Similarly, I was shocked to see that the standard procedure for flight computers acting up was to simply re-power them. Computer hardware/software should be made reliable enough that you don't need to do the "Windows thing" of rebooting regularly to keep it operating. Circuit breaker instead of power switch, but the same deal, really.
The depressing (or incriminating?) part here is that the fix didn't require any hardware modifications, as I would have expected. I assumed that there was some cost/weight issue to having the MCAS have access to the left and right sensors. But nope, it could have compared both. If it can be fixed with a software fix, then it could have been done right from the start without any extra hardware costs of production. Very damning. I get so tired of the reports calling clear software/algorithm bugs "computer glitches." It's akin to blaming every pilot error situation on the plane. Just as with hardware design flaws, software design flaws should have repercussions for the manufacturer, and not written off as "oh, one of those computer glitches!" If your computers are glitchy, don't put them on my plane, thanks.
Sounds a wee bit like the ill-fated 737 Max 8's MCAS system, which overrode the pilot's climb ability when they needed it most. Not having power when you need it to safely avoid an accident will cost lives. But, just as with self-driving cars, more lives will probably be saved, overall, by the system. Because humans, on average, aren't great drivers; computers can, or soon will be able to, outperform them.
After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera's browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV.
Opera Ltd. is publicly listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange [8], with majority ownership and control belonging to Chinese Businessman Yahui Zhou, creator of Beijing Kunlun Tech[9] which specialises in mobile games and cybersecurity specialist Qihoo 360.
If you want to send all your traffic through a Chinese VPN, go ahead, but at least be aware who ultimately controls Opera. The fact it's explicitly pitched as "Norwegian" seems suspicious. Could be a trap.:)
737's can inappropriately (and repeatedly) retard the throttles to idle if the single radar altimeter used gives a bad reading. (And the plane has two radar altimeters!)
So my Google Play music caches my entire library on the 64g MicroSD card on my phone or tablet.
Probably a way more green result, streamed/copied the first time, then playing off a MicroSD card on an energy efficient phone/tablet/etc., as compared to spinning CD's or repeated streaming.
People tend to listen to their music repeatedly, not on a one-off basis,so local cacheing goes a long way.
So instead of taking 100% of my CPU, Firefox will be able to take 500% or 1000% of my CPU (100% for every tab I have opened and Firefox is spinning on for some reason.)
And so instead of nearly crashing my machine by hogging resources, it most certainly will.
Please, Firefox devs, get the CPU and memory leaks, javascript wedging, etc., under control before splitting things into more processes (which will just further hide such performance/memory leaks for now.)
At least one might (supposedly?) be able to kill off rogue/misbehaving pages on a per-process basis. But again, a properly functioning/secure/stable browser wouldn't have that need in the first place.
Sigh. 15% market share vs. Chrome's 60%, I fear for FF's future. It's my main browser, and the last viable hope for any privacy or security on the web (unless you wholehearted trust google.)
While it wasn't the full PhotoShop, Adobe did for awhile produce versions of PhotoShop for the Android phone and tablet. (Not the silly little red-eye photo editor they call PhotoShop on Android now.)
It had way better functionality than any other image editor I've used on Android, with many of PhotoShop's nicities. It was also surprisingly useful and easy to use with a touch interface, not an easy accomplishment.
I bought both the Phone and Tablet versions (I think they were $10 and $20 respectively), and it easy was (and is) my favorite Android app of all time.
Aaaaaannnd they go and suddenly discontinue the product.
While it isn't visible in the Play Store any more, since I did purchase it, I can still download and install it on new devices, thankfully. But I'm sure those days are numbered.
I'm not sure why they pulled it, I think they gave some vague "focus on other stuff" excuse, but I wonder if they were concerned it's great core functionality might have ended up competing with their desktop product for some users...?
Very sad and stupid situation, wish they'd bring it back.
Glad to see the iPad will be getting some PhotoShop love. Hopefully it will be a $20-ish product like the earlier Android product, but given that they're calling it "full PhotoShop" I'm guessing it will be hundreds, out out of my range.
Too bad, they had me as customer, and could have more of my money in the future, if they had just continued down that road they were on with a powerful, cost-effective, phone/tablet version of their product.
