Trial by Jury does not mean "trial by 12 random people off the street".
Cases like this could have jury pools drawn from experts, not laymen. That would still be a trial by jury.
Isn't this actually a better fit for "trial by a jury of your peers"? After all, in the field of software/electronic engineering, 12 random people off the street is hardly going to be peers to the engineers at Samsung/Apple.
But stretching this train of thought, I wonder who would be jurors in a mass murder case.
Namely vector, matrix and quaternion maths mixed with a healthy dose of trigonometry. Most scene graphs and engines will help you out, but then one day you need more than what your engine provides and then you may have to delve even deeper into the world of maths.
Custom lighting? Need to find the centre of mass of your custom procedural object?
Doing a local to world transform? World to local? Then you even have calculation of matrix inverses. While your library will do it for you, at least have the knowledge to know why it may fail.
If you want to do 3d graphics, know your maths, it will save you grief and get you further, quicker.
It has been well known we can't just blow it up for a while. However all we need is to bump it off course. Something a very powerful nuclear bomb may be able to do
"I'm saying that sceptics are moderated down because the moderators disagree with their point of view"
No. They are modded down because they argue against evidence without bringing evidence of their own to the table. An argument with evidence is informative. An argument without evidence is at best uninteresting in the context of global warming, and at worst trolling.
They probably use their influence "at home" as well, but Google is an international behemoth these days, with employees in most major countries in the world. This means they can work in parallel, rather than serially.
Lambdas are generally used to replace functors syntactically, but what I meant was STL algorithms, a set of standard templated methods that can be used on STL conforming data structures (either built in, or your own, as long as they you implement some basics such as iterators).
If used properly, you can achieve some things nearly as quickly in C++ as you can with higher level languages. However, before lambdas you had to use a lot of functors to use them, which limited their elegance.
For a long time now, we've enjoyed exceptionally cheap equipment due to economy of scale. The problem is that the masses mostly need a device for three things: gaming, Office work and the Internet, and none of these tasks are likely to be performed with the same, tinker-friendly, extensible PC that us geeks love.
The future is cheap dumb, locked down consumer and office devices which overlap little with the increasingly expensive devices for professionals, geeks and developers.
When it comes to STL algorithms, you may have been right before C++11/C++0x. Now, with lambda functions, the standard algorithms are genuinely brilliant. Modern IDEs should support debugging the lambdas as well.
I honestly don't care if you disagree. There are enough people around that use them extensively and they are not going away. I would most likely bounce your code your code for NOT using STL algorithms if they were the quickest solution.
I completely agree on struct/class and diamond inheritance though.
...for instance here, I've come to the conclusion that Assange is not a nice person. But whether he is a rapist or just an ass is not yet known. So what on earth should society do in such cases?
Oh, I have this radical new idea; lets have a meeting where one side presents a case in favour of him being a rapist and the other side presents a case against it. We can call this a trial, and it should occur in the same area where the alleged incidence occurred. Assange has up until now tried all manner of ways to avoid this type of meeting, but several levels of English judges have ALL declared that he cannot avoid it any longer.
Sweden is not some banana republic with a dodgy legal system and mass corruption. It is a well-formed and reasonably well functioning system, comparing favourably to most. It is considered one of the least corrupt countries in the world.
Sweden does, however, tend to have quite strict women's rights and sexual abuse laws. In general the idea is that all parts of a sexual encounter should be consensual (not just whether to do it or not, but also how to do it, i.e. if a woman agreed to sex but not S&M, if you force her down and whip her while doing it, this is most likely rape), force isn't necessary to make an encounter illegal (just making it seem hard to get out of it, or simply ignoring pleas not to, is enough), and a woman's continued interaction with the man afterwards isn't seen as definite proof that the encounter was consensual. For instance, if you're in a position of power, and/or the woman's career or other ambitions depended on her continued interaction with you, or the woman may just feel threatened or blame herself afterwards. It is quite common for victims of abuse to assume it was their own fault, and it is very common for victims of abuse to keep seeing their abuser.
