If that became popular the media companies would just add a term that the license is for use by a natural person and not valid for a corporation, if they don't already say that.
However, there is a place for big art too, and nobody is going to make The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in their basement.
If everybody who could stop paying for it would stop paying for it, then the piracy rate would be 99%+. To be honest I don't think there's anybody growing up here in Norway today who can't figure out how to use a torrent client unless they're mentally handicapped, the practical risk of getting caught is nil and even if you were the fine wouldn't be the end of the world. Are we seeing a mass death of entertainment artists? No. I have bought the DVD and later the BluRay set of LotR - I've also downloaded them online. One hardly excludes the other...
Kelvins below freezing would not make any sense. (...) One degree Fahrenheit below freezing is 31 degrees Fahrenheit.
Negative Kelvins would make no sense, but as long as the freezing point is 0 C = 32 F = 273.15 K then one degree Kelvin below freezing would be 272.15 K. Why should it be any different for Kelvins than for Fahrenheit?
If they really wanted to take down TPB, who cares? Shut down the domain name and all the IPs it points to today, as long as nobody can reach it then it's for all practical purposes down. I'd be surprised if they even have actual servers anywhere, and not just encrypted tunnels leading to a leased machine or the cloud. In fact, they probably have hot spares they can redirect the tunnels to if any of their "servers" are compromised.
This sort of reasoning is what gets us bloated and slow desktop apps.
No, it's what keeps people from ever getting around to fixing those issues because they're still busy chasing down application crashes and memory leaks, combined with a fear of throwing out bad code in favor of new code with equally severe bugs. Do any kind of profiling and you will see it's all long tail, a few sections of code are called extremely often and the rest rarely if ever during normal operation as they're error handlers and such.
Except that CPU you're wasting is CPU you can't use for other things. It's expensive to build a data center twice as big because your code performs poorly.
More expensive than the time and cost spent developing, maintaining and dealing with the fallout of bugs in your high performance delicate code? And again it's the long tail, you probably have 10% of the software you use taking 90% of the capacity leaving 10% for the other 90%. Even if their execution time doubled you'd need 110% capacity, not 200% capacity. All I'm saying is write your slow code as clean, safe and maintainable as possible and optimize the few things that really matter.
It's not like Intel had any extra gears to put in when AMD was spanking their ass some years back, they had a process lead and sustained that lead even as AMD was putting out much better CPU designs but no more than that. But the CPU business has been very much so that the one who invests more, earns more and then has more to invest more again and Intel has simply beat AMD by spreading the costs of R&D across more chips. For a while AMD beat it by developing a better design on a lower budget while Intel floundered but in the end economics of scale won out.
This is not just Intel, the number of semiconductor players has been shrinking drastically with processor size and that trend is only going to continue, five out of the top six biggest semiconductor companies increased their market share last year. More and more go with foundries and the foundries are getting fewer and bigger too. Now ARM chips might not be the most powerful chips in the world, but they make billions of them so their processing technology is pretty good. They're going to give Intel a good run for their money, it's certainly no walkover.
+1. High-level features are not mutually exclusive with low-level ones. C++ being "unsafe" in some areas is not something people are in denial about -- it is a purposeful tradeoff for providing unbeatable performance when you need it. Want more safety? Performance not an issue? There are better languages for those cases than C++, and it's a programmer's prerogative to use them, not a standard body's job to adapt the language for something it isn't intended for.
The problem with that argument is that 90%+ of any given application is not performance critical. In many cases I'd argue almost none of the code is performance critical because the limitation sits between the keyboard and the chair, particularly when it comes to writing desktop apps like KDE, Gnome, Firefox, OpenOffice and so on. Far from all tings are critical on the back end either, as long as they get done on time. C++ is like using a scalpel all the time because it's a damn sharp knife, which probably works but it's not practical for anybody, not even trained surgeons. Speaking of better languages, what choices are there for writing something like KDE or Gnome? Java? C#? ObjectiveC? Or something entirely different? It's easy to find faults with C++, it's a bit harder to see the better alternative.
