No. What does this have to do with what I said? The stock price depends on a lot of things. But yes, one of the reasons the stock price was low was certainly that Nokia was underperforming in the smartphone market relative to the expectations investors had. But this is something else than being "on the way out" which would imply that they already essentially lost. If you add more sales than your next best competitor and are profitable you are obviously not "on the way out", even if you disappoint Wall Street. Nokia was on "on the way out" the moment they decided to switch to Windows Phone. Just look at the slashdot comments when this was announced: It was entirely predictable that this strategy will fail.
The networking unit had trouble at that time. The smartphone unit was highly profitable and growing faster than the competition in absolute sales (the quarterly reports are all available). And yes, i don't deny that Nokia had problems before in this area (despite profits and growing sales), but "on its way out" is far from the truth. The numbers simply do not support this. If your sales grow faster than from your competition while you are profitable you are clearly not "on the way out".
If you read again, you may notice that I did not even tell you what journals I think good. I told you how you could start to figure out by yourself what the overall scientific community actually thinks are important journals.
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present.
Nonsense. Although there were some well-known industry shills which tried to argue this to prevent regulation against environmental pollution. As far as I know, nobody took them seriously in the scientific community. Unfortunately, nuclear fanboys jumped right on this bullshit (and the internet is a great source of such nonsense).
Wait, what? No, there's some things which actually have negative medical impacts at the wrong levels, but the right level is a non-zero number.
I did not say that everything follows a linear response.
While it may, in fact, be perfectly good to use LNT for an utter worst-case scenario, it's not
The worst case scenario could easily be much worse the LNT because the deviation could be in both directions. E.g. for substances which have an effect on the endocrine system during development, consequences are much worse than predicted by LNT from higher doses.
necessarily best for any purpose giving us realistic numbers, especially as we get a better understanding of cancer.
The linear response is very well established for for high doses of radiation. There is also some plausible mechanism which predict a linear behaviour (double-strand breaks which are not perfectly repaired but have a residual risk of causing cancer). On the other hand, there is not really any convencing evidence for a non-linear behaviour for radiation at low doses.
For higher doses we know from the data that it is linear (and newer large-scale studies confirm this even for doses as low as used in CT scans). There is some region in between where it could be non-linear because of certain effects, but so far there is not really any convincing evidence that this is indeed the case or proposed mechanism which would seem plausible.
There's no reliable evidence that there isn't, either, and I think a large part of the complaint is that when people trot out the numbers they typically don't give context.
But there are plausible mechanisms, i.e. theory which predicts a linear behaviour. This theory can explain the existing data and we predict using this theory. This is how science works.
Also, I had to study those mechanisms. Their failure is actually relatively predictable and, in fact, to a certain extent desirable because those are the mechanisms by which new genes are produced. Part of the immune system's job, we've found, is to detect and dispose of highly defective cells, which is part of why you see cancer clustering in the demographic groups you do--and why, in healthy young adults, cancer is considered unusual,
But sometimes it might fail to dispose defective cells, doesn't it? Or do you claim this always works perfectly. Because this is essentially what the poster I replied to claimed: No risk at all below a certain dose. Think about it this way: Try to build a machine which is perfectly resilient against destruction of some random subset of its components (and this is what ionizing radiation does to cells). Is this plausible?
This is actually part of why LNT is good for predicting a worst-case--but not terribly good for reliability because some of the factors are dependent upon human behavioral factors, which may result in fewer cancers on the whole, and in fact a certain percentage of cases will only be detected by paranoia and sensitive tests...and clear up on their own.
Individual differences are a different issue, I do not see why this should matter here?
Sorry, selectively picking some random studies of low quality which happen to confirm your preconceptions is not the right way to approach this. One can "prove" all kinds of nonsense in this way. I recommend to start your research with review articles in highly regarded journals. Google scholar's "Metrics" can give you a pretty good idea what journals are important (hint: health physics is not, it is a journal from a special interest group with a clear bias).
