The Committee does not itself announce the names of nominees, neither to the media nor to the candidates themselves. In so far as certain names crop up in the advance speculations as to who will be awarded any given year's Prize, this is either sheer guesswork or information put out by the person or persons behind the nomination. Information in the Nobel Committee's nomination database is not made public until after fifty years.
In this particular case, the two politicians in question decided to send out a press release, the Nobel committee will neither confirm nor deny but there's very little doubt that this is genuine.
I've yet to find a single media solution that has stood the test of time. Yes, I might be able to pull data from a tape from the 1990s, or a burned CD from 1998... but I wouldn't want to bet my data on it. Long term, the only way to do things is archive data in a format that detects (and corrects) errors (I use WinRAR, but.PAR archives work as well) and keep moving them forward in media.
As long as there's someone there to look after the process, but what if instead of the box of family photos in the attic you find an unreadable backup CD labeled "family photos"? The danger is that you ignore or neglect it for a little while and you can't get it back. Having something you can put in a box for 50 years and pull out at the nursing home to reminisce with would be better. And if there's ever a WWIII and people have more important things to think about for 10+ years (war and rebuilding) it would be nice if we didn't lose our entire history.
I'd still like to have something that I could be really sure that yes, this would be easily readable in consumer equipment a long time from now. I wouldn't need to have my own writer, but if you could have something etched that'd last for say 100 years and play in a BluRay player that'd be a good start.
The Nobel prize committee has long since stopped giving prizes in recognition of actual achievement and become way too engaged in trying to affect current affairs by imposing a moral obligation on part of the reciever(s). That has blown up in their face several times now, but they refuse to change course. If today's Nobel committee was brought back to 1938 they'd quickly award Chamberlain and Hitler the prize for "Peace in our time", right before Nazi Germany declared war on half the world.
Sadly, Obama didn't call them out on it. Instead he took the prize and gave a great speech on "just war" to make sure everyone knew he'd be able to engage in war - or start one if need be or even use the nuke suitcase, peace prize or not. Don't get me wrong, peace prize winner sounds like one helluva thing to put on your CV and I'm not sure I could turn it down either, but it would have had so much more balls. Not to mention massive egg on the face of the Nobel committee.
The list of eligible planets have been on public display at the Nobel institute for the last 50 years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complains and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. And by on display I mean in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
TL;DR but to paraphrase Churchill "x86 is the worst form of instruction set, except for all those other forms that have been tried". The rest are dead, Jim. The cruft has been slowly weeded out by extensions and x86-64 and compilers will avoid using poor instructions. The worst are moved to microcode and take up essentially no silicon at all, they're just there so your 8086 software will run unchanged. It's like getting your panties in a bunch over DVORAK, whether or not it's better QWERTY is close enough that the world will never change. The only reason ARM might be the next thing is legal, because there's patents tied to making a x86-compaitble processor (shouldn't they BTW start expiring soon?) while everyone can get an ARM license.
Let's face it. Norway is often very cold in the winter.
Not particularly cold, given how far north we are due to the Gulf stream and particularly if you live near the coastline - and Norway is a lot of coastline. In the capital, the lowest temp last year was -17.2C, just above 0F, the average in the winter months is just below freezing. True, if I pick one of the coldest cities on the coldest nights it might be -30C, but that's rare.
If you fuck up and buy a 'green' car that won't start in the cold, then you die in the cold.
Oh please, it might be a big inconvienience calling a tow truck but nobody's going to die. If you're at home and it won't charge, stay home. If you're at a charging station there will be houses nearby. And if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere on a night with -30C then you're equally screwed as in an ICE car.
And there is this briefly mentioned problem of the fucking Norwegian electrical connectors not mating with standard electric car connectors...
Here we're talking about quite regular home connectors, we use the "Schuko" plug used in most of Europe or alternatively the IEC 60309 industrial plugs for faster charging, both very standard in Europe but different than the US. I guess that's what they're talking about since there's few other Teslas on the road in the colder parts of Europe.
The charging problems mentioned here have by the way been solved in a software patch already, Norwegian papers covered that on last saturday. With charging stations popping up in more and more places, rather abundant and cheap electric power and very nice tax breaks on electric cars I can assure you Tesla will continue to sell well in Norway.
