-everything parallelism, and a few other constraints. That's not a general purpose processor
I did, you're still being silly. It's easy to run non-branching code on a branching processor, it's almost impossible to do the opposite. That is why we call branching processors general purpose. It's easy to run code with weak locality on a processor with strong locality, it's almost impossible to do the opposite. That is we call processors with strong locality general purpose. It's easy to run parallel code on a sequential processor, it's almost impossible to run sequential code on a parallel processor. They won't run them well, for example software rendering on CPUs is horribly slow but t's still orders of magnitude better than trying to use your GPU as a CPU.
The problem is that there's a degree of objection. Here in Norway we currently have 8 parties in parliament, one is a single representative but the other seven fairly well split into two left, three center, two right, though some in the center are more left/right leaning than others. What it means though is that there's a choice to say you want darker/lighter blue/red or that you kind of like the politics, but your party has pissed me off. The elections are actually a bit more of a cluster fuck with coalition building afterwards, but the politics in between is much more dynamic with shifting power inside the blocks. You get a lot more voter feedback on a case by case issue as the current news actually makes waves.
Still don't get it. The difference is that accelerators try to do one thing, or at least one class of problems well at the expense of everything else. They optimize for the best case. CPUs do the same when they incorporates specialized instructions as "mini-accelerators" like AES-NI. But what sets general purpose processors apart is that they assume the worst and tries to make all code perform, no matter how ugly. They optimize for flexibility, with an emphasis on minimizing the worst cases. Those are two broad and fundamentally opposite ideas and while the implementations always differ somewhat the design goals remain the same.
First you say Turing-complete is a poor definition, because it doesn't optimize for performance at all. Then you postulate that a general purpose processor must be efficient at everything, which is obviously setting up a "No true Scotsman" fallacy. You can't optimize for everything at once, you can't create a car with the speed of a Ferrari, the cargo capacity of a truck, the passenger capacity of a minivan and the price and size footprint of a Morris Mini. So the point your making in the headline is based on an absolutely absurd definition of a generalist.
The difference you bring up between general purpose computing and general purpose computers is interesting though, what most people use their cell phone/tablets/laptops/desktops for might possibly be implemented with specialized software/hardware that makes a different trade-off than generic number crunching. But I wouldn't put money on it, I smell another Itanium in the making that'll emulate existing ARM/x86 code horribly. It would take an extreme amount of momentum to make that happen outside academic research papers.
If a procedure requires three integers and a returns a float, that's not an invention that's an agreement between software components to permit inter operation.
But it only has to exist in order to follow that API. If I create a "Point" class I can have the function "int getX()" or "int getHorizontalPosition()", I can choose many different ways to set parameters and defaults through constructors and member functions and overloads and if you look at the API as a whole the division into classes and the means by which they interact is clearly designed. If you isolated two teams and asked them to design any non-trivial API it is extremely unlikely it'd be exactly the same. So the question is, do you have the right to implement the same function using the same API, or the same functionality using a different API? That copyright doesn't cover methods of operation basically means it's not a patent, you can implement the same functionality. Whether you can implement the same functions is more unclear.
Isolated speaking I would say it's a creative work and copyrightable, because you can copyright fairly trivial things such as the ordering of songs on an album. Not the songs themselves, not the cover art but the actual ordering. Spotify has been sued for user playlists mimicing compilation albums, even though the service has licensed all the songs. If that's enough creative input for a copyright, then I'd say the naming and structuring of an API is clearly a creative work as well. Actually let's go back one step and ask what makes a function signature part of an API? Is it particular functions that external programs are granted to run or any function? If you're saying that's something that's explicitly granted then nothing in copyright law says it can't come with strings attached. This function is private unless....