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present.
Nonsense. Although there were some well-known industry shills which tried to argue this to prevent regulation against environmental pollution. As far as I know, nobody took them seriously in the scientific community. Unfortunately, nuclear fanboys jumped right on this bullshit (and the internet is a great source of such nonsense).
This is because natural selection ensures that we can survive the amount of that toxin that we normally find in the environment.
This is true (as long as normally refers to relatively long time frames), but this does not imply your first statement. In case of radiation, natural selection evolved quite sophisticated mechanisms to prevent harm from radiation. But these mechanism can still fail with a very small probability. Since this is a statistical effect, it is clear that this *must be linear* at extremely low doses for fundamental reasons. For higher doses we know from the data that it is linear (and newer large-scale studies confirm this even for doses as low as used in CT scans). There is some region in between where it could be non-linear because of certain effects, but so far there is not really any convincing evidence that this is indeed the case or proposed mechanism which would seem plausible.
This includes the constant drizzle of background radiation that we live in.
Yes, which also causes cancer. Just with a very low probability. Once this probability was so small that the risk from cancer was as equal to the cost of having more expensive repair mechanisms natural selection did not evolve this further.
In fact, the scientific term for belief in LNT in chemistry is "homeopathy."
Nonsense. Homeopathy is the irrational believe that a extremely low dose could be beneficial and that the lower the dose the *more* effective it is. This has nothing to do with LNT. In fact LNT contradicts out homeopathy. That low doses could be beneficial is known as hormesis which is largely nonsense, but promoted by some of the most loudest critics of the LNT.
For another opinion, see report from a committee of the national academy of sciences (but what do they know? clearly this is just a bunch of wackos which do not know any science):
At doses of 100 mSv or less, statistical limitations make it difficult to evaluate cancer risk in humans. A comprehensive review of available biological and bio-physical data led the committee to conclude that the risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans. This assumption is termed the "inear-no-threshold" Source: http://dels.nas.edu/resources/...
Yes, 10000 is certainly exaggerated. On the other hand, none is also clearly nonsense. Here a quote from a study which tries to estimate it:
"We estimate an additional 130 (15-1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24-1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study." Energy Environ. Sci., 2012,5, 8743-8757
Overall, the risks of nuclear a quite reasonable and preferable to coal. Unfortunately, it is far too expensive. Fortunately, there are other alternatives (renewables and energy efficiency) which make much more sense.
For nuclear, load-following may be technically possible to some degree, but of course it makes bad economics even worse. So nobody in their right mind would ever build a nuclear plant with the intention to not run it as much as possible, i.e. for base load (not that anybody in the western world builds nuclear plants for base load - this is also already too expensive). Also a big problem with nuclear are unplanned shut-downs which cannot be predicted.
"Both wind and solar have very poor load following capacity - as they cannot automatically respond significantly to changes in grid frequency (except in the case of overfrequency), whereas most thermal plants have the capacity to automatically increase power, provided they are not at capacity, in response to a drop in grid frequency"
I think you are confused. This is not a technical issue. Of course, solar and wind could follow load very easily if they are not run at capacity. The thing is, once you have such a plant it does not make sense to not run it a full capacity, because the marginal cost for production is close to zero. For thermal plants it makes sense to save fuel if you have a producer with less marginal cost. So it is simply an economical decision to max out the renewables when they are available and balance with other sources.
But in general, this discussion gets more ridiculous every time with people claiming that renewables cannot possible work for the some reasons (intermittency, grid stability,...), , when they already work just fine in practice and on very large scale and all these issues turn out to be quite manageable. And still some fans present nuclear as *the solution* on slashdot over and over again, while in *the real world* nobody builds nuclear anymore because it is simply too expensive. At some point you just have to acknowledge reality.
"What has all this bought in the way of safety? One point of view often expressed privately by those involved in design and construction is that it has bought nothing."
this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed.
