there isn't a whole lot "wrong" per se either with IA-32 or with x86-64.
x86-64 is a good hack; it helps a lot. If you ever program x86-32 in assembly you will quickly realise just how much time and energy has to be wasted due to the tiny number of registers. There is only one general-purpose 32bit register in the programming model. Every single other register (and there's not many of them) is affected by some instruction or other. Loops hit the ECX register, block moves the ESI EDI pair etc. This makes it very hard to fit your own scratch work into any but the smallest code block.
Your compiler has to face the same problem when assigning registers even if you never see assembly language in your life and this register thrashing is one of the biggest causes of heat and clock cycle wastage in the processor. There should have been new registers added when the Pentium arrived, and on subsequent generations. It would not have impacted backward-compatibility but Intel stuck with a 70's programming model until AMD forced their hand only a few years ago.
If Apple had left IBM alone to make the chips instead of interfering, I think PPC would have served them well. Now of course they're stuck with whatever Intel gives them. They better hope it's better than the S.S. Itanic and Hyper-transport were. Assuming they care anymore, that is.
their interviews are tough - or at least are *as* tough as (say) Google and you cannot be a third-rate programmer and get in.
The proof is on every shelf in every software retailer; MS programmers are crap programmers. You can't turn out shit products for decades and then claim that your hiring proceedures are selecting the elite.
Ultimately there are enough of us programmers out there that even if 80% wouldn't consider M$ because of pride
Of good programmers I'd say that more than 99% would not consider M$ because of pride in their work - after all, that pride is a big part of why they're good, and the lack of it is why MS programmers keep churning out rubbish.
I think it is partly management to blame too, of course. Those who do go into Microsoft for something other than money soon run up against idiots like Balmer and it grinds them down as they realise that the culture in the company simply has no place for good, solid, reliable programming. It's a sausage factory for code. Get it out the door; keep getting the upgrade fees, patch it later if someone finds the bugs. Pay the bribes, get the contract, change the law, lock the competitors out and the users in. Who wants to work for that mentality?
God alone knows how bad Vista must be to have stopped this treadmill even for a few months!
If "people" kept wondering why they were crap, they'd stop buying them
And buy what exactly? Macs? Windows is entrenched in workplaces, and that is enough to keep most people tied to it as a day-to-day system. But don't think that ordinary non-IT workers don't hate Windows and Word; they do. But no one's asking them what they think.
You can call MS programmers lots of things, but third-rate wouldn't be one of them
I have seen their hiring at universities; only the third-raters apply because anyone else has too much pride to work for a company where ensuring the user is locked in to you, no matter how bad your product, is more important than making them want to stay with you. If you care about what you do that's not an attractive environment.
Ya, that Bill Gates. What a failure.
Tell me something he's succeeded at in the last 25 years that didn't rely on him being given a million dollars (in the early 60's) by his super-rich family with powerful connections and I might not consider him a failure as an IT geek. Making money with money is hardly the toughest game in town, especially when IBM gives you a free ride for a decade.
I agree. The thing with Microsoft is that people keep wondering why their products are crap. The simple answer is that the people who work at Microsoft are crap. They're crap managers, crap designers, and crap programmers. Look at the IE7 team's blogs. These are third-rate programmers who don't even understand why people think their product sucks, yet they're trying to fix it.
MS got where it is today by being handed a monopoly on a plate by IBM, and they've stayed there by using their power and money to keep that monopoly. They've never had to compete on quality, and their management has never had to innovate, fight their corner in the free market, or learn anything about running a real company in the real world. Consequently, embarrassing arseholes like Balmer and talentless failed geek also-rans like Gates (born rich and never HAD to work a day in his life) have never been sent packing by the shareholders.
X86 had to improve drastically before Apple switched to it.
Firstly, x86 is still shit and always will be; the design was bad from the start. Secondly, the least shitty x86's are AMD but Apple chose Intel instead.
a while back, Anne McCaffrey was squelching fan artists left and right, angry that people should even try to make money off illustrating scenes from her novels.
If they're making money off it I don't think I would count it as "fan" work anymore.
The vast majority of authors (and other IP owners) habitually turn a blind eye to this type of copyright infringement,
Illustrating scenes from a book is not by any stretch of the imagination copyright infringement. What are you copying? An image in your own head? How does AMcC own that exactly?
mainly because it benefits them, but the point is that they can put a stop to it if they want, and some of them have in the past
They can with legal threats and bluff, but it isn't legal and it isn't moral. I suspect, having met Anne several times outside of conventions that she may have been just sick of the appalling lack of skill and taste, not to mention strong pornographic tendancies, of some of these artists. I don't know. Perhap's she's just gone nuts. Either way, I think it's a bad sign to be trying to claim ownership of the insides of people's heads.
If you don't mind paying someone to abuse the patent system. Almost everyone on/. whines about patents yet very few seem to want to do anything about it by, for example, not supporting bastards like Amazon who are working every day to break that patent system and make money out of other people's ideas because of it.
I like how about half of the comments respond how easy it is for the kid to have created the site, or that there's not much innovation going on there.
