You are arguing from a strategic point of view with respect to users. Not that that's wrong, but if you look at this from a kernel developer point of view, one who doesn't really care too much about 3d performance, would you then rather have an unmaintainable blob frequently sending undebuggable bugs into your inbox, generally hurting your reputation and wasting your time, or would you rather turn the tables around and uphold the same principles that go for everyone else?
There's a reason Linus chose the GPL, and it's not because he's religious about it.
I agree the Intel drivers are really buggy. But I recently had to install Noveau on my girlfriend's computer because of a weird race condition with the NVidia drivers, and it works really well - I look forward to the day where Noveau performance is up to par in games.
I read the other day that the EU Parliament is considering adding a 0.5 second minimum order duration limit to the relevant directive (MiFID) to ensure that other parties can actually close the orders and prevent this kind of thing from happening.
This reminds me of a trip to the US 15 years ago where my father had a bit of trouble with the highway ramps, being used to the gentle long ramps in Denmark. This was in the state of New York.
I still recall my older brother who we were visiting shouting the Danish equivalent of "step on it, step on it!" This being a rented car with plenty of muscle, the whole family accelerated as we have never accelerated before.
Huh? Floats is the standard representation of numbers almost everywhere.
It's true you can have pathological cases, but any efficient number representation you pick will necessarily be a trade off. There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.
Actually, I think most people will just google it. If you do that, you end up at the right place automatically. In this case it's actually faster than reading a tutorial with screenshots.
My gf had a baby last year so I actually went looking for this to see if you could buy them cheap from Hong Kong. As it turns out, you can in fact buy the USB gadget with the actual hardware, the problem is that you also need some software to do the imaging, and they generally sell that with a netbook in one ugly looking package. The cheapest online quote I found was something north of 8000-10000 USD.
But you can buy it. So I don't think the hardware is actually the problem. It's just a question of the current customer base being doctors with lots of money to burn. I'm sure that if these were marketed with micro USB and an iPhone/Android app to pregnant consumers, the prices would be in the range 100-500 USD. Assuming ultrasound is not harmful if overdone, I actually think this could be good business. Prospective parents spend a lot of money on baby-related stuff.
If you can sell a lot of them 50k USD isn't really that much. I think you're right the big price is because this is not marketed to consumers, it's marketed to the health sector where people are used to pay a lot of money for their equipment.
IE8 users accessing Google Apps will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.
Oh, just like the ugly box I occasionally see on google.com when I'm visiting with any other browser than Chrome?
As a web developer, it's good that Google is moving people off of the old browsers. While IE 8 does have much better selector support than IE 6 and fixed a lot of bugs, some of the really convenient styling stuff didn't show up until IE 9.
Although, it's also a bit ironic, as I gather the stock browser on all but the most recent Android have a bunch of issues. And I'm not seeing Google stepping up to fix that by some kind of semi-forced upgrade - it's actually a very similar situation.
I'm way behind of games but actually tried Half-Life 2 not long ago and was duly impressed. Then tried Half-Life to get the full story - but Half-Life does feel really icky to play today.
I think it makes a lot of sense to take puzzle elements and story from Half-Life and bring everything up to the same quality level as Half-Life 2. And while graphics and sound are a big part of it, it's not all. The surroundings in Half-Life 1 are much more static in some way, it's less immersive.
... despite the "let's interview a billionaire" theme. The guy has clearly helped a long a lot of interesting stuff, and he's not done yet.
If they can ramp up production of the Tesla S without burning through all their cash, it would be an instant winner here in Denmark, if nothing else then because of our special tax rules for cars.
If you try "baseload wind power" there's plenty of more info, here's one quote:
Addressing Intermittency from Wind and Solar Photovoltaics
Wind power already supplies over 21% of Denmark’s electricity and 15% of Spain and Portugal’s.
Although the output of a single wind farm fluctuates greatly, the fluctuations in the total output from a number of wind farms geographically distributed in different wind regimes are much smaller and partially predictable.
Modelling has also shown that it’s relatively inexpensive to increase the reliability of the total wind output to a level equivalent to a coal-fired power station by adding a few low-cost peak-load gas turbines that are run on renewable biofuels and are operated infrequently, to fill in the gaps when the wind farm production is low.