Sorry, this is almost completely worthless without reproducible builds. (which finally some people started working on in debian) A compromised build host of a single debian developer (of which there are how many?) could easily introduce backdoor into a binary package which could be very hard to detect.
But because we have gaping security holes in essential crypto and with the low quality of software in general this is a mood point anyway.
I am more a fan of Linus than RMS myself, but your comments about RMS are far off. The GPL allows for-profit use. In fact, adding restrictions to only allow non-profit use is incompatible with GPL. Also RMS created highly successful projects. Ever heard of gcc, emacs,...? Linux would probably not exist without gcc. So far these projects seem to do quite well.
Regardless of the efficiency of the process, overgeneration of renewable power is still a huge problem. Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.
I would say that statement is highly misleading. While there a negative prices sometimes on the spot market, this does not not mean that most power exported on the day are sold at negative prices. Most exports are based on long-term contracts, and not affected by negative prices on a short term market at all.
I think the big deal is how decisions are made: In the past, somebody would write a new software and people who liked or needed it would start to migrate to it. Then later it may become the default, but other software would still continue to work and be supported for a long time. Nowadays, a decision is made somewhere and changes are pushed to users who do not want it, while support for alternatives is dropped quickly. So in the end, I think it is a question of software freedom in a very real and practical sense.
Nonsense. Many important allies of the US such as Germany and France opposed the invasion. The veto of the Russians was not a slap in the face (this is business as usual). A slap in the face was that the foreign minister of a close ally directly questions the "evidence" for WMD presented officially as justification to invade a foreign country.
They didn't run their mobile phone business into the ground by clinging to symbian. In fact, they had a great successor already ready: Meego. They killed themselves by: 1) switching to Windows Phone, which was already failing on the market, and at that point in time was in no way competitive 2) already declaring Symbian to be dead before they had working Windows Phones ready 3) refusing to sell the N9 in major markets also it was a clear hit and could have brought in a lot of cash 4) having Windows Phones which initially had a lot of bugs and problems 5) screwing over the few customers who bought their initial Windows phones by not upgrading to Windows Phone 8, 6) having only few very similar smartphones etc....
Yes, it is still no match, but you are confusing specs with design. If one looks at the values from the TOP 500, it doesn't seem to perform bad. In the LINPACK benchmark it comes much closer to the theoretical value than other systems. To me, this is a sign of a very good design. The processor is said to be inspired by alpha. My point is: China is already building supercomputers using their own processors... They are catching up.
This should be up-modded. Yes, we need a way for users to fund open source developers directly. I would certainly pay a few hours of development time for somebody to implement video playback support in evince. (I am waiting for the feature for years, but instead evince got a new GUI).
Yes, these are the C++ answers which I expected and they demonstrate the problem: You can only have static arrays which can live on the stack or dynamic arrays which then must live on the heap. My real world requirement (this is not a synthetic example) is to have dynamic arrays on the stack, because allocation overhead would be huge if you have to allocate temporary arrays each time you process a voxel of 3D volume. Of course, you could work around this ans pre-allocate the temporary memory outside of the loop, but this would unnecessarily complicate the design, especially when you then parallelize the loop. That C++ has no good way of doing this is simply a deficiency of the language.
I don't think that putting this on the stack is "fundamentally wrong". First of all, it is 2015: 424 bytes are not much at all. You can have Gigabytes of stack and it does not matter. On all modern systems with a MMU, it is virtual memory, so if you don't use it it does not cost you anything. With multi-threading on 32 bit there is the risk that you can run out of address space (some compilers support split stacks for this reason). On 64 bit this issue simple does not exist any more. There is no reason whatsoever to not use the stack as much as you can.
But even if you have bounded stack space for some reason (e.g. an embedded system without MMU), this not even a valid argument against VLAs at all. Dynamic arrays are not necessarily bigger than static arrays, or other stuff people are putting on the stack. In fact, the opposite is true: If you need to put things on the stack (see above) and do not have dynamic arrays, you would have to put an array of the maximally possible size on the stack. This is clearly worse.