If the task is "act like a human" then feigning emotion would be part of the goal function, if it doesn't behave or respond in a natural way it is failing even if it's acting more logical. If that means writing out a long division that it calculated in a nanosecond, so be it. If everybody puts on a sad look and offers condolences at a funeral, it will put on a sad face and offer condolences. All you need to do is point it to real human interactions and it'll have an endless supply of contradictory, approximate raw data to try making sense of.
As for us, people are very different. Some are impulsive, some are daring, some are caring, some are charming, some are strange. It doesn't need to get everything right, just roughly right and get rid of all the clearly non-human responses. Particularly if the AI gets to act a bit ignorant, arrogant, stupid, indifferent, irrational or annoyed it can pull a Watson when it knows what to do and just brush it off when it doesn't understand. Also don't forget that there's AI-human interaction, a human can design a specific character and an AI try to act it out. Or even try doing it algorithmically with clustering to create plausible personalities.
Of course it's not really real, but for a real world analogy look at escorts. It's all bullshit and because of the money but people like to pretend they're dating and pretend she wants to have sex. Same with prostitues, customers don't want to hear it's a rent-a-hole service and the meter is running they want sweet, sweet lies. If people can "forget" such little details they'll have no problems "forgetting" that this AI girl is nothing but a bunch of circuits. Particularly if it comes with a "fully functional" android body.
Well, I think they're only interested in it in order to use the platform as a means to push Google services. They don't want to be caught in a situation where Microsoft controls the browser (95% MSIE) or Apple controls the smartphone/tablet (before Android), but even though they can produce Google Nexus I don't think they're genuinely interested in developing CPUs, GPUs, 3G/LTE chips, cameras, OLED screens or dealing with breakage, support, warranties and such, I think they'd rather leave most of that to partners. What they want is the information, "smart" gadgets that gives them data to mine.
For example, take the self driving car I can almost guarantee it'll come with a host of useful services that require you to turn on a location service, while you can hopefully go "off the grid" most people would feed Google a ton of information about where they're going and when that they could sell. That's what they want, not to compete with Ford and Chevrolet. They might have to sell a "Google Car" first, but it'll be mainly to sell the concept to other manufacturers.
This isn't the playground, where "He hit me first!" has any meaning.
Like the cops wouldn't care who started the fight.if two adults were in a fight. One is called assault, the other self defense. If you can't dodge or block, hitting back is absolutely a fair option. And this is more like sports than a fight, if you can't keep a tight defense score more points on the offense instead.
I totally understand passengers having specific destinations, but cargo? Does the lumber care what sawmill it goes to? I guess it does make sense if you're pretending to be Amazon delivering specific packages to specific customers, but for bulk cargo as I seem to remember TTD being mostly about it doesn't seem to make much sense.
Graphics-wise it's a matter of taste. As for gameplay complexity, it's actually the other way around, with proprietary games becoming more and more dumbed down. For instance, the original X-Com vs the 2012 version.
Having played both, I very much enjoyed the new version. The old version had some really annoying unit inventory management and building multiple bases that constantly needed defending lead to very many "preserve the status quo by saving the base" missions. Once in the Enemy Inside expansion was enough, the AI is just not good enough that defending is fun - they just throw massive waves at you to make it difficult. The only real downside I find is that despite all the fuss about SHIVs and MECs, upgrades helps one crew member while regular upgrades improves four-six and with tactical rigging a soldier in titan armor + chitin plating + scope is almost as armored as a MEC and a far better shooter. But getting way off-topic...
Of course not, the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. -- Shamelessly copied from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams
Secondly, while Bieber is famous for being famous.. Carlsen is famous for using his brain and becoming the world champion of chess.
He's become far more famous than his chess skills taken in isolation should indicate, much like Bieber and his musical skills. If he's been 10+ years older, not so good looking and still the world's #1 in chess he'd be much less famous - and I suppose that applies to Bieber and his music too. Half his fame is built on being a teenager beating chess masters twice his age and unlike so many other prodigies that falter when they grow older he's now beating them all - and he has looks good enough to be a model on top. It's the kind of thing the media loves to gobble up and fame seems to be something of a rolling snowball, once they've created a superstar they love coming back for follow-ups. In that sense, I feel the comparison is apt.
