And thus, with the exit of half a dozen of the highest level Microsoft department heads, there is nobody at MS that can take over Ballmer's seat as CEO if the board of directors decides to fire him. He's made it much harder to fire him now.
A G5 tower is a monstrous waste of electricity with trivial performance in return compared to a modern machine. Its primary use these days is as a space heater.
They may also want to make an ARM core that implements a graphics accelerator more friendly to the Direct3D model (and less friendly to OpenGL ES) than is currently available.
The ARM core has nothing to do with graphics. The graphics accelerator is a discrete logic unit chosen by the SOC maker to integrate into the chip. This part uses the standard AHB/AXI (ARM Host Bus) interface. A major architecture license is not required to do this.
CLR acceleration, on the other hand, seems like a possibility. They could replace the Jazelle (Java) mode. More likely, though, they will extend the ARMv7 ThumbEE mode, which is designed for this sort of thing. Here's the synopsis of ThumbEE from the Cortex reference manual:
Thumb Execution Environment (ThumbEE) is a variant of the Thumb instruction set designed as a target for dynamically generated code. This is code that is compiled on the device, from a portable bytecode or other intermediate or native representation, either shortly before or during execution. ThumbEE provides support for Just-In-Time (JIT), Dynamic Adaptive Compilation (DAC) and Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilers, but cannot interwork freely with the ARM and Thumb instruction sets.
ThumbEE is particularly suited to languages that feature managed pointers and array types.
The impact of the TRIM command is vastly overrated. It is effective on "naive" devices that don't allocate a reserve block pool and therefore have to erase before doing every write. On a modern SSD, the disk controller reserves 5-10% of the physical blocks (beyond those that the host can see) as an extended block pool. These blocks are always known to be free (since they're out of the scope of that OS) and are therefore preemptively erased. So, when your OS overwrites a previously written data block, one of these pre-erased blocks is actually written to and the old block is put in the reserve pool for erasing later at the device's leisure.
The one case where this isn't true is if you're constantly writing gigs of data to an empty drive. With TRIM commands, most of your drive may have been pre-erased, whereas without it you may overrun the reserve pool's size and then will be waiting on block erase. For normal desktop users, this is a pathological case. In servers and people who do a lot of heavy video editing it may matter a lot more.
As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access.
While ICQ was founded in Israel, it's been owned by AOL for over a decade. The ICQ network has been integrated with AOL's AIM network many years ago and the servers are located in AOL's network supercenter in Virginia.
There are still problems around the "freedom" part, as LLVM is using BSD-style licensing, authorising proprietary forks. Whereas GCC uses GPL licensing.
You're right, it doesn't solve freedom the problem for all people, but for many it does. And for some that were afraid to touch GPLv3 code, LLVM offers more freedom. So, there are trade-offs.
if they achieve +10% of avg. performance against gcc (not gdb!) on AMD64 and/or ARM platform, everyone will start using it pretty soon. Until then it cannot replace gcc. Unless compiler is in some way seriously broken, its only important characteristic is performance of generated code.
Intel's ICC compiler produces code that is more than 10% faster for x86/x86_64 than GCC (last I checked). ARM's RVCT compiler produces code that is 30% faster than GCC (today)! Why is anyone still using GCC then? Money, MY FREEDOM, and compatibility with gcc-only code are the leading candidates. Interestingly, LLVM solves all three of those issues for most people, plus it has the performance advantage.
Seriously, who holds their phone 12 inches (30 cm) away from their face? I just measured my typical use: about 24 inches if I'm sitting and 36 if I'm standing. I guess by that standard, I should be pretty happy with this display.
According to some things i read the other day, the hardware support for h.264 is really just a programmable DSP in most cases, so they could program support for VP8 if it were being seriously considered, and that appears to be the direction of things.
This was the case several years ago, when it was the wild west of MPEG4. Things were changing too rapidly to make concrete hardware. Today, everyone in the hardware world has pretty much settled on h.264 and the target profiles are well known. Hardware can be made to decode it at much lower power consumption than a DSP (and at much smaller die sizes, making for cheaper chips). People that need a wide variety of codecs or those that have a vested interest in DSPs (such as Texas Instruments) still use them over dedicated IP blocks.