The Linux kernel has been trying something similar with "GPL" exports for kernel modules, basically saying if you touch these interfaces you're mucking so deep in our internal code you're a derivative work. That is trying to say the GPL "infects" over an interface if the creator of the interface wants it to. On the other hand, if you say there is no such distinction then the whole idea of derivative works gets iffy, it's just your code calling my code and my code calling your code no matter if it's my browser sending a HTTP request to your server or my kernel patch calling your kernel code? That would get incredibly nasty too. On the other hand, this is already weird with code that's not compiled but just interpreted, it is a mere aggregation until the interpreter converts it to actual machine code? A php file including another isn't linked at distribution.
Granted, three month's boot camp isn't a lot but software development is not brain surgery and it doesn't take years of training until we let you loose on a live patient. For example I got this big spreadsheet of "business rules" from work where I think < 1 month of SQL experience is sufficient to be useful, here's a text description so write an SQL rule and create a couple test cases to prove it works as intended. And we're talking about simple checks that translate down to WHERE $date1 >= $date2, WHERE $field1 = 'X' and $field2 IS NULL, WHERE $code NOT IN (SELECT code FROM validCodes) and so on. It's still a job that needs doing when there's hundreds of pages describing the input format.
Not worth the wage is another story, but other people only drag down your productivity if you're expected to spend time training them or they're let loose to create havoc you must clean up, if they can shoulder surf until you feel they have anything valuable to contribute with then at worst they're totally useless. Create a branch for them, ask them for a simple feature and if it's okay then great, if it's facepalm-worthy consider cutting your losses but if it's salvageable in less time than writing from scratch you're not worse off and he'll probably do better next time.
Microsoft doesn't win the real "Big Data" contracts, but there's many medium data contracts with delusions of grandeur. I work with a TB-size (as in, >1 TB...) database and while it's certainly no longer small data it's not "Big Data". It fits in a traditional RDBMS, when we get past the buzzwords what our users want are fairly traditional cubes/reports with drilldown that OLAP systems provide. If Microsoft is bad, the alternatives like Oracle, SAS, SAP or IBM are worse. Looking at an open source stack replacing the database is actually the easy bit, I'm sure we'd do fine running on PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Reporting tools on par with Reporting Services are also easy to come by. I've seen nothing as user-friendly as Integration Services on the data flow side which we use a lot, but I guess we could use it with foreign sources and destinations too.
Probably the biggest lack on the data warehouse side is an open source OLAP server. The wikipedia page lists two, one is Palo/Jedox which is a very limited marketing version for their commercial product and the other is Mondarian which by closer inspection seems to just translate MDX to SQL and let the RDBMS database do the aggregation which I suppose is okay for small data sets but will choke on any significant volume. Basically it comes down to all the Microsoft tools being "good enough" and working nicely together, while the rest ends up being a mix of different pieces from here and there. Either that or you're looking at a whole different stack, and I got lots of requirements that'd make a NoSQL solution squirm.
Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"
Well, Linus never agreed that much with the FSF in the first place which is quite evident in many debates like over GPLv3. He wants to build the best kernel ever and if somebody else does something smart he'd like to study it and incorporate it into his project which is his interest in copyleft. Whether it's locked down for the end user to alter or not or if it's used to run open or closed source software isn't really any of his concern, while he picked GPL as his license he's never supported the four freedoms that RMS based it on. His ultimate victory would probably be more like Microsoft and Apple ditching their own kernel in favor of Linux so you'd have Windows/Linux, OS X/Linux, Android/Linux and GNU/Linux. Or really any variety that runs on top of his kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a bit like in IT, nobody notices when it just works. More and more bad designs die on the drawing board because we run detailed simulations. For example if you buy a car today I expect the deformation zones have gone through plenty of simulated crashes. Perhaps you've even stepped that up another notch and let the computer try to design what the optimal deformation zone looks like within certain requirements. Thousands of adjustments times thousands of scenarios at different angles, speeds and vehicles or obstacles and each one an ugly finite element analysis. Engine flows, air resistance, weight distribution, road handling, stress and wear on parts are all possible to simulate long before you even get to the prototype stage. The more computing power which is at our disposal, the more "trivial" things we can use it for. For example I don't think it's long until we're out of the uncanny valley and have CGI figures indistinguishable from real actors.
