The lack of a marketing and sales division, or indeed the need to have a "marketable" name at all. Plus a geeky need to overexplain with acronyms, backronyms, puns on other software (more | less anyone?) or other obscure references. And, but to a much lesser degree, no desire to fight other projects and particularly companies with lawyers over trademark disputes. Usually if it's a cool name it's already used, like for example Phoenix which became Firebird which eventually ended up as Firefox. If you don't care, call it Ekiga and noone will fight you over it;)
Hahhahahahahahaha, you're serious aren't you? The malware/scammers have been distributing DRM'd WMV files for ages, hoping to make suckers get rooted by their malware or steal their credit cards. Nobody distributes them except retards and others too lazy to check their downloads, this changes nothing at all.
Since then they've been catching up more and more, the HD5xxx/Evergreen/R800 instruction set was posted before Christmas so the docs are almost up to date, minus a few things like UVD2. Also AMD promised to help the open source community, not write the whole thing themselves and it's making big strides but there's also a lot of rework going on in xorg to support a modern desktop.
Sun's other FOSS products - Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox are all very important open source products. What will happen to them? If Oracle finishes gobbling Sun up and they languish, does that mean GPL software is incompatible with big business? This hypothetical situation is not very likely, IMO. Oracle's not going to destroy value.
The question is, where is all this hypothetical value? If so, why is Sun struggling bad enough to be bought out by Oracle? Don't get me wrong, I know plenty people who use them who make them valuable to them, but to me it's a little like counting YouTube hits. Sun is like the people who get their 15 minutes of fame, while others use that to make money. A lot of the connections in open source are easy to trace, like Red Hat => kernel. They sell server solutions, servers must be rock stable and scale. If the kernel sucks, so will Red Hat's cash cows. If OpenOffice sucks, then...what? Their StarOffice sales will plummet? Is that even still around, I never hear of it.
I guess you've all heard the buzzword: Monetize. Not nearly everything a company does needs to be directly revenue-generating, just take Microsoft as a case study and all the things they give away for "free" or as express editions to hook people on their products and keep people on the Windows platform. Sometimes it's just for strategic value and no other, like Internet Explorer that's never generated revenue. Google could be just as good a case study, lots of activities that support their data mining and ad sales. But there has to be some plan, some purpose that makes it worth doing otherwise it's just burning money.
Java? Great, you've reached millions of developers. OpenOffice? Great, you've reached millions of office users. Virtualbox? Great, you've reached millions (ok, maybe more thousands on this one) of server administrators. At the danger of invoking an old slashdot chestnut in a serious post, this is where Sun has a "2. ???" step in their business plan. I guess they are offering some form of service and support, but I've certainly never heard anything about it as a compelling offer. Otherwise it just ends up being a very, very expensive branding and marketing expense, and companies can't live on that alone-
Right, which is why I said "kill the terrorists", NOT kill everyone including the civilians who are stuck in the middle and might help us in exchange for development aid and protection. (...) However, when we locate the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters we should kill them.
I don't disagree, but I'm saying it's very difficult. They don't wear uniforms or dog tags, they don't stand in any membership register, they look and speak the same as everyone else, they live among lots of these civilians, their leaders aren't likely to reveal themselves or their locations and any unit trying to take them out could easily be met with a flash mob of militants. I know the IRA and ETA is very different, but the fact is that England and Spain couldn't find them even though they had a lot more control over the area than in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's all a little utopian like saying we want a justice system that punishes the guilty and NOT the innocent. Great, but can we make it happen in practice? On the one extreme the standards of evidence are so high it doesn't effectively fight them, on the other we have witch trials for those accused of being Al-Qaeda or Taliban. While you can find a middle ground, i don't think it will be good enough to stop them.
I would be more amenable to the "macho" argument if the governments of the world, particularly those in Europe, would put aside their reluctance to admit that we have a problem with militant Islam and start killing the terrorists instead of wasting their time on fruitless diplomatic endeavors that simply embolden terrorists everywhere by demonstrating weakness and impotence.
I think most of them are well aware there is a problem with militant Islam. The question is if trying to "kill the terrorists" will work and the experience from IRA, ETA and several other european terror organizations is that it won't. Terrorists don't act like a militia or a guerrilla, they blend into the civil population too well. Going in heavy-handed and trigger-happy will mean a harassed population, huge civilian losses and huge public backlash that'll fuel the terrorists, If you can't be accurate enough, it'll only make the problem worse and worse until muslims and christians in general are at arms.