One billion dollars "worth" of stock in a small-cap company cannot.
If you have a billion dollars worth of stock then it's no longer small-cap by any standard I'd use, nor is the kind of stock that'd flop into nothing if the founder left. If Foxconn was willing to pay $200 million for a 8.8% share, I'm quite sure he could have sold his full share for $500+ million. Maybe he'd lose the coveted title of billionaire but for all intents and purposes he's filthy rich whether he'd cash out or not.
That's the feeling I have as well. I don't use 32 bit desktops any longer. Actually haven't consistently used a 32 bit desktop in four years. To somehow not be aware of the behavior of real users is a huge fail. (...) I don't use [Firefox] anymore. Chrome is superior in every way
I think they know their users perfectly, even slashdotters seem to be clueless that they're running 32 bit software under their 64 bit OS.
But it DID work in Minority Report. They had a crime free society, and only ONE GUY (played by Tom Cruise) was accused unjustly.
I think you should watch the movie again. John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) was not accused unjustly, he had no minority report. Knowing his future enabled him to change the future, but the way precrime worked he was guilty as without the precogs he'd definitively be a murderer. Meanwhile Lamar Burgess (played by Max von Sydow) did commit murder without being stopped because they thought it was an echo of another murder so it wasn't completely crime free. Finally, all the people who had Minority Reports still had a choice which means there is more than reasonable doubt they'd commit the crime, making them unjustly accused.
Depends on your definition of "suck". Price-for-price, AMD and Intel are fairly comparable right now
We heard the same when AMD tried to sell their FX-8150 for $245 and the customers didn't agree, now their FX-8350 sells for $195. When you have to sell a considerably better processor for $50 less while your competitors prices are practically unchanged, it's a good hint that the former wasn't particularly good value. I think AMDs reputation for always providing good value has gotten more than a little tarnished at their high end, sure if you found a good sale but that's usually a case of inventory they can't move otherwise. And their official roadmap is the current Steamroller cores throughout 2013, there must begin to be a lot of customers sitting on AMD Phenom IIs waiting for an upgrade that won't come.
Their "A good manager can manage anything" is the equivalent of "A good developer can develop anything", it doesn't mean that everyone will be good at it, or even can be taught how to be good at it, or that they can do it without learning anything domain-specific. People who think they can simply because they have an MBA degree are typical examples of bad managers, and there's plenty of those just like there are plenty bad developers who somehow got a degree. Yes, you need a "tech hierarchy" from team leads to a chief architect - size depending on your product - that makes sure that everything fits together and that the product delivers the solution. The worst you can have is a PHB making tech decisions, the second worst thing is a developer promoted to manager who thinks that's his only - or even primary - job as a manager.
Managers are about people management, you have say 20 individuals that have their own personal wants and needs and motivations and personality quirks - and whatever else you might have to deal with. You want the to improve as individuals and also want them to work together as a group, trying to improve how they communicate, collaborate, make decisions and so on. You have to bring new people up to speed, handle transitions as people leave and keep it functioning well. And then there's communicating both up and down in the chain of command, not just relaying but trying to keep the demands reasonable both ways. Finally you often have to deal with external issues so it isn't wasting the team's time. Most of this is actually rather generic stuff no matter who you're managing, just like there's good software development practices there's good people management.
Personally, I've seen enough from management work that I've figured it's not for me. It doesn't mean I'm not fond of a good manager who tries to fight the good fight, and the qualities I look for typically change very little even if my job duties change a lot. In particular I don't expect my boss to be an expert in my field, he can't be clueless either but enough that he can understand a high level description of an issue and figure out how to deal with it - not necessarily how to solve it. And the essence of a poor manager doesn't change much either it's someone how drops all the crap from above on those under and cracks the whip harder, leaving you do deal with every problem yourself. Bad managers are just bad, good managers are good and sadly they follow Sturgeon's law.
What does their policy say about activities like running servers? is there a "fair use policy"*?