Oh well, there's no use trying to make sense of corporate greed, even if they're missing out on bigger opportunities because of it.
There may be some "non-comp" clauses (where valid). I realize non-comp's aren't always enforceable, but the managers probably have something (or should have something) in their employment contracts which prevents taking company data (including employee lists), and poaching employees...
I designed and built a case out of a small storage tote, since I wanted a smaller case than standard.
It fit nicely, cooled well, and ran nicely. It looked pretty cool, too, translucent.
But Lordy, don't underestimate the value of shielding/grounding that your metal case gives you. That sucker threw off so much RF interference it was insane. And I got video/sound interference on the display/speakers for the PC, quite serious. And I had occasional lockups.
Tossing the same gear into a metal case, and everything was fine.
If this cardboard case works, it must have some tinfoil or something in it to shield/ground things, or it'll be a dud.
If it is for business, then you can probably live with the latency of satellite. I lived with DirecWay for three years, and survived just fine. It worked very well for me; despite usage caps and limited upload speed, it was a good solution, far better than anything else that was out there.
The standard hardware isn't that expensive; auto-pointing RV-top units are indeed thousands. If you don't mind some manual labour, it is possible to set up and point the cheap default hardware on a tripod (weighted with sandbags, etc.), or on a mount on your RV (taking it off when moving).
Technically you're not supposed to be pointing these things unless you're a qualified tech, but I've done it many a time, and it's not that hard once you learn how. (The thing isn't going to transmit until it's locked on the proper receiving carrier, so you're not going to be taking out other satellites by mistake; you'll just not get a usable system if you fail to point it well.)
So if you're willing to pack up/deploy the dish every time your RV moves and you want internet at your new location, it is a relatively cheap and effective means for accomplishing this. If you were staying at places a week at a time, it might be a good route for you. If you're moving daily, it might be too much work.
Depending upon your intended routes, 3G with a nationwide carrier is a good option, too; I like the total independence that satellite gives you, though.
Despite living in a modest cottage, when Hurricane Juan hit, I was living pretty good with my generator, satellite internet, propane-heated water:) People came to my place to use the Internet and get a shower.
On the topic of Brel, a lot of his songs deal with such themes since he has always been on the verge of depression.
We francophones consider him one of the two or three major writers of the 20th century. A few of his songs have been adapted to English with varying success.
One of the saddest songs I remember growing up, was based upon one of his: Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks (and later redone again by Westlife). And Terry livened the tune up a lot from the original:) Beautiful song, but depressing.
Ive been to the exhibition and the flatly deny the bodies are from prisoners
Really? From wiki (which has a citation in the article):
Under the settlement agreement with New York City, Premier Exhibitions agreed to post disclaimers stating that they could not independently rule out the possibility that remains of Chinese prisoners were used in the production of the displays.
D'oh: correction: I could never get *Myth* to stream to more than one networked computer. Sage streams to three-four computers regularly over WiFi for me, without any problems.
(Wish/. had a 60-second edit function like Reddit. Oh well, my own fault.)
Actually yes. MythTV kicks the utter crap out of any other PVR ever made.
I love MythTV, used it for years. After some frustration (yet another update, yet another two nights messing around to get my IR remote working again, arrrrgh), I tried out SageTV. I have no association with the company; I think it's mostly a one-developer shop. But they make an awesome product. Less than $100 for the server and client licenses, and I had a system that streamed to multiple windows/mac/linux computers seamlessly (I could never get Sage to stream to more than one networked computer, and even that was painful). (And I picked up a couple of dedicated Sage hardware boxes, that work beautifully, loading their GUI off the server. Very slick.)
Not knocking Myth, and I bet it will overtake all others some day; but to say it's the best and kicks everyone's butt, isn't consistent with my experiences. If you like the indy-ish PVR approach, but want something easier and more polished than Myth (and more cross-platform, ironically), do check out Sage.
Yeah because all the users of the site would totally stick around if they were no longer getting all the content for free. *rolls eyes* Why must everyone make up bullshit excuses instead of just admitting that they were downloading stuff because they wanted to get it for free? No one is falling for these bullshit excuses anyway.
