Sadly I know the answer to this as it appeared someone asked in all seriousness. The new GCN architecture is better for compute in general, but worse for BitCoin as they switch from VLIW to a SIMD architecture. But please buy one and eBay it for cheap afterwards all the same;)
Well, I'm sorry you're an idiot. You're somewhat right, actually the eye just takes 18-20 fps to feel smooth if the scene is motion blurred. Reality doesn't have frames, during that 1/20th of a second everything moves. A rendered screen is not motion blurred and will seem extremely stuttering. Yes, perhaps if you rendered at 60 fps and averaged down to 24 fps you wouldn't notice the difference, but having a graphics card that can only render at 24 fps is clearly insufficient. You should go see an optician if you don't notice it.
but there is no way to remove guns from those who shouldn't have them
There's no silver bullet to this, no. But you don't have to eliminate it, you just have to make the cost/benefit not worth it. If you hold a knife to my throat or point a gun at me I'm going to hand over my wallet either way, but if one carries a bunch of firearm-related charges on top maybe it's not worth it. It's a risk buying it, it's a risk if your house is searched, sure killers might still find a gun but your average burglar or robber won't carry one "just because" and there's a much smaller chance it'll end in a gun fight where somebody dies. The downside is that often you have to let them get away, but if you have a gun to shoot them well then they need a gun to shoot you first. The vast majority of killers didn't set out to kill someone, most want to flee the scene.
The people that just got fired and come back and shoot up the office or just learned their girlfriend has been cheating on them or whatever are generally in a rage and grab whatever weapon they got, they don't plan on how could I get a gun now if I didn't already have one. Usually they manage to kill at least their first victim anyway, with or without a firearm. After all, most of us aren't going around with the Secret Service keeping everyone away so the first kill comes by surprise. A gun just happens to make it a lot easier to add victims 2-10. Practically the potential that someone will shoot back doesn't make up for the increased number of shooters, in fact that requires people to carry guns at all times which make them far more likely to snap and use them in a rage.
Planned killings are even worse, the more they're planned the less likely a gun would help you. The gunman has the element of surprise, cover, body armor and can take out likely people to shoot back or choose a time and place where the target is alone or there's plenty victims that are unlikely to have guns. There's no way to combine being a real target with a normal life, then you must live like if you're in an army camp in Afghanistan, living in a secure area, driving armored cars, have everybody you're meeting with searched, you can't walk down the street like a normal person. There's a reason they invented drive-by shootings - you come, kill and get out of there before anyone can shoot back. You don't see many drive-by stabbings.
That is extremely misleading. You could say the same thing about any isolated particle. Firstly, we are talking about the gravitational force carrier, not just 'mass'.
Maybe I'm confused here but isn't the gravitational force carrier the theoretical graviton, which should be a massless spin-2 particle? Which is different from the Higgs boson, which according to the standard model is a spin-0 particle with mass? I thought the Higgs boson was more like the "source" of gravity, like the poles of a magnet which generate a magnetic field. I'm confused:)
I think it depends what you use it for... if it's primarily a gaming machine then the only thing that matter is perceived stability, if it appears to run the games stable then for all intents and purposes mission accomplished. Better frame rates, cheaper parts, bleeding edge drivers, freshly released game still being patched heavily... it's 99% stability all the way.
If you care about producing some kind of output that needs to be correct, then you care a lot more about stability and correctness. I don't want crashes, I don't want corruption, I want a machine that's operating exactly as it should, if there's any kind of issue I don't want "is this because I overclocked it?" to complicate matters. It's actually more that it adds many more possible causes than that it actually is the problem. Just a few rounds of clocking back to spec, trying to see if the problem doesn't occur now then clocking back up as it turns out that had nothing to do with it wastes time.
It's like any technology. Think of any kind of technology, any kind of device, any kind of tool. There are no "good" or "bad" technologies, all of them can be used for good or bad. (...) Hell, not even enriching it to make it weapon grade material is a dead sure indicator that someone has bad intentions, due to the way some reactors work only with such material.
I'm pretty sure no reactor design requires weapon grade material, unless you purposely made one just so you can pretend it's for a reactor. Regular nuclear fuel contains a small bit of weapons grade material, like the fuel for an incineration facility has to have some degree of flammable material - when people started sorting their junk too well, they had to add some small part of paper back into the mix. But weapons grade material is more like napalm, yes it will burn but it's way, way overkill if you just want it to burn, the only practical reason to do it is because you're making a weapon.
Same as with nerve gas, sure if all you have are batches of various chemical compounds that may be used for lots of various purposes that's one thing, but nerve gas itself doesn't really have any other redeeming uses. Then again you have many countries that justify having WMDs, at least the A of ABC (Atomic, Bacterial, Chemical) weapons but you're stretching it very, very far at least. Particularly if you're finding it in some loony's basement, I'm glad that's illegal even if they don't know the where and when he was planning to use it.