I call bs on your little anecdote. If someone was told to ship something to a place they weren't familiar with, they wouldn't ask "where in the US is that?". They would simply ask "where is that?" because they are already in this country and obviously assumed it was simply a place they didn't know about.
Well he didn't say that was a literal quote, "What state is that in?" might be plausible if he mistook it for being a city. As in, I don't care what your little bumfuck town is called just tell me what area. Particularly if people are asking about shipping some place outside the continental US, which may be just as common as Europe.
I think it is just as much that many "trivial" jobs have been replaced by machinery - I won't even go into the current matter of robotics but at least in my country over the last 50 years employment in agriculture has dropped by 90%. With no disrespect to the "well rounded" individuals they were few before and few now, while those who need vocational training need longer and more specialized education. I've heard my parents talking about how early they started working, but quite frankly those jobs no longer exist.
Everybody can understand how to use an axe to chop with. A chain saw, well it takes a little bit of maintenance and care but overall it's rather simple. Many of the forest-clearing machines today pretty much take their own degree to operate, I'd be totally lost without a manual.
Catching up to the closed AMD drivers is a pretty low bar if we are talking about Linux performance.
Depends on what we're talking. The first is simply catching up to the current standards - does the open source drivers even run the same code as the closed source ones. On this they're 3-4 years behind the "state of the art", OpenGL 3.3 was released in March 2010. The second part is catching up to Catalyst in performance - the open source team has said they don't have the manpower to make as many special cases as the Catalyst team, they're aiming at 60-70% performance. Maybe the open source drivers integrate better than proprietary ones, but if AMD produced an OSS driver that was strictly superior to Catalyst it'd be huge.
For example, in no English class that I took was any tense other than past, present, and future named. To learn what perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect versions of those tenses were for I had to take French and translate it myself back into English
I was = past I am = present I will be = future but you've never needed I have been = perfect I was being = imperfect I had been = pluperfect
Pretty much all languages express the same tenses, it just depends on how. True, some languages don't have as many tenses but then it's usually indicated by word ordering or some other way. For exampe in German the difference between "I had money" and "I would have had money" is "I hatte Geld, aber.." and "Ich hätte Geld, aber...". In Norwegian it would be "Jeg hadde penger, men..." and "Hadde jeg penger, men..." and it's really all the same. In English extra words, in German new forms of words and in Norwegian different ordering of words. But the tenses exist as such and any language would have a way of expressing it.
This is what I hate about GPU (opensource) drivers. Never EVER can anyone give full explanations on what the heck is going on. Instead we get oblique hints which more or less equals "RTFS". Or in some rare cases, RTFM. Every time I try to google this stuff up, I ragequit in despair after two hours.
So you're saying you can't write Java without understanding how the JVM is built? The firmware provides you with a very low level API that is very similar to assembler, it's more like runtime-loaded microcode than normal code. If you really care to try, I suggest you start here. Basically you place commands into a ring buffer that is read by the command processor (CP) on the graphics card and then executed on the GPU. There's a ton of registers you can set up, tons of commands, tons of formats (like all the texture formats) and while it is documented it's literally thousands of pages all together.
For example, for the Southern Islands generation alone there is: 229 pages of 3D register documentation 298 pages of instruction set architecture 49 pages of programming guide which expands the 54 pages of evergreen/cayman programming guide which expands the 43 pages of R600/700 programming guide.
Those 700 pages only walk you through the very basics of programming the GPU though, like assembler for a CPU. Beyond that there's very little in the way of tutorials, look at the existing source and figure out what it does down to the registers it sets and commands it sends. By the way, if things are not done in the right order the behavior is often undefined and may lead to soft or hard lock-ups. Personally I gave up because I realized the massive complexity of a modern GPU, quite frankly programming it at this level is extremely difficult.
It drives me nuts too, but you know that if you confront people about it they will just say, "language evolves."
And much like evolution there's no direction towards a "higher" lifeform, there's just selection pressure. For example, they say the inuits have so many words for snow. Well, perhaps other people who rarely see snow don't need half a dictionary of snow forms. Maybe they want to use adjectives like dry snow, wet snow, light snow, heavy snow, powdery snow since the words dry, wet, light, heavy, powdery can be reused in other contexts. Short words (piracy) tends to win over long words (copyright infringement) but there's a limited number of short non-toungetwister words so they're reused. a bear and to bear are totally different words but you figure it out from context. Compactness, precision, complexity on both the part of both the reader and the writer are opposing forces. Particularly the competence level to education time is critical, Latin might have been very precise between two people who've spent years at university but tourist English is easier when you just want to know the way to the nearest toilet.