I'm fairly sure we could operate some public transport on a for-profit basis, like for example bus service. The reason prices are normally set lower than this is:
a) Congestion - building bigger roads is expensive and in many times impossible because you'd have to demolish inner city buildings. Also parking space.
b) Economic - Lower mobility in low income classes, children, students, disabled and elderly that can't drive would create great inefficiencies that would make the tax base poorer, eventually leading to less tax income
c) Environment - More pollution leads to more health issues leads to less people working and at least here with universal healthcare also an increase in expenses.
Basically, you have the lines and prices that are commercially viable. Then we look at the benefits we'd get from operating more lines or at lower prices and pay them to run at a loss. It's a choice, not something that must be.
For commutes they're high density, a double train set is 500 passengers in one go. At least here in Europe trains are often the way for the suburbs to reach the inner city public transport (bus/tram/subway). As for long distance travel I'd favor trains over bus any day of the week. A train lets you get up and walk. The toilet is not extremely cramped. There's a cafeteria section where you can get some food and snacks. Sleeping cabins too, which can be a rather nice compared to flying in with a very, very early morning flight. They've added fairly advanced communications gear to get good wireless coverage entire way too.
The really major downside to trains is when they're not reliable. Any train that breaks down or derails is a beast to move and if the tracks are out there's no such thing as taking a detour. Avalanches, floods, rock slides, and signal failures are all far more complicated to handle than replacing the bus or grounding the airplane. Been there, done that... night train, had to get up at 3AM, bring everything to a bus to get by a flooded area, half an hour bus ride, then get back on a new train going the rest of the way. Very much not fun.
What about the once-flagship Nokia Lumia 900? Oh sure, nevermind; that phone will always be stuck at Windows Phone 7.5. As TFA says, only Windows Phone 8 will be upgraded. Pity those fools that trusted Microsoft and their %$#@! Windows Phone when they bought their new, first ever released (non-linux, non-symbian) Nokia Lumia, complete with new and shiny Windows Phone 7.5. It would be very interesting to learn the stats on those buyers' subsequent smartphone purchases, assuming that was possible.
And that's what this announcement is all about, keep on buying WP8 phones because they won't be obsoleted by Win10 like WP7.5 was. With enough weasel words that they don't actually promise anything.
Unless you're working with an established and already-polished game engine, all the art content for a game of this size has to be built far in advance of when the engine is fully ready to render it at full efficiency. By it's very nature, optimization is something that has to occur near the end of development for a game, since there's no way to optimize game features until they're largely finished and can approach performance issues holistically. The hardest thing about that is you have to make a very early prediction about how much your game will be able to render. It's extremely time-consuming to fix if it turns out your engine simply can't cope with the amount of artwork or game content it's being asked to process, as that artwork and game content has been in the pipeline for years.
That makes somewhat sense for where you're going to be at full tilt on not-as-yet released cards. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for old cards, both the hardware and current-gen engines have usually pushed it close to the max and you can't expect miraculous improvements there. In short, if you overshoot you're planning it poorly.
Don't forget that Intel is also marketing to its business customers, partners, suppliers and vendors what value Intel has to them today and in the future. They have a bit longer perspective than "Should I buy an iPad/Android/Windows tablet today?" they want to hear why they should invest in creating products and services based on Intel technology. Normal end users don't care about the nerd pr0n they want features and prices but for investments that's like driving using the rear view mirror. For example I bet a lot of Nokia's partners would love to have known about Elop's burning platform memo, for customers the choice was easy - simply not buy a Nokia phone. It's a bit harder for everyone supplying to, developing for or selling Nokia phones. Roadmaps, previews, demos and statements of intent are important. The question is, are you buying the story they're selling?
My only reaction to this article is "Duh". We use echolocation every single day, most people are too 'blind' to actually consciously process it.
