Wait, so not only do you read the summary and the article, but you even click on the author's website link?!
I know, I'm a bad Slashdotter. Actually someone pointed this poster out to me a while ago, and I verified his claims and have since been more aware of his activities.
You're right that we should not ignore stories from authors we don't agree with. But we should also be wary of sources that are trying to push an agenda through their presentation of a story. Everyone has bias, but it seems that the stronger the bias, the more distorted the truth becomes to fit the author's world view. There is some threshold in which the presenter can no longer be counted on as a source of reliable information, even in seemingly benign cases.
This is yet another story by our friend "Anti-Globalism" (or "Defeat Globalism" in this case). Note the website the name links to (amerika.org). If you follow it, you'll reach a network of nationalist, anti-foreigner, and eventually racist (neo-Nazi / white power / religious hate), anti-democratic sites. The idea is to start you off with something that will get your nerd-rage going. "How dare those judges redefine libel". Then you'll go to a site that builds on that, but broadens the idea. "It's the Massachusetts liberal activist judges trying to take away our Libertarian freedom". Then it's a few more hops to full on "The Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, white-man hating Liberals are trying to take away our freedoms and give them to urban unwed teenage drug moms on welfare".
As a user of a high-level language, I should not be expected to know the disk I/O API in a given OS. That is for the authors of the compiler or interpreter.
If you need very specific behavior, as a high level developer you should be calling your environment's DoExactlyWhatIWantNotJustWhatIAssume() implementation (which in this case would be something like SyncFileDataToDisk() or TransactionCommit()). Implementing this function is for the authors of the interpreter or library set so that you don't have to understand the disk IO API. If your environment does not provide one of these, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job and you better make friends with some low level programmers.
The only parts of Apple that is really American is their R&D and sales and marketing parts, the rest was outsourced years ago.
Apple has 25,000 employees in the United States, 12,000 of which are in Cupertino, California, and the vast majority of those are in engineering and product development. Apple is one of the few computer makers that designs their desktop and laptop motherboards itself, in the U.S. (as opposed to buying a design from Asian ODMs [see Dell]). All Apple products, from phones to iPods to base stations to accessories are designed, programmed, debugged, and tested in the United States.
Apple writes its own OS entirely in the U.S. It does not have any international code development centers (unlike say Microsoft) except for a few small acquisitions. Apple writes an office suite, various other tools, runs web services, and creates professional grade video and audio software (such as Final Cut Pro), all from California offices. Apple now owns a chip design firm in the U.S. (PA Semiconductor).
The only thing that Apple has outsourced is manufacturing.
lowest common denominator
on
Houses With Tails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Great, all I need is my homeowners' association determining what kind of internet connection I get. What if half of them are happy with dialup? What if some of them don't even want to pay for an internet connection? What if some of them are delinquent on their payments and my connection gets cut off?
How about fuck those guys and let me manage my own connection instead of unnecessarily making it a shared responsibility where decisions are made by a committee of people with no mutual interest?
RNA is a copy of DNA created by an enzyme called RNA Polymerase. All RNA Polymerase does is a simple copy. There is no mechanism for creating "new" RNA that contains data that is not already present in your genes. That is, your body does not contain any device that can write memory information to RNA strands.
Notice, they're not talking about performance improvements. They're not talking about making things more streamlined. They're not talking about going in figuring out why Vista performance is so poor and fixing that. They're talking about ADDING MORE FEATURES.
Does it outperform XP? No chance in hell.
This is classic Microsoft thinking. Ignore what the users are screaming for and give them the same thing they already have with more bells and whistles.
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
This is very obviously an import script. There is no reason you'd waste time trying to create an exact replica of something when a close approximation will do just as well. If you discount the rendering engine's abilities (theirs is obviously lousy), you'll notice that the textures are exactly the same and the locations are laid out identically.
I suspect the case here is this: you have a bunch of guys with coding talent enough to make some rendering engine work (most likely one they 'borrowed'), but no talent/money/desire to get artists to create levels. They figured they could avoid the work by just importing levels directly from other sources and make a game on the cheap.
I was hoping someone would bring up the ARM tools, since that is what I'm currently using. In my experience, binaries they generate are faster and about 30% smaller than GCC, and they do much better optimization.
Having said that, I would switch to GCC in a minute if my team agreed to. Why?
Because the ARM compiler has bugs aplenty. The debugger is one huge bug. If there is a bug, I can't fix it. I have to tell ARM and then get my request ignored because it doesn't affect their big customers and we don't give them enough licensing fees. They keep moving on to new versions of their tool chain that introduce new, interesting bugs. I just want to stick with what I have that works and get a particular bug fixed.