You have a minor point that heap allocation might give you a useful error while stack overrun might corrupt some other part of the memory. I do not think this is really true in practice though. For the following reasons:
- Usually with memory overcommitment you would not get a allocation error even on the heap, but a SEGFAULT when accessing a new page which cannot be allocated. To get an actual memory allocation error you basically have to limit your heap size.
- With a stack overrun you would also get a SEGFAULT which you can catch. You are right that there is the possibility to jump over the guard area with a large allocation, but remember, the guard area is virtual memory and on 64bit you can make it very big at no cost at all. Finally, if you really need to close this loophole, you could use a compiler which inserts run-time checks. So this is not a language-level problem at all.
But the array dimensions would be template parameters - and not be dynamic.
Also the type would look something std::array< std::array<double, 3 >, 3 > . This is a lot more complicated than int[3][3]. But again, I need int[A][B] where A and B are not constant. And this is a simple example, god forbid you need a temporary array on the stack... Maybe you can use alloca (which is not standard I think) and compute the array indices by hand.
As far as I know, there is no good C++ solution. I guess this is the reason std::dynarray and runtime arrays have been proposed for C++14 (did one of them got in?).
In the X Window System core protocol, only four kinds of packets are sent, asynchronously, over the network: requests, replies, events, and errors.
That whole request / reply bit sailed over your head I see. The wire might be asynchronous but Xlib, the library that virtually all client code uses is filled with synchronous code that sends the request and waits for the reply. e.g. call XGetWindowAttributes and it will block until the response comes back.
True. But you claimed X11 does not have async IPC.This is clearly false. Also a lot of stuff is asynchronous even in Xlib. If your point is that Xlib sucks I agree with you - but this does not imply that one needs to invent a new on-the-wire protocol.
There have been attempts to use xcb instead which is an async API but it turns out writing async code is hard, particularly when dealing with legacy code and an arcane windowing system that sends out a storm of messages. It's not hard to find xcb backend projects that have floundered.
Wayland is - as you point out - also an async API. I also used xcb myself, and did not find it too difficult. (most developers woulde use a toolkit and do no care anyway). Legacy code is not a valid criticism. Arcance is simply your personal opinion. I find the X protocol quite OK. "Storms of messages" may be true in some cases, but is not really a problem in an async API or for local clients and could also be easily adressed without rewriting everything and breaking compatibility.
It is called a pixmap.
A pixmap is not a surface. A surface is a texture under the management of a GPU (or software emulation of a GPU). X has no concept of surface.
I am bit puzzled why you think a pixmap could not be on the GPU.
It is damage based windowing system. Hence the reason for extensions to work through this.
I am not sure what this has to do with what you said before and why you think Wayland would not be damaged-based, e.g. the client also tells the compositer which part of a buffer is damaged: wl_surface::damage - mark part of the surface damaged
I am not crying. In fact, I am happy with X. I just point out that I don't see how Wayland has *anything* to offer for a desktop user. Not even performance. But it has disadvantages: And breaking compatibility is most serious one. XWayland only solves one direction (running X clients on Wayland) and not the other (running Wayland clients on X). Finally, there are already mobile devices with Wayland without XWayland, e.g. Jolla. It breaks compatibility with the excellent N9, which is really stupid.
If you don't see why it has anything to offer I suggest you look at the Wayland website where it explains in detail why X is broken.
I looked at the website before. I even watched the stupid talk everybody refers to all the time. I still see no real advantage.
If virtually every X developer can see the need then I don't see why others can't.
That seems to be a myth spread by Wayland proponents.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice case of magical thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?titl...
If you want to sell a division, you don't run it into the ground first. No, this wasn't good for Nokia.