No. To use echolocation would imply that you're making the sound yourself trying to find where it reflects back to you and people generally don't do that. Even in pitch dark most will try using their night vision or feel their way around rather than making noises to nobody in particular. Picking out the direction a sound is coming from or noticing obstacles altering the sound is not the same.
I have long ago concluded that on Slashdot success = evil.
Because more often than not it's true? Market power corrupts, monopoly power corrupts absolutely. Or maybe you should say it's more of a latent behavior in profit-maximizing companies, they simply lack the means to be a market bully until they're successful. Or you're seeing a company in the early phases of an "entice, entrap, exploit" strategy where they act nice and friendly until they got you locked in good and bleed you dry. You might call it good turned evil, they'll call it return on investment and a success. And a tool is a tool, Google used Mozilla to break the IE monopoly and it might have been good for open source and web standards but they were a pawn in a corporate play. And pawns get sacrificed when the goal is in sight, they're not your friends for life.
Of course there are companies that really do stick to making good products and services that the customers like and are happy and willing to pay for, but most sooner or later turn to the dark side. Particularly if they see a downturn in business and is facing cut bonuses and lost jobs, very few businesses go nobly down the drain. And almost anything can be excused with "it's a free market and we're only charging what the market is willing to bear", or at least that's what you say out loud even if you know they had absolutely no real choice in the matter. Particularly in business to business there's absolutely no hesitation or shame in grabbing as much of the other company's money as you can.
If the book is a masterpiece then the fans will be up in arms over the slightest change, if it's only decent to begin with well who cares? The Lord of the Rings is a grand epic, the Hobbit is just a children's story about a dragon's treasure. If they can make a decent trilogy out of it, I don't care so much if they follow the book or not. So the worse the book is, the more I hope they take the opportunity to make a good movie of it. Because of course they'll milk it.
Try to create a computer hardware brand called Windows, advertise your new Windows machine and tell me how many seconds it lasts until you have Microsoft's lawyers on your ass. The criteria is commercial confusion and a system called Gnome is very confusingly similar to a point of sale system using GNOME the desktop environment. Me, not knowing too much of POS systems would probably think that's a GNOME spin-off. If they complain about their shitty Gnome system, I might say "Yeah should have gone with KDE". That is exactly the sort of thing trademark law is designed to avoid.
Then, over in a tiny little corner, you've got the Linux users with a gamer-grade PC, no OS but Linux, no console, and pockets lined with cash earmarked for games if only publishers'd release them on their OS of choice! Except it's "user", not "users". Yeah, that one guy standing in the corner. That's the market: people that want to buy games, want more than the (mostly Indie) games that have been released for Linux already, but won't (or can't) switch to a platform that has a larger selection.
I think it's actually narrower than that, most people who use Linux exclusively do it because of ideological, economical or because you find it the best tool for the job.
The ideologists aren't going to buy closed-source, commercial DRM-wrapped games.
If you picked Linux to save money you aren't very likely to waste it playing games.
And using Linux for gaming is pretty much the opposite of being pragmatic.
The only real counterargument is if you consider there's a broad selection and more games than time to play them. You could play any one of these five games but you're going to buy the one that runs on Linux because that's convenient and you can play it on any machine you own. If you want to play *that* particular AAA title there aren't really any substitutes though.
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
vs
I'm creating a kick-ass OS that'll totally blow minix and gnu/hurd out of the water and I'm offering a lifetime license for only $5-75 for early adopers on Kickstarter
Mars One has as much substance as a MLM pyramid scheme, lots of hype and glossy marketing which not only siphons away funds that could have gone to serious projects but will likely backfire on everyone else when the bubble bursts. There's a difference between thinking outside the box and not really trying, particularly using other people's money.