It's been said over and over again for a decade on slashdot: no one's saying you can't profit from free software, especially RMS. He would love it if everyone could profit from free software.
Say it like it is, he'd love for OSS developers to be paid by magic. He's not opposed to making money, but only in the sense that as long as you're distributing all your code under the GPL and still making money that's fine. It doesn't mean that he's willing to compromise in any way or care about how many potential sources of income releasing it under the GPL negates, only that he isn't opposed to profit as such. He's been quoted many times as essentially saying how you make money is not really our problem and that it's the right thing to do even if you can't make money that way.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
Well, little else is so much about momentum as social networking, without other people it's totally worthless. And as for the comparisons to MySpace as "proof" that everyone soon will be on something else, well before Google there was AltaVista but now Google seems pretty entrenched. And despite all the resources they put into it, G+ is nothing but a very weak shadow of FB mostly made up by inane YouTube accounts. As long as Facebook can clone any "must have" feature new networks come up with before a critical mass leaves it might just gravitate right back. Or perhaps I have the analogy wrong and Facebook is AltaVista and something else the next big thing. It's not something that must happen though.
What I can't really understand is what they think they're gaining by it, how could giving their paying customers a DRM free version hurt when it's trivial to get one from anywhere. All the TV/movie services have said even offline mode is out of the question, not even Steam or Spotify is that anal. Honestly, if you compare music piracy before and after DRM can you even tell the difference? It was available on torrents before, it's still available on torrents now, it's less hassle for the customers but overall the people who wanted to pay pay and those who want to pirate pirate. Or like me, I pay for HBO Nordic and download from my one stop torrent shop because there's zero compelling reasons to use their service. The only value they contribute is the production, they could just as well put up a private torrent with a paywall.
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The Committee does not itself announce the names of nominees, neither to the media nor to the candidates themselves. In so far as certain names crop up in the advance speculations as to who will be awarded any given year's Prize, this is either sheer guesswork or information put out by the person or persons behind the nomination. Information in the Nobel Committee's nomination database is not made public until after fifty years.
In this particular case, the two politicians in question decided to send out a press release, the Nobel committee will neither confirm nor deny but there's very little doubt that this is genuine.
I've yet to find a single media solution that has stood the test of time. Yes, I might be able to pull data from a tape from the 1990s, or a burned CD from 1998... but I wouldn't want to bet my data on it. Long term, the only way to do things is archive data in a format that detects (and corrects) errors (I use WinRAR, but .PAR archives work as well) and keep moving them forward in media.
As long as there's someone there to look after the process, but what if instead of the box of family photos in the attic you find an unreadable backup CD labeled "family photos"? The danger is that you ignore or neglect it for a little while and you can't get it back. Having something you can put in a box for 50 years and pull out at the nursing home to reminisce with would be better. And if there's ever a WWIII and people have more important things to think about for 10+ years (war and rebuilding) it would be nice if we didn't lose our entire history.
I'd still like to have something that I could be really sure that yes, this would be easily readable in consumer equipment a long time from now. I wouldn't need to have my own writer, but if you could have something etched that'd last for say 100 years and play in a BluRay player that'd be a good start.
The Nobel prize committee has long since stopped giving prizes in recognition of actual achievement and become way too engaged in trying to affect current affairs by imposing a moral obligation on part of the reciever(s). That has blown up in their face several times now, but they refuse to change course. If today's Nobel committee was brought back to 1938 they'd quickly award Chamberlain and Hitler the prize for "Peace in our time", right before Nazi Germany declared war on half the world.
Sadly, Obama didn't call them out on it. Instead he took the prize and gave a great speech on "just war" to make sure everyone knew he'd be able to engage in war - or start one if need be or even use the nuke suitcase, peace prize or not. Don't get me wrong, peace prize winner sounds like one helluva thing to put on your CV and I'm not sure I could turn it down either, but it would have had so much more balls. Not to mention massive egg on the face of the Nobel committee.