No. What does this have to do with what I said? The stock price depends on a lot of things. But yes, one of the reasons the stock price was low was certainly that Nokia was underperforming in the smartphone market relative to the expectations investors had. But this is something else than being "on the way out" which would imply that they already essentially lost. If you add more sales than your next best competitor and are profitable you are obviously not "on the way out", even if you disappoint Wall Street. Nokia was on "on the way out" the moment they decided to switch to Windows Phone. Just look at the slashdot comments when this was announced: It was entirely predictable that this strategy will fail.
The networking unit had trouble at that time. The smartphone unit was highly profitable and growing faster than the competition in absolute sales (the quarterly reports are all available). And yes, i don't deny that Nokia had problems before in this area (despite profits and growing sales), but "on its way out" is far from the truth. The numbers simply do not support this. If your sales grow faster than from your competition while you are profitable you are clearly not "on the way out".
If you read again, you may notice that I did not even tell you what journals I think good. I told you how you could start to figure out by yourself what the overall scientific community actually thinks are important journals.
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present.
Nonsense. Although there were some well-known industry shills which tried to argue this to prevent regulation against environmental pollution. As far as I know, nobody took them seriously in the scientific community. Unfortunately, nuclear fanboys jumped right on this bullshit (and the internet is a great source of such nonsense).
Wait, what? No, there's some things which actually have negative medical impacts at the wrong levels, but the right level is a non-zero number.
I did not say that everything follows a linear response.
While it may, in fact, be perfectly good to use LNT for an utter worst-case scenario, it's not
The worst case scenario could easily be much worse the LNT because the deviation could
be in both directions. E.g. for substances which have an effect on the endocrine system
during development, consequences are much worse than predicted by LNT from higher doses.
necessarily best for any purpose giving us realistic numbers, especially as we get a better understanding of cancer.
The linear response is very well established for for high doses of radiation. There is also some plausible mechanism which predict a linear behaviour (double-strand breaks which are not
perfectly repaired but have a residual risk of causing cancer). On the other hand, there is not really any convencing evidence for a non-linear behaviour for radiation at low doses.
For higher doses we know from the data that it is linear (and newer large-scale studies confirm this even for doses as low as used in CT scans). There is some region in between where it could be non-linear because of certain effects, but so far there is not really any convincing evidence that this is indeed the case or proposed mechanism which would seem plausible.
There's no reliable evidence that there isn't, either, and I think a large part of the complaint is that when people trot out the numbers they typically don't give context.
But there are plausible mechanisms, i.e. theory which predicts a linear behaviour. This theory
can explain the existing data and we predict using this theory. This is how science works.
Also, I had to study those mechanisms. Their failure is actually relatively predictable and, in fact, to a certain extent desirable because those are the mechanisms by which new genes are produced.
Part of the immune system's job, we've found, is to detect and dispose of highly defective cells, which is part of why you see cancer clustering in the demographic groups you do--and why, in healthy young adults, cancer is considered unusual,
But sometimes it might fail to dispose defective cells, doesn't it? Or do you claim this always works perfectly. Because this is essentially what the poster I replied to claimed: No risk at all below a certain dose. Think about it this way: Try to build a machine which is perfectly resilient against destruction of some random subset of its components (and this is what ionizing radiation does to cells). Is this plausible?
This is actually part of why LNT is good for predicting a worst-case--but not terribly good for reliability because some of the factors are dependent upon human behavioral factors, which may result in fewer cancers on the whole, and in fact a certain percentage of cases will only be detected by paranoia and sensitive tests...and clear up on their own.
Individual differences are a different issue, I do not see why this should matter here?
This includes the c
Sorry, selectively picking some random studies of low quality which happen to confirm your preconceptions is not the right way to approach this. One can "prove" all kinds of nonsense in this way. I recommend to start your research with review articles in highly regarded journals. Google scholar's "Metrics" can give you a pretty good idea what journals are important (hint: health physics is not, it is a journal from a special interest group with a clear bias).
Guy on slashdot with pseudo-scientific opinion thinks he is smarter than real scientists.... I am deeply impressed.