I've found tests to be mostly useless when it comes to finding bugs, if you could think of the test you'd also make sure the code handles it. What they're invaluable for is testing regressions, so many times doing a seemingly innocent change would break things. Sadly I've found that for anything other than a one man project they are just positive proof, yes you broke something and not negative proof, no you didn't break anything. Just like comments you can never be sure they're really correct and complete, in fact the more likely someone wrote an ugly hack you'll inadvertently break the less likely there'll be tests for it.
Unlike the US system, I believe Italian authorities are free to refile this if they don't like the appeals court ruling?
I can't speak with 100% certainty of Italy, but generally here in Europe they can not refile. However the trial process is not ended until neither side wants to appeal or the appeal possibilities are exhausted. That means you can get acquitted at trial court and the prosecutor appeals, acquitted at appeals court and the prosecutor appeals, the supreme court might say the law was applied wrong and remand it back to the appeals court where you're ultimately convicted. I guess the idea is that a higher court will do a more thorough review and thus its judgement is more valid than the lower court, even if it's to your disadvantage. If you get acquitted and the appeal limit which here is two weeks expires then that is final even if they find the murder weapon with your prints on it three weeks later.
I'll use a gun analogy since that'll probably appeal to US folks. The first trial is like a hip shot, asking both parties "Are you both in agreement with this ruling?" and if both agree then okay. Second trial they take a good aim and ask "Are you still disputing this ruling?" and if yes they put a sniper rifle on a bench and say "This is going to hit so dead center as possible, final ruling. No more appeals." as opposed to the US system where if you can fool one judge once you're off the hook, no matter how ill considered and legally unsound that judgement was. I think we still acquit more people than in the US, there you get really slammed for using your day in court instead of taking the plea bargain, even if you don't really think you're guilty.
Farming equipment gave us farmers with weaker muscles and fatter bellies. However, it did give us more food.
This. That modern developers suck at assembler is a bad thing assumes there's a reason you'd want them doing assembler in the first place. If a farmer's tractor breaks down he doesn't get out and start shoveling, he calls for a tractor repairman which specializes in that sort of thing. If you call a low level library from a high level language and it crashes, check the documentation again. If you're still sure you're doing it right, the efficient thing to do might be to file a bug and let someone used to poking around in C/ASM take a look at it. It's specialization at work and it might not make sense for one person to know the whole stack top to bottom. Or at least that person would be a guru and companies aren't full of those.
It doesn't take poking around at the lowest level to find a hard problem. If you haven't had user requirements that make you feel like you're playing twister trying to fulfill all the requirements at once you can't have worked much on complex projects at all. And for each new round you have to hit another new requirement, screw the initial specification. Or when you realize the whole stack is built wrong for what their real requirements are and you have to unravel and reassemble it differently. Having modules and glue code might not be glamorous but when you're chasing a moving target being agile beats having built the greatest system nobody wants anymore.
There's a name for the effect, which I can't recall
Nostalgia? We remember the good times, dismiss the bad times and being smart is usually linked to a good time like an achievement, praise or victory. The moments you were being dumb and naive were usually embarrassing and awkward, unless they went as far as to be emotionally scarring they're likely to just quietly fade away. I can recall a few episodes that really burned, if I interpolate I probably said a lot of not so very bright things in between too.
If you see your action as independent of or an example for everyone else's, then yes. Those that throw litter out the window aren't looking out and thinking "oh, there's room for one more can out there". But if you feel your good action is being used to counter the overall goal, then it's different. For example say you go to a restaurant and think the service was excellent and want to give a big tip, only to discover that the others are just limping in with the minimum to make the total a modest tip. Your generosity has simply been exploited to support their greed, it didn't end up serving the goal. Are you still going to put in anything extra next time?
You alone deciding not to cheat in a system with rampant cheating won't bring you closer to the goal of a fair evaluation based on merit, it'll only screw yourself over because the cheaters won't stop just because you do. If I get punched by a bully, I don't have a problem with throwing a punch back. That is solving problems through violence. Not because I think violence is a good way to solve problems. Not because I wouldn't support a crackdown on punching. But until such time that someone can really solve the bullying problem, I'm not going to be the punching bag. Let the bully find someone else who doesn't punch back. It doesn't solve the problem, but it solves my problem. So yeah, I think it's easy to find a justification to fight fire with fire.
