My impression is that the mail side of Outlook is probably the least difficult to replace, or rather there all the folders, filters, flags, reminders etc. people use to manage their mails have been done in open source too because they're inherently individual. My impression is that it's the contact and calendar functionality that's missing, that is to say everything past your personal contacts and your personal calendar. Like can I easily see my co-worker's calendars and contact details, available meeting rooms, set up recurring staff/project/team meetings and so on. That and the icon to indicate if you're online/idle/busy/offline (green/yellow/red/gray) is used a lot, either to start a live chat or to actually drop by your office.
Maybe there's other advanced functionality I'm missing... but given how often I have to suggest to managers that they can turn off meeting replies for big meetings if they don't want them etc. I think it would be administrators missing those features not middle management. But I agree with you on the lack of organization-level tools, you can say the same about the whole AD/Group Policy management bit, you can try to create something like LDAP, Puppet etc. but it's clear Linux is not built to be centrally managed with the exception of "web-scale" systems where you just add tons of servers, all alike. Still you'd think that 20 years later it would eventually arrive even if at a glacial pace. But I guess for most people webmail solved it and businesses gave up and went to cloud systems like Google's suite.
I think this is a pointless effort. You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device.
Except they're doing the opposite. Maybe it's not an efficient use of screen space, but scaling up a small screen works. A keyboard obviously works fine. And you got no problem using the mouse to hit an UI element made for sausage fingers. As long as you don't need multi-finger gestures other than pinch and zoom which map great to the mouse wheel you're doing okay.
That means you have to carry an external display, mouse, and keyboard with you. Or hope they will have a spare external display, mouse, and keyboard wherever you go.
It's not for people who need a laptop, quite the opposite. It's for people that only occasionally need something bigger than a smartphone, most likely at home where external display = TV with HDMI. You already have the phone (sunk cost), you already have a TV (sunk cost), buy a little dock and keyboard/mouse and you can write that letter and do that spreadsheet without the laptop.
Granted, right now it only exists on super expensive Galaxy S8s and the dock itself was not cheap but if they can bring it to cheaper phones and bring the price of the dock down - it already went from a launch price of $150 to $90 - there's hundreds of millions of people who have just a smartphone and nothing else. Who don't have a ton of Windows applications they miss. Who are not gamers (or at least Candy Crush-type gamers), who don't need workstations, who sometimes just needs a big screen and better input.
That said, ain't no one building anything to go into space for under 30 million. This is more like research.
Even if a prototype went into space, it'd still be research. No humans? No hurry. The Moon? Too close. A nuclear powered SLS-class launcher to Mars could be useful, but it would obviously be many years and many billions from now. And even for Mars the radiation estimate for a six months trip + surface stay with chemical rockets is within NASAs career limits, so it doesn't seem to be a requirement. And past Mars there's not really anywhere habitable for humans. I suppose it could be useful for interstellar, but the distances are so vast that we'll likely invent fusion reactors that'll overtake them before we got there, even if that takes centuries.
Yes, the code is available, it's open source, after all. The question the article gets to is how do packagers such as Red Hat or CPAN decide which version to include by default - the old, established one that hasn't been updated, or the new one that has updates but not not the long history? That may be a case-by-case issue by it's very nature. The other point raised is that programmers, up open source or proprietary, should make sure that two other people have commit access, or will get it.
That's neat when you have someone to name as your heir before your untimely demise, but it's not like most projects has an over-abundance of volunteers looking to secure their rank in the line of succession. For most projects I think it would be quite unclear who, if any, is going to step up and take over in advance. Maybe they need to feel the void of your absence, maybe they're secretly hoping someone else will pick up the mantle, maybe they don't want to take on the commitment they'd feel as the named successor. This would be more like a system to enable the project members or trustees to create an interim solution, where you have to hand over control that you wouldn't give on a day-to-day basis.
For that I'd probably go with something like Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm and a grace period to prevent hostile takeover, like if 5/8 of those I've given a vote claim that I'm no longer leading the project and I'm unresponsive for a week then they get to appoint a new project leader. That way they essentially have no power individually, but collectively they'd have the power to declare me "dead". If the project is so tiny you're the only one in it you could give the votes to people you trust in related projects. What you don't want to do is say "project abandoned, up for grabs" and have random hackers/bots take over, add malware and push it as an update. Hopefully those you hand the reins to have some sense in picking a successor.
A maximum string length of 256 would be very painful if you routinely deal with longer strings.
You already spend a byte on the null terminator. One more would give you 256*256 = 65k length strings or 32k with a high bit to indicate you should read more length bytes first.
If you are continuing to have trouble with the language, then I would submit that you are probably not a very good programmer, and the behavior of the language (which requires you to have a good grasp on how computers actually work), is probably mysterious to you, but each and every behavior of C++ is there for a very good reason.
Seriously, this level of fanboi-ism gets modded up? To shoot fish in a barrel the zero-terminated C strings was made to save one length-prefix byte and has cost the world a bazillion times more than the Y2K problem and every non-C programming language has abandoned it. But okay, that's an inherited problem. My biggest gripe with C++ is that it's an OOP language without an object oriented memory model, unless you religiously follow RAII as a pattern or trace every execution path when the code changes you will have crazy leaks all over as you create and destroy objects. Why? Because it was originally just a razor thin convenience layer on top of C and for a long time there was no smart pointers or they were in the Boost library and not part of the language itself.
