Someone needed their campaign finances bolstered. There is no way the cost of a few printer drivers could exceed the licenses for all the proprietary software they now need. And in ten years of using Linux on all my company's desktops and notebooks (except those Macs), I've never seen a printer that Linux did not support out of the box.
I remember the original project and the guy who led it, and it was clear that it was a success of technocratic merit over political bluster. A cheap, robust and *secure* computing infrastructure was what they got.
This is far from over, anyhow, someone is going to get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar.
Did you RTFA? Stacking the tabs at the side is one of the layouts, and the "Address bar hidden in tab" Compact layout is one of four.
Actually I like the idea a lot, it's especially annoying on smaller resolution screens to lose space to something we hardly ever type or read. Sure, it helps people who know what they're looking for against phishing, but such people are unlikely to click on random emails anyhow.
Chrome has been doing a good job pushing browsers forwards, after years of bloat and slowdown, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of this.
This works for a component with one set of inputs and one set of outputs.
A trading system is essentially chaotic in the way it processes data because it gets so many inputs and their relative arrival times determine the system's behavior. You'd have to be replacing the old system with an identical new one, and then add heavy and slow synchronization to all the inputs going to both systems (so e.g. a trade A hitting the old system one microsecond before trade B also hits the new system the same way).
So yes, it comes down to running a whole lot of offline tests using real data and then bringing it online.
Next was about patenting, not copyrighting, gene sequences. Copyrighting a gene sequence would make it illegal for carriers of that gene to reproduce. Patents make it illegal for anyone to make money using that gene. And the trick with genes is that one does not patent the DNA at all, but the RNA, which is the 'negative' of the DNA sequence. The RNA is artificially produced, thus an invention. And to do any work with a sequence of DNA you always need RNA, so patenting the RNA gives the same result as patenting the DNA (which no-one does because even Texas judges are not that stupid) would.
If you're going to use terms like "IP", which is little more than a trick for confounding patents with economically sane forms of exclusion, please at least don't confuse copyright and patents (and ship hull designs and plant variety rights and trademarks and domain names and trade secrets, which are all forms of "IP").
In Scotland, a pancake aka "dropped scone" is made from the same dough as Belgian waffles, and is traditionally cooked on a griddle. The English call these "Scotch pancakes". Well made, they are extremely satisfying, and make a great accompaniment to haggis & neeps and black bun, washed down with huge quantities of strong tea with milk. The Flemish also make "pannenkoeken" which are similarly cooked on griddles but with a thinner batter that allows the pancake to be gently spread over the griddle as it cooks, giving the large and thin "pancake" the Brettons called "crêpe" when they imported it from Artois in 1490. Just a year later the French crown took over Brittany, and it has been said this was to seize control of the new pancake industry.
Now to the use of the word "flat"... are we talking about surface curvature (or lack thereof) or thickness? Because Scotch pancakes are not flat at all, they are gently convex, due to the raising agents used (typically buttermilk and baking soda, demonstrating historical cultural connections between lowland Scotland and Flanders, where buttermilk was invented). Whereas the Flemish pannenkoek is somewhat concave, due to the effect of batter pushed out to the edges. French crêpes of course will take the shape of the pan they are cooked in, but are often more concave than convex.
This has absolutely nothing to do with SSDs but neither does the reference to pancakes in the summary.
Computational power doubles at the same price point, every 12-18 months. It's only a few years away from consumer-level encoding. The fight is not today, it's in the next 3-5 years when every mid-to-high range phone/mini tablet/camera can do professional-level video encoding.
The big difference is that Nokia has always made outstanding hardware, and lousy, terrible software. Apple, on the other hand, makes a near-perfect software experience and uses that to sell upmarket, beautifully designed hardware. It would be insane for Apple to use Android, but equally it was insane for Nokia to try to compete with Android. They should, two years ago, have embraced Android and thrown out as many slabs running it as they could, putting those Symbian and Meego talents onto Android, or just focusing on the beautiful hardware people expect these days. Instead they left this space to HTC, while complaining about Chinese manufacturers eating their low-end market.
Microsoft need Nokia desperately since they've lost HTC, but Nokia is committing suicide with this "partnership". It's like hitching your wagon to the Titanic.
It's pretty simple: if you make a product who's name is close enough to potentially confuse customers, and your product is in the same market as the trademarked product, you are on the wrong side of the law. I can make jeans called "Apple" but I cannot make computers called "Appla", "Applish", "Ipple", "Opple", or any name that is potentially confusing. My own company, "iMatix", was close enough to the existing "iMation" that we signed an agreement to never product floppy disks.