While I find it hard to disagree with you, I think it can be put a bit differently... The reason people are so drawn to illegal/free downloads, is that the price point for this media is unrealistically high. $70 for games, $10-$20-$30 for movies. Notice that when you put iPhone apps and singles up for 99c, you suddenly start developing a new multi-million dollar markets.
(Especially since "albums" with a dozen solid songs seem to be a thing of decades past. But that's another story, sigh. There's a rare exception, such as Tom Fun, but in general, I don't see anyone producing solid solid, cohesive, albums these days.)
I would say the motivation for piracy is largely driven by perceived differences between supply and demand pricing. There is a big segment of the market where the current prices don't meet their requirements; and there's a venue where they can get it for a price closer to their threshold ($0 is lot closer to $1, than $70 is to $1), so they figure out how to pirate it, and do so.
Ideology (information wants to be free, yadda yadda yadda!) is a nice excuse, and icing on the cake, but I don't think is a major motivation for most pirates. It's just a bit of self-righteous rationalization after the fact.
I think there will be a big equalization of prices over the next five-ten years, which will make things more sane. I don't mind paying $30/mo. or $50/mo. *total (or even more) for lots of high quality entertainment.
But $40 for cable, $40 for internet, $20+ for movies, $70 for games, etc., etc., is more than I choose to pay. Let people take a slice of my income, and they'll get $30-$50/mo. out of me for entertainment, no problem, instead of the $0 they're getting right now.
People will tend to pay their $40-ish for Internet, and effectively use *that* fee to enable their ability to grab their other entertainment.
Actually, to follow up on my own post, I wouldn't say that compilers got as good as human-written assemblers "ten years ago"; it's more like "15 - 20 years ago," IMO. (And even in the 70's, compilers were good enough that the Unix operating system could be written mostly in C, with a few thousands lines of assembler for optimization.)
Go look at the assembler that some of these compilers produce. It's frightening to see the amount of overhead they cost on even simple assignment operations. I saw one compiler (Microsoft's Visual C++) that took a simple x=10; in C++ and turned it into 15 assembly language operations that, had it been coded by hand, would have been one MOV statement.
Spoken like someone who hasn't used a modern compiler.
This statement might have been true ten years ago (or maybe still true with MSC). But in general, with a good modern compiler, it isn't.
In the Z-80 days, I did everything assembly (actually, in raw machine code, compiling in my head, effectively). I learned C in the 8088 days, but did a lot of optimization, putting my CPU intensive stuff in assembler functions. And so forth on the VAX, and into the 386 days, doing graphics work, 3D stuff, games, and such.
Then the Watcom compiler came along, and started pushing what compilers could truly achieve.
It reached a point where, looking at the generated code, I realized that in general, the compiler was doing as good, or very nearly as good a job as I could do. In some cases, with loop unrolling and other "non-local" optimizations, it was doing better. At this bore out in actual performance timing tests. And the other compilers caught up to Watcom, and they all continued to get better and better; my hand-written optimized code had already reached its limit, that the compilers approached.
Granted, there will always be some case where a bit of assembler can optimize things; but with the speed of CPU's, and the quality of modern compilers, the case where it's worth the effort is *exceedingly* rare.
I doubt you could show an example today with the latest GCC, where an assignment resulted in a dozen instructions.
Hard to beat that (other than figuring out the algorithm and reducing to a constant, which some of the super-advanced compilers probably do:)
And with limited register sets, compilers can be better than humans, at figuring which variables are best stashed in memory or on the stack, and which are best cached in registers.
The console makers keep a pretty tight reign on game development guidelines; you play by their rules, follow their guidelines, adhere to the licensing terms they set, and then you can have your game digitally signed and sold. If you don't have their approval and they don't sign the disc, your game won't run on the console (unless it's hacked).
Given the fact that a USB keyboard/mouse combo can be had for $10-$20, from any vendor, and a console remote can cost you a good chunk of $100, to the console maker, it's pretty easy to see why more games don't allow keyboard/mouse.
On the other hand, most games that would benefit from keyboard/mouse, are single-player FPS type games; single a single controller comes with each console, allowing keyboard/mouse isn't really that big of a threat.