Part of this is that it's not explicit when any library is processing its own data that it'll clean up and when it's returning a new object to me that it expects I'll clean up. Read the documentation, I suppose but an explicit passing of ownership not just reference would be so much better. My second biggest gripe is that there's no safer and easier object oriented communication protocol than using pointers everywhere, which very easily leads to a dangling reference somewhere and leads to much tighter class integration than a publisher/subscriber system. I've written C++ but mainly using the Qt library which is much, much closer to what my ideal OOP language would be like because one mismatched signal-slot doesn't bring the house down, even though the macros and the meta-object compiler (MOC) seemed like a hack around C++'s limitations.
I have the feeling C++ is in no man's land. New mid-level code is written in C#/Java/Swift, high level in Javascript/Perl/Python/PHP/R and so on, low level code in C/assembler. There are a lot of huge, existing C++ code bases so it's not like you'd run out of work but I don't really see who'd start a new project from scratch in C++ today. Particularly since there's no major platform pushing it, on Windows it's C#, on Mac/iOS it's Swift and in the enterprise and on Android it's Java, the embedded market is C and the web is pushing Javascript everywhere: But who's pushing for more C++? Almost nobody, as far as I can see. It's just a complex mix of low-level and high-level concepts thrown in a blender which in theory lets you do many things but in practice is unwieldy for almost anyone.
I suppose you could call that an expert's tool. But sometimes I feel it's like crossing a canyon on a tightrope. The C/assembler guy brought rock climbing gear, he's got a long and tedious climb up and down ahead of him but he's chiseling out steps and building a series of bolts to climb by. The mid/high end guy starts looking for a bridge. What the C++ guy does is difficult and impressive, yet not very productive for anyone else and the next guy also needs to be an expert tightrope walker. You say it's a language for experts, who can afford an expert for every change? How do you become an expert, if a junior C++ developer will fail spectacularly? What I'm saying is that just because it's challenging doesn't mean you're an expert, it just means you're doing it the hard way.
They found that laparoscopic beat open in patient outcomes (so it's a good thing). They further found that adding the robot did nothing to improve outcomes but did cost more (a bad thing) and take longer (also bad and potentially a safety risk).
Unfortunately when you make statistics like this it's never the same doctor operating on the same patient. For example, it's quite possible that younger doctors are prevalent when it comes to robot-assisted surgery while older and more experienced doctors who had to learn to do it on their own continue to do so and that the actual difference is due to differences in experience not technique. It's also possible that those who do robot-assisted surgery can do it with less training than the unassisted ones without being properly reflected in direct costs. If you don't correct for the selection bias then sometimes you get the result that the most experienced doctors have the worst outcomes - because they treat the most difficult cases. It's not always that more data is better data, sometimes case studies where you go really in-depth and make really sure you have apples-to-apples comparisons are more valuable.
This wouldn't be any different then looking at all of Visas equipment and energy costs and dividing by the number of transactions it conducts per day to arrive at a 'cost' of swiping your credit card.
Note that this would only be a tiiiiiny fraction of the cost. Here in Norway we have "BankAxept" which is a no-frills direct debit solution, it costs the store around $0.03/transaction (plus ~$100 to establish, ~$20/month) and VISAs physical transaction costs are probably roughly the same. The rest are the kickbacks, dispute process etc. which is why the store usually pays around 2% in processing fees. Plus they run the risk of chargebacks and such, while with direct debit it's as good as cash in hand. Which you might say is worse for the customers, but in practice I've never had problems with any real world retailer that'd have been better solved with a chargeback. Not big e-tailers either, online fly-by-night stores maybe but you can use the credit card then. And Paypal, eBay etc. don't like it when you escalate to the credit card company anyway, I'm sure you could make an anecdote where it was useful but is that worth 2% off the top of every transaction like your groceries and beers at the pub? No.
A console is a turnkey gaming solution. Sure, there are big updates to download once in a while, but they just work out of the box. The last thing I want in this stage in my life (I'm 40) is get home after a long day at work and fiddle with drivers, configurations, etc.
About 99% of the people who break their machine "fiddle" with it and install random crapware or betas or tweaks get better FPS. If all you want is Windows, Steam/Battle.net/GOG and games with auto-updates enabled using release drivers and auto-detect settings I'd say any difference is absolutely marginal.
That's the beautify of highly intelligent and balanced people, their default behavior is to collaborate.
Smart people who feel they're among their peers mostly yes, unless it becomes too competitive. It's frustrating not having anyone to bounce ideas back and forth with. It's more frustrating when you try to do that with colleagues and hit thin air. It's extremely frustrating when your peer group overrides you even though you're sure they picked an inferior solution that'll cause you lots of woes down the road. But the most frustrating is when you're pulling all the weight and nobody seems to give you any credit for it.
I remember once in school we got to pick our own groups, the three absolutely brightest in the class (top grades end of year) and one second tier grouped up. You might think we'd be at cruising speed because even with a modest effort would put us at top of the class. Instead it was like hey, no lightweights. Everybody wanted to prove they belong in this group. We found relevant data, made an in-depth analysis, had proper reviews, constructive feedback, meaningful discussions and batted it way, way out of the ballpark.