Of course like any such case, it's about convincing a judge. If the judge thinks there is no scope for confusion, fine. Otherwise, name change and potentially, damages.
In this case it's probably more about the gameplay but using such a similar name is really stupid.
You deliberately chose "Tetrada" to sound similar to "Tetris" and on alone the basis that the software is a video game (no matter what else it does), that's grounds for a take down letter, and a civil court case if you don't comply. You are deluded if you think you can play the victim here, and adding your tragic story to the Wikipedia article on the Tetris Company doesn't make your case stronger.
Is it really so difficult to be original?
Honestly, it really annoys me to see your mediocrity dressed up in self-justification and misplaced outrage. You are not a victim, you are an idiot.
"If you remove the core group, you cripple the movement"... this is the kind of thinking that drives the Egyptian internal security to round-up and torture the "core group" of pro-democracy protesters.
Except that it doesn't work that way, anymore. Pre-internet, it used to be that people organized around direct personal connections, and indeed you could break a movement by taking out key individuals, thus breaking its structure. But post-Internet, people organize around issues, and do so without knowing each other, and as long as the issue is there, there will always be someone else to be the "fanatic".
This is how Egyptian crowds spontaneously formed armies of 20,000 strong to fight off pro-regime thugs in Liberty square last week. There are no obvious leaders, no "core", and arresting those who appear to be driving the process, e.g. those who started the facebook pages, or journalists, only makes things worse.
If you don't get this essential aspect of Internet-driven smart crowds, you don't get Anonymous, which represents a form of pragmatic goal-oriented anarchist organization that takes the flash crowd idea to an extreme level. "Anonymous", it's right there in the name. You could be 10 years old, or 70, it doesn't matter and so everyone can participate, at any level whatsoever. There is no core group, by definition, no-one knows anyone else except by temporary memory. It's an internal security service's worst nightmare.
Anonymous is not much more than an idea of what is possible, and when you attack an idea you only make it stronger.
Bankers are pretty scuzzy, yes, but they've always been so. There are good reasons why the financial markets turned to more and more risky products over the years, and computers have a lot to do with it. It comes down to the ever falling cost of IT, and the erosion of banks' monopoly over large IT systems capable of handling trillions of transactions a year. With the loss of this monopoly, they could not sustain profit margins of 6% or so on normal banking products. And without such margins they could not get funding from stock markets. And without that they could not grow and compete in an ever flatter global market.
So you have a financial industry running out of stuff to make money from, and thus driven to take on more and more risky products, where risk means profit (as long as you can win the game, which banks calculate they can almost always do). Thus derivatives on mortgages, credit card debt, intellectual property (patents), even other derivatives... anything with a 10% annual return. The alternative was retreat from stock market money, which only a small specialized bank could do.
Greed and scuzziness are ancient and did not cause this crash, they were just part of the gravity slope. The real cause is the seismic shift in what a "financial product" is, caused by the cost of IT tending towards zero. That seismic shift is so large it caused an earthquake, the crash. The shifts aren't done, and the impact of cheap IT on this sector is not done, and banks as we knew them are probably gone forever, to be replaced by state-sanctioned monopolies.
You're making a false equivalence. Microsoft make their money from Windows and the products that run on it, leveraging a monopoly in ways that have been ruled illegal over and over. Apple make their money from the hardware, and use the OS as added bait. They do not have a monopoly and do not make deals with other manufacturers to get OS/X included on all boxes under the threat of punitive sanctions (which are also illegal).
Much of Europe has specific laws against 'bundling', in which two products are sold together in ways that make it hard for the consumer to exercise fair choice. E.g. GSM handsets + contracts.
This case is not about a general issue of being able to buy hardware without software. It is specifically about being able to escape the Windows tarpit without being penalized (as a consumer) for the cost of the OS if you don't want it. The term "Windows tax" really is accurate: when you buy a notebook (except an Apple) you pay for Windows whether you want it or not. When you buy an Apple computer you are explicitly choosing OS/X as part of the package and you do have an easy alternative.
When notebooks come with a real choice of OSes, as netbooks did in the first years, a sizeable % of buyers choose Linux, because it saves them money and works as well as Windows for most applications. (I know because I've given Linux netbooks to my wife and kids and they have never, once, had trouble using them.)