I'm only familiar with the WII; three extra remotes plus nunchuks cost more than the console. And now WII Motion Plus is going to be used by more and more games, there's another $100. I still like the system, and the features/quality of the controls do seem to justify things to a degree, but I still feel *slightly* gouged. (Third party controllers are available, and really aren't that much cheaper, which kinda indicates that maybe the tech involved in the remotes is a bit pricey to start with.)
I think the average person grossly overestimates the value of this data. In short, unless you're a celebrity, or stalked by an ex, or something, *NOBODY CARES* about this data. (Other than friends, viewing it for its intended purposes, of course.)
And if you're a celebrity, or being stalked, odds are you take some extra privacy measures in your every day life (don't leave blinds up, etc.), so maybe you should take similar measures online (don't publish friends lists to the world).
Facebook does have some privacy holes, but in general you can keep your profile details pretty hush-hush, except to those you choose.
It amazes me how many people are so paranoid. I see almost everyone I know enjoying Facebook, and I've never heard of a single identity theft or other ill effect of it.
The apps is do find annoying (some third party company, not vetted at all, getting all your details when you accept a cheesy gift, etc..); and that's part of the Canadian govt's investigation. Again, I simply don't accept apps.
(Personally, I'm kinda bored with Facebook, only check in occasionally, and find it rather "meh"; but I'm the type with a fairly small and close group of friends to start with, so maybe that's why.)
There's quite a mess with the RS name in Canada. RS Canada was operated by InterTAN, who sold it to Circuit City. Then Radio Shack sued InterTAN for breach of contract, and the Radio Shack name could no longer be used, so they rebranded it "The Source by Circuit City." And now, Radio Shack is apparently going to come into Canada opening stores under that name. Bizarre and annoying.
Sadly, before this silliness, Radio Shack (Canada, at least) had already declined from a cool store with a wide variety of electronics and parts, into a TV/Remote Control Vehicle shop, with a few gadgets and toys, and just a shadow of its former self.
Maybe the new Radio Shack can restore some of its former appeal. I'm not holding my breath.
We're hurting for electronics retailers in Canada, at least of the geeky kind. There's no major chain where you can pop in and buy a motherboard, for example (and I've had iffy success with small-time local dealers). Sigh.
I've visited a Fry's in the US before, and despite it having the same lack of appeal of most big box retailers, it did have things like motherboards and components; good selection, good price, so you hold your nose and buy:)
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Similarly, I was shocked to see that the standard procedure for flight computers acting up was to simply re-power them. Computer hardware/software should be made reliable enough that you don't need to do the "Windows thing" of rebooting regularly to keep it operating. Circuit breaker instead of power switch, but the same deal, really.
The depressing (or incriminating?) part here is that the fix didn't require any hardware modifications, as I would have expected. I assumed that there was some cost/weight issue to having the MCAS have access to the left and right sensors. But nope, it could have compared both.
If it can be fixed with a software fix, then it could have been done right from the start without any extra hardware costs of production.
Very damning.
I get so tired of the reports calling clear software/algorithm bugs "computer glitches."
It's akin to blaming every pilot error situation on the plane.
Just as with hardware design flaws, software design flaws should have repercussions for the manufacturer, and not written off as "oh, one of those computer glitches!" If your computers are glitchy, don't put them on my plane, thanks.
Sounds a wee bit like the ill-fated 737 Max 8's MCAS system, which overrode the pilot's climb ability when they needed it most.
Not having power when you need it to safely avoid an accident will cost lives.
But, just as with self-driving cars, more lives will probably be saved, overall, by the system. Because humans, on average, aren't great drivers; computers can, or soon will be able to, outperform them.
> The Norwegian browser maker,
Really? That seems a bit, errr, disingenuous. Maybe even misleading.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/...
After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera's browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Opera Ltd. is publicly listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange [8], with majority ownership and control belonging to Chinese Businessman Yahui Zhou, creator of Beijing Kunlun Tech[9] which specialises in mobile games and cybersecurity specialist Qihoo 360.
If you want to send all your traffic through a Chinese VPN, go ahead, but at least be aware who ultimately controls Opera. The fact it's explicitly pitched as "Norwegian" seems suspicious. Could be a trap. :)
737's can inappropriately (and repeatedly) retard the throttles to idle if the single radar altimeter used gives a bad reading. (And the plane has two radar altimeters!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are supposedly other similarly reported incidents.