So far, Assange has resisted attempts at deciding his guilt or innocence, based on an argument that was very self-serving, and unlikely to be correct, and UK judges have called him on it. Now let him have his day in court in Sweden.
"So that means if my bootcd's that I create or the ones that I have like Hiren's boot cd, bartpe or any other won't work anymore if its not signed by MS ? That means the IT world will get a kick in the balls with this... like Hiren's will pay for the key"
You can either disable Secureboot (a Spec requirement) or Hiren can sign his boot CD with his own key, which will require you to add his key to your UEFI key list before you can boot it. The big players will either negotiate with hardware manufacturers to preinstall their key, or pay $99 for access to sign their boot CDs with Microsoft's key.
There are plenty of scope here for Microsoft to pull a fast one, but they haven't given us anything concrete to protest about yet.
The ability to disable secureboot is a spec requirement on PC hardware. And Red Hat and Canonical have no choice but to follow Microsoft, because hardware makers aren't going to listen to protests from them on this, when Microsoft requires them to follow the party line in order to get a Microsoft certification.
The problem is that Secureboot DOES add some security, and the current spec DOES require the hardware manufacturers to allow you to switch it off. So even though we all suspect where Microsoft is going with this, there isn't anything reasonable and concrete to protest against. And as long as you only have conjecture and suspicion, nobody is going to listen to protests. This means the only sensible option is to go along with Secureboot, but keep vigilant for when (rather than if) Microsoft tries to pull a fast one.
It is only legally available in two forms: 1. Sky Atlantic on Sky TV. Not available on any competing TV provider. If you're on Virgin, FreeView or whatnot, you have only option 2. 2. Wait a year for the box sets.
Seriously. If the ministry of defence thinks we need to protect from this they can evaluate it up against other threats and spend their existing money accordingly.
You can, but you don't. The point here is not that there's some hypothetical apps out there that might be easier to port if there was a C++ compiler for WP7, it's that there are, in practice, very, very, very few, because C++ is not the recommended language of development for either iOS or Android.
Look I really wish you would just speak for yourself because you lack the knowledge to speak for the rest of us. As someone who is actually writing a cross platform OpenGL game and knows how possible what I'm saying is, I'd like to ask you how you think all those cross platform blockbuster 3d games and classic game ports came along (I love all the classic point and click adventures)? Do you really think they rewrote everything in Objective C because it's the "recommended way" hen they could just slightly adapt their existing c++ code base and write a small Objective C fronted.
I sincerely don't think you know what you're talking about when you say "not many", "a small minority", etc unless you only talk about toy apps like third party alarm clocks or "flashlights". It's not like each app says which programming language it was written in and you have provided absolutely no evidence.
"That's rather a lot of work to make it easier for people to port apps from Android and iOS to WP7, and it seems a little improbable it would benefit Microsoft as the platform would fast develop a reputation for having a lot of quick and dirty ports of iOS/Android software that really don't fit with the WP7 way of doing things."
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about porting games and apps that have been written only with iOS or Android in mind. What I mean is that it is fully possible to start new Android and iOS projects where you write a considerable portion of your code ONCE and then write some small iOS / Android specific bits. For 3D-games you can probably get away with as much as 99% of your code base being shared. This isn't some "non recommended way for exceptional circumstances". This is fully possible and supported.
No. I meant C++. iOS and Android requires a bit of Objective-C and Java respectively, but you can write all your heavy lifting code in C++. For instance, you can write a whole C++ library and reference it in your Objective-C code, through Objective-C++.
So you can essentially share quite a bit of code between iOS and Android. As an example, OpenSceneGraph (openscenegraph.org) runs on both iOS and Android, and that is a C++ based library. I wish I had specified this in my parent post so I didn't have to clarify this.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is.NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
Only Phone Manufacturers are allowed to write unmanaged code for WP7 so that excludes native c++.