Because to use the ARM compiler, you need license certificates, and you need a license server, and you need to be on the local network. When I build a project, over 50% of my compilation time is actually waiting for armcc to authorize itself. I can't install it on a dozen machines. I can't compile when I'm on the road because I have to be on the local network or I have to hunt down a machine-locked license.
The ARM tools are hindering my work. They are slowing down my compile times, they are making me work around bugs, they are not letting me work anywhere I want. GCC may produce inferior code, but it works for me, not against me. This is why open source tools are hurting commercial tools. We're willing to pay for the tools, but the free tools compete in many ways, not just on price.
The expectation for most of us is that there is no random, permanent, publicly displayed record of where we go and what we do, regardless of whether we do it in public or not. That is, in public we don't have privacy, but we generally have anonymity, and street view busts this. Yes, it's entirely possible that someone will take a picture of you and it will end up on the news or the internet. But for people doing something that is generally not newsworthy but they may want to keep private, there is an expectation that this will not happen. This is the same reasoning that makes people opposed to RFID tracking. Yes, someone can follow you around in their car and make notes of what you do, but that is different from a systematic logging of where you are which could happen at any time and any place.
What if a Google camera catches you:...buying drugs?...walking into your ex girlfriend's house?...entering an abortion clinic?...picking your nose?...hanging out in front of a gay bar?...attending a communist party meeting?...golfing on Sunday?...doing something you don't want your friends and neighbors finding out about?
Most of these things may not mean anything to you, but they may mean a lot to some people. Now, if Google announced "we will be taking pictures of this street at 4pm on Monday, don't be there if you don't want your picture taken", that would be a perfectly reasonable solution to this whole thing.
Slashdot really needs a "quick vote" link on any of these articles that are posed as a question. In this example, it would be:
Is Ubuntu selling out or growing up?
Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything Yes, let's forget about Java, that was recently GPL'd. Or Open Solaris, including ZFS. Or Open Office. Or OpenSPARC (you can download and implement their latest processors). Or Netbeans (and Forte before that, though it was lousy). Or being a patron of the FSF.
Those guys are such dicks, they never give the community anything.
No, this doesn't work. NOR flash can be addressed directly. This is not NOR flash, it's NAND. NAND can only be written and read in blocks. NAND requires block error correction due to the high incidence of bit errors (especially on multi-level cells). NAND uses complex wear-leveling software and a lot of black magic to work well (not just block remapping, but active block moving). NAND is very slow compared to real memory, and if you tried to read it as directly-mapped memory your processor would slow down to a crawl.
NAND flash is really a block device. There's no getting around it. Some assumptions we make today will have to be thrown out (such as assuming there's an advantage to writing blocks close together or trying to reorder reads so the drive head sweeps in the most efficient manner), but in general access to NAND memory makes sense only through the same block serialization stack we use today for disks.
Um, I don't think it's the University of California, Los Angeles backing WikiLeaks. Hi, I'm Joe Bruin,
On behalf of the University of California, Los Angeles, the Board of Regents of the University of California, and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I would like to officially support WikiLeaks.
Turn that comment around: Why isn't Google coming to Saskatchewan? If it makes financial and business sense for them to do so, I'm sure they would. Guesses off the top of my head:
1) Insufficient bandwidth or connectivity. 2) Insufficient supply of locals with technical expertise. 3) Bad political climate (taxes, labor laws, environmental laws).
I don't know if any of these are true. Why don't you write Google and find out the reason and what it would take to get them to build there? Your local politicians might be motivated enough to work something out to everyone's benefit.
It boiled down to Microsoft, instead of fixing their bad file parsing code, disabled it so customers couldn't access their older files AND blamed Corel's file format. Notice that they are still not admitting that their code is bad or fixing it, they're just re-enabling their buggy code because customers complained that they couldn't open files.
Do you see the USB icon on one side of your cable? The one that looks like one path forking into three? That one always faces UP. So on the ports on the front of your computer, it will be facing up when you plug it in correctly. If the ports in the back are vertical, it will be UP in relation to how your motherboard is seated (which is pretty much the same on all standard desktops). I hope this clarifies any confusion you have.
When you work for corporate America you follow the proper channels or you end up like this poor bastard. Let me give you another headline and see if you still object: "CVS pharmacist fired for refusing to sell birth control pills to unmarried women."
Now, all I've changed is the company and the *personal belief* that an individual was enforcing. If GameStop doesn't want to sell games to kids with bad grades, it's their store and I have the option of not shopping there. If some employee decided that he knows what's right for the customers and chooses to enforce his views on how the world should work, I would hope that he be fired.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, so not only do you read the summary and the article, but you even click on the author's website link?!