P2P software on the other hand transfers rows of 0s and 1s. I't's like trying to ban the alphabet because the letters could be used to make unlawful writings.It can be practically any format from text, audio, video carrying pretty much all forms of content. There's absolutely nothing inherent in the technology that direct what people can use it for, it's pretty much as generic as it gets. It's like arresting the guy who makes printer ink for anything bad people print with his ink. It's an insane logic and luckily the courts seem a bit saner than that.
Firefox is at least copying an interface that hundreds of millions of people use in Chrome, maybe it's not for you but it certainly seems to work for a lot of people. I'm using Chrome on a 24" screen right now and I can't say I miss any of the things you mention much. Mozilla is quite deluded if they think that's why I use Chrome though. GNOME on the other hand choose to go their own way, really their own way. Which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't constantly collapse the path behind them, if you liked it the way it was then tough, it's changing. Even Jobs didn't have that much god complex thinking he could dictate the new way of doing things. And you damn well better have the direction right, sometimes GNOME gets really lost in the woods. It's like following a guide through the jungle and being almost certain that he's lost and going in the wrong direction but either you keep following him in whatever direction he's going and hope he gets back on track or you're alone on an unsupported path. At least you can switch easily, but running into dead ends aren't fun.
My guess it that Apache just got this from Oracle and they wouldn't want to piss them off by just handing it on to LibreOffice, since clearly Oracle didn't get along with those guys. So they'll make their Apache version, keep the lights on and the project running and then one of them is going to fade away and eventually all that's useful will be merged into the other. I expect more of a xfree86 vs xorg situation here, once the split has already happened there's really not going to be much of a conflict, the developers will pretty soon gravitate towards the one that is best.
Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Sure, because the "shortage" is just a con made by wall street. Are you part of the occupy movement or something? Of course there is a rush of people overreacting too, but it's not like the floods down in Thailand were imaginary. HDD production is way down and with long term contracts with OEMs taking priority the rest of the market was going to get squeezed badly. Everybody that's looked at a price-quantity curve knows that when supply goes way down like that the prices go up. Yes, people that panic buy to be on the safe side amplify it but there wasn't that much in the channel to raid before webshops figured it was a rush and raised prices. By the time "everyone" knows a shortage is coming it's too late to get a good deal already.
(BTW: If you don't see the problem in the above line of code, you are a C++ novice. There is no shame in this, but you probably shouldn't be developing Qt without a code reviewer looking over your shoulder.)
Actually if you're developing for the desktop you're just wasting your time trying to catch std::bad_alloc as
Most desktop operating systems overcommit memory. This means that malloc() or operator new return a valid pointer, even though there is not enough memory available at allocation time. On such systems, no exception of type std::bad_alloc is thrown.
In my experience C++ exceptions are a complete waste of time, I try-catch the call to some crappy third party library and what happens? Boom goes the application anyway. Exceptions that can't catch aren't worth having and my code uses error codes instead, works a million times better. Plus you can't throw exceptions over signal/slot boundaries, so they're not useful even when they technically work. A giant waste of time for everyone involved, too bad they've sold you the kool-aid.
So you're tired of the genre, it's like saying you're tired of running around with guns shooting people - well then all FPS games are going to suck for you. I loved Skyrim, but you could say it's exactly the same as almost every other RPG, you got your fighter, mage and rogue skills, same old go into dungeons and beat the crap out of the usual assortment of bad guys and monsters, level up, get better gear and so on. Yay another game with a fireball spell. There's just a limited way of doing things, a lot of things have changed between I played Civilization 1 and Civilization 5 but a lot more stayed the same. It's the same discover technology, found cities, build units and buildings, deal with other nations and all that stuff. Or all the "Tycoon" games, they all more or less work the same even if you're building a roller coaster or a hospital. If you've tired from that basic game play no game is going to satisfy you.
Of course Chrome has no particular reason to want to kill Firefox, but hey.. it's money they could use on their own browser and get search users they don't pay for, strengthen their own brand and that is 100% loyal to Google and will implement any data gathering they want. Any antitrust case would be far weaker than Microsoft's OS bundling and 95% market share, they're light years away from that being a problem for them so IMO they don't have any huge benefit from keeping them around either. From what I've understood Mozilla's deal has been pretty sweet up until now, seeing as they were Google's weapon to break the IE monopoly. That the deal continues wasn't a surprise, the question is if the deal is as good now that Google has seen how easily they've risen to #2 (at least according to StatCounter) in market share already. Surely somebody there is thinking that they can do this in-house, no big need to prop up other companies.
Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.
The dual license cash flow wasn't that tiny, when Nokia bought Qt in 2008 it was employing 250 people and AFAIK that was their only product. They even said it themselves on the developer FAQ:
As of Qt version 4.5, we license Qt under the LGPL version 2.1. Why? We have always chosen licenses that best support our goals. Following the Nokia acquisition, our goals have changed from being focused on revenue generation to supporting Nokias overall software strategy through the vision of Qt Everywhere.
