Yes, Google does not treat Linux users as first rate consumers. However, they do at least acknowledge our existence (Google Earth, Picasa (kindof), chrome, Android Dev tools). What NetFlix does is completely ignore us. By some definitions you could even argue that they actively ignore us (Seriously, silverlight? WTF?).
Ignore you? Who the f* are you? Who the lot of you represent? The majority of Linux users are... *tada* admins running heavy shit on Linux, not desktop users. First and foremost to start with.
Second, what are your contribution to FOSS? Specially compared to NetFlix.
Just because they don't cater to your specific, alternative-desktop-niche needs that doesn't mean they are smooching to open source. What you are presenting here is simply an argument of convenience. No logic whatsoever behind it. Second, they are under NO obligation to actually even acknowledge your existence. Why should they? Since when open source users and contributors have to acknowledge *you*? They are in the business of maximizing delivery of copyrighted media, and maximizing does not mean catering to *everyone* but to the majority of the market segment.
Whether you like it or not, silverlight (a proprietary product that can actually allow you to create open source applications) is an excellent tool for doing just that (since it is integrated and runs on top of the CLR)... and if it runs in silverlight, it might run on Mono's moonlight (not sure on this, though. Go do some volunteer work on it if you feel so strongly about it - instead of expecting Netflix to bend to your capricious bidding.)
There is nothing in that operational scheme of things that is against producing, consuming and contributing back to open source software projects.
That people actually cry momma and question Netflix's contributions to open source because it doesn't produce a client for their private pet desktops (and without offering to volunteer in creating or working with Netflix for creating a Linux client), man, that's the apex of/. stupidity.
They have taken from the commons and aren't giving back.
Wrong. They contribute to the projects they use.
"Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc."
http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html
Yeah, but since they oh so dare to use silverlight and are not producing a Linux client, the/. in-house retard lot (including the poster of this article) decided in their infinite wisdom that Netflix is hypocrite and not contributing to FOSS. Bunch of useless, clueless fools.
They aren't obligated to give back anything. That's the the whole point of open source.
Exactly. Apparently (and sadly) FOSS debutantes and e-tards who thing they are the shit defenders of open source seem too stupid (or ideological) to actually understand that very important fine point of open source software. Bunch of stupid baboons, the lot of them.
How are open source programmers supposed to implement a Linux port of a proprietary, third-party streaming platform based on Silverlight? Reverse engineering? More importantly, how do they convince Netflix to use it?
Since when a company that touts open source is required to implement a port on Linux? A company can rely on open source and praise it and still remain within the confines of, say, a Windows client. Nowhere there is a requirement in open source users to implement clients for any specific operating system - proprietary or otherwise - using any specific technology stack - proprietary or otherwise.
Once you get big enough, it is no longer possible to keep the devil may care, only beholden to the shareholders attitide, in the real world.
In the real world, companies are not just beholden to the shareholders, but also to their employees and every single person that directly or indirectly work with them and are able to put food in the table. It is stupid, cynical and rather juvenile to forget this fact. It is also irresponsible to expect a company to risk the employment of every person under its payroll to defend an ideological position that was never its own to begin with.
An action of this type not does not amount to a defense of freedom of speech and transparency at all.
Actually it does. The government is avoiding the censorship laws by essentially making veiled threats to companies doing the censorship for them.
And that's the big gaping hole in you argument. It is impossible and illogical to mount an "offensive" defense of freedom of any type if the target of the offensive is a third party being coerced by the actual party accused of violating the freedom being defended. You attack the offender, not those that are being coerced. Anything less amounts too the sadly all-to-common "ends justify the means" argument which is at the root of every violation of inalienable freedoms.
It seems people are responding by making slightly less thinly veiled threats in the opposite direction to prevent the government from using the companies to skirt the law.
Attacking Amazon does not prevent the US government from castigating companies from violating the law (yes, it is not skirting the law but violating established law... you don't like the law, lobby for its change... and yes, it's possible. If people were able to overturn Jim Crow's laws, these type of laws can be changed as well.)
This action does not prevent the government, or any government from that matter, from doing anything of the sort. It is a flawed logical argument what you have here.
But what about the companies caught in the middle? Well, they ammassed so much wealth and power that they put themselves in the middle.
What you just made here is nothing more than an argument of romanticed ideological convenience. There is nothing in logic or ethics that dictate that being successful economically for providing a useful service implies being inherently evil or that one has to surrender the reasonable expectation of not being turned into collateral damage.
If there is a logical consequence from the former to the later, please describe it.
Once you get big enough, it is no longer possible to keep the devil may care, only beholden to the shareholders attitide, in the real world.