I know, I'm a bad Slashdotter. Actually someone pointed this poster out to me a while ago, and I verified his claims and have since been more aware of his activities.
You're right that we should not ignore stories from authors we don't agree with. But we should also be wary of sources that are trying to push an agenda through their presentation of a story. Everyone has bias, but it seems that the stronger the bias, the more distorted the truth becomes to fit the author's world view. There is some threshold in which the presenter can no longer be counted on as a source of reliable information, even in seemingly benign cases.
This is yet another story by our friend "Anti-Globalism" (or "Defeat Globalism" in this case). Note the website the name links to (amerika.org). If you follow it, you'll reach a network of nationalist, anti-foreigner, and eventually racist (neo-Nazi / white power / religious hate), anti-democratic sites. The idea is to start you off with something that will get your nerd-rage going. "How dare those judges redefine libel". Then you'll go to a site that builds on that, but broadens the idea. "It's the Massachusetts liberal activist judges trying to take away our Libertarian freedom". Then it's a few more hops to full on "The Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, white-man hating Liberals are trying to take away our freedoms and give them to urban unwed teenage drug moms on welfare".
You can safely ignore this story.
As a user of a high-level language, I should not be expected to know the disk I/O API in a given OS. That is for the authors of the compiler or interpreter.
If you need very specific behavior, as a high level developer you should be calling your environment's DoExactlyWhatIWantNotJustWhatIAssume() implementation (which in this case would be something like SyncFileDataToDisk() or TransactionCommit()). Implementing this function is for the authors of the interpreter or library set so that you don't have to understand the disk IO API. If your environment does not provide one of these, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job and you better make friends with some low level programmers.
The only parts of Apple that is really American is their R&D and sales and marketing parts, the rest was outsourced years ago.
Apple has 25,000 employees in the United States, 12,000 of which are in Cupertino, California, and the vast majority of those are in engineering and product development. Apple is one of the few computer makers that designs their desktop and laptop motherboards itself, in the U.S. (as opposed to buying a design from Asian ODMs [see Dell]). All Apple products, from phones to iPods to base stations to accessories are designed, programmed, debugged, and tested in the United States.
Apple writes its own OS entirely in the U.S. It does not have any international code development centers (unlike say Microsoft) except for a few small acquisitions. Apple writes an office suite, various other tools, runs web services, and creates professional grade video and audio software (such as Final Cut Pro), all from California offices. Apple now owns a chip design firm in the U.S. (PA Semiconductor).
The only thing that Apple has outsourced is manufacturing.
Great, all I need is my homeowners' association determining what kind of internet connection I get. What if half of them are happy with dialup? What if some of them don't even want to pay for an internet connection? What if some of them are delinquent on their payments and my connection gets cut off?
How about fuck those guys and let me manage my own connection instead of unnecessarily making it a shared responsibility where decisions are made by a committee of people with no mutual interest?
The author is a moron. He meant AFP, Apple File Protocol. Macs do not support AFS out of the box.
RNA is a copy of DNA created by an enzyme called RNA Polymerase. All RNA Polymerase does is a simple copy. There is no mechanism for creating "new" RNA that contains data that is not already present in your genes. That is, your body does not contain any device that can write memory information to RNA strands.
Notice, they're not talking about performance improvements. They're not talking about making things more streamlined. They're not talking about going in figuring out why Vista performance is so poor and fixing that. They're talking about ADDING MORE FEATURES.
Does it outperform XP? No chance in hell.
This is classic Microsoft thinking. Ignore what the users are screaming for and give them the same thing they already have with more bells and whistles.
Nah, forget it. I think the desire to help people and a positive attitude should be all that it takes to get into med school.
Or maybe if you're going to be practicing a science, you should understand it.
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
Easy: try typing this into a word processor.
This is very obviously an import script. There is no reason you'd waste time trying to create an exact replica of something when a close approximation will do just as well. If you discount the rendering engine's abilities (theirs is obviously lousy), you'll notice that the textures are exactly the same and the locations are laid out identically.
I suspect the case here is this: you have a bunch of guys with coding talent enough to make some rendering engine work (most likely one they 'borrowed'), but no talent/money/desire to get artists to create levels. They figured they could avoid the work by just importing levels directly from other sources and make a game on the cheap.
I was hoping someone would bring up the ARM tools, since that is what I'm currently using. In my experience, binaries they generate are faster and about 30% smaller than GCC, and they do much better optimization.
Having said that, I would switch to GCC in a minute if my team agreed to. Why?