There is, according to wikipedia, about 1,570,000,000 muslims in the world. Honestly, 99.99% of those couldn't give a shit if there's other people who live as Christians. Militant islamists won't stop no matter what we say. But they might stop if other muslims said "WTF are you doing? Are you crazy? Stop that shit." and I dont think it would be possible to win against the terrorists unless the average muslim will help us in any case. Either there'll then be an internal feud and the muslims will weed them out on their own, or in worst case the militants will win but even then I think a post-WWIII where they can look at the militants the way germans today look at nazis is better than a christian-led escalation of the conflict.
IN NO EVENT WILL THE LHC BE LIABLE TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY SPECIAL, COLLATERAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR ENHANCED DAMAGES ("EXCLUDED DAMAGES"). EXCLUDED DAMAGES INCLUDE COSTS OF INSPECTION, REMOVAL, AND REPLACEMENT COSTS, REPROCUREMENT COSTS (INCLUDING MAGRATHEA'S ADMINISTRATIVE AND PERSONNEL COSTS) OF REPLACEMENT OR SUBSTITUTE PLANETS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF REVENUE OR PROFITS, AND LOSS OF USE, WITHOUT REGARD TO WHETHER LHC HAS BEEN NOTIFIED IN ADVANCE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY SUCH CLAIM OR DAMAGE.
Blah blah blah, there's too much YELLING in this post. Here's some junk for the filter: This Agreement will be binding upon and inure to the benefit of the parties and their respective permitted successors and assigns. Buyer may not assign this Agreement in any respect without the prior written consent of Seller. Seller may assign this Agreement, in whole or in part, or any of its rights or obligations hereunder without notice to or consent by Buyer. Seller may subcontract manufacturing or other work as to any or all Products without notice to or consent of Buyer. The failure of a party to enforce any right hereunder shall not waive that or any other right. If any provision of any Order Document is held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable, then (i) such provision will be reformed to cure or remove such defect and if not reformed will be severed, (ii) the legality, validity and enforceability of the remaining provisions will not be affected or impaired, and (iii) the parties will endeavor in good faith to replace the severed provisions with valid provisions of the same or similar economic effect. The invalidity of a provision in a particular jurisdiction will not render unenforceable such provision in any other jurisdiction. No amendment or modification to the Order Documents will be effective unless specifically agreed in a writing signed by Seller
Heh, reminds me of an old sig I used to have "Most people are looking for intelligent life in space. I haven't given up Earth yet." or something to that effect.
Honestly, we can only see the nearest handful of stars compared to all planets in all galaxies. If we found even just one planet like earth, the fact that there are two such planets within proximity of each other is strong evidence there really are billions. We're finding lots of the planets that are easy to detect, what you're saying is a bit like searching through the sand with a coarse masked net and concluding there's only big rocks. Even an earth-style Jupiter would be very, very hard to detect despite its size because it has an orbital period of 12 years. They'd like 3x for confirmation, that's 36 years at the earliest. An earth-like planet goes faster but requires a lot higher resolution, and 3x1 year for confirmation is not particularly fast. I imagine by 2100 they'll look back at this discussion and laugh, of course there's pebbles where there's rocks. The only real reason not to think so is that some people have a very strong emotional investment in the earth and humanity being special.
If you include all the resolutions from 1680x1050 all the way up to 1900x1200, HD, or "damn close HD"
"High definition" seems to be one of those ill-defined concepts like "broadband", but the usual definition is 720p+ which even the 1280x1024 screens beat. Graphics cards have been supporting HD resolutions forever but now they just seem to go up, up and away. The latest AMD HD58xx class could probably drive a 3840x2160 (2160p) display in games - they already push that number of pixels in Eyefinity - if you could find one for less than 10,000$. That HDTV/BluRay tops out at 1920x1080 probably means we'll see many screens being 1920 pixels wide but few wider than that.
If we preserve 0.01% of the digital junk we keep around, the 2000s will be much better documented than the 1900s. Hell, I was reading not that long ago about a huge library of old newspapers (like dead tree from the 1800s) that was being thrown away, because no one wanted to pay for storage. It's all been digitized though, probably OCRs too so you can do things like search it instead of sifting through endless microfiles. One reason alone digital will survive because it's valuable, I just recently noticed a newspaper I read would let you access every edition back to 1945 for a fee. That earns money, having a vault of newspapers? I doubt it.