Of course it's easy to get desktops without an OS, if you're a geek and you use custom builds. And yes, you can find specialist stores who will sell you Linux laptops. But the mass of people buy their computers in supermarkets, and that's where the problem lies.
1. Lobby globally for a stronger patent system including patents on basic medical research that increase the cost of treatments and drugs for tropical disease by factors of 10x to 1000x. Rationale: such a patent system will also protect Microsoft's monopoly through patents on its file formats, interfaces, and opponents. 2. Use your tax-deductible charity billions to 'sponsor' friendly government projects and punish those ministers who promote generic medicines, patent free zones, open source software, open standards. 3. Profit.
That's kind of the deal. I like Steve Job's because he's defined the curve of the gadgets I play with. I don't particularly like Bill Gates because he's made the world a worse and more dangerous place for my kids.
... is expected to boost its "membership" from 6.5 million...
Hope that helps. The goal is not to sell dating services, the goal is to attract men with lonely penis syndrome, and sell them useless services. A larger "membership", which presumably will be principally profiles of women naive enough to leave their FB profiles open, will attract more LPS men, and generate more money.
Here's how it works. You have LPS, you go to this site, make a search. The site convincingly shows you dozens of matching profiles (with photos!) Now if you upgrade to a minimum membership you can message, wink, or chat with some of these lovelies.
Apart from the way the names 'Gosu' and 'Go' overlap and are both derived from the board game, what similarities do you see between the gosu-lang.org and the golang.org websites?
I am not a geneticist and if I was, I am not your geneticist and this is not genetic advice. Having said that...
That 1-4% would be everyone of European and Asian descent, i.e. that small fraction of humanity that left Africa around 50K (iirc) years ago and took over the rest of the world from the previous model of human. Africans don't have Neanderthal genes, except introduced over the last hundreds of years by foreigners, making them more modern (take that, white supremacists) and further have a significantly more diverse gene pool which has consequences for things like gene regulation, which has a lot more bugs in the Eurasian lines. We pale skins get sick from things that our African kin don't. Presumably whatever Neanderthal genes we kept weren't random but were useful for things like cold climates.
Well, cheap is $25-$50 for the hardware + whatever the software costs. For Android, that is essentially zero and this makes Shanzai + Android the cheapest possible platform for Africa.
Battery life: most is taken up by fancy screens, wifi, 3G, GPS. Kill all that for a low-cost phone, stick a solar panel on the back, and the battery will last 2-3 days of real use. Furthermore, it's not a week between power outlets, they're everywhere, they just cost money to use.
Rugged? Hardly the point. When you earn a dollar a day, you take _really_ good care of stuff costing $24-$50. I've bought 3rd hand phones in West Africa that still worked.
Patching Android? Are you trolling? I'm on my 3rd Android phone and have never had to 'patch' a phone. WTF are you talking about?
Bascailly, the parent is right: Nokia is about 12-18 months from losing its low end markets to a tidal wave of cheap Android slabbies from China. I'm predicting they will be bought by some random Chinese firm just for the brand, like Commodore, in three years, max.
I predict that projects like OOo take money to keep going, and that within six months LibreOffice and other forks will be dead. Looking at the IRC transcript I don't see Oracle forcing anything. There's a council that runs OOo and some people on that council have made a fork, which is literally a competing product. The correct place for those people is TDF, not the OOoCC, that's surely obvious.
Here's the thing... Red Hat have long claimed to be against software patents and claim a special position when it comes to the business of open source. Yet they have a fairly significant portfolio of software patents, and of business method patents, both in the US and in Europe. Their business method patents tend to cover software distribution and support, thus they are aimed at potential rivals. Definitely not 'defensive'.
Red Hat will happily claim patents on standards they are participating in, as they did with AMQP. And when they had the chance to hit the patent system hard, as they did in Europe from 2005 to present day, they do nothing. I was president of the FFII for two years, and Red Hat sponsored us precisely 0.00 Euro since 2005, to the best of my knowledge. Other firms, like Canonical, did give us quite serious support.
The worst thing in a fight such as we've been in for years against software patents, which are an evil, is so-called friends who in fact endorse and use the very system we're trying to change. Red Hat are this: they claim one thing, but do the opposite. There's no pleasure in seeing them settle here but it is well-deserved.
This comes from personally maintaining some 200+ wikis on Wikidot.com.