As I understand it they wanted to put Qt on phones and make money on cuts from app sales, just like iPhone and Android. With that plan dead and buried, nobody has yet managed to give a sensible answer as to what Nokia hope to make money on using Qt. You get a lot of hand waving and buzzwords but no traceable cash flow of significance.
Virtual machines, parallel processing and thin client "cloud computing" style stuff have been around for decades, but people like to pretend that it's all shiny and new and that your experience becomes completely useless every couple of years.
I think it's a lot that in CS the tools shape the person far more than for an engineer, because the language becomes your way of expressing yourself. Your generic skills become a bit too abstract like learning linguistics, sure that will help you learn (human) languages but you still have to put down very much effort in learning the vocabulary and grammar, not to mention all the expressions and idiosyncrasies to learn each language. If it comes down to understanding or writing a German text I'd rather get one with a degree in German than one with French, Spanish and linguistics. And parallel programming, yes it's nothing "new" in the same way Japanese is nothing new but I'd still not expect them to take it up all that quickly. Of course you shouldn't overstate the differences either, C, C++, Objective-C and C# all have some common C heritage and the other languages weren't invented in a vacuum either. But you do often end up with the developer version of Google Translate, the words might look English but it's obviously a different language translated - and often far more poorly than Google does.
1) It's enough to drive a wrist watch, but no I don't think so. 2) Not going to happen or you could do "identity theft" from any paper cup.. 3) Very limited degree of giving directions with your mind, yes. Anything that actually resembles reading a thought? No. 4) The "poorest of the poor" live on less than a dollar a day. It's a long way to everyone browsing the Internet on their smartphone. 5) Hahahhahhahaha LOL
My prediction is that all these predictions are wrong. That's not to say anything big won't happen, but IBM isn't exactly a Jobs or Zuckerberg. They're good on tech research but I think several of these predictions lack real world grounding.
Well, before Facebook and everyone went into broadcast mode I didn't have a clue how 90% of the people from school ended up, so I did attend a reunion some years back and I think at least 2/3rds of my class was there. Just call it simple curiosity, what do they look like now, what did they end up doing, they pulled up old pictures of us, quoted some old school books and it was just fun comparing who we were then and who are we now and we chatted about old times over beers. I wasn't going to rekindle some long lost friendship or anything, because it was just the distant past we had in common. I don't get the sour grapes though, unless you're the kind of kid that hated high school.
In any case, with Facebook all my curiosity and then way, way much more could be satisfied if I'd bother to watch my feed so I'd be much, much less inclined to go today. I don't get the people who say it enhances everything, if you've read up on Facebook and haven't OD'd on nostalgia already then you're being plain obsessive about your past. It was a decade or more ago, just like I can talk to my long time friends about that cabin trip we went on 10 years ago but it's just a passing subject then we get back into the here and now. Same way with reunions, you go way back and remember the good times then you get back and get on with your life. Doesn't mean it's not a nice trip, but in limited dosage.
Well first of all this isn't Qt, it's a system built using Qt like KDE. Secondly, I don't know when Qt was ever just a GUI toolkit. It's trying to be a full on standard library - not like stdlib, but like Java, C# etc. covering GUI, file systems, networking, databases, multimedia, threads, collection classes and so on - basically you're supposed to be able to write fully functional applications without ever using anything but Qt classes.
Almost everything I have to deal with securely has a https site. That goes for my online bank, "my page" on a whole ton of various services and so on. In fact most of those go on to tell me they'll never ask me for anything important over email and that if I do get an email looking like that it's probably a identity theft/fraud attempt. So the only reason would be talking with other individuals. Most of those would be much easier talking to in real life. The rest, well maybe we wouldn't want to trade email addresses at all, but use some other service. If I feared that someone would be reading my email, I probably wouldn't like to leave that obvious a trace of the communication in the first place. So it really never fits the bill.
Oh no, they told me I should never use the same combination twice and I already use that on my luggage! (How many security WTFs is that rolled into one?)
Well strictly speaking, they don't need to know. The DBA - as in the person that makes sure the database is running, upgrades are done, backups are made and so on is often not really supposed to be privileged to all the information in the database. Probably the same kind of place you won't let your developers see production data, the development server has a different encryption key and the production key is set once during install, backed up in a safe and the production application server logged to hell and back including remote logging and audits. The only access anyone is supposed to have to the system is through the application that's enforcing permissions, logging and all that. I've only worked in relatively low-security environments but I'm perfectly aware that "SELECT * FROM [table]" circumvents anything and everything the application does to protect the data. In many environments that's fine and an accepted risk, if you're managing the database you should be sufficiently trusted to not go poking about. But I can easily see situations where that's not the case, without everybody jumping up and down about outsourcing. It's nothing personal in that they don't trust IT, but just like you in accounting don't want one person who can put in an invoice, approve it and take delivery you don't want one person from IT with all the keys to the castle. That this is the practical reality many places is because there hasn't been any other convenient enough way, it's not by design.