My guess is he complained in the wrong way like being about his health. If he had raised it a conscience issue and that he was a conscious objector to eating products made of or from animals they'd have bent over backwards quite quickly, Sweden is so politically correct to anyone being offended they'd have complied instantly.
Read TFA. They optimise for a specific category of algorithm, that is branch heavy (although comparatively light in computed branches), has strong locality of reference, is either single-threaded or has shared-everything parallelism, and a few other constraints. That's not a general purpose processor
I did, you're still being silly. It's easy to run non-branching code on a branching processor, it's almost impossible to do the opposite. That is why we call branching processors general purpose. It's easy to run code with weak locality on a processor with strong locality, it's almost impossible to do the opposite. That is we call processors with strong locality general purpose. It's easy to run parallel code on a sequential processor, it's almost impossible to run sequential code on a parallel processor. They won't run them well, for example software rendering on CPUs is horribly slow but t's still orders of magnitude better than trying to use your GPU as a CPU.
The problem is that there's a degree of objection. Here in Norway we currently have 8 parties in parliament, one is a single representative but the other seven fairly well split into two left, three center, two right, though some in the center are more left/right leaning than others. What it means though is that there's a choice to say you want darker/lighter blue/red or that you kind of like the politics, but your party has pissed me off. The elections are actually a bit more of a cluster fuck with coalition building afterwards, but the politics in between is much more dynamic with shifting power inside the blocks. You get a lot more voter feedback on a case by case issue as the current news actually makes waves.
Still don't get it. The difference is that accelerators try to do one thing, or at least one class of problems well at the expense of everything else. They optimize for the best case. CPUs do the same when they incorporates specialized instructions as "mini-accelerators" like AES-NI. But what sets general purpose processors apart is that they assume the worst and tries to make all code perform, no matter how ugly. They optimize for flexibility, with an emphasis on minimizing the worst cases. Those are two broad and fundamentally opposite ideas and while the implementations always differ somewhat the design goals remain the same.
First you say Turing-complete is a poor definition, because it doesn't optimize for performance at all. Then you postulate that a general purpose processor must be efficient at everything, which is obviously setting up a "No true Scotsman" fallacy. You can't optimize for everything at once, you can't create a car with the speed of a Ferrari, the cargo capacity of a truck, the passenger capacity of a minivan and the price and size footprint of a Morris Mini. So the point your making in the headline is based on an absolutely absurd definition of a generalist.
The difference you bring up between general purpose computing and general purpose computers is interesting though, what most people use their cell phone/tablets/laptops/desktops for might possibly be implemented with specialized software/hardware that makes a different trade-off than generic number crunching. But I wouldn't put money on it, I smell another Itanium in the making that'll emulate existing ARM/x86 code horribly. It would take an extreme amount of momentum to make that happen outside academic research papers.
If a procedure requires three integers and a returns a float, that's not an invention that's an agreement between software components to permit inter operation.
But it only has to exist in order to follow that API. If I create a "Point" class I can have the function "int getX()" or "int getHorizontalPosition()", I can choose many different ways to set parameters and defaults through constructors and member functions and overloads and if you look at the API as a whole the division into classes and the means by which they interact is clearly designed. If you isolated two teams and asked them to design any non-trivial API it is extremely unlikely it'd be exactly the same. So the question is, do you have the right to implement the same function using the same API, or the same functionality using a different API? That copyright doesn't cover methods of operation basically means it's not a patent, you can implement the same functionality. Whether you can implement the same functions is more unclear.