But that does not give anyone the right, in the real world to target Amazon. It is not Amazon's obligation to keep the devil away anymore (a subjective statement open to interpretation) than you or I as we carry on with our daily tasks. Being moral does not indicate one is liable for evils one is not in charge of controlling.
Furthermore, being moral does not imply one must forcibly coerce others by threat of force to comply with moral standards that might be impractical to follow in the general case. And that's what these hax0r fanboys are doing, lowering themselves to the same level of the government they are accusing of being immoral and corrupt, to the same level of islamo-fascists and every single type of intolerable bigotry. It is not morality, but pure arbitrary extremism.
More to the point that this attack has nothing to do with Amazon being big or not. It sets a precedent that every company big or small can be a target of these stupid hax0r fanboys. They are pretty much making a Bushist-styled "you are with us or against us" statement with their actions.
Should I had a LLC 1-man company under my name providing, say cloud storage, making just enough money for me to live comfortably, and I deny hosting to Wikileads because, oh shit, Uncle Sam will stick a big one up my ass, risking my ability to put food on the table for me and my family, am I a reasonable target for their hacking? For not siding myself with them against the big-one that can utterly destroy me?
That's pretty much the type of arguments that can logically follow from your position.
It is not a matter of a company being big as this whole debacle is not strictly a function of a company's size. Neither it is a justification.
If they were able to actually knock Amazon offline, which I think is mostly unlikely to happen, it would be the first to make a serious economic impact. Mastercard's website may have been unreachable, but their credit processing facilities were just fine, as I demonstrated with my own card several times over the past few days. Amazon, on the other hand, is in the middle of their holiday rush, which is crucially important to them. IIRC, it is the reason they had the cloud infrastructure in the first place: their immense holiday resources went unused during the rest of the year. The last thing they need is a DDoS attack right now. I wonder if they might try to appease the mob with some kind of nod to anon in the form of a daily book deal or similar...
That mob is not as big as you think it is, nor Amazon infrastructure is the typical one that can be brought down or even dented significantly that easily by script kiddies.
Furthermore, I think this is an asshole move by these Wikileads fan hackers. It is preposterous to subject private business to their uncompromising ideologico-retarded for not subjecting themselves to the US government's ire. Damned if you, damned if you don't. I mean, c'mon, even a retarded 6-grader should be able to see that.
An action of this type not does not amount to a defense of freedom of speech and transparency at all.
It is instead unabashed, unjustifiable blackmailing, attacking a third party's (Amazon) private property (infrastructure) for not aligning itself to a particular political/ideological position, in a fight that it's not its own, and risk the ire of an entity far more powerful that itself (the US government)...
... specially if the given third party (Amazon) never gave a binding promise to do anything of the sort, something that only an arrogant asshole would expect it to in the name of their interpretation of freedom.
His point was that a PFOO is a POINTER to a struct _FOO, and so when you say void SomeFunction(const PFOO), you're saying that the POINTER is constant, not the thing being pointed to, which is probably not what was intended. Since the definition of PFOO is located elsewhere, probably in another header file, it's easy to get yourself confused as to what data type you're dealing with.
Ok, now I get what the OP was referring to. Thanks!
The pointer is constant... not what it "points to" and the typedef "hides" that
Oh, I thought it was something else the OP was referring to and that was escaping me. I don't see why 'typedef' would hide that...unless the person doesn't know that the const in const struct _FOO * only refers to the constant pointer to the struct _FOO (and not to what it points to.)
I wouldn't see it so much as typedef hiding that fact as much as I would see it about people not knowing the rules wrt to const and pointers.
Pointer typedefs were a bad idea in the 1980s. They're just terrible today. One pet peeve of mine is this:
typedef struct _FOO { int Blah; } FOO, *PFOO;
void
SomeFunction(const PFOO);
That const doesn't do what you think it does. There was never a good reason to use pointer typedefs. There is certainly no good reason to do so today. Just say no. If your coding convention disagrees, damn the coding convention.
Care to elaborate (on pointer typedefs and the CONST PFOO usage)? Honest question from someone that hasn't touched a C/C++ for the last 12 years and is trying to clear the cob webs.
Apart from the loans, you don't have much of a point. Just look at other countries and you'll see what I mean. It's not that unusual for doctors in other countries to make half or less what we pay our doctors.
He has a point if his comments are specific to the deplorable state of student finances in the US. One can easily accumulate 30-40K in student loans just to get a BS and MS in an engineering discipline. More for an MBA. For medical students it can get worse. This is assuming going to a university that is both local and public. That was my case, and I raked enough student loans that took a substantial chunk of my salary for the first 10 years of my career. Now it is worse.