So my Google Play music caches my entire library on the 64g MicroSD card on my phone or tablet.
Probably a way more green result, streamed/copied the first time, then playing off a MicroSD card on an energy efficient phone/tablet/etc., as compared to spinning CD's or repeated streaming.
People tend to listen to their music repeatedly, not on a one-off basis,so local cacheing goes a long way.
So instead of taking 100% of my CPU, Firefox will be able to take 500% or 1000% of my CPU (100% for every tab I have opened and Firefox is spinning on for some reason.)
And so instead of nearly crashing my machine by hogging resources, it most certainly will.
Please, Firefox devs, get the CPU and memory leaks, javascript wedging, etc., under control before splitting things into more processes (which will just further hide such performance/memory leaks for now.)
At least one might (supposedly?) be able to kill off rogue/misbehaving pages on a per-process basis. But again, a properly functioning/secure/stable browser wouldn't have that need in the first place.
Sigh. 15% market share vs. Chrome's 60%, I fear for FF's future. It's my main browser, and the last viable hope for any privacy or security on the web (unless you wholehearted trust google.)
Security Nightmare???
Awesome, 'cause there's no one I trust more than FB with security, to make sure that camera is never used unknowingly to the owner.
Interesting that, if I recall correctly, his "Brief History of Time" and other published works mentioned that it allowed for the possibility of a God.
He leaves stating there's no God to be published post-humously.
Hedging his bets? Or just avoiding controversy while alive?
While it wasn't the full PhotoShop, Adobe did for awhile produce versions of PhotoShop for the Android phone and tablet. (Not the silly little red-eye photo editor they call PhotoShop on Android now.)
It had way better functionality than any other image editor I've used on Android, with many of PhotoShop's nicities. It was also surprisingly useful and easy to use with a touch interface, not an easy accomplishment.
I bought both the Phone and Tablet versions (I think they were $10 and $20 respectively), and it easy was (and is) my favorite Android app of all time.
Aaaaaannnd they go and suddenly discontinue the product.
While it isn't visible in the Play Store any more, since I did purchase it, I can still download and install it on new devices, thankfully. But I'm sure those days are numbered.
I'm not sure why they pulled it, I think they gave some vague "focus on other stuff" excuse, but I wonder if they were concerned it's great core functionality might have ended up competing with their desktop product for some users...?
Very sad and stupid situation, wish they'd bring it back.
Glad to see the iPad will be getting some PhotoShop love. Hopefully it will be a $20-ish product like the earlier Android product, but given that they're calling it "full PhotoShop" I'm guessing it will be hundreds, out out of my range.
Too bad, they had me as customer, and could have more of my money in the future, if they had just continued down that road they were on with a powerful, cost-effective, phone/tablet version of their product.
Oh well, there's no use trying to make sense of corporate greed, even if they're missing out on bigger opportunities because of it.
There may be some "non-comp" clauses (where valid). I realize non-comp's aren't always enforceable, but the managers probably have something (or should have something) in their employment contracts which prevents taking company data (including employee lists), and poaching employees...
I designed and built a case out of a small storage tote, since I wanted a smaller case than standard.
It fit nicely, cooled well, and ran nicely. It looked pretty cool, too, translucent.
But Lordy, don't underestimate the value of shielding/grounding that your metal case gives you. That sucker threw off so much RF interference it was insane. And I got video/sound interference on the display/speakers for the PC, quite serious. And I had occasional lockups.
Tossing the same gear into a metal case, and everything was fine.
If this cardboard case works, it must have some tinfoil or something in it to shield/ground things, or it'll be a dud.
If it is for business, then you can probably live with the latency of satellite. I lived with DirecWay for three years, and survived just fine. It worked very well for me; despite usage caps and limited upload speed, it was a good solution, far better than anything else that was out there.
The standard hardware isn't that expensive; auto-pointing RV-top units are indeed thousands. If you don't mind some manual labour, it is possible to set up and point the cheap default hardware on a tripod (weighted with sandbags, etc.), or on a mount on your RV (taking it off when moving).
Technically you're not supposed to be pointing these things unless you're a qualified tech, but I've done it many a time, and it's not that hard once you learn how. (The thing isn't going to transmit until it's locked on the proper receiving carrier, so you're not going to be taking out other satellites by mistake; you'll just not get a usable system if you fail to point it well.)