A little late but here are your answers, there's no prohibition on running servers as long as they are for residential use. That is to say both private and public servers, but not commercial use. As for "fair use" policy the closest is this (my translation): "4.1 There is a goal that the Customer shall at all times provide the product specified speed between the Client PC and the Provider's connection to Internet. Since a part of capacity used for the necessary control information, the effective speed can be somewhat lower. The transmission speed on the Internet is outside the Provider's control and here lower speed must be expected." To my knowledge there are no caps, least not any I've heard of or ever read about anyone running into. No fixed IP by default, but you can get that for a small extra fee. And yes, those numbers were download speeds.
Also some of the companies mentioned really aren't doing much in the way of any sort of lock-in. Yes Amazon has about 1% of the Internet in its data centers, which is pretty impressive, but it is just hosting. You buy the virtual servers to do as you please (within the ToS of course).
And I'm sure most "data centers" of the early Internet would love to have the 60/60 Mbit line that I have at home on a plain residential fiber connection, somewhat faster than a T3/DS3. Who needs the data center? You are the data center. Latest stats from Norway now is that the average broadband is 14.8 Mbit/s and the mean 7.9 Mbit/s, graph here as solid green and solid blue line respectively (the others are for business use). Honestly at the rate this is going bandwidth will almost cease to be a limited commodity, it's like asking when the water company will run out of water or the electricity company out of electricity.
caps are optional. you got the message, didn't you? caps hurt (think: carpal tunnel). at 20 or 30, it didn't hurt. I'm 50 now and let me just say, every little bit that helps is appreciated. less hitting of caps key, the better. sorry it offends you.
If the code standard involved CamelCase I think the jigsaw puzzle just fell into place.
...a poor standard can drag everybody down. One of my pet issues right now is a structure that exists as code, as XML and as a database structure. Except code has namespaces, classes/objects and attributes, XML has a schema with elements and attributes with namespaces and database servers have schemas, tables and columns. So when I store an element in a table, I should now call it a class... logical? Not to me, but we're at least trying to be consistently illogical so you only need one code book to decipher it.
...plus if people stayed at home they'd all be using individual air-conditioners/heaters/lights rather than the shared ones at the office. That might offset the benefit of them not driving to work.
I'd probably use a bit more at home, but since I'd otherwise have to warm it up/cool it down when I get home not significantly more. I'm pretty sure keeping both my home and office heated in the winter takes more than just heating my home while telecommuting on top of the transport benefits. Besides, you shouldn't underestimate that with fewer constraints on the commute people could live closer to other things (places, people, activities) they'd otherwise travel to. I had a colleague that every weekend in the winter would drive many hours to go skiing. If he could work from there, he'd probably just live near the ski slopes most of the winter. Long distance relationships with frequent travel wouldn't need to be if you can take the job with you, that sort of thing. I'd never take a pure telecommuting job though, far too risky I'd be undercut by someone far away in a low cost country.
Realistically? Check out the CO2 emissions during the Kyoto treaty here. The treaty parties managed to take it down a few percent while all the other countries that didn't give a shit more than doubled their emissions. And the Kyoto II negotiations have practically collapsed with only the EU and a few other small states agreeing to a new treaty, meaning 90%+ of the world population didn't. And the main increase is going to come from people wanting cars, there's a little over a billion cars in the world today but if the world had the same car density as the US there'd be something like six billion. And they're not going to give a crap about the rich countries telling them they can't have cars because of the pollution.
Some seem to think we can research our way out of this problem by improving energy efficiency but for the most part we just use it to consume more. More efficient light bulbs? Have more light on and longer. More energy efficient TVs? Buy a bigger one. Faster computers? Play Crysis instead of Wolfenstein 3D. Make more efficient aircraft and people want to travel further and more often. I recently read an article about a guy commuting with an airline, he did not want to move and he was important enough the company would pay for it so he traveled 1000 km a day four out of seven days a week. I'm sure there's plenty people in the US too that would like to have everyone else drive a Prius and lower emissions and oil consumption so they can continue to drive an SUV.