The list of eligible planets have been on public display at the Nobel institute for the last 50 years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complains and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. And by on display I mean in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
TL;DR but to paraphrase Churchill "x86 is the worst form of instruction set, except for all those other forms that have been tried". The rest are dead, Jim. The cruft has been slowly weeded out by extensions and x86-64 and compilers will avoid using poor instructions. The worst are moved to microcode and take up essentially no silicon at all, they're just there so your 8086 software will run unchanged. It's like getting your panties in a bunch over DVORAK, whether or not it's better QWERTY is close enough that the world will never change. The only reason ARM might be the next thing is legal, because there's patents tied to making a x86-compaitble processor (shouldn't they BTW start expiring soon?) while everyone can get an ARM license.
Let's face it. Norway is often very cold in the winter.
Not particularly cold, given how far north we are due to the Gulf stream and particularly if you live near the coastline - and Norway is a lot of coastline. In the capital, the lowest temp last year was -17.2C, just above 0F, the average in the winter months is just below freezing. True, if I pick one of the coldest cities on the coldest nights it might be -30C, but that's rare.
If you fuck up and buy a 'green' car that won't start in the cold, then you die in the cold.
Oh please, it might be a big inconvienience calling a tow truck but nobody's going to die. If you're at home and it won't charge, stay home. If you're at a charging station there will be houses nearby. And if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere on a night with -30C then you're equally screwed as in an ICE car.
And there is this briefly mentioned problem of the fucking Norwegian electrical connectors not mating with standard electric car connectors...
Here we're talking about quite regular home connectors, we use the "Schuko" plug used in most of Europe or alternatively the IEC 60309 industrial plugs for faster charging, both very standard in Europe but different than the US. I guess that's what they're talking about since there's few other Teslas on the road in the colder parts of Europe.
The charging problems mentioned here have by the way been solved in a software patch already, Norwegian papers covered that on last saturday. With charging stations popping up in more and more places, rather abundant and cheap electric power and very nice tax breaks on electric cars I can assure you Tesla will continue to sell well in Norway.
If the task is "act like a human" then feigning emotion would be part of the goal function, if it doesn't behave or respond in a natural way it is failing even if it's acting more logical. If that means writing out a long division that it calculated in a nanosecond, so be it. If everybody puts on a sad look and offers condolences at a funeral, it will put on a sad face and offer condolences. All you need to do is point it to real human interactions and it'll have an endless supply of contradictory, approximate raw data to try making sense of.
As for us, people are very different. Some are impulsive, some are daring, some are caring, some are charming, some are strange. It doesn't need to get everything right, just roughly right and get rid of all the clearly non-human responses. Particularly if the AI gets to act a bit ignorant, arrogant, stupid, indifferent, irrational or annoyed it can pull a Watson when it knows what to do and just brush it off when it doesn't understand. Also don't forget that there's AI-human interaction, a human can design a specific character and an AI try to act it out. Or even try doing it algorithmically with clustering to create plausible personalities.
Of course it's not really real, but for a real world analogy look at escorts. It's all bullshit and because of the money but people like to pretend they're dating and pretend she wants to have sex. Same with prostitues, customers don't want to hear it's a rent-a-hole service and the meter is running they want sweet, sweet lies. If people can "forget" such little details they'll have no problems "forgetting" that this AI girl is nothing but a bunch of circuits. Particularly if it comes with a "fully functional" android body.
Well, if you're being paid good money for stating the obvious you should have a pretty steady job. There's worse things to do for a living...
Well, I think they're only interested in it in order to use the platform as a means to push Google services. They don't want to be caught in a situation where Microsoft controls the browser (95% MSIE) or Apple controls the smartphone/tablet (before Android), but even though they can produce Google Nexus I don't think they're genuinely interested in developing CPUs, GPUs, 3G/LTE chips, cameras, OLED screens or dealing with breakage, support, warranties and such, I think they'd rather leave most of that to partners. What they want is the information, "smart" gadgets that gives them data to mine.
For example, take the self driving car I can almost guarantee it'll come with a host of useful services that require you to turn on a location service, while you can hopefully go "off the grid" most people would feed Google a ton of information about where they're going and when that they could sell. That's what they want, not to compete with Ford and Chevrolet. They might have to sell a "Google Car" first, but it'll be mainly to sell the concept to other manufacturers.
This isn't the playground, where "He hit me first!" has any meaning.
