...why anyone would use Gmail for anything other than utterly disposable correspondence?
Google Takeout designed to help you move most of your stuff off G-services. The problem? It falls down badly when it comes to Gmail – probably the most important Google service for most of us.
I have been using Gmail (as well as my own mail server) for many years and it's been very reliable. The main reason I haven't been motivated to stop using it is that Gmail is easily IMAP-accessible, so I can use any client I want and I will be able to move all my mail any time I want. I'm not sure what failure the article is talking about since it links to a Google page explaining exactly how to get your Gmail messages out using POP3 or IMAP.
I don't think so at all. I think this is Google playing it smart and getting in position to make some big moves, although I can't in any way speculate on what, I'm no tech expert. But that being said, based on their latest stuff, they haven't stopped running out of ides.
You don't have to run out of ideas to become a patent troll. Microsoft has a research division which seems to come up with all kinds of interesting stuff, most of which never sees the light of day. Though they invent far less than they claim, Apple certainly has some good new ideas of their own. Patent trolling is simply more profitable than innovating in many cases. As Google isn't run by idiots and has a responsibility to provide the most value for their shareholders, they will eventually find themselves in a position where they must use patents offensively if the system isn't fixed to remove the incentive for abuse.
I can't answer that specifically,; however companies do nede to protect themselves and that seems to be the case ehre. Of course when they are larger they by patents, because that is when they ahve the money to do it.
By your logic, IBM would have stopped innovating 30 years ago.
Yeah, IBM is certainly innovating at a similar rate to Google.
Google is saying the purpose of obtaining patents such as these is so they have more defense against patent attacks. I think that's probably true at the moment. What I wonder is how long it will take Google to amass enough of an arsenal to decide they can be a patent bully like Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and many others. In any case, these patents are nothing more than corporate weapons and doing nothing to promote innovation.
what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game
Don't forget the IBM/Microsoft partnership on OS/2. At some point MS decided they'd do better on their own an started developing NT OS/2 which is the basis of Windows NT, XP, and all current versions of Windows.
The movie was terrible and had almost nothing to do with any of the games. Doom III was not innovative in game play, but it was entertaining in the same way that the original Doom was. Playing Doom III took me back to how scary some of the dark areas of the original were when I'd hear imps behind me coming out of the walls.
Obviously Carmack is not the sole fount of creativity in the world. But his output is amazing. I still know people who talk about Commander Keen. As far as Doom, Quake and the like, the market has spoken. I have spent many hours playing Doom and Quake deathmatch. There was a time the Internet component of Doom's deathmatch was seen as innovative. As far as I'm concerned, Doom and Quake set the bar for FPS, the way Age of Empires set the bar for RTS (I'm biased against Starcraft...)
Carmack released id Tech 3's code as GPL. Go look at that code. I spend so much time looking over other people's crappy code. That code looks real nice. I couldn't believe how good the code looked. Clear as a bell what everything does. It's also amazing so little code can do so much in games like OpenArena.
Reading the book Masters of Doom made me admire Carmack all the more as a coder. I don't know who was wrong or right in the office politics with him and Romero at I.D., most people I know who have met Romero say he's a nice guy. But there's no taking away Carmack's technical prowess.
I don't think anybody's impugning Carmack's coding prowess or creativity in game engine design. The discussion is about creativity of game play. Id has not innovated much in game play for at least a decade while others have. However, if people continue to find their sort of game entertaining, there's no reason Id shouldn't keep making them. I'm not willing to pay money for more of the same from Id, but I don't bear any grudge against them.
Only a small (though loud) minority of Linux users believes in a Microsoft vs Linux fight. Linux was created in 1991 to be a POSIX compliant kernel, not to be a competitor to MS. The GNU tools were created to have a free Unix. GNU + Linux is a fine example of open source in the Unix world, and is definitely not a reaction/fight/whatever towards Microsoft.
You've obviously been paying no attention whatsoever to servers and phones, where MS is very much in direct competition with various *nix, including various GNU/Linux and other Linux-based operating systems. Servers have been dominated by *nix for decades though MS is always trying to gain more market share. Phones will soon (if not already) be completely dominated by *nix, where Android is one of the most important software platforms. MS is also pushing phone development hard. Though there is much competition between Linux and Microsoft, I think the more important competition is between Free and non-Free operating systems.
With the way the Apple juggernaut has been steamrolling it would make sense to me for Microsoft and Open Source in general to find a way of co-existing. Say what you want about Microsoft, but Apple's heavy-handed, strict controls and policies makes Microsoft look like a pussy cat in comparison.