Besides, who does anything valuable that's bound to a media format anymore? It's called a disc image, and let you store it on any digital medium without having a real floppy or CD or DVD or whatnot. I talked to a relative of mine, they were getting fiber installed now, 15/15 Mbit was the slowest they'd offer. With that, you can have version-preserving, offsite backups in multiple bunkers half-way around the globe, safe for all but armageddon. Even if half the world was nuked pretty much all music would survive if Spotify's servers do. And don't think there'd be any lost episodes of Doctor Who.
The format stuff is overrated. Emulation and virtualization means no one cares if there's no more C64s and Spectrums and Amigas and Motorola Macs, the images still run. And just because you can't open an ancient doc file in Office 2007 on Windows 7, does anyone really think we honestly couldn't find a binary of Office 95, fire it up in a virtualized Windows 95 and look? The only things that are really lost are some obscure science formats that nobody had or saw the purpose of or stuff that could only be captured once, like the original moon landing tape.
Sure there will be personal tragedies of people who didn't pay any attention but they already do. Many, many people have realized when their homes burned down that uh-oh, all our family photos went with it. But the abundance of bandwidth and storage we're seeing is also an incredible opportunity to make easy, lazy solutions. Also wireless broadband can eventually become cheap enough that you backup as you go, if you lose the camera you might lose that day's picture but not your month-long trip. The greatest danger you'll lose something is because your relatives had a little "accident" when you tried to show the 10431 pictures and 2554 minutes of video grandaunt Selma took of her little wonderbrat.
Wow, you're cherry-picking in favor of Intel, how about some quotes like:
When I first started testing Clarkdale I actually had to call Intel and ask them to explain why this wasn't a worthless product. The Core i5 661 is priced entirely too high for what it is, and it's not even the most expensive Clarkdale Intel is selling!
And as far as these new chips go, does Intel want to get a monopoly charge dropped on it?
The writing has been on the wall for a while, it will all be integrated into one chip at least on the low end. Oh sure Intel might get slapped one way or the other but by the time the dust settles it'll all be on a <30nm chip and no court will manage to force them to create discrete chips again.
The other part is games but the chips are running ahead of eyes and displays and developer time, if you looked at the latest reviews they only test at 2560x1600 with full AA/AF. I'm sure Fermi will be impressive but 30" displays is a tiny niche and the rest don't need it.
nVidia is talking about supercomputers and GPGPU but they're going the way of Cray and SGI, into some niche where they'll slowly wither away. AMD will hang in their because their CPU/GPU combos beat Intel on the GPU part.
I don't know about these chipsets, but the current Intel chipsets with HD acceleration support like Poulsbo and GMA X4500HD have had extremely poor Linux support. nVidia and VDPAU was really the first viable solution.
The *real* story, which CNN apparently wishes to ignore, is that the vast majority of people are honest, and wish to pay the authors whose books they like, *instead* of pirating.
Not to mention "in addition to", I don't remember the last time I bought a DVD/BluRay without already having seen the movie or series. But I'll gladly admit there's things I haven't paid for, particularly if I'd rather like a refund of the time I wasted on it.
Was it really designed for 90 days? It could be that the only way they could sell it to Congress was if they told them that they only had to pay for technicians for 3 months.
Well, yes and no. The models suggested that the solar panels would be clogged up with dust so it'd be like a car with an empty gas tank, after 90 sols it'd be still in great condition but out of juice so that was the mission. In practice dust devils clear most of the dust, but noone knew that before they arrived. Perhaps some speculated and hoped, but certainly not knew or assumed. Nothing about the rover was intentionally limited to three months, though if they knew they'd be out there for many years I'm sure some design choices would have been different. But that's why we can send a second generation if and when these rovers finally kick the bucket.
And if you're that worried about a verbose section of code, extract a method, give it a good name, and be done. Now you have both a one-liner method call that is easy to read in context and a more verbose implementation that is easier to understand and maintain in the future.
And for the love of $deity, don't create side effects which aren't apparent from the function name. Like doing data hacks in the loadFromDisk() method. What is unfortunately also annoying with "functionifying" a method is that it clogs up the class methods, I wish there was a keyword like "foohelper() helps foo();" which would mean foohelper() is only in scope inside foo(). If something is complex and consists of several long operations, it's usually cleaner to have a supermethod which only calls helpers.