So if you're willing to pack up/deploy the dish every time your RV moves and you want internet at your new location, it is a relatively cheap and effective means for accomplishing this. If you were staying at places a week at a time, it might be a good route for you. If you're moving daily, it might be too much work.
Depending upon your intended routes, 3G with a nationwide carrier is a good option, too; I like the total independence that satellite gives you, though.
Despite living in a modest cottage, when Hurricane Juan hit, I was living pretty good with my generator, satellite internet, propane-heated water :) People came to my place to use the Internet and get a shower.
A geneticist (one of those people who like to play God) named JBS? Is that short for Jeebus?
One of the saddest songs I remember growing up, was based upon one of his: Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks (and later redone again by Westlife). And Terry livened the tune up a lot from the original :) Beautiful song, but depressing.
Really? From wiki (which has a citation in the article):
Shudder.
D'oh: correction: I could never get *Myth* to stream to more than one networked computer. Sage streams to three-four computers regularly over WiFi for me, without any problems.
(Wish /. had a 60-second edit function like Reddit. Oh well, my own fault.)
I love MythTV, used it for years. After some frustration (yet another update, yet another two nights messing around to get my IR remote working again, arrrrgh), I tried out SageTV. I have no association with the company; I think it's mostly a one-developer shop. But they make an awesome product. Less than $100 for the server and client licenses, and I had a system that streamed to multiple windows/mac/linux computers seamlessly (I could never get Sage to stream to more than one networked computer, and even that was painful). (And I picked up a couple of dedicated Sage hardware boxes, that work beautifully, loading their GUI off the server. Very slick.)
Not knocking Myth, and I bet it will overtake all others some day; but to say it's the best and kicks everyone's butt, isn't consistent with my experiences. If you like the indy-ish PVR approach, but want something easier and more polished than Myth (and more cross-platform, ironically), do check out Sage.
While I find it hard to disagree with you, I think it can be put a bit differently... The reason people are so drawn to illegal/free downloads, is that the price point for this media is unrealistically high. $70 for games, $10-$20-$30 for movies. Notice that when you put iPhone apps and singles up for 99c, you suddenly start developing a new multi-million dollar markets.
(Especially since "albums" with a dozen solid songs seem to be a thing of decades past. But that's another story, sigh. There's a rare exception, such as Tom Fun, but in general, I don't see anyone producing solid solid, cohesive, albums these days.)
I would say the motivation for piracy is largely driven by perceived differences between supply and demand pricing. There is a big segment of the market where the current prices don't meet their requirements; and there's a venue where they can get it for a price closer to their threshold ($0 is lot closer to $1, than $70 is to $1), so they figure out how to pirate it, and do so.
Ideology (information wants to be free, yadda yadda yadda!) is a nice excuse, and icing on the cake, but I don't think is a major motivation for most pirates. It's just a bit of self-righteous rationalization after the fact.
I think there will be a big equalization of prices over the next five-ten years, which will make things more sane. I don't mind paying $30/mo. or $50/mo. *total (or even more) for lots of high quality entertainment.
But $40 for cable, $40 for internet, $20+ for movies, $70 for games, etc., etc., is more than I choose to pay. Let people take a slice of my income, and they'll get $30-$50/mo. out of me for entertainment, no problem, instead of the $0 they're getting right now.
People will tend to pay their $40-ish for Internet, and effectively use *that* fee to enable their ability to grab their other entertainment.
Actually, to follow up on my own post, I wouldn't say that compilers got as good as human-written assemblers "ten years ago"; it's more like "15 - 20 years ago," IMO. (And even in the 70's, compilers were good enough that the Unix operating system could be written mostly in C, with a few thousands lines of assembler for optimization.)
Spoken like someone who hasn't used a modern compiler.
This statement might have been true ten years ago (or maybe still true with MSC). But in general, with a good modern compiler, it isn't.
In the Z-80 days, I did everything assembly (actually, in raw machine code, compiling in my head, effectively). I learned C in the 8088 days, but did a lot of optimization, putting my CPU intensive stuff in assembler functions. And so forth on the VAX, and into the 386 days, doing graphics work, 3D stuff, games, and such.