Apple is even more of a contradiction than Microsoft. They have and continue to make useful contributions to a variety of important Free Software projects (probably much more than MS has done), such as GCC, CUPS and Webkit. They use those projects as well as lots of proprietary code to restrict users horribly. In fact, there are many corporations, including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Google which use and contribute to Linux and many other Free Software projects while maintaining an ambivalence toward the principles behind Free Software. So, there is already coexistence, but it's not always a good thing.
Perhaps if they instead focused on fixing the memory leaks, pushing out 64-bit builds wouldn't be so pressing an issue?
64-bit builds of Firefox are neither new nor a misfeature. It's perfectly natural to run 64-bit applications on 64-bit operating systems and I've been running x86_64 Firefox on GNU/Linux and OSX for years. The fact that the Mozilla-provided Windows builds will finally catch up is barely newsworthy.
...does not feel much faster than my MacPlus, because operating system and software makers managed to slow everything down again using "advanced software engineering techniques."
How long did it take to transfer a 1MiB file from a LAN file server to your MacPlus? How fast local applications "feel" has nothing to do with Ethernet.
Military grade = So expensive that we sell these to the military (and they are silly enough to pay this much for fancily rebadged off-the-shelf hardware)
So, did the planetarium pay the ridiculous "military grade" premium or were they smart enough to find the COTS version?
The Sandia Cooler may also be the technology that smashes down the “Thermal Brick Wall” that is preventing computer chips from moving beyond 3GHz.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell chip makers about this "Brick Wall". Seriously, sounds like the author is making stuff up with absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
So, why aren't 4GHz CPUs common yet? If TFA is making stuff up about the cooling problems, they sure put a lot of work into the report to convince us.
Unnatural colour of CFL light being harsher on your eyes is another story...
It is another story: an old and increasingly irrelevant one. When my dad started replacing our bulbs with CFLs in the early 90s, they were always noticeably different in color and light quality. Now, all the room lights in my house are CFLs and I can't tell the difference between one of them and an incandescent side by side.
The good thing about this is that it seems Apple has based AirPrint on existing standards implemented in Free tools. What's odd is that other people are adding this functionality on to CUPS rather than it being released as part of CUPS itself. Apple bought CUPS from Easy Software Products. Though Apple has kept the CUPS going as a Free Software project mostly under GPL and LGPL, they can keep additions they write proprietary if they choose.
I'm much more concerned about my laptop power supply and the several hundred dollars I might have to shell out if this insanity fries my laptop. Ditto for the TV and the other appliances. The other appliances belong to the landlord; but it's still no fun to have to be around and have some tech service them.
There's little risk of damage to any device because of the frequency changing slightly. The article didn't mention any expensive electronics because line frequency has no effect on them whatsoever. They all use DC internally, so their power supplies must rectify the line current anyway.
I never really thought about how digital clocks keep track of time. This is a very interesting issue.
Of course, it could also turn into a boon for the industry, having everyone buy a clock that doesnt rely on "power timing".
Every $2 watch has used a quartz crystal for decades. It's incredible that any electric clocks still use line frequency. If this change helps get rid of them, that's fine with me.
Not trolling. Just fed up with sudo. For a single user system, why not have the option of just plain not installing it by default? I mean, its my system. I'm going to perform all root operations on it. Why do I have to be inconvenienced by this annoying application?
That is a troll. If you don't like to use sudo, then don't. It's not necessary to whine about it. I don't like ed, but you don't hear me complaining.
I am glad that C++ is still evolving. That last major improvement I remember was the addition of the string class. Then shortly after that my professional focus moved away from C and C++ and towards higher level languages (.NET, PHP, Python, Java, etc...). I just recently started my own personal project so I decided to relearn C++ again, and I noticed there is a fair amount of new stuff that wasn't there before (or I was never taught)
While all of the new features sound like a step in the right direction, I remain unimpressed because it still doesn't have automatic memory management (garbage collection) built-in. Of course, there are numerous libraries that add it, but in incompatible ways. Until it's a standard part of the language, I don't think it's a good choice for new general application development. If you have legacy C++ and/or C code you want to maintain and improve, the new features probably very nice.
Slashdot Mirror
...why anyone would use Gmail for anything other than utterly disposable correspondence?
Google Takeout designed to help you move most of your stuff off G-services. The problem? It falls down badly when it comes to Gmail – probably the most important Google service for most of us.
I have been using Gmail (as well as my own mail server) for many years and it's been very reliable. The main reason I haven't been motivated to stop using it is that Gmail is easily IMAP-accessible, so I can use any client I want and I will be able to move all my mail any time I want. I'm not sure what failure the article is talking about since it links to a Google page explaining exactly how to get your Gmail messages out using POP3 or IMAP.