In fact, there is NO valid example of a LNT toxin in nature. If you reduce the concentration of any toxin in, say, water, there is always a point at which its medical impact drops to zero while there is still some toxin present.
Nonsense. Although there were some well-known industry shills which tried to argue this to prevent regulation against environmental pollution. As far as I know, nobody took them seriously in the scientific community. Unfortunately, nuclear fanboys jumped right on this bullshit (and the internet is a great source of such nonsense).
This is because natural selection ensures that we can survive the amount of that toxin that we normally find in the environment.
This is true (as long as normally refers to relatively long time frames), but this does not imply your first statement. In case of radiation, natural selection evolved quite sophisticated mechanisms to prevent harm from radiation. But these mechanism can still fail with a very small probability. Since this is a statistical effect, it is clear that this *must be linear* at extremely low doses for fundamental reasons. For higher doses we know from the data that it is linear (and newer large-scale studies confirm this even for doses as low as used in CT scans). There is some region in between where it could be non-linear because of certain effects, but so far there is not really any convincing evidence that this is indeed the case or proposed mechanism which would seem plausible.
This includes the constant drizzle of background radiation that we live in.
Yes, which also causes cancer. Just with a very low probability. Once this probability was so small that the risk from cancer was as equal to the cost of having more expensive repair mechanisms natural selection did not evolve this further.
In fact, the scientific term for belief in LNT in chemistry is "homeopathy."
Nonsense. Homeopathy is the irrational believe that a extremely low dose could be beneficial and that the lower the dose the *more* effective it is. This has nothing to do with LNT. In fact LNT contradicts out homeopathy. That low doses could be beneficial is known as hormesis which is largely nonsense, but promoted by some of the most loudest critics of the LNT.
For another opinion, see report from a committee of the national academy of sciences (but what do they know? clearly this is just a bunch of wackos which do not know any science):
At doses of 100 mSv or less, statistical limitations make it difficult to evaluate cancer risk in humans. A comprehensive review of available biological and bio-physical data led the committee to conclude that the risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans. This assumption is termed the "inear-no-threshold"
Source: http://dels.nas.edu/resources/...
Yes, 10000 is certainly exaggerated. On the other hand, none is also clearly nonsense. Here a quote from a study which tries to estimate it:
"We estimate an additional 130 (15-1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24-1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study."
Energy Environ. Sci., 2012,5, 8743-8757
Overall, the risks of nuclear a quite reasonable and preferable to coal. Unfortunately, it is far too expensive. Fortunately, there are other alternatives (renewables and energy efficiency) which make much more sense.
For nuclear, load-following may be technically possible to some degree, but of course it makes bad economics even worse. So nobody in their right mind would ever build a nuclear plant with the intention to not run it as much as possible, i.e. for base load (not that anybody in the western world builds nuclear plants for base load - this is also already too expensive). Also a big problem with nuclear are unplanned shut-downs which cannot be predicted.
"Both wind and solar have very poor load following capacity - as they cannot automatically respond significantly to changes in grid frequency (except in the case of overfrequency), whereas most thermal plants have the capacity to automatically increase power, provided they are not at capacity, in response to a drop in grid frequency"
I think you are confused. This is not a technical issue. Of course, solar and wind could follow load very easily if they are not run at capacity. The thing is, once you have such a plant it does not make sense to not run it a full capacity, because the marginal cost for production is close to zero. For thermal plants it makes sense to save fuel if you have a producer with less marginal cost. So it is simply an economical decision to max out the renewables when they are available and balance with other sources.
But in general, this discussion gets more ridiculous every time with people claiming that renewables cannot possible work for the some reasons (intermittency, grid stability, ...), , when they already work just fine in practice and on very large scale and all these issues turn out to be quite manageable. And still some fans present nuclear as *the solution* on slashdot over and over again, while in *the real world* nobody builds nuclear anymore because it is simply too expensive. At some point you just have to acknowledge reality.