And it can get much worse if you want to pursue a certain quality of post-grad education (or a career choice) and your only options are to study 1) in a private university (what my sister had to do); or 2) a non-local university (worse if it has to be a non-local, private one.)
As I sometimes look at the German model of education with envy and admiration, I dread for my poor baby daughter for the time when she goes to college. A substantial chunk of my salary will have to an Ed. fund for her future college expenses sans she has to sell an eye and an ovary just to get a 4-year college degree.
It's really f*up here in the US. How the hell we stay afloat as an industrialized country is still beyond me.
TRWTF, IMHO, is that Tai's article is cited almost 40 times. I'd like to think it was meant as an April Fool's joke and got published too soon (in February).
You'd be surprise how many academic papers cite other papers based on keyword matching and one-line sentence citations only.
Either you are trolling or you are utterly clueless.
Not trolling at all. Indeed, you are unable to answer the question I pose, and instead turn try to turn it around into an attack on me.
Not unable, but simply unwilling. I mean, c'mon. Are you serious that you could not have answered that question yourself by doing a simple google or looking at the MS research publication? Also (and furthermore), why answering the question when it is indeed a loaded one?
Indeed it is a loaded one because it is disingenuous to require industrial research to be significantly revolutionary since 1) revolutionary significance can only be answered and attested in decades, and 2) being a research project and product/software development project are not mutually exclusive states of being.
Where one to apply such fallacious and fictitious criteria equitably, then the overwhelming majority of academic and research projects would be thrown out of the window since they are 1) intertwined with a software development effort and/or 2) do not and most likely will not significantly advance the state of the art and knowledge in computer science.
Revolutionary breakthrough in all science do not come out of the vacuum, but built themselves on top of prior research (much of which would be considered insignificant when taken in isolation). That is why is strange to ask such strange questions. They serve no purpose, and at worse, they are simply loaded statements that do not help advancing one's knowledge on the subject (and might in fact impairs it.)
It is not a serious question regardless of whether you believe it is. If you expect or want serious answers, then put good questions that deserve one.
(for the record, I am not utterly clueless, partially maybe. But not utterly.)
Simple due diligence with an internet search engine would help you reduce the gap in awareness. Somebody already posted (see below) a list of current active research being performed by MS R&D. You can form your own opinion on the revolutionary significance of any of it (which is a loaded - and naive - one given the reasons I outlined above.)
How much money has Microsoft said in its SEC filings that it has spent on Research and Development. What is the result of that money spent?
Now here you are trolling in a grandiose non-sequitur way.
I remember the big PR splash that Microsoft Surface made, and how it was boasted to be a product of Microsoft Research. Then I saw this video of Johnny lee who surpasses Microsoft Surface for $50 in parts and some real creative research and development.
So that's your evidence (an unsurprising marketing gimmick from a for-profit company's marketing department) for questioning MS's research? You take a marketing gimmick to wonder the quality of research being done by a research arm that has the likes of Leslie Lamport on payroll?
One person offered Clippy as a shining star of Microsoft Research.
(I'll pause while the laughter subsides....)
That is funny I grant you that, but I highly doubt how one could take such a dumb suggestion with any seriousness as a counter-example in a serious discussion.
There is no way that a person can be genuinely interested in learning about an organization's research while at the same time indulging in such parochial argumentative gimmicks.
Some good projects of Microsoft Research have been mentioned, but I will ask my question again --- what project in Microsoft Research has dramatically changed the computer industry?
Again, as I mentioned before, yours is a loaded, debatable question. It has no purpose other than making noise. People have already posted links to current MS research
Microsoft researchers built tools that are helpful in testing very large and complex software, essential to try to guarantee that the code does what it's supposed to,
That certainly does not sound like basic research to me. Indeed, it does not even sound like research. It is a software development project.
Can anyone name one Microsoft Research project that has significantly affected the computer industry?
Either you are trolling or you are utterly clueless.
"Right or wrong wrt the decision, it's ultimately caused by the cheaters."
No, it's not. The cheaters didn't force the professor to give a mandatory retake.
Not, they did not. But they give sufficient cause for the professor to exercise his administrative right to force a re-test. Arguing that everything that happened is not ultimately rooted on the cheaters is pure denial.
So honest people have to do extra work, and cheaters get a second chance. What a great life lesson this school is teaching.