Send rovers in pairs, each with half the instrumentation load, but tethered together by a cable. One gets stuck, the other pulls it out. Give the cable a release so if one rover dies, the other can continue with the remaining instruments.
One of the key issues is having power enough to heat them in the winter. For that reason alone it's probably better to build a bigger, more durable platform instead. It's not like it didn't have redundancy, each wheel has a separate drive and it's not like a fully operational rover would get stuck like this. They're just running out of redundancy.
Well it's been stuck now for a long time, if they can't get it loose then it'll die anyway. Right now this is more a marathon event to see how long they can stay alive than anything else, they must have done every secondary and tertiery science mission ever planned for it and is just making it up as they go along now.
Re:This kind of hype was exactly the problem
on
The Long Shadow of Y2K
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The hype (although blown our of proportion) was due to the truth that there was a genuine problem and it required a large amount of man power to fix it (and a large segment of companies waited until the last minute to fix it). And yet reporters go on spouting arrogantly how Y2K was a giant scam, or boogie man spread by IT.
But the point is that it was blown way out of proportion, not just the critical stuff but all the nice-to-haves were fixed and I'm sure many took the opportunity to shoehorn big upgrades in under guise of the y2k bug. It'd be like discovering that 90% of the SOX-compliance processes you do isn't actually mandated by law but just by control freak bean counters under the guise of SOX, then naturally people feel scammed or scared by a boogie man. Of course companies needed to fix what they needed to have, but they spent far more than that out of fear.
That's not an example of a developer who doesn't understand OS concepts. That's an example of a moron who should be shown the door with extreme prejudice.
By your standards there wouldn't be anyone worthy of making your system. Or if there was then a) you couldn't find them, b) they'd be moving on to a better positions' at another company and c) be too busy to help your project. If you got someone that's great at making the computer do what you want, that's a valuable skill. You'd be surprised how many would-be coders couldn't code their way out of a paper bag if their life depended on it. Fire him? You got to be kidding me, take it for what it is and have someone who's good at input checking do that. The coders you want only exists in fairy tales.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of a marketing and sales division, or indeed the need to have a "marketable" name at all. Plus a geeky need to overexplain with acronyms, backronyms, puns on other software (more | less anyone?) or other obscure references. And, but to a much lesser degree, no desire to fight other projects and particularly companies with lawyers over trademark disputes. Usually if it's a cool name it's already used, like for example Phoenix which became Firebird which eventually ended up as Firefox. If you don't care, call it Ekiga and noone will fight you over it ;)
Hahhahahahahahaha, you're serious aren't you? The malware/scammers have been distributing DRM'd WMV files for ages, hoping to make suckers get rooted by their malware or steal their credit cards. Nobody distributes them except retards and others too lazy to check their downloads, this changes nothing at all.
Why don't we take the warning labels off things and let things work themselves out?
Only all the AAA games on Windows, but clearly you are far more important than them.
How many years was it again that they promised to produce open source graphic drivers for Linux?
Announced: September 7th, 2007: press release
Since then they've been catching up more and more, the HD5xxx/Evergreen/R800 instruction set was posted before Christmas so the docs are almost up to date, minus a few things like UVD2. Also AMD promised to help the open source community, not write the whole thing themselves and it's making big strides but there's also a lot of rework going on in xorg to support a modern desktop.
Sun's other FOSS products - Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox are all very important open source products. What will happen to them? If Oracle finishes gobbling Sun up and they languish, does that mean GPL software is incompatible with big business? This hypothetical situation is not very likely, IMO. Oracle's not going to destroy value.
The question is, where is all this hypothetical value? If so, why is Sun struggling bad enough to be bought out by Oracle? Don't get me wrong, I know plenty people who use them who make them valuable to them, but to me it's a little like counting YouTube hits. Sun is like the people who get their 15 minutes of fame, while others use that to make money. A lot of the connections in open source are easy to trace, like Red Hat => kernel. They sell server solutions, servers must be rock stable and scale. If the kernel sucks, so will Red Hat's cash cows. If OpenOffice sucks, then...what? Their StarOffice sales will plummet? Is that even still around, I never hear of it.
I guess you've all heard the buzzword: Monetize. Not nearly everything a company does needs to be directly revenue-generating, just take Microsoft as a case study and all the things they give away for "free" or as express editions to hook people on their products and keep people on the Windows platform. Sometimes it's just for strategic value and no other, like Internet Explorer that's never generated revenue. Google could be just as good a case study, lots of activities that support their data mining and ad sales. But there has to be some plan, some purpose that makes it worth doing otherwise it's just burning money.