What was the result of that? Well the final results were to be presented in class, which was plain awkward. Without any of the usual suspects distributed to carry the group some of the other groups were plain abysmal, while our report was basically rubbing their noses in it. Not that we were trying to be mean, but we did want to excel. From that day to the end of that school I don't think we ever got to pick our own groups again, at least not with that teacher. They put some educational spin on it, but it was pretty clear to me it was for the weaker pupils' benefit and not ours.
The even more important takeaway from the other 90% is that being innocent and taking your trial to court is no guarantee you'll be found not guilty. The system should work so that you assume the court is right *most* the time, where the guilty get a reasonable rebate for confessing since they'd probably be convicted - otherwise they have really nothing to lose, while the innocent should not get an unreasonable extra punishment for trying to prove their innocence. What happens in the US is post-hoc justification, they were guilty (because they were found guilty) and they tried to get away with it (because they took it to trial) so let's lock them away forever.
What's wrong with the US system is that your plea is not taken into consideration at sentencing, it's being used to decide what crime to charge you with in the first place. Objectively I find that absurd because what actually happened can't be altered through a plea deal, the required flexibility for whether you should be punished stronger or lighter should be in the sentencing. Here in Norway the prosecution has to play their hand first, we're charging you with crimes X and Y, here's our sentencing recommendation if you're found guilty. Then you can either pick a "confession ruling" (tilståelsesdom) which is very simplified process for a 15-30% reduction in sentencing at the court's discretion or you can bring it to a full trial. It seems to work okay, though you never really know.
They should, as a rule, point information under dispute to other sites.
So when the Holocaust deniers object they should just say the allegations are under dispute? The tin foil hatters who believe chemtrails are real and that you just bought the cover story? My guess is that which sites you'd point them to would be just as controversial. And you'd still have disputes over formulations and presentation, relevancy and notability, quality of sources... if you're not willing to have any sort of rules and referees they'd probably have to replace Wikipedia with a page that said "It's complicated. Google it."
I see the cost being a factor at first. The lidar system adds something like $7500 on top of the car. (...) There must be others that would very much like to be driven around, but are flatly unable to get a license, due to age, vision, motor cortex problems etc. So I see those groups as the pioneers.
My parents have lost their driving licenses, going to the cabin without me they'd have to take a complicated taxi-train-taxi setup or a direct taxi which would be like $170 whereas the actual running costs are like $40. And they'd probably have to pay some return fare since the driver would be way out of his regular area, so potentially closer to $300. So around $250 extra, one way so $500 round trip. Multiply by 5-10 trips a year, 5-10 years lifespan, never mind the other uses they'd have... $7500 is a bargain. If they could offer full level 5 autonomy on all public roads I think they'd sell at $100k.
In the end, technology is what we choose to make of it.
No, it's not some lump of clay you can shape into any form you want. It's like saying we can turn heroin into a good thing by regulating it instead of suppressing it. Some technology is overwhelmingly good. Some technology is overwhelmingly bad. Most are in the middle, but even then you can't really pick and choose the pros and cons. Very often you either use it, or you don't. Like say camera phones, today kids are worried they'll be secretly photographed or filmed naked in the shower. We didn't have that problem, sure you can make rules about it but to act like you can regulate where, when and why people use their camera phones is folly. And it has a lot of great advantages too, though I suppose the Amish would disagree..
Society and technology is like two balls held together by a rubber band bouncing through a flipper game. Sometimes we use technology to change society, sometimes technology changes us and we're only dealing with the fallout. I think it's presumptuous to think that if we can choose that path, sometimes the pull of technology is so strong that you might steer it a bit in one direction or the other but the overall change is a near inevitability and it's all but impossible to predict what you set in motion. Which is not to say that we should just give up and become some sort of tech determinists, but that sometimes it washes over us like a hurricane. You can prepare up front, you can clean up afterwards but you can't really regulate the storm. The storm doesn't listen.
The main threat is developing AI and data mining operations to interpret large amounts of data and build profiles of all of us. It's a privacy issue, and one we are capable of solving by mandating that our privacy is respected. While I'm not confident we'll actually do so, it is definitely in our control.
Our as in our collective control, maybe. Our as in you individually? To some degree I suppose, but I can't stop other people from letting Facebook go through their contact list. I can't stop them from backing up their photos to the cloud, almost everyone I know does. At least they only rarely post them in public or tag me, but still. When I drive to work there's a congestion zone you have to pay to enter, there's no manual booth anymore they just photograph your license plate and you get the bill in the mail. I could take the bus, but they don't sell period tickets electronically and cash prices are sky high allegedly due to risk of theft so in a month I'd pay 5x as much. In two years the electricity meters will be a smart meter saying how much power I use in 15 minute increments.
Every so often there's another "let's save everyone's Internet traffic for a year" or "let's keep that decade for a decade because it might help a cold case" or "let's go cashless" or "let's install a GPS in every car and do road pricing" and while they never quite win privacy is dying the death of a thousand needle pricks. And that doesn't count things like the NSA wiretapping all phone calls or the Equinox breach and other wholesale breaches of privacy. What's AI in all this? It's the computing power that lets a few thousand people spy on millions of people, compare this to the DDR's paper archives and where a huge fraction of the population was on the payroll. Now you're instantly transcribed, analyzed, cross-referenced, indexed, threat evaluated, flagged and filed for eternity. It's no longer man against man, it's man against man and a million little electronic devices.
A lot of freelance platforms have been doing this for years but it's not a reasonable solution. You can't measure development productivity based on trackable "focus" and "intensity" scores because a lot of that happens inside of your brain.