The great lesson of life is that:
if you are not a cheat, cheaters will eventually make it harder on you in some shape, form or manner at some point in life; deal with it with dignity.
if you are a cheat, you will eventually make it harder on those who do not; learn to life with dignity
It is actually ridiculous to think life is fair 100% of the time. It isn't. Sometimes, no matter what you do, you are going to end up with the short end of the stick. If you have dignity and fortitude, you might complain a little, but won't expect fairness 100% of the time. You simply grind your teeth and walk over the obstacle (specially a small one such as re-taking a test - which is a very small obstacle in the grand scheme of things.) You do it, you shrug it off and you keep going.
Note: I've been made to retake a midterm (college physics II) because of people cheating, so I know what a PITA it is to re-take a test for something I didn't do.
Obviously it is annoying and it is unfair. But it also obvious that some cases necessitate to drop all results and order a re-test. Smart, hard-working people with a well-place of dignity simply deal with it.
On the other hand, looking at the whole affair as an unfair life lesson betrays a ridiculous, undignifying sense of entitlement, an entitlement that life and the world have never made a promise (much less a guarantee) of.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
I was once at a similar situation (college physics II). Some students cheated, and others (us) didn't. But the professor caught on and decided - for a variety of reasons - to have everyone retake the test. The primary reason for such a course of action is that it becomes almost impossible to determine who cheated and who did not (specially if those who did not did well comparably to those who did cheat.)
Those of us who did not cheat never contemplated calling the professor an idiot or thinking it was a horrendous, despicable act. We were pissed at the cheaters, but not at the professor. Right or wrong wrt the decision, it's ultimately caused by the cheaters.
Making us re-take the test was an injustice, albeit more of an annoyance, responsibility of which falls squarely on the cheaters. As for the professor, that's his right to order a re-test. Really, it is.
A web-based startup can spend merely $3000, and for that they can get 4 to 5 servers. Using Linux, PostgreSQL, Python and other free and open source software means the only cost is in setting up the systems and maintaining them
4 or 5 desktop machines that you put a server OS on maybe. But if you want actual server-class hardware, that $3000 will get you one decent one.
Maybe he has never worked on an environment that actually requires server-class hardware or he thinks startups == home network at mom-n-pop's hardware store.
Indeed. Doesn't matter what this guy might have on the back - 5 boxes or 20 boxes. No bandwidth (or expensive bandwidth) -> no scalability (or scalability that will drive his coffers to the ground.)
This guy's analysis doesn't take into account other factors that affect one's ability to scale - electric foot print, hardware leases, etc.
And why would I want to have my developer doing basic sysadmin work on a regular basis. Yes, I want my developer to be smart enough to do just that (vital for setting up dev sandboxes and working with the infrastructure guy.) But I want him to be focused on development. Beyond a certain size, a startup needs to have an infrastructure that facilitates development rather than depending on developers being swiss-army-knives.
Moreover, why would I want the same hardware to run for years. Hardware fail, specially cheap desktop boxes (the ones this person seems to get for 4-5 at $5,000.) Maybe I might want not one (as the AC suggests) but several boxes for development and testing - If you are a startup, you always want as many or if not more sandboxes than production boxes.
You want good hardware for production, specially if you expect scalability (and thus shitloads of 24/7 traffic). $5000 doesn't cut it. And you want similar hardware for unit/system/pre-production testing.
This guy is suggesting the most rudimentary and infantile of setups: one box for development and internal software. Who the hell can possibly suggest that????? What kind of novice approach would put developers to do development and test on the same box that runs internal production software?
A startup (at least the ones I've been) are not a garage shop nor a village's doctor's office. A start up that has legitimate worries about scalability needs more than that. And startup scratching scalability to stupid programmers or stupid managers is such a sophomore/. cliche devoid of reality and experience, it's not even funny.
We are waiting for decent kernel tracing since a decade, while LTTng is readily available today. It's better than any other tools like perf, ftrace and dtrace. Microsoft Windows has the Event Tracing for Windows since 2003, and if Linux wants to be taken seriously, it has to be mainline and available without kernel patching. And, I think that users should not be experts to use that kind of tools.
You might be Ph.D student, but apparently you are disconnected from industrial reality. Linux not being taken seriously? Are you f* kidding me? Is that going to be part of your problem statement at the start of your dissertation?
Seriously. You take the cake in the academic hyperbole department.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Google does not treat Linux users as first rate consumers. However, they do at least acknowledge our existence (Google Earth, Picasa (kindof), chrome, Android Dev tools). What NetFlix does is completely ignore us. By some definitions you could even argue that they actively ignore us (Seriously, silverlight? WTF?).
Ignore you? Who the f* are you? Who the lot of you represent? The majority of Linux users are ... *tada* admins running heavy shit on Linux, not desktop users. First and foremost to start with.