Of course, but there's no such thing as perfect journalism. Reporting just one side of the story is wrong, so is giving equal time to flat-earthers and round-earthers, nobody is perfectly without bias and their own point of view, nobody knows for a fact that there's no more facts they should have had or maybe breaking the news is necessary to get attention to the case before you'll get the rest of the story. For example in the case you quote the school might very well have stonewalled citing student confidentiality leaving you with nothing but the suspended student's side of the story until you go public with it. What do you to then, drop it because there might be some other side of the story you haven't heard? If every journalist did that, you'd not see much news. You only get both sides of the story if both sides volunteer to tell it, often one side can't and often one side won't. If I can answer no comment and that means no story, most PR representatives would have their mouths superglued shut.
The main advantages of the netbook over the laptop was always that it was 'more portable' than a laptop. I don't know anyone who bought a netbook just because it was cheap
Not just because, but's it's certainly a part of it. I have a big desktop with plenty CPU, RAM, GPU etc. when I need it, I bought a little netbook to have at the other end of the scale. The most important part was that I had no performance requirements to speak of at all. Now that it was both portable and cheap was certainly good, but I can't pretend to be that much of a road warrior that 1 kg vs 2 kg or 4 vs 8 hour battery life time is really that essential. For the same price, I might have gone bigger, after all some things like full size keyboards are comfy and it would let me do a bit more serious stuff even though it's just nice-to-have. But so is honestly the extra netbook features too. My smart phone also now covers some of the uses I'd have fofr the netbook, pushing me back towards a more traditional laptop when I first carry one. It isn't by any means a replacement but they cover a spectrum from "always in my pocket" to "big stationary desktop" where laptops, nettops and possibly tablets (not so far) are all somewhat overlapping.
2. They are being paid, make sure they do the work they need to by the time it needs to be done. Stick to schedules. I can not stress how important it is to stick to schedules. If a programmer can't meet targets you feel were set fairly then you may have to fire him/her. (...) 4. Designate a planner. This will probably be you. The planner takes the goal and the design and makes it into a step by step development cycle programmers can follow. (...)
You may not know it, but the people working for you probably think you're a lousy manager. You're the traditional project manager coming up with an estimate based on how hard it sounds like doing without taking any input from the ones actually working on the code, then drive people hard to meet your imagined schedule. From the "watch every commit" it sounds like you're trying to be the supercoder micromanaging everything everyone under you is doing. Chances are that if you're trying to do that much at once, your quality will turn to shit too even if you could outperform any one of them individually. Particularly if you're doing any part of the managing bit, making sure all your people are productive, clearing roadblocks, dealing with recruitment/staffing/budget issues, management reporting and so on. If you're serious you should get out of management, quick.
2nd claim: It is easily argued that remote-killing does not fulfill the proportionality argument of just war (bellum iustum).
Why? Trying to get in a position where you can kill the enemy, but the enemy can't kill you has been the fundamental essence of warfare since forever. Getting air superiority to enable free bombing, artillery with longer range than the opposition, stealth so you can see them but they can't see you. It makes very little real difference if the US had nuked Hiroshima from a computer terminal back home or a pilot high in the skies above as long as the asymmetry is there. That part isn't fundamentally new.
I guess it could work both ways, sure if you want to do evil then remote controls means nobody can really get back at you. On the other hand, you don't have to fear for your own life because you're not actually there. Not matter how much you tell your soldiers not to start firing until they're sure it's actually enemies, any sane soldier will choose to err on the side that keeps him alive. With robots that's much less of a pressing matter, let them take the first shot as long as you can converge and neutralize them afterwards. The soldiers don't have the option to rape, pillage and plunder. The telemetry data can be reviewed for any grounds for disciplinary action or a court martial, providing much more information on what soldiers in the field actually did.
Yes, you have the option of using too excessive force or being too ruthless, but honestly most of these options are there already today. Call in an air strike with some heavy bombs and they could flatten pretty much everything, of course with ugly collateral damage and public resentment. That wouldn't really change much, the same factors that curb what you do today will still apply in the future. As long as the military is trying to be the good guys, it'll be fine. If it turns into more of a total war thing with killing the enemy at all costs, then I plan to hide in the deepest bunker I can find anyways...
That's not nearly enough, unfortunately. My Facebook profile is next to nothing, it exists only so I can respond to event invites because it's become the de facto way of doing it and in some way I can understand that people go "Why can't you stop being such a special snowflake so I can have my guest list in one place?" and isolated speaking, no I don't really care that anyone knows I was there. But as a free bonus I also got tagged in pictures from the party by some less than privacy sensitive people, which I don't need. I didn't upload those pictures, I didn't tag them and honestly I wish there was a "do not tag" flag I could set where nobody could tag me in any way without approval. Then again I turned my sharing settings down to the minimum, though I'm not sure it actually helps when I'm not the one doing the sharing. Sigh.....