They don't really think you measure progress by how much you're banging on the keyboard either. They just want to know when you're shirking or goofing off while on the clock. Do a little quid pro quo, if you're thinking about work while away from your desk, think about other things while you're at your desk.
From a business perspective? I doubt it. They basically drained the bottom out of the market by force-bundling it with their CPUs, weakening AMD and nVidia considerably. Will a 15-45W CPU+GPU ever "catch up" to a dGPU that draws a few hundred watts alone? Obviously not. But they took almost the whole non-gamer market (71% by units) and according to this article 22% of Overwatch players use Intel integrated graphics. Consider then non-competitive games like Civilization etc. and you'll realize not everyone needs a monster card to run 4K @ ultra quality or 1080p @ 144+ Hz. Or they can't afford it at least. Of course now Intel is being undercut by mobile, gaming is one of the big reasons people buy PCs so it's the non-gamer segment that's shrinking.
This is what Apple should use in future iPhones. A phone that runs an OS that is compatable with both macOS and iOS, that can connect to a keyboard and monitor and can be used as a PC in that way. They already working on that already and I wouldn't be surprised if some of Apple's money is quietly going towards AMD and Intel's new project.
If you think Apple is walking away from their own in-house A11 chip you're nuts. They've consistently out-performed all other ARM chips in single threaded performance, in their power envelope they're class leading while Intel has repeatedly tried, failed and eventually given up to sell a compelling phone chip. The question is rather when they decide the as-of-yet unreleased A11X tablet version is ready to go in a convertible/laptop form factor. The connectors are no problem, the phone already talks USB over lightning and the wireless streaming is the same only compressed and without a physical port. They probably have all the relevant bits merged to make an ARM laptop, though knowing Apple it'll probably be a walled garden.
My guess is that they'd rather try something like StarCraft because the mechanics are more generic, like you collect resources, build units and attack enemies in quite free patterns whereas in Civilization the tactic is heavily driven by the game mechanics. Like, you do things in a particular order every time. I think Civilization would be easier for an AI to win with a balanced strategy and then win on micro-management.
If I recall correctly the solution was always to report a fake version where it was expected for compatibility and append the real data as a comment, there might have been a total stealth option but never as a default I think. So assuming the people who gather the statistics pay attention and use the real data we should be good.
Humanity could fix the CO2 global warming issue as well, faster than expected, if united in focus on changing the current status quo.
Unlikely. The ozone layer was badly affected by a few chemicals for which we found alternatives. The vast majority of our energy production comes from fossil fuels and there's more people who want a higher standard of living every day. Even with a massive increase in renewable energy, green technology etc. total emissions are going up and will likely continue to rise as a billion Indians follow China, they're now roughly where China was 25 years ago. You can get a big report here (PDF) that'll break it down in more detail, long story short bringing the rest of the world up to western standards of living is another +50-100% added to CO2 emissions. Those who want to make cuts just draw lines downwards and ignore that there are huge structural reasons for increases that need to be offset before we're even stable.
If it's important enough you obviously shouldn't trust any third party to verify anyone's identity, but if I don't know who you are should I start fingerprinting and DNA testing you or should I ask for a driver's license or passport? It's a bit the same with websites, for the most part I'm satisfied with a CA backing the claim. The alternative is that I have no clue, because there's no practical way for me to verify everything in person.
If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway. But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it.
Everyone is capable of using it just like they could butcher any language, but English is a PITA to learn properly because they've generally not only adopted the vocabulary but also other bits and pieces. For example say the following words: beak peak weak leak steak... whoops, the last one is completely different for no discernible reason because it's a loaner from old Norse. You were knighted but not fighted, you were fought. And you're ugly-uglier-ugliest but beautiful-more beautiful-most beautiful not beautiful(l?)er. It's no wonder that basic users end up with "me love you long time" English, a lot of it is simply rote memorization that this is the way things are. Same with vocabulary, a driver does driving and a plumber does plumbing but a person cooking food is a chef rather than a cook(er?). It's not that any pattern is more or less valid, but English got all of them mashed together.
There are roughly 7.6 billion people on the planet, and about 1/4 of them use facebook? I'm guessing there are well north of 200 million fakes.
You don't understand the reach of Facebook. Here in Norway 80% of the population has used Facebook in the last three months and 65% use it daily. In the youth category (16-24) about 90% use it daily. Granted, we're only 5.2 million of the world population but "everyone" is on Facebook. These are quite reliable statistics not made by Facebook. Getting a Facebook account is the current decade's version of getting a GeoCities homepage, "everyone" has one. I'm quite willing to believe Facebook's numbers are accurate. I don't want the to be, but the facts quite clearly reject my wishes.
To be honest, that's not how most people think about their data. For the most part they think that some entities are acting within the law like Google, Apple etc. and the law will protect them. And then there's the entities that operate outside the law and they'll hack their way in whether it's local or in the cloud. Look at all the people who get viruses and malware, they don't feel particularly much safer just because it's physically on-premise. At least with the cloud they got backups so it's done half right, often they don't have anything.
For a business, it's pretty much the same except how much do you really trust your employees to be better than the cloud providers? Maybe a few that focus very hard on IT security do, but for most businesses it's like my network, their network... it's not exactly risk free either way. If you got real secrets I'd keep them on an air-gapped computer.