There are two kinds of vandals: those in the community of contributors, and those outside it. The first class of vandals cannot easily be detected automatically but when a wiki is actively built, the community will easily and happily fix damage done by these. The second class are usually spammers and come along when the wiki is stale. They are easily detected by the fact that a long static page is suddenly edited by an unknown person. It's very rare to find a real edit happening late after a wiki has solidified. We handle the second type of vandalism trivially by getting email notifications on any edits.
Trick is, wikis (maybe not Wikipedia but then certainly individual pages) don't have random life cycles but go through growth and stasis.
There are several problems with this letter. It suggests that only free software does not use patents, so it sets itself up for being labelled a typical anti-capitalist rant from long haired hippies who hate property in all its forms.
They should have noted that Microsoft Windows, Office, Excel, PowerPoint became world dominant without a single patent being filed. That there are clear economic studies that show that software patents cause innovation to stop (Bessen et al), that the original premise behind patents was to reduce competition, and that the only provable value in a patent (any patent) is the documentation of knowledge in return for that toxic temporary monopoly. The reason software patents fail so badly is that we don't need patents to explain how software technology works.
All patents are toxic to their industries but at least we can reconstruct steam engines using the patent archive. That cost 20 years of progress during the industrial revolution.
There is never going to be anyone who 100 years from now reconstructs how to build a multithreaded web server from the patent archive. This is the fraud, and that is the reason software patents must be killed.
The drop-off in per-core efficiency is due to multithreading models based on shared data. Shared data requires locks, semaphores, and waits, and as the number of threads trying to share the same data increases, they get more and more conflicts, and waits, so that even the very best multithreaded application sees no speedup after four or so cores. But it's unlikely to have such heavy work on a desktop, and for dedicated back-end servers it's frustrating because above four cores, there's no obvious gain. Perhaps that is why Intel and AMD are not yet fighting a core war.
However the shared data design is just one option. If you do message-passing concurrency you can create applications in any language that can scale linearly to any number of cores. It's possible in any language, just requires the right inter-thread communication model.
I assume the core war will come once message-passing concurrency becomes a standard way of writing concurrent applications.
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Someone needed their campaign finances bolstered. There is no way the cost of a few printer drivers could exceed the licenses for all the proprietary software they now need. And in ten years of using Linux on all my company's desktops and notebooks (except those Macs), I've never seen a printer that Linux did not support out of the box.
I remember the original project and the guy who led it, and it was clear that it was a success of technocratic merit over political bluster. A cheap, robust and *secure* computing infrastructure was what they got.
This is far from over, anyhow, someone is going to get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar.
Did you RTFA? Stacking the tabs at the side is one of the layouts, and the "Address bar hidden in tab" Compact layout is one of four.
Actually I like the idea a lot, it's especially annoying on smaller resolution screens to lose space to something we hardly ever type or read. Sure, it helps people who know what they're looking for against phishing, but such people are unlikely to click on random emails anyhow.
Chrome has been doing a good job pushing browsers forwards, after years of bloat and slowdown, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of this.
This works for a component with one set of inputs and one set of outputs.
A trading system is essentially chaotic in the way it processes data because it gets so many inputs and their relative arrival times determine the system's behavior. You'd have to be replacing the old system with an identical new one, and then add heavy and slow synchronization to all the inputs going to both systems (so e.g. a trade A hitting the old system one microsecond before trade B also hits the new system the same way).
So yes, it comes down to running a whole lot of offline tests using real data and then bringing it online.
Next was about patenting, not copyrighting, gene sequences. Copyrighting a gene sequence would make it illegal for carriers of that gene to reproduce. Patents make it illegal for anyone to make money using that gene. And the trick with genes is that one does not patent the DNA at all, but the RNA, which is the 'negative' of the DNA sequence. The RNA is artificially produced, thus an invention. And to do any work with a sequence of DNA you always need RNA, so patenting the RNA gives the same result as patenting the DNA (which no-one does because even Texas judges are not that stupid) would.
If you're going to use terms like "IP", which is little more than a trick for confounding patents with economically sane forms of exclusion, please at least don't confuse copyright and patents (and ship hull designs and plant variety rights and trademarks and domain names and trade secrets, which are all forms of "IP").
Yes, Facebook is now flatter than a pancake. The question is, Scotch pancake, Flemish pannenkoek, or Bretton crepe?