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Sadly I know the answer to this as it appeared someone asked in all seriousness. The new GCN architecture is better for compute in general, but worse for BitCoin as they switch from VLIW to a SIMD architecture. But please buy one and eBay it for cheap afterwards all the same ;)
Well, I'm sorry you're an idiot. You're somewhat right, actually the eye just takes 18-20 fps to feel smooth if the scene is motion blurred. Reality doesn't have frames, during that 1/20th of a second everything moves. A rendered screen is not motion blurred and will seem extremely stuttering. Yes, perhaps if you rendered at 60 fps and averaged down to 24 fps you wouldn't notice the difference, but having a graphics card that can only render at 24 fps is clearly insufficient. You should go see an optician if you don't notice it.
but there is no way to remove guns from those who shouldn't have them
There's no silver bullet to this, no. But you don't have to eliminate it, you just have to make the cost/benefit not worth it. If you hold a knife to my throat or point a gun at me I'm going to hand over my wallet either way, but if one carries a bunch of firearm-related charges on top maybe it's not worth it. It's a risk buying it, it's a risk if your house is searched, sure killers might still find a gun but your average burglar or robber won't carry one "just because" and there's a much smaller chance it'll end in a gun fight where somebody dies. The downside is that often you have to let them get away, but if you have a gun to shoot them well then they need a gun to shoot you first. The vast majority of killers didn't set out to kill someone, most want to flee the scene.
The people that just got fired and come back and shoot up the office or just learned their girlfriend has been cheating on them or whatever are generally in a rage and grab whatever weapon they got, they don't plan on how could I get a gun now if I didn't already have one. Usually they manage to kill at least their first victim anyway, with or without a firearm. After all, most of us aren't going around with the Secret Service keeping everyone away so the first kill comes by surprise. A gun just happens to make it a lot easier to add victims 2-10. Practically the potential that someone will shoot back doesn't make up for the increased number of shooters, in fact that requires people to carry guns at all times which make them far more likely to snap and use them in a rage.
Planned killings are even worse, the more they're planned the less likely a gun would help you. The gunman has the element of surprise, cover, body armor and can take out likely people to shoot back or choose a time and place where the target is alone or there's plenty victims that are unlikely to have guns. There's no way to combine being a real target with a normal life, then you must live like if you're in an army camp in Afghanistan, living in a secure area, driving armored cars, have everybody you're meeting with searched, you can't walk down the street like a normal person. There's a reason they invented drive-by shootings - you come, kill and get out of there before anyone can shoot back. You don't see many drive-by stabbings.
That is extremely misleading. You could say the same thing about any isolated particle. Firstly, we are talking about the gravitational force carrier, not just 'mass'.
Maybe I'm confused here but isn't the gravitational force carrier the theoretical graviton, which should be a massless spin-2 particle? Which is different from the Higgs boson, which according to the standard model is a spin-0 particle with mass? I thought the Higgs boson was more like the "source" of gravity, like the poles of a magnet which generate a magnetic field. I'm confused :)
I think it depends what you use it for... if it's primarily a gaming machine then the only thing that matter is perceived stability, if it appears to run the games stable then for all intents and purposes mission accomplished. Better frame rates, cheaper parts, bleeding edge drivers, freshly released game still being patched heavily... it's 99% stability all the way.
If you care about producing some kind of output that needs to be correct, then you care a lot more about stability and correctness. I don't want crashes, I don't want corruption, I want a machine that's operating exactly as it should, if there's any kind of issue I don't want "is this because I overclocked it?" to complicate matters. It's actually more that it adds many more possible causes than that it actually is the problem. Just a few rounds of clocking back to spec, trying to see if the problem doesn't occur now then clocking back up as it turns out that had nothing to do with it wastes time.
It's like any technology. Think of any kind of technology, any kind of device, any kind of tool. There are no "good" or "bad" technologies, all of them can be used for good or bad. (...) Hell, not even enriching it to make it weapon grade material is a dead sure indicator that someone has bad intentions, due to the way some reactors work only with such material.
I'm pretty sure no reactor design requires weapon grade material, unless you purposely made one just so you can pretend it's for a reactor. Regular nuclear fuel contains a small bit of weapons grade material, like the fuel for an incineration facility has to have some degree of flammable material - when people started sorting their junk too well, they had to add some small part of paper back into the mix. But weapons grade material is more like napalm, yes it will burn but it's way, way overkill if you just want it to burn, the only practical reason to do it is because you're making a weapon.
Same as with nerve gas, sure if all you have are batches of various chemical compounds that may be used for lots of various purposes that's one thing, but nerve gas itself doesn't really have any other redeeming uses. Then again you have many countries that justify having WMDs, at least the A of ABC (Atomic, Bacterial, Chemical) weapons but you're stretching it very, very far at least. Particularly if you're finding it in some loony's basement, I'm glad that's illegal even if they don't know the where and when he was planning to use it.