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My impression is that the mail side of Outlook is probably the least difficult to replace, or rather there all the folders, filters, flags, reminders etc. people use to manage their mails have been done in open source too because they're inherently individual. My impression is that it's the contact and calendar functionality that's missing, that is to say everything past your personal contacts and your personal calendar. Like can I easily see my co-worker's calendars and contact details, available meeting rooms, set up recurring staff/project/team meetings and so on. That and the icon to indicate if you're online/idle/busy/offline (green/yellow/red/gray) is used a lot, either to start a live chat or to actually drop by your office.
Maybe there's other advanced functionality I'm missing... but given how often I have to suggest to managers that they can turn off meeting replies for big meetings if they don't want them etc. I think it would be administrators missing those features not middle management. But I agree with you on the lack of organization-level tools, you can say the same about the whole AD/Group Policy management bit, you can try to create something like LDAP, Puppet etc. but it's clear Linux is not built to be centrally managed with the exception of "web-scale" systems where you just add tons of servers, all alike. Still you'd think that 20 years later it would eventually arrive even if at a glacial pace. But I guess for most people webmail solved it and businesses gave up and went to cloud systems like Google's suite.
I think this is a pointless effort. You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device.
Except they're doing the opposite. Maybe it's not an efficient use of screen space, but scaling up a small screen works. A keyboard obviously works fine. And you got no problem using the mouse to hit an UI element made for sausage fingers. As long as you don't need multi-finger gestures other than pinch and zoom which map great to the mouse wheel you're doing okay.
That means you have to carry an external display, mouse, and keyboard with you. Or hope they will have a spare external display, mouse, and keyboard wherever you go.
It's not for people who need a laptop, quite the opposite. It's for people that only occasionally need something bigger than a smartphone, most likely at home where external display = TV with HDMI. You already have the phone (sunk cost), you already have a TV (sunk cost), buy a little dock and keyboard/mouse and you can write that letter and do that spreadsheet without the laptop.
Granted, right now it only exists on super expensive Galaxy S8s and the dock itself was not cheap but if they can bring it to cheaper phones and bring the price of the dock down - it already went from a launch price of $150 to $90 - there's hundreds of millions of people who have just a smartphone and nothing else. Who don't have a ton of Windows applications they miss. Who are not gamers (or at least Candy Crush-type gamers), who don't need workstations, who sometimes just needs a big screen and better input.
That said, ain't no one building anything to go into space for under 30 million. This is more like research.
Even if a prototype went into space, it'd still be research. No humans? No hurry. The Moon? Too close. A nuclear powered SLS-class launcher to Mars could be useful, but it would obviously be many years and many billions from now. And even for Mars the radiation estimate for a six months trip + surface stay with chemical rockets is within NASAs career limits, so it doesn't seem to be a requirement. And past Mars there's not really anywhere habitable for humans. I suppose it could be useful for interstellar, but the distances are so vast that we'll likely invent fusion reactors that'll overtake them before we got there, even if that takes centuries.
Yes, the code is available, it's open source, after all. The question the article gets to is how do packagers such as Red Hat or CPAN decide which version to include by default - the old, established one that hasn't been updated, or the new one that has updates but not not the long history? That may be a case-by-case issue by it's very nature. The other point raised is that programmers, up open source or proprietary, should make sure that two other people have commit access, or will get it.
That's neat when you have someone to name as your heir before your untimely demise, but it's not like most projects has an over-abundance of volunteers looking to secure their rank in the line of succession. For most projects I think it would be quite unclear who, if any, is going to step up and take over in advance. Maybe they need to feel the void of your absence, maybe they're secretly hoping someone else will pick up the mantle, maybe they don't want to take on the commitment they'd feel as the named successor. This would be more like a system to enable the project members or trustees to create an interim solution, where you have to hand over control that you wouldn't give on a day-to-day basis.
For that I'd probably go with something like Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm and a grace period to prevent hostile takeover, like if 5/8 of those I've given a vote claim that I'm no longer leading the project and I'm unresponsive for a week then they get to appoint a new project leader. That way they essentially have no power individually, but collectively they'd have the power to declare me "dead". If the project is so tiny you're the only one in it you could give the votes to people you trust in related projects. What you don't want to do is say "project abandoned, up for grabs" and have random hackers/bots take over, add malware and push it as an update. Hopefully those you hand the reins to have some sense in picking a successor.
A maximum string length of 256 would be very painful if you routinely deal with longer strings.
You already spend a byte on the null terminator. One more would give you 256*256 = 65k length strings or 32k with a high bit to indicate you should read more length bytes first.
If you are continuing to have trouble with the language, then I would submit that you are probably not a very good programmer, and the behavior of the language (which requires you to have a good grasp on how computers actually work), is probably mysterious to you, but each and every behavior of C++ is there for a very good reason.
Seriously, this level of fanboi-ism gets modded up? To shoot fish in a barrel the zero-terminated C strings was made to save one length-prefix byte and has cost the world a bazillion times more than the Y2K problem and every non-C programming language has abandoned it. But okay, that's an inherited problem. My biggest gripe with C++ is that it's an OOP language without an object oriented memory model, unless you religiously follow RAII as a pattern or trace every execution path when the code changes you will have crazy leaks all over as you create and destroy objects. Why? Because it was originally just a razor thin convenience layer on top of C and for a long time there was no smart pointers or they were in the Boost library and not part of the language itself.