I don't think so at all. I think this is Google playing it smart and getting in position to make some big moves, although I can't in any way speculate on what, I'm no tech expert. But that being said, based on their latest stuff, they haven't stopped running out of ides.
You don't have to run out of ideas to become a patent troll. Microsoft has a research division which seems to come up with all kinds of interesting stuff, most of which never sees the light of day. Though they invent far less than they claim, Apple certainly has some good new ideas of their own. Patent trolling is simply more profitable than innovating in many cases. As Google isn't run by idiots and has a responsibility to provide the most value for their shareholders, they will eventually find themselves in a position where they must use patents offensively if the system isn't fixed to remove the incentive for abuse.
It sounds like most of the patents Google bought are Hardware Patents - IE Physical products instead of Imaginary Products such as Software Algorthyms
Do you have a count? I didn't see any enumeration of the patents in the transaction. Unfortunately, that will probably never be public knowledge.
I can't answer that specifically,; however companies do nede to protect themselves and that seems to be the case ehre.
Of course when they are larger they by patents, because that is when they ahve the money to do it.
By your logic, IBM would have stopped innovating 30 years ago.
Yeah, IBM is certainly innovating at a similar rate to Google.
Google is saying the purpose of obtaining patents such as these is so they have more defense against patent attacks. I think that's probably true at the moment. What I wonder is how long it will take Google to amass enough of an arsenal to decide they can be a patent bully like Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and many others. In any case, these patents are nothing more than corporate weapons and doing nothing to promote innovation.
what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game
Don't forget the IBM/Microsoft partnership on OS/2. At some point MS decided they'd do better on their own an started developing NT OS/2 which is the basis of Windows NT, XP, and all current versions of Windows.
The religion of peace has struck again.
It doesn't sound like anyone has claimed responsibility or any likely perpetrator has been identified by authorities.
The movie was terrible and had almost nothing to do with any of the games. Doom III was not innovative in game play, but it was entertaining in the same way that the original Doom was. Playing Doom III took me back to how scary some of the dark areas of the original were when I'd hear imps behind me coming out of the walls.
Obviously Carmack is not the sole fount of creativity in the world. But his output is amazing. I still know people who talk about Commander Keen. As far as Doom, Quake and the like, the market has spoken. I have spent many hours playing Doom and Quake deathmatch. There was a time the Internet component of Doom's deathmatch was seen as innovative. As far as I'm concerned, Doom and Quake set the bar for FPS, the way Age of Empires set the bar for RTS (I'm biased against Starcraft...)
Carmack released id Tech 3's code as GPL. Go look at that code. I spend so much time looking over other people's crappy code. That code looks real nice. I couldn't believe how good the code looked. Clear as a bell what everything does. It's also amazing so little code can do so much in games like OpenArena.
Reading the book Masters of Doom made me admire Carmack all the more as a coder. I don't know who was wrong or right in the office politics with him and Romero at I.D., most people I know who have met Romero say he's a nice guy. But there's no taking away Carmack's technical prowess.
I don't think anybody's impugning Carmack's coding prowess or creativity in game engine design. The discussion is about creativity of game play. Id has not innovated much in game play for at least a decade while others have. However, if people continue to find their sort of game entertaining, there's no reason Id shouldn't keep making them. I'm not willing to pay money for more of the same from Id, but I don't bear any grudge against them.
Doom III didn't have much of a story or characters, but which Id game did? In particular how was Dooom III any less of a game than the original Doom?
Only a small (though loud) minority of Linux users believes in a Microsoft vs Linux fight. Linux was created in 1991 to be a POSIX compliant kernel, not to be a competitor to MS. The GNU tools were created to have a free Unix. GNU + Linux is a fine example of open source in the Unix world, and is definitely not a reaction/fight/whatever towards Microsoft.
You've obviously been paying no attention whatsoever to servers and phones, where MS is very much in direct competition with various *nix, including various GNU/Linux and other Linux-based operating systems. Servers have been dominated by *nix for decades though MS is always trying to gain more market share. Phones will soon (if not already) be completely dominated by *nix, where Android is one of the most important software platforms. MS is also pushing phone development hard. Though there is much competition between Linux and Microsoft, I think the more important competition is between Free and non-Free operating systems.
With the way the Apple juggernaut has been steamrolling it would make sense to me for Microsoft and Open Source in general to find a way of co-existing. Say what you want about Microsoft, but Apple's heavy-handed, strict controls and policies makes Microsoft look like a pussy cat in comparison.