P2P software on the other hand transfers rows of 0s and 1s. I't's like trying to ban the alphabet because the letters could be used to make unlawful writings .It can be practically any format from text, audio, video carrying pretty much all forms of content. There's absolutely nothing inherent in the technology that direct what people can use it for, it's pretty much as generic as it gets. It's like arresting the guy who makes printer ink for anything bad people print with his ink. It's an insane logic and luckily the courts seem a bit saner than that.
Firefox is at least copying an interface that hundreds of millions of people use in Chrome, maybe it's not for you but it certainly seems to work for a lot of people. I'm using Chrome on a 24" screen right now and I can't say I miss any of the things you mention much. Mozilla is quite deluded if they think that's why I use Chrome though. GNOME on the other hand choose to go their own way, really their own way. Which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't constantly collapse the path behind them, if you liked it the way it was then tough, it's changing. Even Jobs didn't have that much god complex thinking he could dictate the new way of doing things. And you damn well better have the direction right, sometimes GNOME gets really lost in the woods. It's like following a guide through the jungle and being almost certain that he's lost and going in the wrong direction but either you keep following him in whatever direction he's going and hope he gets back on track or you're alone on an unsupported path. At least you can switch easily, but running into dead ends aren't fun.
My guess it that Apache just got this from Oracle and they wouldn't want to piss them off by just handing it on to LibreOffice, since clearly Oracle didn't get along with those guys. So they'll make their Apache version, keep the lights on and the project running and then one of them is going to fade away and eventually all that's useful will be merged into the other. I expect more of a xfree86 vs xorg situation here, once the split has already happened there's really not going to be much of a conflict, the developers will pretty soon gravitate towards the one that is best.
Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Sure, because the "shortage" is just a con made by wall street. Are you part of the occupy movement or something? Of course there is a rush of people overreacting too, but it's not like the floods down in Thailand were imaginary. HDD production is way down and with long term contracts with OEMs taking priority the rest of the market was going to get squeezed badly. Everybody that's looked at a price-quantity curve knows that when supply goes way down like that the prices go up. Yes, people that panic buy to be on the safe side amplify it but there wasn't that much in the channel to raid before webshops figured it was a rush and raised prices. By the time "everyone" knows a shortage is coming it's too late to get a good deal already.
QSomething* something = new QSomething();
(BTW: If you don't see the problem in the above line of code, you are a C++ novice. There is no shame in this, but you probably shouldn't be developing Qt without a code reviewer looking over your shoulder.)
Actually if you're developing for the desktop you're just wasting your time trying to catch std::bad_alloc as
Most desktop operating systems overcommit memory. This means that malloc() or operator new return a valid pointer, even though there is not enough memory available at allocation time. On such systems, no exception of type std::bad_alloc is thrown.
In my experience C++ exceptions are a complete waste of time, I try-catch the call to some crappy third party library and what happens? Boom goes the application anyway. Exceptions that can't catch aren't worth having and my code uses error codes instead, works a million times better. Plus you can't throw exceptions over signal/slot boundaries, so they're not useful even when they technically work. A giant waste of time for everyone involved, too bad they've sold you the kool-aid.
So you're tired of the genre, it's like saying you're tired of running around with guns shooting people - well then all FPS games are going to suck for you. I loved Skyrim, but you could say it's exactly the same as almost every other RPG, you got your fighter, mage and rogue skills, same old go into dungeons and beat the crap out of the usual assortment of bad guys and monsters, level up, get better gear and so on. Yay another game with a fireball spell. There's just a limited way of doing things, a lot of things have changed between I played Civilization 1 and Civilization 5 but a lot more stayed the same. It's the same discover technology, found cities, build units and buildings, deal with other nations and all that stuff. Or all the "Tycoon" games, they all more or less work the same even if you're building a roller coaster or a hospital. If you've tired from that basic game play no game is going to satisfy you.
Of course Chrome has no particular reason to want to kill Firefox, but hey.. it's money they could use on their own browser and get search users they don't pay for, strengthen their own brand and that is 100% loyal to Google and will implement any data gathering they want. Any antitrust case would be far weaker than Microsoft's OS bundling and 95% market share, they're light years away from that being a problem for them so IMO they don't have any huge benefit from keeping them around either. From what I've understood Mozilla's deal has been pretty sweet up until now, seeing as they were Google's weapon to break the IE monopoly. That the deal continues wasn't a surprise, the question is if the deal is as good now that Google has seen how easily they've risen to #2 (at least according to StatCounter) in market share already. Surely somebody there is thinking that they can do this in-house, no big need to prop up other companies.
Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.
The dual license cash flow wasn't that tiny, when Nokia bought Qt in 2008 it was employing 250 people and AFAIK that was their only product. They even said it themselves on the developer FAQ:
As of Qt version 4.5, we license Qt under the LGPL version 2.1. Why? We have always chosen licenses that best support our goals. Following the Nokia acquisition, our goals have changed from being focused on revenue generation to supporting Nokias overall software strategy through the vision of Qt Everywhere.