Exactly. Further, the U.S. has had tax payer-funded health insurance for decades, it's called Medicare (for old people), Medicaid (for the disabled), the Veterans Administration (covers veteran soldiers), the U.S. Armed Forces medical services (which covers active military personnel and their families), as well as the health insurance of government workers. You don't see old people being forced to exercise and eat right, do you? You don't see soldiers' spouses and children being rounded up and put in fat camps.
Despite what Glenn Beck tells you, you will not be marked with the sign of the beast and then put into government-run health detention facilities.
Especially in a public health care setting, where it is the taxpayer who is/will be footing the bill for treatment.
You were doing so well until you got to this sentence. Let's not pull this into the discussion and bring the loonies out (or give them an excuse to shout that public health care is forcing their children to watch porn in class).
How about instead you conclude with this: Public health also means protecting the health of those children whose parents are too stupid, crazy, or superstitious to take steps to educate their kids on disease prevention. HIV, Syphilis, and Hepatitis can be fatal, but are all easily preventable and no person should get infected with them due to lack of knowledge.
Your statement about what constitutes "genuine" is not factual. 1 in 3 pirated copies of Windows actually have malicious software, malware, spyware, trojans, or other undersirable elements.
This statement is disingenuous. That means that 2 in 3 pirated copies of windows do not have these (i.e., they are exactly as Microsoft released them) and they are still considered not "genuine". Please don't redefine genuine to mean "Microsoft got paid".
It is always easy to count the number of potential people inconvenienced by a method like this, but considering the number of people saved from buy dangerous software, the trade-off seems justified.
The purpose of this software is very clearly NOT saving people from viruses. If that were so, it would be a virus-cleaner. The purpose here is to stop piracy (most likely piracy by computer builders and fixers).
Microsoft firmly believes that those who purchase counterfeit copies of Windows are VICTIMS not criminals. If we actually thought they were criminals, we would be taking grandmas and children to court like the RIAA.
The people who paid for a computer or a repair and got a pirated version of Windows are victims. But if their computers are working properly, they are only further victimized by Microsoft invalidating their Windows license. Microsoft is not doing this for the welfare of these people. Just the opposite, they are leaning on these people to get them to turn in those that provided them with the unlicensed copy of Windows.
As a final point, if you consider how sophisticated the world's botnets, trojans, and online attack vectors are becoming, a significant delivery method for these loads are via pirated software, if you refuse to acknowledge this, you're being ignorant.
If you believe this is about Microsoft caring about the welfare of people with pirated Windows, you're being ignorant.
First of all, all versions of Windows are "genuine". There isn't someone out there making a knock-off operating system and selling it as Windows, so let's stop the doublespeak.
What you're trying to stop is unlicensed installations. If I bought a machine from some vendor and he put on a copy of Windows, I honestly don't care as long as it keeps working. If this thing starts popping up, you've made your copyright enforcement problems my problems. Trust me, I have enough problems without dealing with Microsoft's.
Voluntary is another bit of nonsense. It's voluntary but you can't get updates without it. We all know how that goes, we've seen it before.
No personally identifiable information is transmitted. That is until you need to call Microsoft to get your Windows reactivated.
Pirates will work around it. Honest users will be inconvenienced. MS can keep this patch, we don't want it.
Not exactly... Apple has been slowly squeezing the Carbon (std. C++ lib set) into non-existence, which means you get to do it in Cocoa (that is, Obj-C).
Objective C / C++ is only required for doing the UI. 99% of your project can remain in C or C++ with only a very thin shim in Obj-C for the UI layer. There is no requirement to move your code base to except for the Mac-specific UI layer.
IIRC, there's no 64-bit Carbon love in SL, though the 32-bit Carbon libs should still be happily intact.
There is no 64 bit Carbon, because it's a relic. Cocoa easily mixes with C code (Obj-C is just C with extra stuff). Unless you're Adobe and you have a huge amount of UI code in Carbon, there is no reason to keep hanging on to it.
There's also (IIRC) Grand Central to contend with when you're dinking around with video, and I doubt that you could find an easy parallel for that when porting in from *nix.
Grand Central Dispatch is not required for video at all. Mac OS X supports the standard POSIX pthreads interface for threading.
The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.
Apple makes you program in the painful language of Objective C or some other language that Apple deems as necessary but most programmers cry out in agony.