"What has all this bought in the way of safety? One point of view often expressed privately by those involved in design and construction is that it has bought nothing."
Factual data. Haha.
this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed.
Sorry, this is almost completely worthless without reproducible builds. (which finally some people started working on in debian) A compromised build host of a single debian developer (of which there are how many?) could easily introduce backdoor into a binary package which could be very hard to detect.
But because we have gaping security holes in essential crypto and with the low quality of software in general this is a mood point anyway.
I am more a fan of Linus than RMS myself, but your comments about RMS are far off. The GPL allows for-profit use. In fact, adding restrictions to only allow non-profit use is incompatible with GPL. ...? Linux would probably not exist without gcc. So far these projects seem to do quite well.
Also RMS created highly successful projects. Ever heard of gcc, emacs,
Regardless of the efficiency of the process, overgeneration of renewable power is still a huge problem. Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.
I would say that statement is highly misleading. While there a negative prices sometimes on the spot market, this does not not mean that most power exported on the day are sold at negative prices. Most exports are based on long-term contracts, and not affected by negative prices on a short term market at all.
I think the big deal is how decisions are made: In the past, somebody would write a new software and people who liked or needed it would start to migrate to it. Then later it may become the default, but other software would still continue to work and be supported for a long time. Nowadays, a decision is made somewhere and changes are pushed to users who do not want it, while support for alternatives is dropped quickly. So in the end, I think it is a question of software freedom in a very real and practical sense.
Nonsense. Many important allies of the US such as Germany and France opposed the invasion. The veto of the Russians was not a slap in the face (this is business as usual). A slap in the face was that the foreign minister of a close ally directly questions the "evidence" for WMD presented officially as justification to invade a foreign country.
They didn't run their mobile phone business into the ground by clinging to symbian. In fact, they had a great successor already ready: Meego. They killed themselves by: 1) switching to Windows Phone, which was already failing on the market, and at that point in time was in no way competitive 2) already declaring Symbian to be dead before they had working Windows Phones ready 3) refusing to sell the N9 in major markets also it was a clear hit and could have brought in a lot of cash 4) having Windows Phones which initially had a lot of bugs and problems 5) screwing over the few customers who bought their initial Windows phones by not upgrading to Windows Phone 8, 6) having only few very similar smartphones etc....
Yes, it is still no match, but you are confusing specs with design. If one looks at the values from the TOP 500, it doesn't seem to perform bad. In the LINPACK benchmark it comes much closer to the theoretical value than other systems. To me, this is a sign of a very good design. The processor is said to be inspired by alpha. My point is: China is already building supercomputers using their own processors... They are catching up.
Looked at the TOP 500 recently?
ShenWei SW1600
This should be up-modded. Yes, we need a way for users to fund open source developers directly. I would certainly pay a few hours of development time for somebody to implement video playback support in evince. (I am waiting for the feature for years, but instead evince got a new GUI).
Yes, these are the C++ answers which I expected and they demonstrate the problem: You can only have static arrays which can live on the stack or dynamic arrays which then must live on the heap. My real world requirement (this is not a synthetic example) is to have dynamic arrays on the stack, because allocation overhead would be huge if you have to allocate temporary arrays each time you process a voxel of 3D volume. Of course, you could work around this ans pre-allocate the temporary memory outside of the loop, but this would unnecessarily complicate the design, especially when you then parallelize the loop. That C++ has no good way of doing this is simply a deficiency of the language.
I don't think that putting this on the stack is "fundamentally wrong". First of all, it is 2015: 424 bytes are not much at all. You can have Gigabytes of stack and it does not matter. On all modern systems with a MMU, it is virtual memory, so if you don't use it it does not cost you anything. With multi-threading on 32 bit there is the risk that you can run out of address space (some compilers support split stacks for this reason). On 64 bit this issue simple does not exist any more. There is no reason whatsoever to not use the stack as much as you can.