And even if you can run managed C++ in the CLR, most C++ codebases can not compile this way without major changes.
The UI may be great and the development environment good, but Microsoft, in a misguided attempt to lock developers to the platform (that only works when you have them to begin with), made it impossible to use c++ and OpenGL on them meaning every part of an Android or iOS game/app has to be rewritten to work on Windows Phone 7.
When you make it too hard, developers will stick with the platforms where the customers are; Android and iOS
If this is the argument that comes from being sober, then we should be glad that so many of our brilliant scientists were inebriated for large parts of their lives.
To be more serious; it is about a thirst for knowledge and discovery, one of the main reasons for any scientific advances. Why should we be satisfied with exploring earth? Why shouldn't we explore the rest of our universe for life and other discoveries?
It is not amazing, but it is competitive. Battery life is average, performance is average. GPU performance is currently a bit below average, but this is a solid first attempt. It clearly proves that x86 CPUs can compete on battery life.
The important question is this: why would you pick Intel over the established Android ARM cortex architecture? It is possible that price and Intel's famous production and supply can win over some manufacturers, but you'd expect something a bit more amazing was required to gain a considerable market share.
I prefer my TV's to be dumb displays They should be limited to take video in, modify resolution/contrast/etc as per settings and display it on the screen, and provide a control interface IF I want to play media on it, I will use a device for that Modularity is better
I hear you, but this (the current) approach has some serious drawbacks, including cable mess and multiple remotes (or one poor universal), power extensions when you only have two sockets, etc.
The right approach would be for each TV to come with a hidden and swappable "smart" unit (or bought "naked" if you wish), controlled by the main TV's remote control, powered by the TV and with a standardised interface. This way, you'd have the best of both worlds, you'd be rid of the cable and remote control mess and it'd still be modular. People could then create Boxee boxes, Cable/Satellite set top boxes or fully functional PCs to adhere to the standardised smart unit interface. You may also want the WIFI or Ethernet connectivity in the TV, so that you could have multiple smart units all connected to a hub in the TV.
The problem is that nobody but the consumer is interested in standards. They would all create their own proprietary slot suitable only for their own smart units.
"Virtually all of the major games are programed in LibGCM, kind-of DirectX, and GX for the PS3, 360, and Wii respectively. And the handhelds don't use OpenGL at all, especially not the DS which is only barely 3D capable in the first place."
You are conveniently leaving out the massively growing Android and iOS smartphone and tablet market, where OpenGL is the standard 3D graphics engine.
My home town has 2 GAME shops that are less than 100 yards apart, and a further GameStation shop less than 5 minutes walk away. This never made any sense to me. Besides, you can buy games in at least 3 other shops nearby. If this is normal, there's no wonder they are going into administration.
The demise of GAME may be sad for the staff in the shops, but for anyone else, this is hardly that upsetting. Someone else will take over, and hopefully do a better job at running their business.
It's not that it's not perfectly logical. It is a sound policy.
It is, however, a little bit embarrassing that they've had to spell this out like this.
There are Microsoft employees that require apple products though. After all, Microsoft supports OSX for some of their software, and they surely have to test some of their websites on mobile safari. Microsoft isn't big enough online to ignore the big players.
Grantparent: "Things like trees and faces are already rendered to a complexity beyond where it's reasonable to create them by hand." You: "No, actually they are not. I had dabbled a lot with 3D in 2007/2008 and I can tell you no engine whatsoever delivers accurate foliage."
Are you not talking about different things? The parent was talking about foliage basically being procedurally created using an algorithm with some random elements, while you are talking about whether the resulting geometry is accurate or whether it is rendered realistically or not.
I don't think anyone is arguing that what we currently do is "good enough", but surely nobody creates foliage for games by hand in a 3D modelling application? That would surely be ridiculously expensive and will still suffer in large part from the same problems you mention?
Slashdot Mirror
No need to buy thousands of doses of penicillin or heart medication. Just buy one dose and it'll serve the entire population.