Part of this is that it's not explicit when any library is processing its own data that it'll clean up and when it's returning a new object to me that it expects I'll clean up. Read the documentation, I suppose but an explicit passing of ownership not just reference would be so much better. My second biggest gripe is that there's no safer and easier object oriented communication protocol than using pointers everywhere, which very easily leads to a dangling reference somewhere and leads to much tighter class integration than a publisher/subscriber system. I've written C++ but mainly using the Qt library which is much, much closer to what my ideal OOP language would be like because one mismatched signal-slot doesn't bring the house down, even though the macros and the meta-object compiler (MOC) seemed like a hack around C++'s limitations.
I have the feeling C++ is in no man's land. New mid-level code is written in C#/Java/Swift, high level in Javascript/Perl/Python/PHP/R and so on, low level code in C/assembler. There are a lot of huge, existing C++ code bases so it's not like you'd run out of work but I don't really see who'd start a new project from scratch in C++ today. Particularly since there's no major platform pushing it, on Windows it's C#, on Mac/iOS it's Swift and in the enterprise and on Android it's Java, the embedded market is C and the web is pushing Javascript everywhere: But who's pushing for more C++? Almost nobody, as far as I can see. It's just a complex mix of low-level and high-level concepts thrown in a blender which in theory lets you do many things but in practice is unwieldy for almost anyone.
I suppose you could call that an expert's tool. But sometimes I feel it's like crossing a canyon on a tightrope. The C/assembler guy brought rock climbing gear, he's got a long and tedious climb up and down ahead of him but he's chiseling out steps and building a series of bolts to climb by. The mid/high end guy starts looking for a bridge. What the C++ guy does is difficult and impressive, yet not very productive for anyone else and the next guy also needs to be an expert tightrope walker. You say it's a language for experts, who can afford an expert for every change? How do you become an expert, if a junior C++ developer will fail spectacularly? What I'm saying is that just because it's challenging doesn't mean you're an expert, it just means you're doing it the hard way.
They found that laparoscopic beat open in patient outcomes (so it's a good thing). They further found that adding the robot did nothing to improve outcomes but did cost more (a bad thing) and take longer (also bad and potentially a safety risk).
Unfortunately when you make statistics like this it's never the same doctor operating on the same patient. For example, it's quite possible that younger doctors are prevalent when it comes to robot-assisted surgery while older and more experienced doctors who had to learn to do it on their own continue to do so and that the actual difference is due to differences in experience not technique. It's also possible that those who do robot-assisted surgery can do it with less training than the unassisted ones without being properly reflected in direct costs. If you don't correct for the selection bias then sometimes you get the result that the most experienced doctors have the worst outcomes - because they treat the most difficult cases. It's not always that more data is better data, sometimes case studies where you go really in-depth and make really sure you have apples-to-apples comparisons are more valuable.
This wouldn't be any different then looking at all of Visas equipment and energy costs and dividing by the number of transactions it conducts per day to arrive at a 'cost' of swiping your credit card.
Note that this would only be a tiiiiiny fraction of the cost. Here in Norway we have "BankAxept" which is a no-frills direct debit solution, it costs the store around $0.03/transaction (plus ~$100 to establish, ~$20/month) and VISAs physical transaction costs are probably roughly the same. The rest are the kickbacks, dispute process etc. which is why the store usually pays around 2% in processing fees. Plus they run the risk of chargebacks and such, while with direct debit it's as good as cash in hand. Which you might say is worse for the customers, but in practice I've never had problems with any real world retailer that'd have been better solved with a chargeback. Not big e-tailers either, online fly-by-night stores maybe but you can use the credit card then. And Paypal, eBay etc. don't like it when you escalate to the credit card company anyway, I'm sure you could make an anecdote where it was useful but is that worth 2% off the top of every transaction like your groceries and beers at the pub? No.
A console is a turnkey gaming solution. Sure, there are big updates to download once in a while, but they just work out of the box. The last thing I want in this stage in my life (I'm 40) is get home after a long day at work and fiddle with drivers, configurations, etc.
About 99% of the people who break their machine "fiddle" with it and install random crapware or betas or tweaks get better FPS. If all you want is Windows, Steam/Battle.net/GOG and games with auto-updates enabled using release drivers and auto-detect settings I'd say any difference is absolutely marginal.
That's the beautify of highly intelligent and balanced people, their default behavior is to collaborate.
Smart people who feel they're among their peers mostly yes, unless it becomes too competitive. It's frustrating not having anyone to bounce ideas back and forth with. It's more frustrating when you try to do that with colleagues and hit thin air. It's extremely frustrating when your peer group overrides you even though you're sure they picked an inferior solution that'll cause you lots of woes down the road. But the most frustrating is when you're pulling all the weight and nobody seems to give you any credit for it.
I remember once in school we got to pick our own groups, the three absolutely brightest in the class (top grades end of year) and one second tier grouped up. You might think we'd be at cruising speed because even with a modest effort would put us at top of the class. Instead it was like hey, no lightweights. Everybody wanted to prove they belong in this group. We found relevant data, made an in-depth analysis, had proper reviews, constructive feedback, meaningful discussions and batted it way, way out of the ballpark.