But even if you have bounded stack space for some reason (e.g. an embedded system without MMU), this not even a valid argument against VLAs at all. Dynamic arrays are not necessarily bigger than static arrays, or other stuff people are putting on the stack. In fact, the opposite is true: If you need to put things on the stack (see above) and do not have dynamic arrays, you would have to put an array of the maximally possible size on the stack. This is clearly worse.
You have a minor point that heap allocation might give you a useful error while stack overrun might corrupt some other part
of the memory. I do not think this is really true in practice though. For the following reasons:
- Usually with memory overcommitment you would not get a allocation error even on the heap, but a SEGFAULT when accessing a new page which cannot be allocated. To get an actual memory allocation error you basically have to limit your heap size.
- With a stack overrun you would also get a SEGFAULT which you can catch. You are right that there is the possibility to jump over the guard area with a large allocation, but remember, the guard area is virtual memory and on 64bit you can make it very big at no cost at all. Finally, if you really need to close this loophole, you could use a compiler which inserts run-time checks. So this is not a language-level problem at all.
But the array dimensions would be template parameters - and not be dynamic.
Also the type would look something std::array< std::array<double, 3 >, 3 > . This is a lot more complicated than int[3][3]. But again, I need int[A][B] where A and B are not constant. And this is a simple example, god forbid you need a temporary array on the stack... Maybe you can use alloca (which is not standard I think) and compute the array indices by hand.
As far as I know, there is no good C++ solution. I guess this is the reason std::dynarray and runtime arrays have been proposed for C++14 (did one of them got in?).
In the X Window System core protocol, only four kinds of packets are sent, asynchronously, over the network: requests, replies, events, and errors.
That whole request / reply bit sailed over your head I see. The wire might be asynchronous but Xlib, the library that virtually all client code uses is filled with synchronous code that sends the request and waits for the reply. e.g. call XGetWindowAttributes and it will block until the response comes back.
True. But you claimed X11 does not have async IPC.This is clearly false. Also a lot of stuff is asynchronous even in Xlib. If your point is that Xlib sucks I agree with you - but this does not imply that one needs to invent a new on-the-wire protocol.
There have been attempts to use xcb instead which is an async API but it turns out writing async code is hard, particularly when dealing with legacy code and an arcane windowing system that sends out a storm of messages. It's not hard to find xcb backend projects that have floundered.
Wayland is - as you point out - also an async API. I also used xcb myself, and did not find it too difficult. (most developers woulde use a toolkit and do no care anyway). Legacy code is not a valid criticism. Arcance is simply your personal opinion. I find the X protocol quite OK. "Storms of messages" may be true in some cases, but is not really a problem in an async API or for local clients and could also be easily adressed without rewriting everything and breaking compatibility.
It is called a pixmap.
A pixmap is not a surface. A surface is a texture under the management of a GPU (or software emulation of a GPU). X has no concept of surface.
I am bit puzzled why you think a pixmap could not be on the GPU.
It is damage based windowing system. Hence the reason for extensions to work through this.
I am not sure what this has to do with what you said before and why you think Wayland would not be damaged-based, e.g. the client also tells the compositer which part of a buffer is damaged:
wl_surface::damage - mark part of the surface damaged
I am not crying. In fact, I am happy with X. I just point out that I don't see how Wayland has *anything* to offer for a desktop user. Not even performance. But it has disadvantages: And breaking compatibility is most serious one. XWayland only solves one direction (running X clients on Wayland) and not the other (running Wayland clients on X). Finally, there are already mobile devices with Wayland without XWayland, e.g. Jolla. It breaks compatibility with the excellent N9, which is really stupid.
If you don't see why it has anything to offer I suggest you look at the Wayland website where it explains in detail why X is broken.
I looked at the website before. I even watched the stupid talk everybody refers to all the time. I still see no real advantage.
If virtually every X developer can see the need then I don't see why others can't.
That seems to be a myth spread by Wayland proponents.