Second, what are your contribution to FOSS? Specially compared to NetFlix.
"Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc." http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html [netflix.com]
Just because they don't cater to your specific, alternative-desktop-niche needs that doesn't mean they are smooching to open source. What you are presenting here is simply an argument of convenience. No logic whatsoever behind it. Second, they are under NO obligation to actually even acknowledge your existence. Why should they? Since when open source users and contributors have to acknowledge *you*? They are in the business of maximizing delivery of copyrighted media, and maximizing does not mean catering to *everyone* but to the majority of the market segment.
Whether you like it or not, silverlight (a proprietary product that can actually allow you to create open source applications) is an excellent tool for doing just that (since it is integrated and runs on top of the CLR)... and if it runs in silverlight, it might run on Mono's moonlight (not sure on this, though. Go do some volunteer work on it if you feel so strongly about it - instead of expecting Netflix to bend to your capricious bidding.)
There is nothing in that operational scheme of things that is against producing, consuming and contributing back to open source software projects.
That people actually cry momma and question Netflix's contributions to open source because it doesn't produce a client for their private pet desktops (and without offering to volunteer in creating or working with Netflix for creating a Linux client), man, that's the apex of /. stupidity.
They are mooching.
They have taken from the commons and aren't giving back.
Wrong. They contribute to the projects they use. "Here is an incomplete sampling of the projects we utilize, we have contributed back to most of them: Hudson, Hadoop, Hive, Honu, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Ivy, Cassandra, HBase, etc, etc." http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-use-and-contribute-to-open.html
Yeah, but since they oh so dare to use silverlight and are not producing a Linux client, the /. in-house retard lot (including the poster of this article) decided in their infinite wisdom that Netflix is hypocrite and not contributing to FOSS. Bunch of useless, clueless fools.
They aren't obligated to give back anything. That's the the whole point of open source.
Exactly. Apparently (and sadly) FOSS debutantes and e-tards who thing they are the shit defenders of open source seem too stupid (or ideological) to actually understand that very important fine point of open source software. Bunch of stupid baboons, the lot of them.
How are open source programmers supposed to implement a Linux port of a proprietary, third-party streaming platform based on Silverlight? Reverse engineering? More importantly, how do they convince Netflix to use it?
Since when a company that touts open source is required to implement a port on Linux? A company can rely on open source and praise it and still remain within the confines of, say, a Windows client. Nowhere there is a requirement in open source users to implement clients for any specific operating system - proprietary or otherwise - using any specific technology stack - proprietary or otherwise.
Once you get big enough, it is no longer possible to keep the devil may care, only beholden to the shareholders attitide, in the real world.
In the real world, companies are not just beholden to the shareholders, but also to their employees and every single person that directly or indirectly work with them and are able to put food in the table. It is stupid, cynical and rather juvenile to forget this fact. It is also irresponsible to expect a company to risk the employment of every person under its payroll to defend an ideological position that was never its own to begin with.
An action of this type not does not amount to a defense of freedom of speech and transparency at all.
Actually it does. The government is avoiding the censorship laws by essentially making veiled threats to companies doing the censorship for them.
And that's the big gaping hole in you argument. It is impossible and illogical to mount an "offensive" defense of freedom of any type if the target of the offensive is a third party being coerced by the actual party accused of violating the freedom being defended. You attack the offender, not those that are being coerced. Anything less amounts too the sadly all-to-common "ends justify the means" argument which is at the root of every violation of inalienable freedoms.
It seems people are responding by making slightly less thinly veiled threats in the opposite direction to prevent the government from using the companies to skirt the law.
Attacking Amazon does not prevent the US government from castigating companies from violating the law (yes, it is not skirting the law but violating established law... you don't like the law, lobby for its change... and yes, it's possible. If people were able to overturn Jim Crow's laws, these type of laws can be changed as well.)
This action does not prevent the government, or any government from that matter, from doing anything of the sort. It is a flawed logical argument what you have here.
But what about the companies caught in the middle? Well, they ammassed so much wealth and power that they put themselves in the middle.
May I introduce you to the is-ought problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
What you just made here is nothing more than an argument of romanticed ideological convenience. There is nothing in logic or ethics that dictate that being successful economically for providing a useful service implies being inherently evil or that one has to surrender the reasonable expectation of not being turned into collateral damage.
If there is a logical consequence from the former to the later, please describe it.
Once you get big enough, it is no longer possible to keep the devil may care, only beholden to the shareholders attitide, in the real world.
