The idea is also to be able to render objects that are smaller than the spatial resolution of the view. Think a long distance away you're looking at a guywire of a comms tower.
Yes your right, but as I suggested its a hack to get around lack of resolution. Forcing a fudge factor (a bunch of large grey pixels) in may not always be the best response. Plus, its limited by the oversampling ratio. What i'm arguing is that a display of 2x the DPI will look better than a 2x over-sample. Eventually increasing either the over-sample or the DPI will be insufficient to portray more information. I might even be willing to argue that a 4x over-sample is less helpful than a 2x resolution increase.
To your point about guy-wires, from my office window I can see a ham radio (I assume) antenna in the local neighborhood about a block away. I can't see the guy-wires even though I know they are there. Same thing for the big FM antennas about 4 miles away on the ridge.
The eye is pretty good at picking out jaggies, especially in tough cases (high contrast, thin line, shallow slope against the pixel grid,)
In my case, on the higher res displays, its not the line stepping that is the problem so much as "crawling". In other words, the position of the step is moving around in an otherwise static display. That said, I would take a 2x DPI increase in any application. Of course i'm the guy fighting to turn off clear type cause I can't stand the color bleeding.
For some reason WebOs continues to have the same problem with trailing a generation on the hardware side that Palm did. I remember going into assorted places looking at the Palm OS devices in the late '90s when all the wince machines were color, and the sad little palms were all black/white. Then when they finally came out with a color version the screen looked like it was two generations behind. Sure my palm would go 3 months on a set of batteries vs a daily charge on the wince devices, but they should have been making a color version to sell to the people who wanted color, and a BW version for people that cared about battery life.
That said the OS's have always been better in their own quirky ways. Not necessary better from a bullet list of features, but better from a more carefully thought out perspective.
AA is a crutch to get around a lack of DPI. Take the iphone 4 at 326 DPI, it is 3 to 4x the DPI of the average craptasic "HD" computer monitor. I have a laptop with a 15" 1920x1200 screen. At that DPI Seeing the "jaggies" is pretty difficult compared with the same resolution on my 24". On the 15" can turn AA on/off and its pretty difficult to discern the difference. That monitor is only ~150DPI. I challenge you to see the affects of anti-aliasing on a screen with a DPI equivalent to the iphone 4.
The playstation/xbox on the other-hand are often used on TV's with DPI's approaching 30. If you get within a couple feet of those things the current generation of game machines look like total crap. Of course the game machines have AC power, so there really isn't an excuse. I've often wondered why sony/MS haven't added AA to one of the respun versions of their consoles.
At which point you set your application to use WASAPI in exclusive mode, and get all the low latency you want. A hell of a lot lower than WDM offers in Windows XP. Or you use ASIO.
Both of which are basically the same functionality, the former is just a Microsoft sanctioned API while the latter which works on pre vista machines is not. Again, they fixed the problem for the applications willing to rewrite their audio interface for a new API. Everyone else got screwed. Before vista, sweeping API changes like this would have been rolled into the previous versions of windows to ease developer pain, and provide a clear path forward. Today, if you want to write a new application for windows, you don't have a clear API to use for low latency unless you are willing to throw 45% (or whatever the current XP percentage of windows users is) of your potential customers away, or code for multiple APIs.
Like an audio mixer that lets you set different volumes for each application, instead of each hardware output
I guess I will post on this one too. Turns out that audio mixer adds significant audio latency. Google it! The separate volume controls are nice, for the once in a million times I'm listening to music and watching youtube videos, but its a real deal breaker for people that want low latency audio.
There are a bunch of videos/benchmarks like this, basically the GDI in vista/7 is a dog. Which might not be a problem except that basically all windows apps outside of games are GDI.
Its not just passwords, in a lot of places (like for example Texas) there is mandatory blood draw for people accused of DWI. They call it "no refusal weekends" or some such. You don't have the right to refuse, they will forcibly draw it if you resist.
Doctors will tell you that Medicare and especially Medicaid pay far below the rate of private health insurance. One doctor compared his Medicaid patients to "working for free."
Maybe, but my step father does almost exclusively medicare/medicaid work. Its hard to generalize about medicaid, as the states are involved. Medicare on the otherhand pays pretty well when compared with insurance. The raw numbers are generally a little less, but my mother who does all the paperwork says that medicare is a much better deal as she can do dozens of medicare claims in the time it generally takes to do a single insurance claim, as the paperwork is usually much more straightforward. Then there is the issue of getting paid. Medicare is reliable, the insurance companies? Not so much. In the end they don't like private insurance because its just to mush hassle.