As I understand it they wanted to put Qt on phones and make money on cuts from app sales, just like iPhone and Android. With that plan dead and buried, nobody has yet managed to give a sensible answer as to what Nokia hope to make money on using Qt. You get a lot of hand waving and buzzwords but no traceable cash flow of significance.
Virtual machines, parallel processing and thin client "cloud computing" style stuff have been around for decades, but people like to pretend that it's all shiny and new and that your experience becomes completely useless every couple of years.
I think it's a lot that in CS the tools shape the person far more than for an engineer, because the language becomes your way of expressing yourself. Your generic skills become a bit too abstract like learning linguistics, sure that will help you learn (human) languages but you still have to put down very much effort in learning the vocabulary and grammar, not to mention all the expressions and idiosyncrasies to learn each language. If it comes down to understanding or writing a German text I'd rather get one with a degree in German than one with French, Spanish and linguistics. And parallel programming, yes it's nothing "new" in the same way Japanese is nothing new but I'd still not expect them to take it up all that quickly. Of course you shouldn't overstate the differences either, C, C++, Objective-C and C# all have some common C heritage and the other languages weren't invented in a vacuum either. But you do often end up with the developer version of Google Translate, the words might look English but it's obviously a different language translated - and often far more poorly than Google does.
1) It's enough to drive a wrist watch, but no I don't think so.
2) Not going to happen or you could do "identity theft" from any paper cup..
3) Very limited degree of giving directions with your mind, yes. Anything that actually resembles reading a thought? No.
4) The "poorest of the poor" live on less than a dollar a day. It's a long way to everyone browsing the Internet on their smartphone.
5) Hahahhahhahaha LOL
My prediction is that all these predictions are wrong. That's not to say anything big won't happen, but IBM isn't exactly a Jobs or Zuckerberg. They're good on tech research but I think several of these predictions lack real world grounding.
Well, before Facebook and everyone went into broadcast mode I didn't have a clue how 90% of the people from school ended up, so I did attend a reunion some years back and I think at least 2/3rds of my class was there. Just call it simple curiosity, what do they look like now, what did they end up doing, they pulled up old pictures of us, quoted some old school books and it was just fun comparing who we were then and who are we now and we chatted about old times over beers. I wasn't going to rekindle some long lost friendship or anything, because it was just the distant past we had in common. I don't get the sour grapes though, unless you're the kind of kid that hated high school.
In any case, with Facebook all my curiosity and then way, way much more could be satisfied if I'd bother to watch my feed so I'd be much, much less inclined to go today. I don't get the people who say it enhances everything, if you've read up on Facebook and haven't OD'd on nostalgia already then you're being plain obsessive about your past. It was a decade or more ago, just like I can talk to my long time friends about that cabin trip we went on 10 years ago but it's just a passing subject then we get back into the here and now. Same way with reunions, you go way back and remember the good times then you get back and get on with your life. Doesn't mean it's not a nice trip, but in limited dosage.
Well first of all this isn't Qt, it's a system built using Qt like KDE. Secondly, I don't know when Qt was ever just a GUI toolkit. It's trying to be a full on standard library - not like stdlib, but like Java, C# etc. covering GUI, file systems, networking, databases, multimedia, threads, collection classes and so on - basically you're supposed to be able to write fully functional applications without ever using anything but Qt classes.
Almost everything I have to deal with securely has a https site. That goes for my online bank, "my page" on a whole ton of various services and so on. In fact most of those go on to tell me they'll never ask me for anything important over email and that if I do get an email looking like that it's probably a identity theft/fraud attempt. So the only reason would be talking with other individuals. Most of those would be much easier talking to in real life. The rest, well maybe we wouldn't want to trade email addresses at all, but use some other service. If I feared that someone would be reading my email, I probably wouldn't like to leave that obvious a trace of the communication in the first place. So it really never fits the bill.
Oh no, they told me I should never use the same combination twice and I already use that on my luggage! (How many security WTFs is that rolled into one?)
Well strictly speaking, they don't need to know. The DBA - as in the person that makes sure the database is running, upgrades are done, backups are made and so on is often not really supposed to be privileged to all the information in the database. Probably the same kind of place you won't let your developers see production data, the development server has a different encryption key and the production key is set once during install, backed up in a safe and the production application server logged to hell and back including remote logging and audits. The only access anyone is supposed to have to the system is through the application that's enforcing permissions, logging and all that. I've only worked in relatively low-security environments but I'm perfectly aware that "SELECT * FROM [table]" circumvents anything and everything the application does to protect the data. In many environments that's fine and an accepted risk, if you're managing the database you should be sufficiently trusted to not go poking about. But I can easily see situations where that's not the case, without everybody jumping up and down about outsourcing. It's nothing personal in that they don't trust IT, but just like you in accounting don't want one person who can put in an invoice, approve it and take delivery you don't want one person from IT with all the keys to the castle. That this is the practical reality many places is because there hasn't been any other convenient enough way, it's not by design.