It's easy AND pointless, that's the real issue. Who cares? Sharing pictures online is not hard nor is it worthwhile.
Google serves an actual purpose. Increasinly badly, I'd admit, but it's still useful. Flickr and this thing are just visual blogs and as such just a waste of virtual paper.
"It in no way applies to reporters _ in any way, shape or form," said Mike Dawson, a senior policy adviser to DeWine, responding to an inquiry Friday afternoon. "If a technical fix is necessary, it will be made."
Notice that Dawson gives no evidence to support this assertion. Probably because it's a lie. The law has been prompted by the press reporting Bush's law breaking, naturally it's aimed at them.
I would make commercial use copyright 50 years or life of creator, whichever is longer. I'm happy with the idea of artists leaving their children the proceeds of their work, but if said artist gets run over the day after selling their blockbuster novel to some firm I'd like the children to have that too. What I don't want to see any more is companies holding and raping the creative work of long dead people (ie, Winnie-the-Pooh).
I see no point in having copyright on personal use, in the sense that you should be able to do anything to a legally obtained copy of a work so long as it is for your own use. There is no reason, other than creating a legal framework to support a business model, to have any copyright restrictions on personal use of personal property.
As to fines for breach of copyright: (2 times cost of disc) times number of copies squared.
Well spotted. The GP is exactly what I do with TeX: enter the data and apply a format file to it. With standard ones I've developed over the years for my own use I find TeX faster and easier to use (especially for indexing, running headers and TOC generation) than any graphical WP system.
Indeed. If you want to see a great example of the blind leading the blind you should have a look through the IE team's blogs. What a bunch of useless twats; no wonder MS can't get a decent system out the door if that's the sort of "talent" they hire.
Grip, for all its power, has no usability whatsoever. What most people want to do is just open Linux Media Player, insert a CD, click the start rip button, wait 5 minutes and come back to find a load of MP3s.
I do this all the time with Grip (well, to oggs but otherwise); what's the problem you're having?
if you're a connesseur you may want 5.1 or even 7.1.
Back in my day we spelt connesseur with an "i", as in "idiot", as in "idiot who'll be fleeced by the first hi-fi salesman that comes along".
Properly mixed stereo is all you need, including games. Badly mixed stereo, I'll grant you, is not much use.
No, that's a complete theory, and there are very few of them. A correct theory simply has to have no incorrect parts. Newton's theory of gravity is incomplete but it can be made correct simply by defining the parameters within which it works (ie, well away from where relativistic effects occur).
The theory of evolution can never be complete because we will never know everything needed to complete it, but it appears to be correct within the parameters existing on the Earth for at least the whole of the fossil record.
Every liberal in the world thinks Bush and Co. are the biggest idiots in the world.
Not "Bush and Co", just Bush (alright, and Rumsfeld). Just because Bush's shoelaces are tied doesn't mean he can tie his own shoes - he has people (the "Co") who do it for him. Just like he had someone pull him out of going to 'Nam.
Professional pirates will break this in a week (I can think of a simple system that would probably cost a few grand: pocket-money for the major players). The real point is to close the region-encoding hole, which is how the price-fixing cartel (I thought that was illegal, oh well) makes sure that the same content, made for the same costs, can be sold to you at a higher price if the price-fixing cartel thinks you've got the dough.
Pirate HD-DVD will be available everywhere as soon as the market is worth the pirates' time to break in. The price-fixing cartel thinks that they'll make more than enough to cover the losses by making as many honest people as possible pay twice for the same content or just plain old pay monopoly prices once.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and for some very low values of "needed" too.
x86-64 is a good hack; it helps a lot. If you ever program x86-32 in assembly you will quickly realise just how much time and energy has to be wasted due to the tiny number of registers. There is only one general-purpose 32bit register in the programming model. Every single other register (and there's not many of them) is affected by some instruction or other. Loops hit the ECX register, block moves the ESI EDI pair etc. This makes it very hard to fit your own scratch work into any but the smallest code block.
Your compiler has to face the same problem when assigning registers even if you never see assembly language in your life and this register thrashing is one of the biggest causes of heat and clock cycle wastage in the processor. There should have been new registers added when the Pentium arrived, and on subsequent generations. It would not have impacted backward-compatibility but Intel stuck with a 70's programming model until AMD forced their hand only a few years ago.
If Apple had left IBM alone to make the chips instead of interfering, I think PPC would have served them well. Now of course they're stuck with whatever Intel gives them. They better hope it's better than the S.S. Itanic and Hyper-transport were. Assuming they care anymore, that is.
TWW
The proof is on every shelf in every software retailer; MS programmers are crap programmers. You can't turn out shit products for decades and then claim that your hiring proceedures are selecting the elite.
Ultimately there are enough of us programmers out there that even if 80% wouldn't consider M$ because of pride
Of good programmers I'd say that more than 99% would not consider M$ because of pride in their work - after all, that pride is a big part of why they're good, and the lack of it is why MS programmers keep churning out rubbish.