Current power grid systems are already built to handle fluctuations in supply and demand with peak-load plants such as hydroelectric and gas turbines which can be switched on and off quickly, and by reserve baseload plants that are kept hot.
[Recent studies] (http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/wwsis.html) by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that wind could supply 20-30% of electricity, given improved transmission links and a little low-cost flexible back-up.
Hey, would you please stop posting that list over and over again?
Most of the stuff on that list is obsolete or clearly the opinion of someone who likes to futz. For instance, the sound link is to Slashdot (of all places) to a 2009 article, while sound works fine out of the box on a default install of any contemporary distro - as long as you don't futz with it.
Or "KMS exclusively grabs video output and disallows VESA graphics modes (thus it's impossible to switch different versions of graphics drivers on the fly)" - really, this is major problem hindering Linux on the desktop?
I had an accountant who gave this advice: look at yourself in the mirror and ask, is this really right? If you can't honestly say yes, don't do it.
I'd have to agree. Whatever you do, keep your path clean. This also goes for interactions with customers and other business partners. Trust and a clean conscience is worth more than a bit of money.
The difference is that you're embedding some stuff in the coding, that's why you can do better with a specialized algorithm. For instance, consider the trivial case of an algorithm for compressing the Bible. If you embed the Bible in the decoder, you only need to transmit one bit, is this the Bible or not (if not, you of course have to transfer everything). This would be really, really efficient for transfering the bible, a generic algorithm would never be able to do that, but it would obviously be worse for everything else.
Each time you specialize a compression algorithm, you make it worse for something else because in one way or another you're reserving bits for your specialization.
Slashdot Mirror
You are arguing from a strategic point of view with respect to users. Not that that's wrong, but if you look at this from a kernel developer point of view, one who doesn't really care too much about 3d performance, would you then rather have an unmaintainable blob frequently sending undebuggable bugs into your inbox, generally hurting your reputation and wasting your time, or would you rather turn the tables around and uphold the same principles that go for everyone else?
There's a reason Linus chose the GPL, and it's not because he's religious about it.
I agree the Intel drivers are really buggy. But I recently had to install Noveau on my girlfriend's computer because of a weird race condition with the NVidia drivers, and it works really well - I look forward to the day where Noveau performance is up to par in games.
Because Microsoft debugs drivers for manufacturers without sources? Really? [Citation needed]
I read the other day that the EU Parliament is considering adding a 0.5 second minimum order duration limit to the relevant directive (MiFID) to ensure that other parties can actually close the orders and prevent this kind of thing from happening.
This reminds me of a trip to the US 15 years ago where my father had a bit of trouble with the highway ramps, being used to the gentle long ramps in Denmark. This was in the state of New York.
I still recall my older brother who we were visiting shouting the Danish equivalent of "step on it, step on it!" This being a rented car with plenty of muscle, the whole family accelerated as we have never accelerated before.
Huh? Floats is the standard representation of numbers almost everywhere.
It's true you can have pathological cases, but any efficient number representation you pick will necessarily be a trade off. There's a reason floats are implemented in hardware.
the salt must be produced by hand
Washed or unwashed hands?
Check the photo of the ear in the arm. Awesome times we live in!
I'm on Debian which is about as pure as it gets, but unfortunately they're in freeze at the moment so we probably won't see 3.6 for some time.
I think the goal is to get there, but they obviously need some iterations.
Actually, I think most people will just google it. If you do that, you end up at the right place automatically. In this case it's actually faster than reading a tutorial with screenshots.
This is not correct. It was actually designed for small laptop screens (well, small compared to desktop screens).
My gf had a baby last year so I actually went looking for this to see if you could buy them cheap from Hong Kong. As it turns out, you can in fact buy the USB gadget with the actual hardware, the problem is that you also need some software to do the imaging, and they generally sell that with a netbook in one ugly looking package. The cheapest online quote I found was something north of 8000-10000 USD.
But you can buy it. So I don't think the hardware is actually the problem. It's just a question of the current customer base being doctors with lots of money to burn. I'm sure that if these were marketed with micro USB and an iPhone/Android app to pregnant consumers, the prices would be in the range 100-500 USD. Assuming ultrasound is not harmful if overdone, I actually think this could be good business. Prospective parents spend a lot of money on baby-related stuff.