Like the cops wouldn't care who started the fight.if two adults were in a fight. One is called assault, the other self defense. If you can't dodge or block, hitting back is absolutely a fair option. And this is more like sports than a fight, if you can't keep a tight defense score more points on the offense instead.
I totally understand passengers having specific destinations, but cargo? Does the lumber care what sawmill it goes to? I guess it does make sense if you're pretending to be Amazon delivering specific packages to specific customers, but for bulk cargo as I seem to remember TTD being mostly about it doesn't seem to make much sense.
Graphics-wise it's a matter of taste. As for gameplay complexity, it's actually the other way around, with proprietary games becoming more and more dumbed down. For instance, the original X-Com vs the 2012 version.
Having played both, I very much enjoyed the new version. The old version had some really annoying unit inventory management and building multiple bases that constantly needed defending lead to very many "preserve the status quo by saving the base" missions. Once in the Enemy Inside expansion was enough, the AI is just not good enough that defending is fun - they just throw massive waves at you to make it difficult. The only real downside I find is that despite all the fuss about SHIVs and MECs, upgrades helps one crew member while regular upgrades improves four-six and with tactical rigging a soldier in titan armor + chitin plating + scope is almost as armored as a MEC and a far better shooter. But getting way off-topic...
It is far from that simple.
Of course not, the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. -- Shamelessly copied from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams
Secondly, while Bieber is famous for being famous.. Carlsen is famous for using his brain and becoming the world champion of chess.
He's become far more famous than his chess skills taken in isolation should indicate, much like Bieber and his musical skills. If he's been 10+ years older, not so good looking and still the world's #1 in chess he'd be much less famous - and I suppose that applies to Bieber and his music too. Half his fame is built on being a teenager beating chess masters twice his age and unlike so many other prodigies that falter when they grow older he's now beating them all - and he has looks good enough to be a model on top. It's the kind of thing the media loves to gobble up and fame seems to be something of a rolling snowball, once they've created a superstar they love coming back for follow-ups. In that sense, I feel the comparison is apt.
I call bs on your little anecdote. If someone was told to ship something to a place they weren't familiar with, they wouldn't ask "where in the US is that?". They would simply ask "where is that?" because they are already in this country and obviously assumed it was simply a place they didn't know about.
Well he didn't say that was a literal quote, "What state is that in?" might be plausible if he mistook it for being a city. As in, I don't care what your little bumfuck town is called just tell me what area. Particularly if people are asking about shipping some place outside the continental US, which may be just as common as Europe.
I think it is just as much that many "trivial" jobs have been replaced by machinery - I won't even go into the current matter of robotics but at least in my country over the last 50 years employment in agriculture has dropped by 90%. With no disrespect to the "well rounded" individuals they were few before and few now, while those who need vocational training need longer and more specialized education. I've heard my parents talking about how early they started working, but quite frankly those jobs no longer exist.
Everybody can understand how to use an axe to chop with. A chain saw, well it takes a little bit of maintenance and care but overall it's rather simple. Many of the forest-clearing machines today pretty much take their own degree to operate, I'd be totally lost without a manual.
Catching up to the closed AMD drivers is a pretty low bar if we are talking about Linux performance.
Depends on what we're talking. The first is simply catching up to the current standards - does the open source drivers even run the same code as the closed source ones. On this they're 3-4 years behind the "state of the art", OpenGL 3.3 was released in March 2010. The second part is catching up to Catalyst in performance - the open source team has said they don't have the manpower to make as many special cases as the Catalyst team, they're aiming at 60-70% performance. Maybe the open source drivers integrate better than proprietary ones, but if AMD produced an OSS driver that was strictly superior to Catalyst it'd be huge.
For example, in no English class that I took was any tense other than past, present, and future named. To learn what perfect, imperfect, and pluperfect versions of those tenses were for I had to take French and translate it myself back into English
I was = past
I am = present
I will be = future
but you've never needed
I have been = perfect
I was being = imperfect
I had been = pluperfect
Pretty much all languages express the same tenses, it just depends on how. True, some languages don't have as many tenses but then it's usually indicated by word ordering or some other way. For exampe in German the difference between "I had money" and "I would have had money" is "I hatte Geld, aber.." and "Ich hätte Geld, aber...". In Norwegian it would be "Jeg hadde penger, men..." and "Hadde jeg penger, men..." and it's really all the same. In English extra words, in German new forms of words and in Norwegian different ordering of words. But the tenses exist as such and any language would have a way of expressing it.