In Scotland, a pancake aka "dropped scone" is made from the same dough as Belgian waffles, and is traditionally cooked on a griddle. The English call these "Scotch pancakes". Well made, they are extremely satisfying, and make a great accompaniment to haggis & neeps and black bun, washed down with huge quantities of strong tea with milk. The Flemish also make "pannenkoeken" which are similarly cooked on griddles but with a thinner batter that allows the pancake to be gently spread over the griddle as it cooks, giving the large and thin "pancake" the Brettons called "crêpe" when they imported it from Artois in 1490. Just a year later the French crown took over Brittany, and it has been said this was to seize control of the new pancake industry.
Now to the use of the word "flat"... are we talking about surface curvature (or lack thereof) or thickness? Because Scotch pancakes are not flat at all, they are gently convex, due to the raising agents used (typically buttermilk and baking soda, demonstrating historical cultural connections between lowland Scotland and Flanders, where buttermilk was invented). Whereas the Flemish pannenkoek is somewhat concave, due to the effect of batter pushed out to the edges. French crêpes of course will take the shape of the pan they are cooked in, but are often more concave than convex.
This has absolutely nothing to do with SSDs but neither does the reference to pancakes in the summary.
Computational power doubles at the same price point, every 12-18 months. It's only a few years away from consumer-level encoding. The fight is not today, it's in the next 3-5 years when every mid-to-high range phone/mini tablet/camera can do professional-level video encoding.
The big difference is that Nokia has always made outstanding hardware, and lousy, terrible software. Apple, on the other hand, makes a near-perfect software experience and uses that to sell upmarket, beautifully designed hardware. It would be insane for Apple to use Android, but equally it was insane for Nokia to try to compete with Android. They should, two years ago, have embraced Android and thrown out as many slabs running it as they could, putting those Symbian and Meego talents onto Android, or just focusing on the beautiful hardware people expect these days. Instead they left this space to HTC, while complaining about Chinese manufacturers eating their low-end market.
Microsoft need Nokia desperately since they've lost HTC, but Nokia is committing suicide with this "partnership". It's like hitching your wagon to the Titanic.
It's pretty simple: if you make a product who's name is close enough to potentially confuse customers, and your product is in the same market as the trademarked product, you are on the wrong side of the law. I can make jeans called "Apple" but I cannot make computers called "Appla", "Applish", "Ipple", "Opple", or any name that is potentially confusing. My own company, "iMatix", was close enough to the existing "iMation" that we signed an agreement to never product floppy disks.
Of course like any such case, it's about convincing a judge. If the judge thinks there is no scope for confusion, fine. Otherwise, name change and potentially, damages.
In this case it's probably more about the gameplay but using such a similar name is really stupid.
"You don't understand trademark law at all"
Care to back up that assertion with something tangible?
You deliberately chose "Tetrada" to sound similar to "Tetris" and on alone the basis that the software is a video game (no matter what else it does), that's grounds for a take down letter, and a civil court case if you don't comply. You are deluded if you think you can play the victim here, and adding your tragic story to the Wikipedia article on the Tetris Company doesn't make your case stronger.
Is it really so difficult to be original?
Honestly, it really annoys me to see your mediocrity dressed up in self-justification and misplaced outrage. You are not a victim, you are an idiot.
"If you remove the core group, you cripple the movement"... this is the kind of thinking that drives the Egyptian internal security to round-up and torture the "core group" of pro-democracy protesters.
Except that it doesn't work that way, anymore. Pre-internet, it used to be that people organized around direct personal connections, and indeed you could break a movement by taking out key individuals, thus breaking its structure. But post-Internet, people organize around issues, and do so without knowing each other, and as long as the issue is there, there will always be someone else to be the "fanatic".
This is how Egyptian crowds spontaneously formed armies of 20,000 strong to fight off pro-regime thugs in Liberty square last week. There are no obvious leaders, no "core", and arresting those who appear to be driving the process, e.g. those who started the facebook pages, or journalists, only makes things worse.
If you don't get this essential aspect of Internet-driven smart crowds, you don't get Anonymous, which represents a form of pragmatic goal-oriented anarchist organization that takes the flash crowd idea to an extreme level. "Anonymous", it's right there in the name. You could be 10 years old, or 70, it doesn't matter and so everyone can participate, at any level whatsoever. There is no core group, by definition, no-one knows anyone else except by temporary memory. It's an internal security service's worst nightmare.
Anonymous is not much more than an idea of what is possible, and when you attack an idea you only make it stronger.
Rules 1 and 2, tard, rules 1 and 2!