Apple is even more of a contradiction than Microsoft. They have and continue to make useful contributions to a variety of important Free Software projects (probably much more than MS has done), such as GCC, CUPS and Webkit. They use those projects as well as lots of proprietary code to restrict users horribly. In fact, there are many corporations, including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Google which use and contribute to Linux and many other Free Software projects while maintaining an ambivalence toward the principles behind Free Software. So, there is already coexistence, but it's not always a good thing.
Perhaps if they instead focused on fixing the memory leaks, pushing out 64-bit builds wouldn't be so pressing an issue?
64-bit builds of Firefox are neither new nor a misfeature. It's perfectly natural to run 64-bit applications on 64-bit operating systems and I've been running x86_64 Firefox on GNU/Linux and OSX for years. The fact that the Mozilla-provided Windows builds will finally catch up is barely newsworthy.
...does not feel much faster than my MacPlus, because operating system and software makers managed to slow everything down again using "advanced software engineering techniques."
How long did it take to transfer a 1MiB file from a LAN file server to your MacPlus? How fast local applications "feel" has nothing to do with Ethernet.
Military grade = So expensive that we sell these to the military (and they are silly enough to pay this much for fancily rebadged off-the-shelf hardware)
So, did the planetarium pay the ridiculous "military grade" premium or were they smart enough to find the COTS version?
The whole article smells like BS to me. FTFA:
The Sandia Cooler may also be the technology that smashes down the “Thermal Brick Wall” that is preventing computer chips from moving beyond 3GHz.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell chip makers about this "Brick Wall". Seriously, sounds like the author is making stuff up with absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
So, why aren't 4GHz CPUs common yet? If TFA is making stuff up about the cooling problems, they sure put a lot of work into the report to convince us.
Unnatural colour of CFL light being harsher on your eyes is another story...
It is another story: an old and increasingly irrelevant one. When my dad started replacing our bulbs with CFLs in the early 90s, they were always noticeably different in color and light quality. Now, all the room lights in my house are CFLs and I can't tell the difference between one of them and an incandescent side by side.
The good thing about this is that it seems Apple has based AirPrint on existing standards implemented in Free tools. What's odd is that other people are adding this functionality on to CUPS rather than it being released as part of CUPS itself. Apple bought CUPS from Easy Software Products. Though Apple has kept the CUPS going as a Free Software project mostly under GPL and LGPL, they can keep additions they write proprietary if they choose.
I'm much more concerned about my laptop power supply and the several hundred dollars I might have to shell out if this insanity fries my laptop. Ditto for the TV and the other appliances. The other appliances belong to the landlord; but it's still no fun to have to be around and have some tech service them.
There's little risk of damage to any device because of the frequency changing slightly. The article didn't mention any expensive electronics because line frequency has no effect on them whatsoever. They all use DC internally, so their power supplies must rectify the line current anyway.
Such a small change can have such a big impact.
I never really thought about how digital clocks keep track of time. This is a very interesting issue.
Of course, it could also turn into a boon for the industry, having everyone buy a clock that doesnt rely on "power timing".
Every $2 watch has used a quartz crystal for decades. It's incredible that any electric clocks still use line frequency. If this change helps get rid of them, that's fine with me.
Not trolling. Just fed up with sudo. For a single user system, why not have the option of just plain not installing it by default? I mean, its my system. I'm going to perform all root operations on it. Why do I have to be inconvenienced by this annoying application?
That is a troll. If you don't like to use sudo, then don't. It's not necessary to whine about it. I don't like ed, but you don't hear me complaining.
I like the underbars, always makes me feel "closer to the hardware" when I see a lot of them.
There's not reason for all languages to look the same.
There's also no logical connection between underscores and hardware. I write Python all the time with lots of them.
C++ goes all the way to 11. It's one louder than other languages.
It's certainly bigger. I thought it was complex before, but now it's a behemoth.
I am glad that C++ is still evolving. That last major improvement I remember was the addition of the string class. Then shortly after that my professional focus moved away from C and C++ and towards higher level languages (.NET, PHP, Python, Java, etc...). I just recently started my own personal project so I decided to relearn C++ again, and I noticed there is a fair amount of new stuff that wasn't there before (or I was never taught)
While all of the new features sound like a step in the right direction, I remain unimpressed because it still doesn't have automatic memory management (garbage collection) built-in. Of course, there are numerous libraries that add it, but in incompatible ways. Until it's a standard part of the language, I don't think it's a good choice for new general application development. If you have legacy C++ and/or C code you want to maintain and improve, the new features probably very nice.
In a sign that many eyes don't really make (security) bugs shallow
Also proof that security through obscurity works.
How is this proof of that? For all we know, crackers have been exploiting this vulnerability for years.