This is what I hate about GPU (opensource) drivers. Never EVER can anyone give full explanations on what the heck is going on. Instead we get oblique hints which more or less equals "RTFS". Or in some rare cases, RTFM. Every time I try to google this stuff up, I ragequit in despair after two hours.
So you're saying you can't write Java without understanding how the JVM is built? The firmware provides you with a very low level API that is very similar to assembler, it's more like runtime-loaded microcode than normal code. If you really care to try, I suggest you start here. Basically you place commands into a ring buffer that is read by the command processor (CP) on the graphics card and then executed on the GPU. There's a ton of registers you can set up, tons of commands, tons of formats (like all the texture formats) and while it is documented it's literally thousands of pages all together.
For example, for the Southern Islands generation alone there is:
229 pages of 3D register documentation
298 pages of instruction set architecture
49 pages of programming guide which expands the
54 pages of evergreen/cayman programming guide which expands the
43 pages of R600/700 programming guide.
Those 700 pages only walk you through the very basics of programming the GPU though, like assembler for a CPU. Beyond that there's very little in the way of tutorials, look at the existing source and figure out what it does down to the registers it sets and commands it sends. By the way, if things are not done in the right order the behavior is often undefined and may lead to soft or hard lock-ups. Personally I gave up because I realized the massive complexity of a modern GPU, quite frankly programming it at this level is extremely difficult.
It drives me nuts too, but you know that if you confront people about it they will just say, "language evolves."
And much like evolution there's no direction towards a "higher" lifeform, there's just selection pressure. For example, they say the inuits have so many words for snow. Well, perhaps other people who rarely see snow don't need half a dictionary of snow forms. Maybe they want to use adjectives like dry snow, wet snow, light snow, heavy snow, powdery snow since the words dry, wet, light, heavy, powdery can be reused in other contexts. Short words (piracy) tends to win over long words (copyright infringement) but there's a limited number of short non-toungetwister words so they're reused. a bear and to bear are totally different words but you figure it out from context. Compactness, precision, complexity on both the part of both the reader and the writer are opposing forces. Particularly the competence level to education time is critical, Latin might have been very precise between two people who've spent years at university but tourist English is easier when you just want to know the way to the nearest toilet.
It's been said over and over again for a decade on slashdot: no one's saying you can't profit from free software, especially RMS. He would love it if everyone could profit from free software.
Say it like it is, he'd love for OSS developers to be paid by magic. He's not opposed to making money, but only in the sense that as long as you're distributing all your code under the GPL and still making money that's fine. It doesn't mean that he's willing to compromise in any way or care about how many potential sources of income releasing it under the GPL negates, only that he isn't opposed to profit as such. He's been quoted many times as essentially saying how you make money is not really our problem and that it's the right thing to do even if you can't make money that way.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
Well, little else is so much about momentum as social networking, without other people it's totally worthless. And as for the comparisons to MySpace as "proof" that everyone soon will be on something else, well before Google there was AltaVista but now Google seems pretty entrenched. And despite all the resources they put into it, G+ is nothing but a very weak shadow of FB mostly made up by inane YouTube accounts. As long as Facebook can clone any "must have" feature new networks come up with before a critical mass leaves it might just gravitate right back. Or perhaps I have the analogy wrong and Facebook is AltaVista and something else the next big thing. It's not something that must happen though.
For some reason this comes to mind...
three orders of magnitude added 5 out of 28 days
Somehow 10^194 doesn't seem significantly worse than 10^191.
What I can't really understand is what they think they're gaining by it, how could giving their paying customers a DRM free version hurt when it's trivial to get one from anywhere. All the TV/movie services have said even offline mode is out of the question, not even Steam or Spotify is that anal. Honestly, if you compare music piracy before and after DRM can you even tell the difference? It was available on torrents before, it's still available on torrents now, it's less hassle for the customers but overall the people who wanted to pay pay and those who want to pirate pirate. Or like me, I pay for HBO Nordic and download from my one stop torrent shop because there's zero compelling reasons to use their service. The only value they contribute is the production, they could just as well put up a private torrent with a paywall.