Then the Watcom compiler came along, and started pushing what compilers could truly achieve.
It reached a point where, looking at the generated code, I realized that in general, the compiler was doing as good, or very nearly as good a job as I could do. In some cases, with loop unrolling and other "non-local" optimizations, it was doing better. At this bore out in actual performance timing tests. And the other compilers caught up to Watcom, and they all continued to get better and better; my hand-written optimized code had already reached its limit, that the compilers approached.
Granted, there will always be some case where a bit of assembler can optimize things; but with the speed of CPU's, and the quality of modern compilers, the case where it's worth the effort is *exceedingly* rare.
I doubt you could show an example today with the latest GCC, where an assignment resulted in a dozen instructions.
Simple example:
i = 0;
for (j = 0; j < 10; j++)
i += j;
ran through "gcc -O -S", gives:
movl $0, %eax
movl $0, %edx
L2:
addl %edx, %eax
incl %edx
cmpl $10, %edx
jne L2
Hard to beat that (other than figuring out the algorithm and reducing to a constant, which some of the super-advanced compilers probably do :)
And with limited register sets, compilers can be better than humans, at figuring which variables are best stashed in memory or on the stack, and which are best cached in registers.
The console makers keep a pretty tight reign on game development guidelines; you play by their rules, follow their guidelines, adhere to the licensing terms they set, and then you can have your game digitally signed and sold. If you don't have their approval and they don't sign the disc, your game won't run on the console (unless it's hacked).
Given the fact that a USB keyboard/mouse combo can be had for $10-$20, from any vendor, and a console remote can cost you a good chunk of $100, to the console maker, it's pretty easy to see why more games don't allow keyboard/mouse.
On the other hand, most games that would benefit from keyboard/mouse, are single-player FPS type games; single a single controller comes with each console, allowing keyboard/mouse isn't really that big of a threat.
I'm only familiar with the WII; three extra remotes plus nunchuks cost more than the console. And now WII Motion Plus is going to be used by more and more games, there's another $100. I still like the system, and the features/quality of the controls do seem to justify things to a degree, but I still feel *slightly* gouged. (Third party controllers are available, and really aren't that much cheaper, which kinda indicates that maybe the tech involved in the remotes is a bit pricey to start with.)
I think the average person grossly overestimates the value of this data. In short, unless you're a celebrity, or stalked by an ex, or something, *NOBODY CARES* about this data. (Other than friends, viewing it for its intended purposes, of course.)
And if you're a celebrity, or being stalked, odds are you take some extra privacy measures in your every day life (don't leave blinds up, etc.), so maybe you should take similar measures online (don't publish friends lists to the world).
Facebook does have some privacy holes, but in general you can keep your profile details pretty hush-hush, except to those you choose.
It amazes me how many people are so paranoid. I see almost everyone I know enjoying Facebook, and I've never heard of a single identity theft or other ill effect of it.
The apps is do find annoying (some third party company, not vetted at all, getting all your details when you accept a cheesy gift, etc..); and that's part of the Canadian govt's investigation. Again, I simply don't accept apps.
(Personally, I'm kinda bored with Facebook, only check in occasionally, and find it rather "meh"; but I'm the type with a fairly small and close group of friends to start with, so maybe that's why.)
There's quite a mess with the RS name in Canada. RS Canada was operated by InterTAN, who sold it to Circuit City. Then Radio Shack sued InterTAN for breach of contract, and the Radio Shack name could no longer be used, so they rebranded it "The Source by Circuit City." And now, Radio Shack is apparently going to come into Canada opening stores under that name. Bizarre and annoying.
Sadly, before this silliness, Radio Shack (Canada, at least) had already declined from a cool store with a wide variety of electronics and parts, into a TV/Remote Control Vehicle shop, with a few gadgets and toys, and just a shadow of its former self.
Maybe the new Radio Shack can restore some of its former appeal. I'm not holding my breath.
We're hurting for electronics retailers in Canada, at least of the geeky kind. There's no major chain where you can pop in and buy a motherboard, for example (and I've had iffy success with small-time local dealers). Sigh.
I've visited a Fry's in the US before, and despite it having the same lack of appeal of most big box retailers, it did have things like motherboards and components; good selection, good price, so you hold your nose and buy :)