Java? Great, you've reached millions of developers. OpenOffice? Great, you've reached millions of office users. Virtualbox? Great, you've reached millions (ok, maybe more thousands on this one) of server administrators. At the danger of invoking an old slashdot chestnut in a serious post, this is where Sun has a "2. ???" step in their business plan. I guess they are offering some form of service and support, but I've certainly never heard anything about it as a compelling offer. Otherwise it just ends up being a very, very expensive branding and marketing expense, and companies can't live on that alone-
Sorry but no - protestantism allows you to buy your way to heaven, not FOSS
I'll happily set up a Foolbuntu download site and charge 999$ for download access, hey it worked for that iTunes app didn't it?
Right, which is why I said "kill the terrorists", NOT kill everyone including the civilians who are stuck in the middle and might help us in exchange for development aid and protection. (...) However, when we locate the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters we should kill them.
I don't disagree, but I'm saying it's very difficult. They don't wear uniforms or dog tags, they don't stand in any membership register, they look and speak the same as everyone else, they live among lots of these civilians, their leaders aren't likely to reveal themselves or their locations and any unit trying to take them out could easily be met with a flash mob of militants. I know the IRA and ETA is very different, but the fact is that England and Spain couldn't find them even though they had a lot more control over the area than in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's all a little utopian like saying we want a justice system that punishes the guilty and NOT the innocent. Great, but can we make it happen in practice? On the one extreme the standards of evidence are so high it doesn't effectively fight them, on the other we have witch trials for those accused of being Al-Qaeda or Taliban. While you can find a middle ground, i don't think it will be good enough to stop them.
I would be more amenable to the "macho" argument if the governments of the world, particularly those in Europe, would put aside their reluctance to admit that we have a problem with militant Islam and start killing the terrorists instead of wasting their time on fruitless diplomatic endeavors that simply embolden terrorists everywhere by demonstrating weakness and impotence.
I think most of them are well aware there is a problem with militant Islam. The question is if trying to "kill the terrorists" will work and the experience from IRA, ETA and several other european terror organizations is that it won't. Terrorists don't act like a militia or a guerrilla, they blend into the civil population too well. Going in heavy-handed and trigger-happy will mean a harassed population, huge civilian losses and huge public backlash that'll fuel the terrorists, If you can't be accurate enough, it'll only make the problem worse and worse until muslims and christians in general are at arms.
There is, according to wikipedia, about 1,570,000,000 muslims in the world. Honestly, 99.99% of those couldn't give a shit if there's other people who live as Christians. Militant islamists won't stop no matter what we say. But they might stop if other muslims said "WTF are you doing? Are you crazy? Stop that shit." and I dont think it would be possible to win against the terrorists unless the average muslim will help us in any case. Either there'll then be an internal feud and the muslims will weed them out on their own, or in worst case the militants will win but even then I think a post-WWIII where they can look at the militants the way germans today look at nazis is better than a christian-led escalation of the conflict.
IN NO EVENT WILL THE LHC BE LIABLE TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY SPECIAL, COLLATERAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR ENHANCED DAMAGES ("EXCLUDED DAMAGES"). EXCLUDED DAMAGES INCLUDE COSTS OF INSPECTION, REMOVAL, AND REPLACEMENT COSTS, REPROCUREMENT COSTS (INCLUDING MAGRATHEA'S ADMINISTRATIVE AND PERSONNEL COSTS) OF REPLACEMENT OR SUBSTITUTE PLANETS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF REVENUE OR PROFITS, AND LOSS OF USE, WITHOUT REGARD TO WHETHER LHC HAS BEEN NOTIFIED IN ADVANCE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY SUCH CLAIM OR DAMAGE.
Blah blah blah, there's too much YELLING in this post. Here's some junk for the filter: This Agreement will be binding upon and inure to the benefit of the parties and their respective permitted successors and assigns. Buyer may not assign this Agreement in any respect without the prior written consent of Seller. Seller may assign this Agreement, in whole or in part, or any of its rights or obligations hereunder without notice to or consent by Buyer. Seller may subcontract manufacturing or other work as to any or all Products without notice to or consent of Buyer. The failure of a party to enforce any right hereunder shall not waive that or any other right. If any provision of any Order Document is held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable, then (i) such provision will be reformed to cure or remove such defect and if not reformed will be severed, (ii) the legality, validity and enforceability of the remaining provisions will not be affected or impaired, and (iii) the parties will endeavor in good faith to replace the severed provisions with valid provisions of the same or similar economic effect. The invalidity of a provision in a particular jurisdiction will not render unenforceable such provision in any other jurisdiction. No amendment or modification to the Order Documents will be effective unless specifically agreed in a writing signed by Seller
Heh, reminds me of an old sig I used to have "Most people are looking for intelligent life in space. I haven't given up Earth yet." or something to that effect.