So, while my parents aren't getting rich and living in expensive houses/etc, they are doing just fine. When compared to some other professions they are doing extremely well. Working for a decent wage, and working for free are two different things. The doctors, claiming they are working for free should try getting a PhD in physics.
A quick google search turned up this.. Look at page 3
You are absolutey, incredibly, incorrect when you say "...pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth.."
Really? Do you know how the SGR is computed? Lets see...
The statute specifies a formula to calculate the SGR based on our estimate of the change in each of four factors. The four factors for calculating the SGR are as follows: (1) The estimated percentage change in fees for physiciansâ(TM) services. (2) The estimated percentage change in the average number of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. (3) The estimated 10-year average annual percentage change in real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. (4) The estimated percentage change in expenditures due to changes in law or regulations.
With medicare everything is a formula, but the underlying values being plugged into the formula are correlated with a number of things, including most importantly doctors fees and "locality cost of business". Guess who sets those values? Now if you feel that medicare is underpaying you, what is the best way to get more money from medicare? Well raising your retail rates of course, because you can get ahead of the curve by raising your rates in expectation of your costs in one or two years time. In other words, you overprice your retail numbers, so that you get paid sufficiently from medicare next year. Of course, the same game applies for insurance companies too, which use formulas directly correlated to the medicare payment schedule. The end result is very few people are paying the retail numbers, but the majority of the patients are isolated through medicare/insurance which are basing their numbers on the retail costs.
Generally your are correct, but the first picture is totally misleading. Three things.
First, medicare/medicaid are a serious problem, 20 years from now. That said, its nothing that cannot be fixed with a few tweaks to the funding and eligibility models. The fundamental problem is that the government pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth. Naturally, this an under damped response curve which will do what they always do, break the system. Furthermore, tweaking the benefits model would do wonders too. For example, deprioritizing old people with terminal medical conditions to avoid spending a shitload prolonging lives for two months.
Secondly, this is a picture of the federal budget, not actual spending. If it were actual spending, you would see a significant uptick for things like the recent wars, which have been completely funded as emergency spending bills to keep them out of the general budget.
Finally, besides all the funding that happens outside of the budget, is the fact that the majority of the money in the non defense and other categories end up falling into either DHS (the actual department of defense, rather than the department of war) or are auxiliary costs of the department of defense (think veterans benefits, NASA funding benefiting the military, etc). Then you have to consider what percentage of the interest on the debt is a direct result of wars/homeland security costs. The remaining discretionary spending portion for parks, roads, research, etc is less than 5% by some accounts.
I find that vista/7 broke a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts. In the past the OS components used by most win32 apps had a standard set of hotkeys. Now, it seems the new guys doing UI work at MS don't even know what the hotkeys should be so they don't implement them when they choose to rewrite the UI interfaces. Plus the whole alt/vs ctrl argument barely works anymore. In the past, a key to operate globally would be alt and key, the local application equivalent would be ctrl and key. So Alt-f4 was close application windows, where ctrl-f4 was close MDI child/dialog box. Ctrl-tab, change tab/mdi child, alt-tab change application. Before MS decided "hiding" the keyboard shortcuts for menu items was a good default, most applications made it a priority to make sure every menu item had a keyboard shortcuts. Now its not unusual to find applications that just fail to provide any at all.
I'm not sure the lack of a switch indicates compatibility with 110/220 line voltages of 50/60 hz freqs. For that you should read the power supply specs. For the last few years Ive been putting power supplies that work on either in my devices because they costs the same as older ones that are 110 or 220 only. Its automatic in almost all the modern switching designs i've seen. Especially with computers, the only that that's usually required is a power cord change. Its probably a supply chain issue for most companies the same way that you get RoHS stickers and lead free electronics you buy here in the US.
Yah, they have a team studying the issue rather than sitting down and duplicating a few cases and fixing the problems. Frankly, for one case, my personal opinion is they have a serious problem with their garbage collector. Part of the application I maintain has a control panel that ajax requests an image (bunch of graphs) from the server and substitutes it for the previous image. This allows us to do some pretty fancy drawing without moving a ton of data over the network. Leave that thing open and you can see FF's memory usage skyrocket over time. Strangely enough, IE doesn't seem to have a problem. Leave it open for a few days and FF is consuming multiple GB of memory. Closing the tab won't even free it.