But that does not give anyone the right, in the real world to target Amazon. It is not Amazon's obligation to keep the devil away anymore (a subjective statement open to interpretation) than you or I as we carry on with our daily tasks. Being moral does not indicate one is liable for evils one is not in charge of controlling.
Furthermore, being moral does not imply one must forcibly coerce others by threat of force to comply with moral standards that might be impractical to follow in the general case. And that's what these hax0r fanboys are doing, lowering themselves to the same level of the government they are accusing of being immoral and corrupt, to the same level of islamo-fascists and every single type of intolerable bigotry. It is not morality, but pure arbitrary extremism.
More to the point that this attack has nothing to do with Amazon being big or not. It sets a precedent that every company big or small can be a target of these stupid hax0r fanboys. They are pretty much making a Bushist-styled "you are with us or against us" statement with their actions.
Should I had a LLC 1-man company under my name providing, say cloud storage, making just enough money for me to live comfortably, and I deny hosting to Wikileads because, oh shit, Uncle Sam will stick a big one up my ass, risking my ability to put food on the table for me and my family, am I a reasonable target for their hacking? For not siding myself with them against the big-one that can utterly destroy me?
That's pretty much the type of arguments that can logically follow from your position.
It is not a matter of a company being big as this whole debacle is not strictly a function of a company's size. Neither it is a justification.
If they were able to actually knock Amazon offline, which I think is mostly unlikely to happen, it would be the first to make a serious economic impact. Mastercard's website may have been unreachable, but their credit processing facilities were just fine, as I demonstrated with my own card several times over the past few days. Amazon, on the other hand, is in the middle of their holiday rush, which is crucially important to them. IIRC, it is the reason they had the cloud infrastructure in the first place: their immense holiday resources went unused during the rest of the year. The last thing they need is a DDoS attack right now. I wonder if they might try to appease the mob with some kind of nod to anon in the form of a daily book deal or similar...
That mob is not as big as you think it is, nor Amazon infrastructure is the typical one that can be brought down or even dented significantly that easily by script kiddies.
Furthermore, I think this is an asshole move by these Wikileads fan hackers. It is preposterous to subject private business to their uncompromising ideologico-retarded for not subjecting themselves to the US government's ire. Damned if you, damned if you don't. I mean, c'mon, even a retarded 6-grader should be able to see that.
An action of this type not does not amount to a defense of freedom of speech and transparency at all.
It is instead unabashed, unjustifiable blackmailing, attacking a third party's (Amazon) private property (infrastructure) for not aligning itself to a particular political/ideological position, in a fight that it's not its own, and risk the ire of an entity far more powerful that itself (the US government)...
alphas weren't much more expensive... if i remember right $800 got a 1.2 Ghtz bare bones system... about the same as a 433Mhtz with pentiums.
got it... so the ignorant public just never UNDERSTOOD how good the alpha product was and that is the reason they didn't buy it.
you're an idiot.
if only microsoft had dedicated itself to a symbiotic relationship with alpha to cross optimize... wahhhhh wahhhhh.
perhaps one day you'll not be an idiot?
Apparently, gratuitous insulting has become the cornerstone of logical arguments. Bravo.
His point was that a PFOO is a POINTER to a struct _FOO, and so when you say void SomeFunction(const PFOO), you're saying that the POINTER is constant, not the thing being pointed to, which is probably not what was intended. Since the definition of PFOO is located elsewhere, probably in another header file, it's easy to get yourself confused as to what data type you're dealing with.
Ok, now I get what the OP was referring to. Thanks!
The pointer is constant... not what it "points to" and the typedef "hides" that
Oh, I thought it was something else the OP was referring to and that was escaping me. I don't see why 'typedef' would hide that ...unless the person doesn't know that the const in const struct _FOO * only refers to the constant pointer to the struct _FOO (and not to what it points to.)
I wouldn't see it so much as typedef hiding that fact as much as I would see it about people not knowing the rules wrt to const and pointers.
Pointer typedefs were a bad idea in the 1980s. They're just terrible today. One pet peeve of mine is this: typedef struct _FOO { int Blah; } FOO, *PFOO;
void SomeFunction(const PFOO);
That const doesn't do what you think it does. There was never a good reason to use pointer typedefs. There is certainly no good reason to do so today. Just say no. If your coding convention disagrees, damn the coding convention.
Care to elaborate (on pointer typedefs and the CONST PFOO usage)? Honest question from someone that hasn't touched a C/C++ for the last 12 years and is trying to clear the cob webs.
Apart from the loans, you don't have much of a point. Just look at other countries and you'll see what I mean. It's not that unusual for doctors in other countries to make half or less what we pay our doctors.