Trial by Jury does not mean "trial by 12 random people off the street".
Cases like this could have jury pools drawn from experts, not laymen. That would still be a trial by jury.
Isn't this actually a better fit for "trial by a jury of your peers"? After all, in the field of software/electronic engineering, 12 random people off the street is hardly going to be peers to the engineers at Samsung/Apple.
But stretching this train of thought, I wonder who would be jurors in a mass murder case.
Namely vector, matrix and quaternion maths mixed with a healthy dose of trigonometry. Most scene graphs and engines will help you out, but then one day you need more than what your engine provides and then you may have to delve even deeper into the world of maths.
Custom lighting? Need to find the centre of mass of your custom procedural object?
Doing a local to world transform? World to local? Then you even have calculation of matrix inverses. While your library will do it for you, at least have the knowledge to know why it may fail.
If you want to do 3d graphics, know your maths, it will save you grief and get you further, quicker.
It has been well known we can't just blow it up for a while. However all we need is to bump it off course. Something a very powerful nuclear bomb may be able to do
"I'm saying that sceptics are moderated down because the moderators disagree with their point of view"
No. They are modded down because they argue against evidence without bringing evidence of their own to the table. An argument with evidence is informative. An argument without evidence is at best uninteresting in the context of global warming, and at worst trolling.
They probably use their influence "at home" as well, but Google is an international behemoth these days, with employees in most major countries in the world. This means they can work in parallel, rather than serially.
Lambdas are generally used to replace functors syntactically, but what I meant was STL algorithms, a set of standard templated methods that can be used on STL conforming data structures (either built in, or your own, as long as they you implement some basics such as iterators).
If used properly, you can achieve some things nearly as quickly in C++ as you can with higher level languages. However, before lambdas you had to use a lot of functors to use them, which limited their elegance.
For a long time now, we've enjoyed exceptionally cheap equipment due to economy of scale. The problem is that the masses mostly need a device for three things: gaming, Office work and the Internet, and none of these tasks are likely to be performed with the same, tinker-friendly, extensible PC that us geeks love.
The future is cheap dumb, locked down consumer and office devices which overlap little with the increasingly expensive devices for professionals, geeks and developers.
When it comes to STL algorithms, you may have been right before C++11/C++0x. Now, with lambda functions, the standard algorithms are genuinely brilliant. Modern IDEs should support debugging the lambdas as well.
I honestly don't care if you disagree. There are enough people around that use them extensively and they are not going away. I would most likely bounce your code your code for NOT using STL algorithms if they were the quickest solution.
I completely agree on struct/class and diamond inheritance though.
...for instance here, I've come to the conclusion that Assange is not a nice person. But whether he is a rapist or just an ass is not yet known. So what on earth should society do in such cases?
Oh, I have this radical new idea; lets have a meeting where one side presents a case in favour of him being a rapist and the other side presents a case against it. We can call this a trial, and it should occur in the same area where the alleged incidence occurred. Assange has up until now tried all manner of ways to avoid this type of meeting, but several levels of English judges have ALL declared that he cannot avoid it any longer.
Sweden is not some banana republic with a dodgy legal system and mass corruption. It is a well-formed and reasonably well functioning system, comparing favourably to most. It is considered one of the least corrupt countries in the world.
Sweden does, however, tend to have quite strict women's rights and sexual abuse laws. In general the idea is that all parts of a sexual encounter should be consensual (not just whether to do it or not, but also how to do it, i.e. if a woman agreed to sex but not S&M, if you force her down and whip her while doing it, this is most likely rape), force isn't necessary to make an encounter illegal (just making it seem hard to get out of it, or simply ignoring pleas not to, is enough), and a woman's continued interaction with the man afterwards isn't seen as definite proof that the encounter was consensual. For instance, if you're in a position of power, and/or the woman's career or other ambitions depended on her continued interaction with you, or the woman may just feel threatened or blame herself afterwards. It is quite common for victims of abuse to assume it was their own fault, and it is very common for victims of abuse to keep seeing their abuser.