What's wrong with Objective C? You can mix Objective C and "pure" C / C++ in the same project. Any decent C++ programmer can pick up Objective C / Objective C++ in one day of practice[1]. Obj-C is a superset of C, all of your favorite tricks still work. You can program it on Linux or Cygwin using GnuStep and gcc (though admittedly getting it going is kind of a pain). If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++. I don't see how it would be an obstacle to anyone.
I did some research into this a number of years ago (before torrents were around). I found that you can store 64 KB (if I recall correctly) in a slashdot comment. Now, the idea was not to to use slashdot as storage, they'd quickly put a stop to that. The trick is using slashdot and other forums and wikis as a way to get your data into the Google cache, where it will be served rapidly for everyone who wants it. There should also be forward correction data uploaded (like parity files) so that if some segments get lost, they can be recovered. Then what you need is an index file (kind of like a torrent file) that tells you what Google keywords you need to search for to find any given segment of the file, and software that will parse this file, download, and assemble the chunks into the completed data.
I wrote a little bit of code for it. It's all very straightforward, I just never got the time to get enough of it implemented to release anything. With torrents, it seems somewhat worthless to pursue now.
While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.
Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.
Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced: Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace SPARC - Their CPU line Java - Maybe you've heard of it. OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution. VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine. NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE. OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server High Availability Cluster
Honorable mention: NFS - The Network File System vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers
So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.
Twitter's developers care more about being cool and hip and using the latest tool so that they remain popular, than they do about having a site that stays up 7 days a week.
Exactly. Scalability problems arise from poor implementation, not from language choices. Scalable platforms have been implemented in the past with PHP, ASP, Perl, C, Java, and I'm sure with Ruby, Python, or your favorite new language. Twitter is a massive-scale site, they should be looking at deep engineering, not a buzzword platform that promises easy scalability for dummies.
Scala may help them alleviate problems they've hit in the Rails framework. What will help them with the problems they hit in Scala?
Slashdot Mirror
And thus, with the exit of half a dozen of the highest level Microsoft department heads, there is nobody at MS that can take over Ballmer's seat as CEO if the board of directors decides to fire him. He's made it much harder to fire him now.
A G5 tower is a monstrous waste of electricity with trivial performance in return compared to a modern machine. Its primary use these days is as a space heater.
They may also want to make an ARM core that implements a graphics accelerator more friendly to the Direct3D model (and less friendly to OpenGL ES) than is currently available.
The ARM core has nothing to do with graphics. The graphics accelerator is a discrete logic unit chosen by the SOC maker to integrate into the chip. This part uses the standard AHB/AXI (ARM Host Bus) interface. A major architecture license is not required to do this.
CLR acceleration, on the other hand, seems like a possibility. They could replace the Jazelle (Java) mode. More likely, though, they will extend the ARMv7 ThumbEE mode, which is designed for this sort of thing. Here's the synopsis of ThumbEE from the Cortex reference manual:
Thumb Execution Environment (ThumbEE) is a variant of the Thumb instruction set designed as a target for dynamically generated code. This is code that is compiled on the device, from a portable bytecode or other intermediate or native representation, either shortly before or during execution. ThumbEE provides support for Just-In-Time (JIT), Dynamic Adaptive Compilation (DAC) and Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilers, but cannot interwork freely with the ARM and Thumb instruction sets.
ThumbEE is particularly suited to languages that feature managed pointers and array types.
The impact of the TRIM command is vastly overrated. It is effective on "naive" devices that don't allocate a reserve block pool and therefore have to erase before doing every write. On a modern SSD, the disk controller reserves 5-10% of the physical blocks (beyond those that the host can see) as an extended block pool. These blocks are always known to be free (since they're out of the scope of that OS) and are therefore preemptively erased. So, when your OS overwrites a previously written data block, one of these pre-erased blocks is actually written to and the old block is put in the reserve pool for erasing later at the device's leisure.
The one case where this isn't true is if you're constantly writing gigs of data to an empty drive. With TRIM commands, most of your drive may have been pre-erased, whereas without it you may overrun the reserve pool's size and then will be waiting on block erase. For normal desktop users, this is a pathological case. In servers and people who do a lot of heavy video editing it may matter a lot more.
As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access.
While ICQ was founded in Israel, it's been owned by AOL for over a decade. The ICQ network has been integrated with AOL's AIM network many years ago and the servers are located in AOL's network supercenter in Virginia.