Bankers are pretty scuzzy, yes, but they've always been so. There are good reasons why the financial markets turned to more and more risky products over the years, and computers have a lot to do with it. It comes down to the ever falling cost of IT, and the erosion of banks' monopoly over large IT systems capable of handling trillions of transactions a year. With the loss of this monopoly, they could not sustain profit margins of 6% or so on normal banking products. And without such margins they could not get funding from stock markets. And without that they could not grow and compete in an ever flatter global market.
So you have a financial industry running out of stuff to make money from, and thus driven to take on more and more risky products, where risk means profit (as long as you can win the game, which banks calculate they can almost always do). Thus derivatives on mortgages, credit card debt, intellectual property (patents), even other derivatives... anything with a 10% annual return. The alternative was retreat from stock market money, which only a small specialized bank could do.
Greed and scuzziness are ancient and did not cause this crash, they were just part of the gravity slope. The real cause is the seismic shift in what a "financial product" is, caused by the cost of IT tending towards zero. That seismic shift is so large it caused an earthquake, the crash. The shifts aren't done, and the impact of cheap IT on this sector is not done, and banks as we knew them are probably gone forever, to be replaced by state-sanctioned monopolies.
That's my view, anyhow. :-)
You're making a false equivalence. Microsoft make their money from Windows and the products that run on it, leveraging a monopoly in ways that have been ruled illegal over and over. Apple make their money from the hardware, and use the OS as added bait. They do not have a monopoly and do not make deals with other manufacturers to get OS/X included on all boxes under the threat of punitive sanctions (which are also illegal).
Much of Europe has specific laws against 'bundling', in which two products are sold together in ways that make it hard for the consumer to exercise fair choice. E.g. GSM handsets + contracts.
This case is not about a general issue of being able to buy hardware without software. It is specifically about being able to escape the Windows tarpit without being penalized (as a consumer) for the cost of the OS if you don't want it. The term "Windows tax" really is accurate: when you buy a notebook (except an Apple) you pay for Windows whether you want it or not. When you buy an Apple computer you are explicitly choosing OS/X as part of the package and you do have an easy alternative.
When notebooks come with a real choice of OSes, as netbooks did in the first years, a sizeable % of buyers choose Linux, because it saves them money and works as well as Windows for most applications. (I know because I've given Linux netbooks to my wife and kids and they have never, once, had trouble using them.)
Of course it's easy to get desktops without an OS, if you're a geek and you use custom builds. And yes, you can find specialist stores who will sell you Linux laptops. But the mass of people buy their computers in supermarkets, and that's where the problem lies.
1. Lobby globally for a stronger patent system including patents on basic medical research that increase the cost of treatments and drugs for tropical disease by factors of 10x to 1000x. Rationale: such a patent system will also protect Microsoft's monopoly through patents on its file formats, interfaces, and opponents.
2. Use your tax-deductible charity billions to 'sponsor' friendly government projects and punish those ministers who promote generic medicines, patent free zones, open source software, open standards.
3. Profit.
That's kind of the deal. I like Steve Job's because he's defined the curve of the gadgets I play with. I don't particularly like Bill Gates because he's made the world a worse and more dangerous place for my kids.
... is expected to boost its "membership" from 6.5 million...
Hope that helps. The goal is not to sell dating services, the goal is to attract men with lonely penis syndrome, and sell them useless services. A larger "membership", which presumably will be principally profiles of women naive enough to leave their FB profiles open, will attract more LPS men, and generate more money.
Here's how it works. You have LPS, you go to this site, make a search. The site convincingly shows you dozens of matching profiles (with photos!) Now if you upgrade to a minimum membership you can message, wink, or chat with some of these lovelies.
Except they're not there.
Apart from the way the names 'Gosu' and 'Go' overlap and are both derived from the board game, what similarities do you see between the gosu-lang.org and the golang.org websites?
I am not a geneticist and if I was, I am not your geneticist and this is not genetic advice. Having said that...
That 1-4% would be everyone of European and Asian descent, i.e. that small fraction of humanity that left Africa around 50K (iirc) years ago and took over the rest of the world from the previous model of human. Africans don't have Neanderthal genes, except introduced over the last hundreds of years by foreigners, making them more modern (take that, white supremacists) and further have a significantly more diverse gene pool which has consequences for things like gene regulation, which has a lot more bugs in the Eurasian lines. We pale skins get sick from things that our African kin don't. Presumably whatever Neanderthal genes we kept weren't random but were useful for things like cold climates.