He has a point if his comments are specific to the deplorable state of student finances in the US. One can easily accumulate 30-40K in student loans just to get a BS and MS in an engineering discipline. More for an MBA. For medical students it can get worse. This is assuming going to a university that is both local and public. That was my case, and I raked enough student loans that took a substantial chunk of my salary for the first 10 years of my career. Now it is worse.
And it can get much worse if you want to pursue a certain quality of post-grad education (or a career choice) and your only options are to study 1) in a private university (what my sister had to do); or 2) a non-local university (worse if it has to be a non-local, private one.)
As I sometimes look at the German model of education with envy and admiration, I dread for my poor baby daughter for the time when she goes to college. A substantial chunk of my salary will have to an Ed. fund for her future college expenses sans she has to sell an eye and an ovary just to get a 4-year college degree.
It's really f*up here in the US. How the hell we stay afloat as an industrialized country is still beyond me.
TRWTF, IMHO, is that Tai's article is cited almost 40 times. I'd like to think it was meant as an April Fool's joke and got published too soon (in February).
You'd be surprise how many academic papers cite other papers based on keyword matching and one-line sentence citations only.
Here, another one, just off the press:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/11/LINQ-Z3
Let us know if that is revolutionary enough.
Either you are trolling or you are utterly clueless.
Not trolling at all. Indeed, you are unable to answer the question I pose, and instead turn try to turn it around into an attack on me.
Not unable, but simply unwilling. I mean, c'mon. Are you serious that you could not have answered that question yourself by doing a simple google or looking at the MS research publication? Also (and furthermore), why answering the question when it is indeed a loaded one?
Indeed it is a loaded one because it is disingenuous to require industrial research to be significantly revolutionary since 1) revolutionary significance can only be answered and attested in decades, and 2) being a research project and product/software development project are not mutually exclusive states of being.
Where one to apply such fallacious and fictitious criteria equitably, then the overwhelming majority of academic and research projects would be thrown out of the window since they are 1) intertwined with a software development effort and/or 2) do not and most likely will not significantly advance the state of the art and knowledge in computer science.
Revolutionary breakthrough in all science do not come out of the vacuum, but built themselves on top of prior research (much of which would be considered insignificant when taken in isolation). That is why is strange to ask such strange questions. They serve no purpose, and at worse, they are simply loaded statements that do not help advancing one's knowledge on the subject (and might in fact impairs it.) It is not a serious question regardless of whether you believe it is. If you expect or want serious answers, then put good questions that deserve one.
(for the record, I am not utterly clueless, partially maybe. But not utterly.)
Simple due diligence with an internet search engine would help you reduce the gap in awareness. Somebody already posted (see below) a list of current active research being performed by MS R&D. You can form your own opinion on the revolutionary significance of any of it (which is a loaded - and naive - one given the reasons I outlined above.)
How much money has Microsoft said in its SEC filings that it has spent on Research and Development. What is the result of that money spent?
Now here you are trolling in a grandiose non-sequitur way.
I remember the big PR splash that Microsoft Surface made, and how it was boasted to be a product of Microsoft Research. Then I saw this video of Johnny lee who surpasses Microsoft Surface for $50 in parts and some real creative research and development.
So that's your evidence (an unsurprising marketing gimmick from a for-profit company's marketing department) for questioning MS's research? You take a marketing gimmick to wonder the quality of research being done by a research arm that has the likes of Leslie Lamport on payroll?
One person offered Clippy as a shining star of Microsoft Research.
(I'll pause while the laughter subsides....)
That is funny I grant you that, but I highly doubt how one could take such a dumb suggestion with any seriousness as a counter-example in a serious discussion.
There is no way that a person can be genuinely interested in learning about an organization's research while at the same time indulging in such parochial argumentative gimmicks.
Some good projects of Microsoft Research have been mentioned, but I will ask my question again --- what project in Microsoft Research has dramatically changed the computer industry?
Again, as I mentioned before, yours is a loaded, debatable question. It has no purpose other than making noise. People have already posted links to current MS research
From the article:
Microsoft researchers built tools that are helpful in testing very large and complex software, essential to try to guarantee that the code does what it's supposed to,
That certainly does not sound like basic research to me. Indeed, it does not even sound like research. It is a software development project.
Can anyone name one Microsoft Research project that has significantly affected the computer industry?
Either you are trolling or you are utterly clueless.
That could sound like an excellent master plan to repopulate the Earth after the apocalypse, sir.
They have found it!
"Right or wrong wrt the decision, it's ultimately caused by the cheaters." No, it's not. The cheaters didn't force the professor to give a mandatory retake.