Honestly, we can only see the nearest handful of stars compared to all planets in all galaxies. If we found even just one planet like earth, the fact that there are two such planets within proximity of each other is strong evidence there really are billions. We're finding lots of the planets that are easy to detect, what you're saying is a bit like searching through the sand with a coarse masked net and concluding there's only big rocks. Even an earth-style Jupiter would be very, very hard to detect despite its size because it has an orbital period of 12 years. They'd like 3x for confirmation, that's 36 years at the earliest. An earth-like planet goes faster but requires a lot higher resolution, and 3x1 year for confirmation is not particularly fast. I imagine by 2100 they'll look back at this discussion and laugh, of course there's pebbles where there's rocks. The only real reason not to think so is that some people have a very strong emotional investment in the earth and humanity being special.
If you include all the resolutions from 1680x1050 all the way up to 1900x1200, HD, or "damn close HD"
"High definition" seems to be one of those ill-defined concepts like "broadband", but the usual definition is 720p+ which even the 1280x1024 screens beat. Graphics cards have been supporting HD resolutions forever but now they just seem to go up, up and away. The latest AMD HD58xx class could probably drive a 3840x2160 (2160p) display in games - they already push that number of pixels in Eyefinity - if you could find one for less than 10,000$. That HDTV/BluRay tops out at 1920x1080 probably means we'll see many screens being 1920 pixels wide but few wider than that.
If we preserve 0.01% of the digital junk we keep around, the 2000s will be much better documented than the 1900s. Hell, I was reading not that long ago about a huge library of old newspapers (like dead tree from the 1800s) that was being thrown away, because no one wanted to pay for storage. It's all been digitized though, probably OCRs too so you can do things like search it instead of sifting through endless microfiles. One reason alone digital will survive because it's valuable, I just recently noticed a newspaper I read would let you access every edition back to 1945 for a fee. That earns money, having a vault of newspapers? I doubt it.
Besides, who does anything valuable that's bound to a media format anymore? It's called a disc image, and let you store it on any digital medium without having a real floppy or CD or DVD or whatnot. I talked to a relative of mine, they were getting fiber installed now, 15/15 Mbit was the slowest they'd offer. With that, you can have version-preserving, offsite backups in multiple bunkers half-way around the globe, safe for all but armageddon. Even if half the world was nuked pretty much all music would survive if Spotify's servers do. And don't think there'd be any lost episodes of Doctor Who.
The format stuff is overrated. Emulation and virtualization means no one cares if there's no more C64s and Spectrums and Amigas and Motorola Macs, the images still run. And just because you can't open an ancient doc file in Office 2007 on Windows 7, does anyone really think we honestly couldn't find a binary of Office 95, fire it up in a virtualized Windows 95 and look? The only things that are really lost are some obscure science formats that nobody had or saw the purpose of or stuff that could only be captured once, like the original moon landing tape.
Sure there will be personal tragedies of people who didn't pay any attention but they already do. Many, many people have realized when their homes burned down that uh-oh, all our family photos went with it. But the abundance of bandwidth and storage we're seeing is also an incredible opportunity to make easy, lazy solutions. Also wireless broadband can eventually become cheap enough that you backup as you go, if you lose the camera you might lose that day's picture but not your month-long trip. The greatest danger you'll lose something is because your relatives had a little "accident" when you tried to show the 10431 pictures and 2554 minutes of video grandaunt Selma took of her little wonderbrat.
Wow, you're cherry-picking in favor of Intel, how about some quotes like:
When I first started testing Clarkdale I actually had to call Intel and ask them to explain why this wasn't a worthless product. The Core i5 661 is priced entirely too high for what it is, and it's not even the most expensive Clarkdale Intel is selling!
And as far as these new chips go, does Intel want to get a monopoly charge dropped on it?