So far, Assange has resisted attempts at deciding his guilt or innocence, based on an argument that was very self-serving, and unlikely to be correct, and UK judges have called him on it. Now let him have his day in court in Sweden.
"So that means if my bootcd's that I create or the ones that I have like Hiren's boot cd, bartpe or any other won't work anymore if its not signed by MS ? That means the IT world will get a kick in the balls with this... like Hiren's will pay for the key"
You can either disable Secureboot (a Spec requirement) or Hiren can sign his boot CD with his own key, which will require you to add his key to your UEFI key list before you can boot it. The big players will either negotiate with hardware manufacturers to preinstall their key, or pay $99 for access to sign their boot CDs with Microsoft's key.
There are plenty of scope here for Microsoft to pull a fast one, but they haven't given us anything concrete to protest about yet.
The ability to disable secureboot is a spec requirement on PC hardware. And Red Hat and Canonical have no choice but to follow Microsoft, because hardware makers aren't going to listen to protests from them on this, when Microsoft requires them to follow the party line in order to get a Microsoft certification.
The problem is that Secureboot DOES add some security, and the current spec DOES require the hardware manufacturers to allow you to switch it off. So even though we all suspect where Microsoft is going with this, there isn't anything reasonable and concrete to protest against. And as long as you only have conjecture and suspicion, nobody is going to listen to protests. This means the only sensible option is to go along with Secureboot, but keep vigilant for when (rather than if) Microsoft tries to pull a fast one.
It is only legally available in two forms:
1. Sky Atlantic on Sky TV. Not available on any competing TV provider. If you're on Virgin, FreeView or whatnot, you have only option 2.
2. Wait a year for the box sets.
..an infinite amount of money to protect us.
Seriously. If the ministry of defence thinks we need to protect from this they can evaluate it up against other threats and spend their existing money accordingly.
You can, but you don't. The point here is not that there's some hypothetical apps out there that might be easier to port if there was a C++ compiler for WP7, it's that there are, in practice, very, very, very few, because C++ is not the recommended language of development for either iOS or Android.
Look I really wish you would just speak for yourself because you lack the knowledge to speak for the rest of us. As someone who is actually writing a cross platform OpenGL game and knows how possible what I'm saying is, I'd like to ask you how you think all those cross platform blockbuster 3d games and classic game ports came along (I love all the classic point and click adventures)? Do you really think they rewrote everything in Objective C because it's the "recommended way" hen they could just slightly adapt their existing c++ code base and write a small Objective C fronted.
I sincerely don't think you know what you're talking about when you say "not many", "a small minority", etc unless you only talk about toy apps like third party alarm clocks or "flashlights". It's not like each app says which programming language it was written in and you have provided absolutely no evidence.
"That's rather a lot of work to make it easier for people to port apps from Android and iOS to WP7, and it seems a little improbable it would benefit Microsoft as the platform would fast develop a reputation for having a lot of quick and dirty ports of iOS/Android software that really don't fit with the WP7 way of doing things."
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about porting games and apps that have been written only with iOS or Android in mind. What I mean is that it is fully possible to start new Android and iOS projects where you write a considerable portion of your code ONCE and then write some small iOS / Android specific bits. For 3D-games you can probably get away with as much as 99% of your code base being shared. This isn't some "non recommended way for exceptional circumstances". This is fully possible and supported.
You meant "Java" and "Objective C", right?
No. I meant C++. iOS and Android requires a bit of Objective-C and Java respectively, but you can write all your heavy lifting code in C++. For instance, you can write a whole C++ library and reference it in your Objective-C code, through Objective-C++.
So you can essentially share quite a bit of code between iOS and Android. As an example, OpenSceneGraph (openscenegraph.org) runs on both iOS and Android, and that is a C++ based library. I wish I had specified this in my parent post so I didn't have to clarify this.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is .NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
Only Phone Manufacturers are allowed to write unmanaged code for WP7 so that excludes native c++.