If you can sell a lot of them 50k USD isn't really that much. I think you're right the big price is because this is not marketed to consumers, it's marketed to the health sector where people are used to pay a lot of money for their equipment.
Either we're good at writing comments, or we, as a community, are just really bad at submitting news.
Where's the "+1 Unlucky" mod when you need it?
You're assuming his previous work was good. Step one is making sure you always do a good job, so you can show it off. :)
IE8 users accessing Google Apps will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.
Oh, just like the ugly box I occasionally see on google.com when I'm visiting with any other browser than Chrome?
As a web developer, it's good that Google is moving people off of the old browsers. While IE 8 does have much better selector support than IE 6 and fixed a lot of bugs, some of the really convenient styling stuff didn't show up until IE 9.
Although, it's also a bit ironic, as I gather the stock browser on all but the most recent Android have a bunch of issues. And I'm not seeing Google stepping up to fix that by some kind of semi-forced upgrade - it's actually a very similar situation.
I'm way behind of games but actually tried Half-Life 2 not long ago and was duly impressed. Then tried Half-Life to get the full story - but Half-Life does feel really icky to play today.
I think it makes a lot of sense to take puzzle elements and story from Half-Life and bring everything up to the same quality level as Half-Life 2. And while graphics and sound are a big part of it, it's not all. The surroundings in Half-Life 1 are much more static in some way, it's less immersive.
... despite the "let's interview a billionaire" theme. The guy has clearly helped a long a lot of interesting stuff, and he's not done yet.
If they can ramp up production of the Tesla S without burning through all their cash, it would be an instant winner here in Denmark, if nothing else then because of our special tax rules for cars.
You're oversimplifying this.
If you try "baseload wind power" there's plenty of more info, here's one quote:
Addressing Intermittency from Wind and Solar Photovoltaics
Wind power already supplies over 21% of Denmark’s electricity and 15% of Spain and Portugal’s.
Although the output of a single wind farm fluctuates greatly, the fluctuations in the total output from a number of wind farms geographically distributed in different wind regimes are much smaller and partially predictable.
Modelling has also shown that it’s relatively inexpensive to increase the reliability of the total wind output to a level equivalent to a coal-fired power station by adding a few low-cost peak-load gas turbines that are run on renewable biofuels and are operated infrequently, to fill in the gaps when the wind farm production is low.
Current power grid systems are already built to handle fluctuations in supply and demand with peak-load plants such as hydroelectric and gas turbines which can be switched on and off quickly, and by reserve baseload plants that are kept hot.
[Recent studies] (http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/wwsis.html) by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that wind could supply 20-30% of electricity, given improved transmission links and a little low-cost flexible back-up.
This is actually also what makes GNOME 3 nice to use. Need a terminal? Hit Windows key, type "term" + enter (or Ctrl+enter to start a new). Job done.
Hey, would you please stop posting that list over and over again?
Most of the stuff on that list is obsolete or clearly the opinion of someone who likes to futz. For instance, the sound link is to Slashdot (of all places) to a 2009 article, while sound works fine out of the box on a default install of any contemporary distro - as long as you don't futz with it.
Or "KMS exclusively grabs video output and disallows VESA graphics modes (thus it's impossible to switch different versions of graphics drivers on the fly)" - really, this is major problem hindering Linux on the desktop?
I had an accountant who gave this advice: look at yourself in the mirror and ask, is this really right? If you can't honestly say yes, don't do it.
I'd have to agree. Whatever you do, keep your path clean. This also goes for interactions with customers and other business partners. Trust and a clean conscience is worth more than a bit of money.
The difference is that you're embedding some stuff in the coding, that's why you can do better with a specialized algorithm. For instance, consider the trivial case of an algorithm for compressing the Bible. If you embed the Bible in the decoder, you only need to transmit one bit, is this the Bible or not (if not, you of course have to transfer everything). This would be really, really efficient for transfering the bible, a generic algorithm would never be able to do that, but it would obviously be worse for everything else.
Each time you specialize a compression algorithm, you make it worse for something else because in one way or another you're reserving bits for your specialization.
Is it using lasers? If not, it doesn't count.