The writing has been on the wall for a while, it will all be integrated into one chip at least on the low end. Oh sure Intel might get slapped one way or the other but by the time the dust settles it'll all be on a <30nm chip and no court will manage to force them to create discrete chips again.
The other part is games but the chips are running ahead of eyes and displays and developer time, if you looked at the latest reviews they only test at 2560x1600 with full AA/AF. I'm sure Fermi will be impressive but 30" displays is a tiny niche and the rest don't need it.
nVidia is talking about supercomputers and GPGPU but they're going the way of Cray and SGI, into some niche where they'll slowly wither away. AMD will hang in their because their CPU/GPU combos beat Intel on the GPU part.
Not sure about Intel.
I don't know about these chipsets, but the current Intel chipsets with HD acceleration support like Poulsbo and GMA X4500HD have had extremely poor Linux support. nVidia and VDPAU was really the first viable solution.
If all you need to reach is loopback, there are many better options than using a network socket...
The *real* story, which CNN apparently wishes to ignore, is that the vast majority of people are honest, and wish to pay the authors whose books they like, *instead* of pirating.
Not to mention "in addition to", I don't remember the last time I bought a DVD/BluRay without already having seen the movie or series. But I'll gladly admit there's things I haven't paid for, particularly if I'd rather like a refund of the time I wasted on it.
Was it really designed for 90 days? It could be that the only way they could sell it to Congress was if they told them that they only had to pay for technicians for 3 months.
Well, yes and no. The models suggested that the solar panels would be clogged up with dust so it'd be like a car with an empty gas tank, after 90 sols it'd be still in great condition but out of juice so that was the mission. In practice dust devils clear most of the dust, but noone knew that before they arrived. Perhaps some speculated and hoped, but certainly not knew or assumed. Nothing about the rover was intentionally limited to three months, though if they knew they'd be out there for many years I'm sure some design choices would have been different. But that's why we can send a second generation if and when these rovers finally kick the bucket.
And if you're that worried about a verbose section of code, extract a method, give it a good name, and be done. Now you have both a one-liner method call that is easy to read in context and a more verbose implementation that is easier to understand and maintain in the future.
And for the love of $deity, don't create side effects which aren't apparent from the function name. Like doing data hacks in the loadFromDisk() method. What is unfortunately also annoying with "functionifying" a method is that it clogs up the class methods, I wish there was a keyword like "foohelper() helps foo();" which would mean foohelper() is only in scope inside foo(). If something is complex and consists of several long operations, it's usually cleaner to have a supermethod which only calls helpers.
Send rovers in pairs, each with half the instrumentation load, but tethered together by a cable. One gets stuck, the other pulls it out. Give the cable a release so if one rover dies, the other can continue with the remaining instruments.
One of the key issues is having power enough to heat them in the winter. For that reason alone it's probably better to build a bigger, more durable platform instead. It's not like it didn't have redundancy, each wheel has a separate drive and it's not like a fully operational rover would get stuck like this. They're just running out of redundancy.
Well it's been stuck now for a long time, if they can't get it loose then it'll die anyway. Right now this is more a marathon event to see how long they can stay alive than anything else, they must have done every secondary and tertiery science mission ever planned for it and is just making it up as they go along now.
The hype (although blown our of proportion) was due to the truth that there was a genuine problem and it required a large amount of man power to fix it (and a large segment of companies waited until the last minute to fix it). And yet reporters go on spouting arrogantly how Y2K was a giant scam, or boogie man spread by IT.
But the point is that it was blown way out of proportion, not just the critical stuff but all the nice-to-haves were fixed and I'm sure many took the opportunity to shoehorn big upgrades in under guise of the y2k bug. It'd be like discovering that 90% of the SOX-compliance processes you do isn't actually mandated by law but just by control freak bean counters under the guise of SOX, then naturally people feel scammed or scared by a boogie man. Of course companies needed to fix what they needed to have, but they spent far more than that out of fear.
That's not an example of a developer who doesn't understand OS concepts. That's an example of a moron who should be shown the door with extreme prejudice.
By your standards there wouldn't be anyone worthy of making your system. Or if there was then a) you couldn't find them, b) they'd be moving on to a better positions' at another company and c) be too busy to help your project. If you got someone that's great at making the computer do what you want, that's a valuable skill. You'd be surprised how many would-be coders couldn't code their way out of a paper bag if their life depended on it. Fire him? You got to be kidding me, take it for what it is and have someone who's good at input checking do that. The coders you want only exists in fairy tales.