That said, I don't think there'll be any abrupt collapse so the doomsday preppers are probably going to be disappointed. It'll just gradually get worse until finally everybody can agree that it's bad enough that something has to be done. And I don't think that solution will involve first and second class citizens depending on how much their country has polluted in the past, you're never going to cement the idea that Americans should have two polluting cars and huge emissions while Indians should ride a bike and have low emissions because they've polluted so little in the past and we should now freeze time. Usually I just get bizarre replies like that China has higher emissions than the US, to which I can only reply that the US has way higher emissions than Norway. It's a meaningless comparison but it keeps getting made.
Yes, except certain standards basically give your peripherals practically free reign to roam through your memory, specifically Firewire and Thunderbolt or if the attacker can add such a port through extension cards and the drivers are installed automatically. This is rather well documented behavior, and the small price you have to pay for closing this loophole:
The drawback of this mitigation is that external storage devices can no longer connect by using the 1394 port, and all PCI Express devices that are connected to the Thunderbolt port will not work. Because USB and eSATA are so prevalent, and because DisplayPort often works even when Thunderbolt is disabled, the adverse effect caused by these mitigations should be limited.
What's next, kicking people who have served their time out of movie theaters, restaurants, concerts, and sporting events just because there might be some kids around?
A certain percentage will never agree that sex offenders have ever "served their time". They'd like everyone who's ever earned that title to either: a) Be in prison for life b) Go kill themselves c) Stay a zillion miles from anywhere they go So their answer to your question is "Yes, all of the above and we're still too nice to them."
Gamers are on the upgrade treadmill because games put them there aka "But does it run Crysis?", not because they so desperately want to be. As long as the games are made to perform on the hardware people got, they're quite happy - just look at consoles. Yes, I appreciate the ability to pop open my case and put in a faster card but beyond that I'm not interested in tweaking it. Outside a very few competitive FPS gamers and overclockers who spend more time fiddling with settings and running benchmarks than playing nobody cares if you got 59 fps and I got 56 fps. Most games are not twitch games where milliseconds count.
More importantly, it ensures my freedom to go wherever I please in Europe and work there. It ensures that no citizen is SOL when their government goes bonkers: higher norms must be obeyed. To me, the guarentee of fundamental freedoms is more important that the guarentee that my government can be arbitrarily dickish to me without external interference. People moaning about "sovereingty" really mean "I don't like them foreigners" and "why can't we be horrible to people we don't like?".
If that's how you feel, why not let the UN run a world government? People don't want to be governed by far away places that don't really care about the local opinion or have their best interests at heart. The idea that we need the EU to be civilized democracies is rather absurd, there are very many equally free independent countries. What is happening in the EU is in many ways stronger than in the US where you have state law and federal law, in the EU you don't create law directly you pass directives that require national laws to change. Over time less and less is free for the national legislature to decide until all the meaningful decisions happens in Brussels. Maybe that's how you like it I'm glad Norway values its independence, even though our politicians don't.
I've found that to be true of most bugs actually, if you have to hand it off for someone else to fix it's highly unlikely they'll rush to fix it at a pace that solves your immediate problem so you better work around it yourself. At least with one particularly product I worked with though, I often found that bugs would get fixed 6-12 months later. Apparently every so often they'd gather up all the low priority bugs in that area of the code and go bug stomping. I guess it's easier for the developers to understand more of the code and fix many things at once than trying to snipe one and one bug, so I can understand that. If you're planning to use the product over any length of time, those kind of cleanups are worth the bug reporting time. Otherwise you'll just keep running into it again and again.
You mean to tell me that the old version of Qt were unfit?
Apparently it had far too little buzzword-compliance with their traditional widget-based imperative style GUI, now it's HTML/CSS/Javascript and declarative style GUI that is the "hot thing". I guess the good side is that it's like writing a web app that many developers know how to do but it has pretty much all the bad sides too, personally I find it's a giant step backwards. Or rather if I was going to do it this way I'd probably just go for HTML+JQuery and make it run in a browser against a back-end instead.
Slashdot Mirror
If that became popular the media companies would just add a term that the license is for use by a natural person and not valid for a corporation, if they don't already say that.
However, there is a place for big art too, and nobody is going to make The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in their basement.