I think it is partly management to blame too, of course. Those who do go into Microsoft for something other than money soon run up against idiots like Balmer and it grinds them down as they realise that the culture in the company simply has no place for good, solid, reliable programming. It's a sausage factory for code. Get it out the door; keep getting the upgrade fees, patch it later if someone finds the bugs. Pay the bribes, get the contract, change the law, lock the competitors out and the users in. Who wants to work for that mentality?
God alone knows how bad Vista must be to have stopped this treadmill even for a few months!
TWW
And buy what exactly? Macs? Windows is entrenched in workplaces, and that is enough to keep most people tied to it as a day-to-day system. But don't think that ordinary non-IT workers don't hate Windows and Word; they do. But no one's asking them what they think.
You can call MS programmers lots of things, but third-rate wouldn't be one of them
I have seen their hiring at universities; only the third-raters apply because anyone else has too much pride to work for a company where ensuring the user is locked in to you, no matter how bad your product, is more important than making them want to stay with you. If you care about what you do that's not an attractive environment.
Ya, that Bill Gates. What a failure.
Tell me something he's succeeded at in the last 25 years that didn't rely on him being given a million dollars (in the early 60's) by his super-rich family with powerful connections and I might not consider him a failure as an IT geek. Making money with money is hardly the toughest game in town, especially when IBM gives you a free ride for a decade.
TWW
MS got where it is today by being handed a monopoly on a plate by IBM, and they've stayed there by using their power and money to keep that monopoly. They've never had to compete on quality, and their management has never had to innovate, fight their corner in the free market, or learn anything about running a real company in the real world. Consequently, embarrassing arseholes like Balmer and talentless failed geek also-rans like Gates (born rich and never HAD to work a day in his life) have never been sent packing by the shareholders.
TWW
Firstly, x86 is still shit and always will be; the design was bad from the start. Secondly, the least shitty x86's are AMD but Apple chose Intel instead.
TWW
The poster was talking about Apple's legacy computer business, not their iTunes store.
TWW
If they're making money off it I don't think I would count it as "fan" work anymore.
The vast majority of authors (and other IP owners) habitually turn a blind eye to this type of copyright infringement,
Illustrating scenes from a book is not by any stretch of the imagination copyright infringement. What are you copying? An image in your own head? How does AMcC own that exactly?
mainly because it benefits them, but the point is that they can put a stop to it if they want, and some of them have in the past
They can with legal threats and bluff, but it isn't legal and it isn't moral. I suspect, having met Anne several times outside of conventions that she may have been just sick of the appalling lack of skill and taste, not to mention strong pornographic tendancies, of some of these artists. I don't know. Perhap's she's just gone nuts. Either way, I think it's a bad sign to be trying to claim ownership of the insides of people's heads.
TWW
This is true; I know many Mac users who also use the Mail app to send each other their Photoshop files.
TWW
Go ask iTunes users.
TWW
That's what I call news!
TWW
Two words: "Fuck them".
TWW
It's easy AND pointless, that's the real issue. Who cares? Sharing pictures online is not hard nor is it worthwhile.
Google serves an actual purpose. Increasinly badly, I'd admit, but it's still useful. Flickr and this thing are just visual blogs and as such just a waste of virtual paper.
TWW
Notice that Dawson gives no evidence to support this assertion. Probably because it's a lie. The law has been prompted by the press reporting Bush's law breaking, naturally it's aimed at them.
TWW
I see no point in having copyright on personal use, in the sense that you should be able to do anything to a legally obtained copy of a work so long as it is for your own use. There is no reason, other than creating a legal framework to support a business model, to have any copyright restrictions on personal use of personal property.
As to fines for breach of copyright: (2 times cost of disc) times number of copies squared.
TWW
TWW
Indeed. If you want to see a great example of the blind leading the blind you should have a look through the IE team's blogs. What a bunch of useless twats; no wonder MS can't get a decent system out the door if that's the sort of "talent" they hire.
TWW
I do this all the time with Grip (well, to oggs but otherwise); what's the problem you're having?
TWW
Properly mixed stereo is all you need, including games. Badly mixed stereo, I'll grant you, is not much use.
TWW
No, that's a complete theory, and there are very few of them. A correct theory simply has to have no incorrect parts. Newton's theory of gravity is incomplete but it can be made correct simply by defining the parameters within which it works (ie, well away from where relativistic effects occur).
The theory of evolution can never be complete because we will never know everything needed to complete it, but it appears to be correct within the parameters existing on the Earth for at least the whole of the fossil record.
TWW
Not "Bush and Co", just Bush (alright, and Rumsfeld). Just because Bush's shoelaces are tied doesn't mean he can tie his own shoes - he has people (the "Co") who do it for him. Just like he had someone pull him out of going to 'Nam.
I'm probably grumpy because for the last week my smtpd server has been turning away an average of 1 spam per second, 24hrs a day.
TWW
Might as well remove the only remaining difference between blogs and spam.
TWW
No, that's in Cuba. You know, the little bit of Cuba in the bottom-right corner with the Stars and Stripes flying over it?
TWW
Pirate HD-DVD will be available everywhere as soon as the market is worth the pirates' time to break in. The price-fixing cartel thinks that they'll make more than enough to cover the losses by making as many honest people as possible pay twice for the same content or just plain old pay monopoly prices once.
TWW