Of course, but there's no such thing as perfect journalism. Reporting just one side of the story is wrong, so is giving equal time to flat-earthers and round-earthers, nobody is perfectly without bias and their own point of view, nobody knows for a fact that there's no more facts they should have had or maybe breaking the news is necessary to get attention to the case before you'll get the rest of the story. For example in the case you quote the school might very well have stonewalled citing student confidentiality leaving you with nothing but the suspended student's side of the story until you go public with it. What do you to then, drop it because there might be some other side of the story you haven't heard? If every journalist did that, you'd not see much news. You only get both sides of the story if both sides volunteer to tell it, often one side can't and often one side won't. If I can answer no comment and that means no story, most PR representatives would have their mouths superglued shut.
The main advantages of the netbook over the laptop was always that it was 'more portable' than a laptop. I don't know anyone who bought a netbook just because it was cheap
Not just because, but's it's certainly a part of it. I have a big desktop with plenty CPU, RAM, GPU etc. when I need it, I bought a little netbook to have at the other end of the scale. The most important part was that I had no performance requirements to speak of at all. Now that it was both portable and cheap was certainly good, but I can't pretend to be that much of a road warrior that 1 kg vs 2 kg or 4 vs 8 hour battery life time is really that essential. For the same price, I might have gone bigger, after all some things like full size keyboards are comfy and it would let me do a bit more serious stuff even though it's just nice-to-have. But so is honestly the extra netbook features too. My smart phone also now covers some of the uses I'd have fofr the netbook, pushing me back towards a more traditional laptop when I first carry one. It isn't by any means a replacement but they cover a spectrum from "always in my pocket" to "big stationary desktop" where laptops, nettops and possibly tablets (not so far) are all somewhat overlapping.
2. They are being paid, make sure they do the work they need to by the time it needs to be done. Stick to schedules. I can not stress how important it is to stick to schedules. If a programmer can't meet targets you feel were set fairly then you may have to fire him/her. (...)
4. Designate a planner. This will probably be you. The planner takes the goal and the design and makes it into a step by step development cycle programmers can follow. (...)
You may not know it, but the people working for you probably think you're a lousy manager. You're the traditional project manager coming up with an estimate based on how hard it sounds like doing without taking any input from the ones actually working on the code, then drive people hard to meet your imagined schedule. From the "watch every commit" it sounds like you're trying to be the supercoder micromanaging everything everyone under you is doing. Chances are that if you're trying to do that much at once, your quality will turn to shit too even if you could outperform any one of them individually. Particularly if you're doing any part of the managing bit, making sure all your people are productive, clearing roadblocks, dealing with recruitment/staffing/budget issues, management reporting and so on. If you're serious you should get out of management, quick.
2nd claim: It is easily argued that remote-killing does not fulfill the proportionality argument of just war (bellum iustum).
Why? Trying to get in a position where you can kill the enemy, but the enemy can't kill you has been the fundamental essence of warfare since forever. Getting air superiority to enable free bombing, artillery with longer range than the opposition, stealth so you can see them but they can't see you. It makes very little real difference if the US had nuked Hiroshima from a computer terminal back home or a pilot high in the skies above as long as the asymmetry is there. That part isn't fundamentally new.
I guess it could work both ways, sure if you want to do evil then remote controls means nobody can really get back at you. On the other hand, you don't have to fear for your own life because you're not actually there. Not matter how much you tell your soldiers not to start firing until they're sure it's actually enemies, any sane soldier will choose to err on the side that keeps him alive. With robots that's much less of a pressing matter, let them take the first shot as long as you can converge and neutralize them afterwards. The soldiers don't have the option to rape, pillage and plunder. The telemetry data can be reviewed for any grounds for disciplinary action or a court martial, providing much more information on what soldiers in the field actually did.
Yes, you have the option of using too excessive force or being too ruthless, but honestly most of these options are there already today. Call in an air strike with some heavy bombs and they could flatten pretty much everything, of course with ugly collateral damage and public resentment. That wouldn't really change much, the same factors that curb what you do today will still apply in the future. As long as the military is trying to be the good guys, it'll be fine. If it turns into more of a total war thing with killing the enemy at all costs, then I plan to hide in the deepest bunker I can find anyways...
That's not nearly enough, unfortunately. My Facebook profile is next to nothing, it exists only so I can respond to event invites because it's become the de facto way of doing it and in some way I can understand that people go "Why can't you stop being such a special snowflake so I can have my guest list in one place?" and isolated speaking, no I don't really care that anyone knows I was there. But as a free bonus I also got tagged in pictures from the party by some less than privacy sensitive people, which I don't need. I didn't upload those pictures, I didn't tag them and honestly I wish there was a "do not tag" flag I could set where nobody could tag me in any way without approval. Then again I turned my sharing settings down to the minimum, though I'm not sure it actually helps when I'm not the one doing the sharing. Sigh.....