If everybody who could stop paying for it would stop paying for it, then the piracy rate would be 99%+. To be honest I don't think there's anybody growing up here in Norway today who can't figure out how to use a torrent client unless they're mentally handicapped, the practical risk of getting caught is nil and even if you were the fine wouldn't be the end of the world. Are we seeing a mass death of entertainment artists? No. I have bought the DVD and later the BluRay set of LotR - I've also downloaded them online. One hardly excludes the other...
Kelvins below freezing would not make any sense. (...) One degree Fahrenheit below freezing is 31 degrees Fahrenheit.
Negative Kelvins would make no sense, but as long as the freezing point is 0 C = 32 F = 273.15 K then one degree Kelvin below freezing would be 272.15 K. Why should it be any different for Kelvins than for Fahrenheit?
If they really wanted to take down TPB, who cares? Shut down the domain name and all the IPs it points to today, as long as nobody can reach it then it's for all practical purposes down. I'd be surprised if they even have actual servers anywhere, and not just encrypted tunnels leading to a leased machine or the cloud. In fact, they probably have hot spares they can redirect the tunnels to if any of their "servers" are compromised.
This sort of reasoning is what gets us bloated and slow desktop apps.
No, it's what keeps people from ever getting around to fixing those issues because they're still busy chasing down application crashes and memory leaks, combined with a fear of throwing out bad code in favor of new code with equally severe bugs. Do any kind of profiling and you will see it's all long tail, a few sections of code are called extremely often and the rest rarely if ever during normal operation as they're error handlers and such.
Except that CPU you're wasting is CPU you can't use for other things. It's expensive to build a data center twice as big because your code performs poorly.
More expensive than the time and cost spent developing, maintaining and dealing with the fallout of bugs in your high performance delicate code? And again it's the long tail, you probably have 10% of the software you use taking 90% of the capacity leaving 10% for the other 90%. Even if their execution time doubled you'd need 110% capacity, not 200% capacity. All I'm saying is write your slow code as clean, safe and maintainable as possible and optimize the few things that really matter.
It's not like Intel had any extra gears to put in when AMD was spanking their ass some years back, they had a process lead and sustained that lead even as AMD was putting out much better CPU designs but no more than that. But the CPU business has been very much so that the one who invests more, earns more and then has more to invest more again and Intel has simply beat AMD by spreading the costs of R&D across more chips. For a while AMD beat it by developing a better design on a lower budget while Intel floundered but in the end economics of scale won out.
This is not just Intel, the number of semiconductor players has been shrinking drastically with processor size and that trend is only going to continue, five out of the top six biggest semiconductor companies increased their market share last year. More and more go with foundries and the foundries are getting fewer and bigger too. Now ARM chips might not be the most powerful chips in the world, but they make billions of them so their processing technology is pretty good. They're going to give Intel a good run for their money, it's certainly no walkover.
+1. High-level features are not mutually exclusive with low-level ones. C++ being "unsafe" in some areas is not something people are in denial about -- it is a purposeful tradeoff for providing unbeatable performance when you need it. Want more safety? Performance not an issue? There are better languages for those cases than C++, and it's a programmer's prerogative to use them, not a standard body's job to adapt the language for something it isn't intended for.
The problem with that argument is that 90%+ of any given application is not performance critical. In many cases I'd argue almost none of the code is performance critical because the limitation sits between the keyboard and the chair, particularly when it comes to writing desktop apps like KDE, Gnome, Firefox, OpenOffice and so on. Far from all tings are critical on the back end either, as long as they get done on time. C++ is like using a scalpel all the time because it's a damn sharp knife, which probably works but it's not practical for anybody, not even trained surgeons. Speaking of better languages, what choices are there for writing something like KDE or Gnome? Java? C#? ObjectiveC? Or something entirely different? It's easy to find faults with C++, it's a bit harder to see the better alternative.
One billion dollars "worth" of stock in a small-cap company cannot.