Not, they did not. But they give sufficient cause for the professor to exercise his administrative right to force a re-test. Arguing that everything that happened is not ultimately rooted on the cheaters is pure denial.
So honest people have to do extra work, and cheaters get a second chance. What a great life lesson this school is teaching.
The great lesson of life is that:
It is actually ridiculous to think life is fair 100% of the time. It isn't. Sometimes, no matter what you do, you are going to end up with the short end of the stick. If you have dignity and fortitude, you might complain a little, but won't expect fairness 100% of the time. You simply grind your teeth and walk over the obstacle (specially a small one such as re-taking a test - which is a very small obstacle in the grand scheme of things.) You do it, you shrug it off and you keep going.
Note: I've been made to retake a midterm (college physics II) because of people cheating, so I know what a PITA it is to re-take a test for something I didn't do.
Obviously it is annoying and it is unfair. But it also obvious that some cases necessitate to drop all results and order a re-test. Smart, hard-working people with a well-place of dignity simply deal with it.
On the other hand, looking at the whole affair as an unfair life lesson betrays a ridiculous, undignifying sense of entitlement, an entitlement that life and the world have never made a promise (much less a guarantee) of.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
I was once at a similar situation (college physics II). Some students cheated, and others (us) didn't. But the professor caught on and decided - for a variety of reasons - to have everyone retake the test. The primary reason for such a course of action is that it becomes almost impossible to determine who cheated and who did not (specially if those who did not did well comparably to those who did cheat.)
Those of us who did not cheat never contemplated calling the professor an idiot or thinking it was a horrendous, despicable act. We were pissed at the cheaters, but not at the professor. Right or wrong wrt the decision, it's ultimately caused by the cheaters.
Making us re-take the test was an injustice, albeit more of an annoyance, responsibility of which falls squarely on the cheaters. As for the professor, that's his right to order a re-test. Really, it is.
A web-based startup can spend merely $3000, and for that they can get 4 to 5 servers. Using Linux, PostgreSQL, Python and other free and open source software means the only cost is in setting up the systems and maintaining them
4 or 5 desktop machines that you put a server OS on maybe. But if you want actual server-class hardware, that $3000 will get you one decent one.
Maybe he has never worked on an environment that actually requires server-class hardware or he thinks startups == home network at mom-n-pop's hardware store.
You seem to have left out bandwidth.
Indeed. Doesn't matter what this guy might have on the back - 5 boxes or 20 boxes. No bandwidth (or expensive bandwidth) -> no scalability (or scalability that will drive his coffers to the ground.)
This guy's analysis doesn't take into account other factors that affect one's ability to scale - electric foot print, hardware leases, etc.
And why would I want to have my developer doing basic sysadmin work on a regular basis. Yes, I want my developer to be smart enough to do just that (vital for setting up dev sandboxes and working with the infrastructure guy.) But I want him to be focused on development. Beyond a certain size, a startup needs to have an infrastructure that facilitates development rather than depending on developers being swiss-army-knives.
Moreover, why would I want the same hardware to run for years. Hardware fail, specially cheap desktop boxes (the ones this person seems to get for 4-5 at $5,000.) Maybe I might want not one (as the AC suggests) but several boxes for development and testing - If you are a startup, you always want as many or if not more sandboxes than production boxes.
You want good hardware for production, specially if you expect scalability (and thus shitloads of 24/7 traffic). $5000 doesn't cut it. And you want similar hardware for unit/system/pre-production testing.
This guy is suggesting the most rudimentary and infantile of setups: one box for development and internal software. Who the hell can possibly suggest that????? What kind of novice approach would put developers to do development and test on the same box that runs internal production software?
A startup (at least the ones I've been) are not a garage shop nor a village's doctor's office. A start up that has legitimate worries about scalability needs more than that. And startup scratching scalability to stupid programmers or stupid managers is such a sophomore /. cliche devoid of reality and experience, it's not even funny.
We are waiting for decent kernel tracing since a decade, while LTTng is readily available today. It's better than any other tools like perf, ftrace and dtrace. Microsoft Windows has the Event Tracing for Windows since 2003, and if Linux wants to be taken seriously, it has to be mainline and available without kernel patching. And, I think that users should not be experts to use that kind of tools.
You might be Ph.D student, but apparently you are disconnected from industrial reality. Linux not being taken seriously? Are you f* kidding me? Is that going to be part of your problem statement at the start of your dissertation?
Seriously. You take the cake in the academic hyperbole department.
You have no clue, buddy. Your opinion is uninformed.
Elaborate.