Well, cheap is $25-$50 for the hardware + whatever the software costs. For Android, that is essentially zero and this makes Shanzai + Android the cheapest possible platform for Africa.
Battery life: most is taken up by fancy screens, wifi, 3G, GPS. Kill all that for a low-cost phone, stick a solar panel on the back, and the battery will last 2-3 days of real use. Furthermore, it's not a week between power outlets, they're everywhere, they just cost money to use.
Rugged? Hardly the point. When you earn a dollar a day, you take _really_ good care of stuff costing $24-$50. I've bought 3rd hand phones in West Africa that still worked.
Patching Android? Are you trolling? I'm on my 3rd Android phone and have never had to 'patch' a phone. WTF are you talking about?
Bascailly, the parent is right: Nokia is about 12-18 months from losing its low end markets to a tidal wave of cheap Android slabbies from China. I'm predicting they will be bought by some random Chinese firm just for the brand, like Commodore, in three years, max.
I predict that projects like OOo take money to keep going, and that within six months LibreOffice and other forks will be dead. Looking at the IRC transcript I don't see Oracle forcing anything. There's a council that runs OOo and some people on that council have made a fork, which is literally a competing product. The correct place for those people is TDF, not the OOoCC, that's surely obvious.
Here's the thing... Red Hat have long claimed to be against software patents and claim a special position when it comes to the business of open source. Yet they have a fairly significant portfolio of software patents, and of business method patents, both in the US and in Europe. Their business method patents tend to cover software distribution and support, thus they are aimed at potential rivals. Definitely not 'defensive'.
Red Hat will happily claim patents on standards they are participating in, as they did with AMQP. And when they had the chance to hit the patent system hard, as they did in Europe from 2005 to present day, they do nothing. I was president of the FFII for two years, and Red Hat sponsored us precisely 0.00 Euro since 2005, to the best of my knowledge. Other firms, like Canonical, did give us quite serious support.
The worst thing in a fight such as we've been in for years against software patents, which are an evil, is so-called friends who in fact endorse and use the very system we're trying to change. Red Hat are this: they claim one thing, but do the opposite. There's no pleasure in seeing them settle here but it is well-deserved.
This comes from personally maintaining some 200+ wikis on Wikidot.com.
There are two kinds of vandals: those in the community of contributors, and those outside it. The first class of vandals cannot easily be detected automatically but when a wiki is actively built, the community will easily and happily fix damage done by these. The second class are usually spammers and come along when the wiki is stale. They are easily detected by the fact that a long static page is suddenly edited by an unknown person. It's very rare to find a real edit happening late after a wiki has solidified. We handle the second type of vandalism trivially by getting email notifications on any edits.
Trick is, wikis (maybe not Wikipedia but then certainly individual pages) don't have random life cycles but go through growth and stasis.
There are several problems with this letter. It suggests that only free software does not use patents, so it sets itself up for being labelled a typical anti-capitalist rant from long haired hippies who hate property in all its forms.
They should have noted that Microsoft Windows, Office, Excel, PowerPoint became world dominant without a single patent being filed. That there are clear economic studies that show that software patents cause innovation to stop (Bessen et al), that the original premise behind patents was to reduce competition, and that the only provable value in a patent (any patent) is the documentation of knowledge in return for that toxic temporary monopoly. The reason software patents fail so badly is that we don't need patents to explain how software technology works.
All patents are toxic to their industries but at least we can reconstruct steam engines using the patent archive. That cost 20 years of progress during the industrial revolution.
There is never going to be anyone who 100 years from now reconstructs how to build a multithreaded web server from the patent archive. This is the fraud, and that is the reason software patents must be killed.
The drop-off in per-core efficiency is due to multithreading models based on shared data. Shared data requires locks, semaphores, and waits, and as the number of threads trying to share the same data increases, they get more and more conflicts, and waits, so that even the very best multithreaded application sees no speedup after four or so cores. But it's unlikely to have such heavy work on a desktop, and for dedicated back-end servers it's frustrating because above four cores, there's no obvious gain. Perhaps that is why Intel and AMD are not yet fighting a core war.
However the shared data design is just one option. If you do message-passing concurrency you can create applications in any language that can scale linearly to any number of cores. It's possible in any language, just requires the right inter-thread communication model.
I assume the core war will come once message-passing concurrency becomes a standard way of writing concurrent applications.