What was the result of that? Well the final results were to be presented in class, which was plain awkward. Without any of the usual suspects distributed to carry the group some of the other groups were plain abysmal, while our report was basically rubbing their noses in it. Not that we were trying to be mean, but we did want to excel. From that day to the end of that school I don't think we ever got to pick our own groups again, at least not with that teacher. They put some educational spin on it, but it was pretty clear to me it was for the weaker pupils' benefit and not ours.
The even more important takeaway from the other 90% is that being innocent and taking your trial to court is no guarantee you'll be found not guilty. The system should work so that you assume the court is right *most* the time, where the guilty get a reasonable rebate for confessing since they'd probably be convicted - otherwise they have really nothing to lose, while the innocent should not get an unreasonable extra punishment for trying to prove their innocence. What happens in the US is post-hoc justification, they were guilty (because they were found guilty) and they tried to get away with it (because they took it to trial) so let's lock them away forever.
What's wrong with the US system is that your plea is not taken into consideration at sentencing, it's being used to decide what crime to charge you with in the first place. Objectively I find that absurd because what actually happened can't be altered through a plea deal, the required flexibility for whether you should be punished stronger or lighter should be in the sentencing. Here in Norway the prosecution has to play their hand first, we're charging you with crimes X and Y, here's our sentencing recommendation if you're found guilty. Then you can either pick a "confession ruling" (tilståelsesdom) which is very simplified process for a 15-30% reduction in sentencing at the court's discretion or you can bring it to a full trial. It seems to work okay, though you never really know.
They should, as a rule, point information under dispute to other sites.
So when the Holocaust deniers object they should just say the allegations are under dispute? The tin foil hatters who believe chemtrails are real and that you just bought the cover story? My guess is that which sites you'd point them to would be just as controversial. And you'd still have disputes over formulations and presentation, relevancy and notability, quality of sources... if you're not willing to have any sort of rules and referees they'd probably have to replace Wikipedia with a page that said "It's complicated. Google it."
I see the cost being a factor at first. The lidar system adds something like $7500 on top of the car. (...) There must be others that would very much like to be driven around, but are flatly unable to get a license, due to age, vision, motor cortex problems etc. So I see those groups as the pioneers.
My parents have lost their driving licenses, going to the cabin without me they'd have to take a complicated taxi-train-taxi setup or a direct taxi which would be like $170 whereas the actual running costs are like $40. And they'd probably have to pay some return fare since the driver would be way out of his regular area, so potentially closer to $300. So around $250 extra, one way so $500 round trip. Multiply by 5-10 trips a year, 5-10 years lifespan, never mind the other uses they'd have... $7500 is a bargain. If they could offer full level 5 autonomy on all public roads I think they'd sell at $100k.
In the end, technology is what we choose to make of it.
No, it's not some lump of clay you can shape into any form you want. It's like saying we can turn heroin into a good thing by regulating it instead of suppressing it. Some technology is overwhelmingly good. Some technology is overwhelmingly bad. Most are in the middle, but even then you can't really pick and choose the pros and cons. Very often you either use it, or you don't. Like say camera phones, today kids are worried they'll be secretly photographed or filmed naked in the shower. We didn't have that problem, sure you can make rules about it but to act like you can regulate where, when and why people use their camera phones is folly. And it has a lot of great advantages too, though I suppose the Amish would disagree..
Society and technology is like two balls held together by a rubber band bouncing through a flipper game. Sometimes we use technology to change society, sometimes technology changes us and we're only dealing with the fallout. I think it's presumptuous to think that if we can choose that path, sometimes the pull of technology is so strong that you might steer it a bit in one direction or the other but the overall change is a near inevitability and it's all but impossible to predict what you set in motion. Which is not to say that we should just give up and become some sort of tech determinists, but that sometimes it washes over us like a hurricane. You can prepare up front, you can clean up afterwards but you can't really regulate the storm. The storm doesn't listen.
The main threat is developing AI and data mining operations to interpret large amounts of data and build profiles of all of us. It's a privacy issue, and one we are capable of solving by mandating that our privacy is respected. While I'm not confident we'll actually do so, it is definitely in our control.
Our as in our collective control, maybe. Our as in you individually? To some degree I suppose, but I can't stop other people from letting Facebook go through their contact list. I can't stop them from backing up their photos to the cloud, almost everyone I know does. At least they only rarely post them in public or tag me, but still. When I drive to work there's a congestion zone you have to pay to enter, there's no manual booth anymore they just photograph your license plate and you get the bill in the mail. I could take the bus, but they don't sell period tickets electronically and cash prices are sky high allegedly due to risk of theft so in a month I'd pay 5x as much. In two years the electricity meters will be a smart meter saying how much power I use in 15 minute increments.
Every so often there's another "let's save everyone's Internet traffic for a year" or "let's keep that decade for a decade because it might help a cold case" or "let's go cashless" or "let's install a GPS in every car and do road pricing" and while they never quite win privacy is dying the death of a thousand needle pricks. And that doesn't count things like the NSA wiretapping all phone calls or the Equinox breach and other wholesale breaches of privacy. What's AI in all this? It's the computing power that lets a few thousand people spy on millions of people, compare this to the DDR's paper archives and where a huge fraction of the population was on the payroll. Now you're instantly transcribed, analyzed, cross-referenced, indexed, threat evaluated, flagged and filed for eternity. It's no longer man against man, it's man against man and a million little electronic devices.
A lot of freelance platforms have been doing this for years but it's not a reasonable solution. You can't measure development productivity based on trackable "focus" and "intensity" scores because a lot of that happens inside of your brain.