If you have a billion dollars worth of stock then it's no longer small-cap by any standard I'd use, nor is the kind of stock that'd flop into nothing if the founder left. If Foxconn was willing to pay $200 million for a 8.8% share, I'm quite sure he could have sold his full share for $500+ million. Maybe he'd lose the coveted title of billionaire but for all intents and purposes he's filthy rich whether he'd cash out or not.
That's the feeling I have as well. I don't use 32 bit desktops any longer. Actually haven't consistently used a 32 bit desktop in four years. To somehow not be aware of the behavior of real users is a huge fail. (...) I don't use [Firefox] anymore. Chrome is superior in every way
I think they know their users perfectly, even slashdotters seem to be clueless that they're running 32 bit software under their 64 bit OS.
But it DID work in Minority Report. They had a crime free society, and only ONE GUY (played by Tom Cruise) was accused unjustly.
I think you should watch the movie again. John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) was not accused unjustly, he had no minority report. Knowing his future enabled him to change the future, but the way precrime worked he was guilty as without the precogs he'd definitively be a murderer. Meanwhile Lamar Burgess (played by Max von Sydow) did commit murder without being stopped because they thought it was an echo of another murder so it wasn't completely crime free. Finally, all the people who had Minority Reports still had a choice which means there is more than reasonable doubt they'd commit the crime, making them unjustly accused.
Depends on your definition of "suck". Price-for-price, AMD and Intel are fairly comparable right now
We heard the same when AMD tried to sell their FX-8150 for $245 and the customers didn't agree, now their FX-8350 sells for $195. When you have to sell a considerably better processor for $50 less while your competitors prices are practically unchanged, it's a good hint that the former wasn't particularly good value. I think AMDs reputation for always providing good value has gotten more than a little tarnished at their high end, sure if you found a good sale but that's usually a case of inventory they can't move otherwise. And their official roadmap is the current Steamroller cores throughout 2013, there must begin to be a lot of customers sitting on AMD Phenom IIs waiting for an upgrade that won't come.
Their "A good manager can manage anything" is the equivalent of "A good developer can develop anything", it doesn't mean that everyone will be good at it, or even can be taught how to be good at it, or that they can do it without learning anything domain-specific. People who think they can simply because they have an MBA degree are typical examples of bad managers, and there's plenty of those just like there are plenty bad developers who somehow got a degree. Yes, you need a "tech hierarchy" from team leads to a chief architect - size depending on your product - that makes sure that everything fits together and that the product delivers the solution. The worst you can have is a PHB making tech decisions, the second worst thing is a developer promoted to manager who thinks that's his only - or even primary - job as a manager.
Managers are about people management, you have say 20 individuals that have their own personal wants and needs and motivations and personality quirks - and whatever else you might have to deal with. You want the to improve as individuals and also want them to work together as a group, trying to improve how they communicate, collaborate, make decisions and so on. You have to bring new people up to speed, handle transitions as people leave and keep it functioning well. And then there's communicating both up and down in the chain of command, not just relaying but trying to keep the demands reasonable both ways. Finally you often have to deal with external issues so it isn't wasting the team's time. Most of this is actually rather generic stuff no matter who you're managing, just like there's good software development practices there's good people management.
Personally, I've seen enough from management work that I've figured it's not for me. It doesn't mean I'm not fond of a good manager who tries to fight the good fight, and the qualities I look for typically change very little even if my job duties change a lot. In particular I don't expect my boss to be an expert in my field, he can't be clueless either but enough that he can understand a high level description of an issue and figure out how to deal with it - not necessarily how to solve it. And the essence of a poor manager doesn't change much either it's someone how drops all the crap from above on those under and cracks the whip harder, leaving you do deal with every problem yourself. Bad managers are just bad, good managers are good and sadly they follow Sturgeon's law.
What does their policy say about activities like running servers? is there a "fair use policy"*?
A little late but here are your answers, there's no prohibition on running servers as long as they are for residential use. That is to say both private and public servers, but not commercial use. As for "fair use" policy the closest is this (my translation):
"4.1 There is a goal that the Customer shall at all times provide the product specified speed between the Client PC and the Provider's connection to Internet. Since a part of capacity used for the necessary control information, the effective speed can be somewhat lower. The transmission speed on the Internet is outside the Provider's control and here lower speed must be expected."