There are still problems around the "freedom" part, as LLVM is using BSD-style licensing, authorising proprietary forks. Whereas GCC uses GPL licensing.
You're right, it doesn't solve freedom the problem for all people, but for many it does. And for some that were afraid to touch GPLv3 code, LLVM offers more freedom. So, there are trade-offs.
if they achieve +10% of avg. performance against gcc (not gdb!) on AMD64 and/or ARM platform, everyone will start using it pretty soon. Until then it cannot replace gcc. Unless compiler is in some way seriously broken, its only important characteristic is performance of generated code.
Intel's ICC compiler produces code that is more than 10% faster for x86/x86_64 than GCC (last I checked). ARM's RVCT compiler produces code that is 30% faster than GCC (today)! Why is anyone still using GCC then? Money, MY FREEDOM, and compatibility with gcc-only code are the leading candidates. Interestingly, LLVM solves all three of those issues for most people, plus it has the performance advantage.
Seriously, who holds their phone 12 inches (30 cm) away from their face? I just measured my typical use: about 24 inches if I'm sitting and 36 if I'm standing. I guess by that standard, I should be pretty happy with this display.
Even better, free Portal for PC and Mac here: http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/
You mean Shenanigans?
According to some things i read the other day, the hardware support for h.264 is really just a programmable DSP in most cases, so they could program support for VP8 if it were being seriously considered, and that appears to be the direction of things.
This was the case several years ago, when it was the wild west of MPEG4. Things were changing too rapidly to make concrete hardware. Today, everyone in the hardware world has pretty much settled on h.264 and the target profiles are well known. Hardware can be made to decode it at much lower power consumption than a DSP (and at much smaller die sizes, making for cheaper chips). People that need a wide variety of codecs or those that have a vested interest in DSPs (such as Texas Instruments) still use them over dedicated IP blocks.
Exactly. Further, the U.S. has had tax payer-funded health insurance for decades, it's called Medicare (for old people), Medicaid (for the disabled), the Veterans Administration (covers veteran soldiers), the U.S. Armed Forces medical services (which covers active military personnel and their families), as well as the health insurance of government workers. You don't see old people being forced to exercise and eat right, do you? You don't see soldiers' spouses and children being rounded up and put in fat camps.
Despite what Glenn Beck tells you, you will not be marked with the sign of the beast and then put into government-run health detention facilities.
Especially in a public health care setting, where it is the taxpayer who is/will be footing the bill for treatment.
You were doing so well until you got to this sentence. Let's not pull this into the discussion and bring the loonies out (or give them an excuse to shout that public health care is forcing their children to watch porn in class).
How about instead you conclude with this:
Public health also means protecting the health of those children whose parents are too stupid, crazy, or superstitious to take steps to educate their kids on disease prevention. HIV, Syphilis, and Hepatitis can be fatal, but are all easily preventable and no person should get infected with them due to lack of knowledge.
Your statement about what constitutes "genuine" is not factual. 1 in 3 pirated copies of Windows actually have malicious software, malware, spyware, trojans, or other undersirable elements.
This statement is disingenuous. That means that 2 in 3 pirated copies of windows do not have these (i.e., they are exactly as Microsoft released them) and they are still considered not "genuine". Please don't redefine genuine to mean "Microsoft got paid".
It is always easy to count the number of potential people inconvenienced by a method like this, but considering the number of people saved from buy dangerous software, the trade-off seems justified.
The purpose of this software is very clearly NOT saving people from viruses. If that were so, it would be a virus-cleaner. The purpose here is to stop piracy (most likely piracy by computer builders and fixers).
Microsoft firmly believes that those who purchase counterfeit copies of Windows are VICTIMS not criminals. If we actually thought they were criminals, we would be taking grandmas and children to court like the RIAA.
The people who paid for a computer or a repair and got a pirated version of Windows are victims. But if their computers are working properly, they are only further victimized by Microsoft invalidating their Windows license. Microsoft is not doing this for the welfare of these people. Just the opposite, they are leaning on these people to get them to turn in those that provided them with the unlicensed copy of Windows.
As a final point, if you consider how sophisticated the world's botnets, trojans, and online attack vectors are becoming, a significant delivery method for these loads are via pirated software, if you refuse to acknowledge this, you're being ignorant.
If you believe this is about Microsoft caring about the welfare of people with pirated Windows, you're being ignorant.