Isolated speaking I would say it's a creative work and copyrightable, because you can copyright fairly trivial things such as the ordering of songs on an album. Not the songs themselves, not the cover art but the actual ordering. Spotify has been sued for user playlists mimicing compilation albums, even though the service has licensed all the songs. If that's enough creative input for a copyright, then I'd say the naming and structuring of an API is clearly a creative work as well. Actually let's go back one step and ask what makes a function signature part of an API? Is it particular functions that external programs are granted to run or any function? If you're saying that's something that's explicitly granted then nothing in copyright law says it can't come with strings attached. This function is private unless....
The Linux kernel has been trying something similar with "GPL" exports for kernel modules, basically saying if you touch these interfaces you're mucking so deep in our internal code you're a derivative work. That is trying to say the GPL "infects" over an interface if the creator of the interface wants it to. On the other hand, if you say there is no such distinction then the whole idea of derivative works gets iffy, it's just your code calling my code and my code calling your code no matter if it's my browser sending a HTTP request to your server or my kernel patch calling your kernel code? That would get incredibly nasty too. On the other hand, this is already weird with code that's not compiled but just interpreted, it is a mere aggregation until the interpreter converts it to actual machine code? A php file including another isn't linked at distribution.
I started with
Granted, three month's boot camp isn't a lot but software development is not brain surgery and it doesn't take years of training until we let you loose on a live patient. For example I got this big spreadsheet of "business rules" from work where I think < 1 month of SQL experience is sufficient to be useful, here's a text description so write an SQL rule and create a couple test cases to prove it works as intended. And we're talking about simple checks that translate down to WHERE $date1 >= $date2, WHERE $field1 = 'X' and $field2 IS NULL, WHERE $code NOT IN (SELECT code FROM validCodes) and so on. It's still a job that needs doing when there's hundreds of pages describing the input format.
Not worth the wage is another story, but other people only drag down your productivity if you're expected to spend time training them or they're let loose to create havoc you must clean up, if they can shoulder surf until you feel they have anything valuable to contribute with then at worst they're totally useless. Create a branch for them, ask them for a simple feature and if it's okay then great, if it's facepalm-worthy consider cutting your losses but if it's salvageable in less time than writing from scratch you're not worse off and he'll probably do better next time.
Microsoft doesn't win the real "Big Data" contracts, but there's many medium data contracts with delusions of grandeur. I work with a TB-size (as in, >1 TB...) database and while it's certainly no longer small data it's not "Big Data". It fits in a traditional RDBMS, when we get past the buzzwords what our users want are fairly traditional cubes/reports with drilldown that OLAP systems provide. If Microsoft is bad, the alternatives like Oracle, SAS, SAP or IBM are worse. Looking at an open source stack replacing the database is actually the easy bit, I'm sure we'd do fine running on PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Reporting tools on par with Reporting Services are also easy to come by. I've seen nothing as user-friendly as Integration Services on the data flow side which we use a lot, but I guess we could use it with foreign sources and destinations too.
Probably the biggest lack on the data warehouse side is an open source OLAP server. The wikipedia page lists two, one is Palo/Jedox which is a very limited marketing version for their commercial product and the other is Mondarian which by closer inspection seems to just translate MDX to SQL and let the RDBMS database do the aggregation which I suppose is okay for small data sets but will choke on any significant volume. Basically it comes down to all the Microsoft tools being "good enough" and working nicely together, while the rest ends up being a mix of different pieces from here and there. Either that or you're looking at a whole different stack, and I got lots of requirements that'd make a NoSQL solution squirm.
Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"
Well, Linus never agreed that much with the FSF in the first place which is quite evident in many debates like over GPLv3. He wants to build the best kernel ever and if somebody else does something smart he'd like to study it and incorporate it into his project which is his interest in copyleft. Whether it's locked down for the end user to alter or not or if it's used to run open or closed source software isn't really any of his concern, while he picked GPL as his license he's never supported the four freedoms that RMS based it on. His ultimate victory would probably be more like Microsoft and Apple ditching their own kernel in favor of Linux so you'd have Windows/Linux, OS X/Linux, Android/Linux and GNU/Linux. Or really any variety that runs on top of his kernel.