To my knowledge there are no caps, least not any I've heard of or ever read about anyone running into. No fixed IP by default, but you can get that for a small extra fee. And yes, those numbers were download speeds.
Also some of the companies mentioned really aren't doing much in the way of any sort of lock-in. Yes Amazon has about 1% of the Internet in its data centers, which is pretty impressive, but it is just hosting. You buy the virtual servers to do as you please (within the ToS of course).
And I'm sure most "data centers" of the early Internet would love to have the 60/60 Mbit line that I have at home on a plain residential fiber connection, somewhat faster than a T3/DS3. Who needs the data center? You are the data center. Latest stats from Norway now is that the average broadband is 14.8 Mbit/s and the mean 7.9 Mbit/s, graph here as solid green and solid blue line respectively (the others are for business use). Honestly at the rate this is going bandwidth will almost cease to be a limited commodity, it's like asking when the water company will run out of water or the electricity company out of electricity.
caps are optional. you got the message, didn't you? caps hurt (think: carpal tunnel). at 20 or 30, it didn't hurt. I'm 50 now and let me just say, every little bit that helps is appreciated. less hitting of caps key, the better. sorry it offends you.
If the code standard involved CamelCase I think the jigsaw puzzle just fell into place.
...a poor standard can drag everybody down. One of my pet issues right now is a structure that exists as code, as XML and as a database structure. Except code has namespaces, classes/objects and attributes, XML has a schema with elements and attributes with namespaces and database servers have schemas, tables and columns. So when I store an element in a table, I should now call it a class... logical? Not to me, but we're at least trying to be consistently illogical so you only need one code book to decipher it.
...plus if people stayed at home they'd all be using individual air-conditioners/heaters/lights rather than the shared ones at the office. That might offset the benefit of them not driving to work.
I'd probably use a bit more at home, but since I'd otherwise have to warm it up/cool it down when I get home not significantly more. I'm pretty sure keeping both my home and office heated in the winter takes more than just heating my home while telecommuting on top of the transport benefits. Besides, you shouldn't underestimate that with fewer constraints on the commute people could live closer to other things (places, people, activities) they'd otherwise travel to. I had a colleague that every weekend in the winter would drive many hours to go skiing. If he could work from there, he'd probably just live near the ski slopes most of the winter. Long distance relationships with frequent travel wouldn't need to be if you can take the job with you, that sort of thing. I'd never take a pure telecommuting job though, far too risky I'd be undercut by someone far away in a low cost country.
Realistically? Check out the CO2 emissions during the Kyoto treaty here. The treaty parties managed to take it down a few percent while all the other countries that didn't give a shit more than doubled their emissions. And the Kyoto II negotiations have practically collapsed with only the EU and a few other small states agreeing to a new treaty, meaning 90%+ of the world population didn't. And the main increase is going to come from people wanting cars, there's a little over a billion cars in the world today but if the world had the same car density as the US there'd be something like six billion. And they're not going to give a crap about the rich countries telling them they can't have cars because of the pollution.
Some seem to think we can research our way out of this problem by improving energy efficiency but for the most part we just use it to consume more. More efficient light bulbs? Have more light on and longer. More energy efficient TVs? Buy a bigger one. Faster computers? Play Crysis instead of Wolfenstein 3D. Make more efficient aircraft and people want to travel further and more often. I recently read an article about a guy commuting with an airline, he did not want to move and he was important enough the company would pay for it so he traveled 1000 km a day four out of seven days a week. I'm sure there's plenty people in the US too that would like to have everyone else drive a Prius and lower emissions and oil consumption so they can continue to drive an SUV.