They don't really think you measure progress by how much you're banging on the keyboard either. They just want to know when you're shirking or goofing off while on the clock. Do a little quid pro quo, if you're thinking about work while away from your desk, think about other things while you're at your desk.
Makes sense. Intel graphics are still a failure.
From a business perspective? I doubt it. They basically drained the bottom out of the market by force-bundling it with their CPUs, weakening AMD and nVidia considerably. Will a 15-45W CPU+GPU ever "catch up" to a dGPU that draws a few hundred watts alone? Obviously not. But they took almost the whole non-gamer market (71% by units) and according to this article 22% of Overwatch players use Intel integrated graphics. Consider then non-competitive games like Civilization etc. and you'll realize not everyone needs a monster card to run 4K @ ultra quality or 1080p @ 144+ Hz. Or they can't afford it at least. Of course now Intel is being undercut by mobile, gaming is one of the big reasons people buy PCs so it's the non-gamer segment that's shrinking.
This is what Apple should use in future iPhones. A phone that runs an OS that is compatable with both macOS and iOS, that can connect to a keyboard and monitor and can be used as a PC in that way. They already working on that already and I wouldn't be surprised if some of Apple's money is quietly going towards AMD and Intel's new project.
If you think Apple is walking away from their own in-house A11 chip you're nuts. They've consistently out-performed all other ARM chips in single threaded performance, in their power envelope they're class leading while Intel has repeatedly tried, failed and eventually given up to sell a compelling phone chip. The question is rather when they decide the as-of-yet unreleased A11X tablet version is ready to go in a convertible/laptop form factor. The connectors are no problem, the phone already talks USB over lightning and the wireless streaming is the same only compressed and without a physical port. They probably have all the relevant bits merged to make an ARM laptop, though knowing Apple it'll probably be a walled garden.
My guess is that they'd rather try something like StarCraft because the mechanics are more generic, like you collect resources, build units and attack enemies in quite free patterns whereas in Civilization the tactic is heavily driven by the game mechanics. Like, you do things in a particular order every time. I think Civilization would be easier for an AI to win with a balanced strategy and then win on micro-management.
If I recall correctly the solution was always to report a fake version where it was expected for compatibility and append the real data as a comment, there might have been a total stealth option but never as a default I think. So assuming the people who gather the statistics pay attention and use the real data we should be good.
Humanity could fix the CO2 global warming issue as well, faster than expected, if united in focus on changing the current status quo.
Unlikely. The ozone layer was badly affected by a few chemicals for which we found alternatives. The vast majority of our energy production comes from fossil fuels and there's more people who want a higher standard of living every day. Even with a massive increase in renewable energy, green technology etc. total emissions are going up and will likely continue to rise as a billion Indians follow China, they're now roughly where China was 25 years ago. You can get a big report here (PDF) that'll break it down in more detail, long story short bringing the rest of the world up to western standards of living is another +50-100% added to CO2 emissions. Those who want to make cuts just draw lines downwards and ignore that there are huge structural reasons for increases that need to be offset before we're even stable.
If it's important enough you obviously shouldn't trust any third party to verify anyone's identity, but if I don't know who you are should I start fingerprinting and DNA testing you or should I ask for a driver's license or passport? It's a bit the same with websites, for the most part I'm satisfied with a CA backing the claim. The alternative is that I have no clue, because there's no practical way for me to verify everything in person.
If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway. But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it.
Everyone is capable of using it just like they could butcher any language, but English is a PITA to learn properly because they've generally not only adopted the vocabulary but also other bits and pieces. For example say the following words: beak peak weak leak steak... whoops, the last one is completely different for no discernible reason because it's a loaner from old Norse. You were knighted but not fighted, you were fought. And you're ugly-uglier-ugliest but beautiful-more beautiful-most beautiful not beautiful(l?)er. It's no wonder that basic users end up with "me love you long time" English, a lot of it is simply rote memorization that this is the way things are. Same with vocabulary, a driver does driving and a plumber does plumbing but a person cooking food is a chef rather than a cook(er?). It's not that any pattern is more or less valid, but English got all of them mashed together.
There are roughly 7.6 billion people on the planet, and about 1/4 of them use facebook? I'm guessing there are well north of 200 million fakes.
You don't understand the reach of Facebook. Here in Norway 80% of the population has used Facebook in the last three months and 65% use it daily. In the youth category (16-24) about 90% use it daily. Granted, we're only 5.2 million of the world population but "everyone" is on Facebook. These are quite reliable statistics not made by Facebook. Getting a Facebook account is the current decade's version of getting a GeoCities homepage, "everyone" has one. I'm quite willing to believe Facebook's numbers are accurate. I don't want the to be, but the facts quite clearly reject my wishes.
To be honest, that's not how most people think about their data. For the most part they think that some entities are acting within the law like Google, Apple etc. and the law will protect them. And then there's the entities that operate outside the law and they'll hack their way in whether it's local or in the cloud. Look at all the people who get viruses and malware, they don't feel particularly much safer just because it's physically on-premise. At least with the cloud they got backups so it's done half right, often they don't have anything.
For a business, it's pretty much the same except how much do you really trust your employees to be better than the cloud providers? Maybe a few that focus very hard on IT security do, but for most businesses it's like my network, their network... it's not exactly risk free either way. If you got real secrets I'd keep them on an air-gapped computer.