Because the ARM compiler has bugs aplenty. The debugger is one huge bug. If there is a bug, I can't fix it. I have to tell ARM and then get my request ignored because it doesn't affect their big customers and we don't give them enough licensing fees. They keep moving on to new versions of their tool chain that introduce new, interesting bugs. I just want to stick with what I have that works and get a particular bug fixed.
Because to use the ARM compiler, you need license certificates, and you need a license server, and you need to be on the local network. When I build a project, over 50% of my compilation time is actually waiting for armcc to authorize itself. I can't install it on a dozen machines. I can't compile when I'm on the road because I have to be on the local network or I have to hunt down a machine-locked license.
The ARM tools are hindering my work. They are slowing down my compile times, they are making me work around bugs, they are not letting me work anywhere I want. GCC may produce inferior code, but it works for me, not against me. This is why open source tools are hurting commercial tools. We're willing to pay for the tools, but the free tools compete in many ways, not just on price.
The expectation for most of us is that there is no random, permanent, publicly displayed record of where we go and what we do, regardless of whether we do it in public or not. That is, in public we don't have privacy, but we generally have anonymity, and street view busts this. Yes, it's entirely possible that someone will take a picture of you and it will end up on the news or the internet. But for people doing something that is generally not newsworthy but they may want to keep private, there is an expectation that this will not happen. This is the same reasoning that makes people opposed to RFID tracking. Yes, someone can follow you around in their car and make notes of what you do, but that is different from a systematic logging of where you are which could happen at any time and any place.
...buying drugs? ...walking into your ex girlfriend's house? ...entering an abortion clinic? ...picking your nose? ...hanging out in front of a gay bar? ...attending a communist party meeting? ...golfing on Sunday? ...doing something you don't want your friends and neighbors finding out about?
What if a Google camera catches you:
Most of these things may not mean anything to you, but they may mean a lot to some people. Now, if Google announced "we will be taking pictures of this street at 4pm on Monday, don't be there if you don't want your picture taken", that would be a perfectly reasonable solution to this whole thing.
Great, let's see how long he survives in a vacuum.
( ) Selling out
( ) Growing up
Optional checkbox:
[ ] Submitter is an idiot
[ Vote ] [ See Results ]
Those guys are such dicks, they never give the community anything.
No, this doesn't work. NOR flash can be addressed directly. This is not NOR flash, it's NAND. NAND can only be written and read in blocks. NAND requires block error correction due to the high incidence of bit errors (especially on multi-level cells). NAND uses complex wear-leveling software and a lot of black magic to work well (not just block remapping, but active block moving). NAND is very slow compared to real memory, and if you tried to read it as directly-mapped memory your processor would slow down to a crawl.
NAND flash is really a block device. There's no getting around it. Some assumptions we make today will have to be thrown out (such as assuming there's an advantage to writing blocks close together or trying to reorder reads so the drive head sweeps in the most efficient manner), but in general access to NAND memory makes sense only through the same block serialization stack we use today for disks.
On behalf of the University of California, Los Angeles, the Board of Regents of the University of California, and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I would like to officially support WikiLeaks.
Go Number One Bruins
Turn that comment around: Why isn't Google coming to Saskatchewan? If it makes financial and business sense for them to do so, I'm sure they would. Guesses off the top of my head:
1) Insufficient bandwidth or connectivity.
2) Insufficient supply of locals with technical expertise.
3) Bad political climate (taxes, labor laws, environmental laws).
I don't know if any of these are true. Why don't you write Google and find out the reason and what it would take to get them to build there? Your local politicians might be motivated enough to work something out to everyone's benefit.
It boiled down to Microsoft, instead of fixing their bad file parsing code, disabled it so customers couldn't access their older files AND blamed Corel's file format. Notice that they are still not admitting that their code is bad or fixing it, they're just re-enabling their buggy code because customers complained that they couldn't open files.
Do you see the USB icon on one side of your cable? The one that looks like one path forking into three? That one always faces UP. So on the ports on the front of your computer, it will be facing up when you plug it in correctly. If the ports in the back are vertical, it will be UP in relation to how your motherboard is seated (which is pretty much the same on all standard desktops). I hope this clarifies any confusion you have.
"CVS pharmacist fired for refusing to sell birth control pills to unmarried women."
Now, all I've changed is the company and the *personal belief* that an individual was enforcing. If GameStop doesn't want to sell games to kids with bad grades, it's their store and I have the option of not shopping there. If some employee decided that he knows what's right for the customers and chooses to enforce his views on how the world should work, I would hope that he be fired.
That's the same combination I have on my luggage!