That said, I don't think there'll be any abrupt collapse so the doomsday preppers are probably going to be disappointed. It'll just gradually get worse until finally everybody can agree that it's bad enough that something has to be done. And I don't think that solution will involve first and second class citizens depending on how much their country has polluted in the past, you're never going to cement the idea that Americans should have two polluting cars and huge emissions while Indians should ride a bike and have low emissions because they've polluted so little in the past and we should now freeze time. Usually I just get bizarre replies like that China has higher emissions than the US, to which I can only reply that the US has way higher emissions than Norway. It's a meaningless comparison but it keeps getting made.
Yes, except certain standards basically give your peripherals practically free reign to roam through your memory, specifically Firewire and Thunderbolt or if the attacker can add such a port through extension cards and the drivers are installed automatically. This is rather well documented behavior, and the small price you have to pay for closing this loophole:
The drawback of this mitigation is that external storage devices can no longer connect by using the 1394 port, and all PCI Express devices that are connected to the Thunderbolt port will not work. Because USB and eSATA are so prevalent, and because DisplayPort often works even when Thunderbolt is disabled, the adverse effect caused by these mitigations should be limited.
What's next, kicking people who have served their time out of movie theaters, restaurants, concerts, and sporting events just because there might be some kids around?
A certain percentage will never agree that sex offenders have ever "served their time". They'd like everyone who's ever earned that title to either:
a) Be in prison for life
b) Go kill themselves
c) Stay a zillion miles from anywhere they go
So their answer to your question is "Yes, all of the above and we're still too nice to them."
Gamers are on the upgrade treadmill because games put them there aka "But does it run Crysis?", not because they so desperately want to be. As long as the games are made to perform on the hardware people got, they're quite happy - just look at consoles. Yes, I appreciate the ability to pop open my case and put in a faster card but beyond that I'm not interested in tweaking it. Outside a very few competitive FPS gamers and overclockers who spend more time fiddling with settings and running benchmarks than playing nobody cares if you got 59 fps and I got 56 fps. Most games are not twitch games where milliseconds count.
More importantly, it ensures my freedom to go wherever I please in Europe and work there. It ensures that no citizen is SOL when their government goes bonkers: higher norms must be obeyed. To me, the guarentee of fundamental freedoms is more important that the guarentee that my government can be arbitrarily dickish to me without external interference. People moaning about "sovereingty" really mean "I don't like them foreigners" and "why can't we be horrible to people we don't like?".
If that's how you feel, why not let the UN run a world government? People don't want to be governed by far away places that don't really care about the local opinion or have their best interests at heart. The idea that we need the EU to be civilized democracies is rather absurd, there are very many equally free independent countries. What is happening in the EU is in many ways stronger than in the US where you have state law and federal law, in the EU you don't create law directly you pass directives that require national laws to change. Over time less and less is free for the national legislature to decide until all the meaningful decisions happens in Brussels. Maybe that's how you like it I'm glad Norway values its independence, even though our politicians don't.
I've found that to be true of most bugs actually, if you have to hand it off for someone else to fix it's highly unlikely they'll rush to fix it at a pace that solves your immediate problem so you better work around it yourself. At least with one particularly product I worked with though, I often found that bugs would get fixed 6-12 months later. Apparently every so often they'd gather up all the low priority bugs in that area of the code and go bug stomping. I guess it's easier for the developers to understand more of the code and fix many things at once than trying to snipe one and one bug, so I can understand that. If you're planning to use the product over any length of time, those kind of cleanups are worth the bug reporting time. Otherwise you'll just keep running into it again and again.
I personally can't stand Yoda style, I'd rather they make an ":=" operator and banish the single "=" as an operator entirely.
a := b <-- assignment
a == b <-- comparison
a = b <-- invalid code
Pretty hard both to typo wrong and read wrong, as a transition you could use a compiler flag to set it to off/optional/mandatory.
You mean to tell me that the old version of Qt were unfit?
Apparently it had far too little buzzword-compliance with their traditional widget-based imperative style GUI, now it's HTML/CSS/Javascript and declarative style GUI that is the "hot thing". I guess the good side is that it's like writing a web app that many developers know how to do but it has pretty much all the bad sides too, personally I find it's a giant step backwards. Or rather if I was going to do it this way I'd probably just go for HTML+JQuery and make it run in a browser against a back-end instead.