And even if you can run managed C++ in the CLR, most C++ codebases can not compile this way without major changes.
The UI may be great and the development environment good, but Microsoft, in a misguided attempt to lock developers to the platform (that only works when you have them to begin with), made it impossible to use c++ and OpenGL on them meaning every part of an Android or iOS game/app has to be rewritten to work on Windows Phone 7.
When you make it too hard, developers will stick with the platforms where the customers are; Android and iOS
If this is the argument that comes from being sober, then we should be glad that so many of our brilliant scientists were inebriated for large parts of their lives.
To be more serious; it is about a thirst for knowledge and discovery, one of the main reasons for any scientific advances. Why should we be satisfied with exploring earth? Why shouldn't we explore the rest of our universe for life and other discoveries?
It is not amazing, but it is competitive. Battery life is average, performance is average. GPU performance is currently a bit below average, but this is a solid first attempt. It clearly proves that x86 CPUs can compete on battery life.
The important question is this: why would you pick Intel over the established Android ARM cortex architecture? It is possible that price and Intel's famous production and supply can win over some manufacturers, but you'd expect something a bit more amazing was required to gain a considerable market share.
I prefer my TV's to be dumb displays
They should be limited to take video in, modify resolution/contrast/etc as per settings and display it on the screen, and provide a control interface
IF I want to play media on it, I will use a device for that
Modularity is better
I hear you, but this (the current) approach has some serious drawbacks, including cable mess and multiple remotes (or one poor universal), power extensions when you only have two sockets, etc.
The right approach would be for each TV to come with a hidden and swappable "smart" unit (or bought "naked" if you wish), controlled by the main TV's remote control, powered by the TV and with a standardised interface. This way, you'd have the best of both worlds, you'd be rid of the cable and remote control mess and it'd still be modular. People could then create Boxee boxes, Cable/Satellite set top boxes or fully functional PCs to adhere to the standardised smart unit interface. You may also want the WIFI or Ethernet connectivity in the TV, so that you could have multiple smart units all connected to a hub in the TV.
The problem is that nobody but the consumer is interested in standards. They would all create their own proprietary slot suitable only for their own smart units.
"Virtually all of the major games are programed in LibGCM, kind-of DirectX, and GX for the PS3, 360, and Wii respectively. And the handhelds don't use OpenGL at all, especially not the DS which is only barely 3D capable in the first place."
You are conveniently leaving out the massively growing Android and iOS smartphone and tablet market, where OpenGL is the standard 3D graphics engine.
My home town has 2 GAME shops that are less than 100 yards apart, and a further GameStation shop less than 5 minutes walk away. This never made any sense to me. Besides, you can buy games in at least 3 other shops nearby. If this is normal, there's no wonder they are going into administration.
The demise of GAME may be sad for the staff in the shops, but for anyone else, this is hardly that upsetting. Someone else will take over, and hopefully do a better job at running their business.
It's not that it's not perfectly logical. It is a sound policy.
It is, however, a little bit embarrassing that they've had to spell this out like this.
There are Microsoft employees that require apple products though. After all, Microsoft supports OSX for some of their software, and they surely have to test some of their websites on mobile safari. Microsoft isn't big enough online to ignore the big players.
Grantparent:
"Things like trees and faces are already rendered to a complexity beyond where it's reasonable to create them by hand."
You:
"No, actually they are not. I had dabbled a lot with 3D in 2007/2008 and I can tell you no engine whatsoever delivers accurate foliage."
Are you not talking about different things? The parent was talking about foliage basically being procedurally created using an algorithm with some random elements, while you are talking about whether the resulting geometry is accurate or whether it is rendered realistically or not.
I don't think anyone is arguing that what we currently do is "good enough", but surely nobody creates foliage for games by hand in a 3D modelling application? That would surely be ridiculously expensive and will still suffer in large part from the same problems you mention?