First of all, all versions of Windows are "genuine". There isn't someone out there making a knock-off operating system and selling it as Windows, so let's stop the doublespeak.
What you're trying to stop is unlicensed installations. If I bought a machine from some vendor and he put on a copy of Windows, I honestly don't care as long as it keeps working. If this thing starts popping up, you've made your copyright enforcement problems my problems. Trust me, I have enough problems without dealing with Microsoft's.
Voluntary is another bit of nonsense. It's voluntary but you can't get updates without it. We all know how that goes, we've seen it before.
No personally identifiable information is transmitted. That is until you need to call Microsoft to get your Windows reactivated.
Pirates will work around it. Honest users will be inconvenienced. MS can keep this patch, we don't want it.
Dear god, I hoped you were joking.
Slashdot's running on 1.3.41.
This was obviously a joke. Slashdot is still run by a mess of perl scripts. They've yet to drag themselves into early last decade.
Not exactly... Apple has been slowly squeezing the Carbon (std. C++ lib set) into non-existence, which means you get to do it in Cocoa (that is, Obj-C).
Objective C / C++ is only required for doing the UI. 99% of your project can remain in C or C++ with only a very thin shim in Obj-C for the UI layer. There is no requirement to move your code base to except for the Mac-specific UI layer.
IIRC, there's no 64-bit Carbon love in SL, though the 32-bit Carbon libs should still be happily intact.
There is no 64 bit Carbon, because it's a relic. Cocoa easily mixes with C code (Obj-C is just C with extra stuff). Unless you're Adobe and you have a huge amount of UI code in Carbon, there is no reason to keep hanging on to it.
There's also (IIRC) Grand Central to contend with when you're dinking around with video, and I doubt that you could find an easy parallel for that when porting in from *nix.
Grand Central Dispatch is not required for video at all. Mac OS X supports the standard POSIX pthreads interface for threading.
Use open source, get cutting edge things.
I run Linux, where's my ZFS? No, FUSE doesn't count.
For units with bitlength a multiple of 4, (0x2B | ~0x2B) == 0xFFFFF...
x | ~x = 0xFF..FF, which is equal to -1 in the 2's complement signed version of the resulting type. Why not (0x2B | ~0x2B) == -1
example:
main() { printf("%d\n", (0x2b | ~0x2b)); }
But, does it run Linux?
No, it's GNU/FreeBSD. It can, however, emulate Linux system calls and therefore natively run binaries compiled for Linux.
I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this.
The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.
Apple makes you program in the painful language of Objective C or some other language that Apple deems as necessary but most programmers cry out in agony.
What's wrong with Objective C? You can mix Objective C and "pure" C / C++ in the same project. Any decent C++ programmer can pick up Objective C / Objective C++ in one day of practice[1]. Obj-C is a superset of C, all of your favorite tricks still work. You can program it on Linux or Cygwin using GnuStep and gcc (though admittedly getting it going is kind of a pain). If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++. I don't see how it would be an obstacle to anyone.
[1] No True Scotsman would doubt this comment.
I did some research into this a number of years ago (before torrents were around). I found that you can store 64 KB (if I recall correctly) in a slashdot comment. Now, the idea was not to to use slashdot as storage, they'd quickly put a stop to that. The trick is using slashdot and other forums and wikis as a way to get your data into the Google cache, where it will be served rapidly for everyone who wants it. There should also be forward correction data uploaded (like parity files) so that if some segments get lost, they can be recovered. Then what you need is an index file (kind of like a torrent file) that tells you what Google keywords you need to search for to find any given segment of the file, and software that will parse this file, download, and assemble the chunks into the completed data.
I wrote a little bit of code for it. It's all very straightforward, I just never got the time to get enough of it implemented to release anything. With torrents, it seems somewhat worthless to pursue now.
While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.
Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.
Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster
Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers
So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.
Twitter's developers care more about being cool and hip and using the latest tool so that they remain popular, than they do about having a site that stays up 7 days a week.
Exactly. Scalability problems arise from poor implementation, not from language choices. Scalable platforms have been implemented in the past with PHP, ASP, Perl, C, Java, and I'm sure with Ruby, Python, or your favorite new language. Twitter is a massive-scale site, they should be looking at deep engineering, not a buzzword platform that promises easy scalability for dummies.
Scala may help them alleviate problems they've hit in the Rails framework. What will help them with the problems they hit in Scala?