You expect anyone who actually works in corporate IT to buy this?
Yah IE8 and IE9, because he couldn't just say IE9 cause it probably won't work on 50% of corporate machines. Unlike every other vendor's browser which do work on XP and w2k3 machines.
If your just talking about file meta data. NTFS as had extensible attribute (basically meta data) on files since at least NT 3.51 (maybe earlier). Plus the alternate file stream system would basically allow any application (aka backup applications, media applications, shell replacements whatever) to extend the concept in any way they wanted.
None of this is new, when I heard about the database filesystem back in 2002/2003 I though WFT, someone at M$ doesn't even know what their current filesystem is capable of. Nothing they were listing wasn't possible with just minor shell tweaks and a couple standardized api's on the existing filesystem. Plus, the whole thing strikes of a fundamental misunderstanding of how OS's manage resources and the fairly tight integration between a filesystem and the virtual memory subsystem in every modern OS.
Sure the concept of a database and a filesystem are pretty similar, in fact you can often substitute one for the other. Its a matter of what the data storage engine is optimized for. Database are optimized to speed up searching and modifying small records of a predefined length. Filesystems are optimized to minimize data access latencies on hierarchical pieces of data that are constantly growing and shrinking.
In fact writing a filesystem that backs its data in a database would be fairly easy. I could probably write a linux FUSE plugin to talk to sqllite in under a week. Making it work well would be another matter.
Many coders to this day hold Delphi 4 to be one of the most productive environments of all time
I will buy that, in fact I would probably put it ahead of current.net platforms as well. Then there was C++ Builder which was basically delphi with ugly syntax. Either way, M$ started switching their API's to COM even before.net. That was the first major change in the M$ API churn. When that happened I pretty much started to write the native platform off because there wasn't any reason that those API's couldn't have been directly C callable with a COM wrapper. Then.net came out, and everyone was like WTF, and it constantly was lagging the platform (64-bit support was probably 1 year after the 2003 64-bit beta), and now with some of the win7 functionality. So it wasn't really a platform either, just a bunch of crap on the platform. Now this, which isn't particularly surprising, it was only a matter of time.
The developer interest in iphone/android proves that there are developers out there looking for a platform to write apps on because M$ has pushed basically every group away at this point.
I don't think I could consider writing a heavyweight application for a MS platform that I expected would have more than a 5 year life. I would probably end up using QT but I would seriously have to evaluate Lazarus.
Elon Musk, particularly with his experience at SpaceX, has become much more sold upon the concept of building everything in-house and reducing the number of external parts suppliers to the absolute bare minimum
You know, that is what is wrong with a lot of engineering in the US. Its being driven by MBA's that think that buying a part from a 3rd party is the same as designing it yourself. Its one thing to cobble parts from hundreds of suppliers together to build something fairly uninspiring. If your actually building something cutting edge or just unusual you quickly discover that things don't often go together in real life like they do on the white board. Time and time again some part of the system wasn't quite designed to handle the abuse your giving it. Sure its rated for X, but is it rated for X given constant load for 24-7, or is it rated for a pulsing load between X and 1/2 X.. Then there is the vendor problem, they sell the part with that rating, because the customer buying 100M of them asked for it, but doesn't really care. So you then have to basically test and analyze each part in sufficient detail that you might just have well designed it yourself.
Then of course are all the unexpected problems. Ok, so part Z won't work, and there aren't any alternatives and the vendor doesn't want to design/build a new one for your 1k parts run. So, you have this incredible time slip while you design/build the part from the ground up in house. If you had designed it from the ground up in house, to begin with it could have been included in the schedule, but now your waiting around for 6 months for a new design. The worse thing is when you get that fixed and it moves the problem area somewhere else and you have to repeat the whole process.
Engineering something like this requires very careful worse case planning. Time and time again though the pessimists worse case projections are ignored by the higher levels of optimists in management, especially if there is some kind of 3rd party funding. Maybe its a conscience choice, but it seems many startups run on the most optimistic schedules. Then when they fall flat the investors are given the chance of throwing it all away or putting in more money. Invariably they put more money in. So in the end, it comes down to asking for X and never getting funding, or asking for 1/4X, failing a few times and ending up paying more than X in the long run.
Look at the 80+ specifications (the base level is only 80% which is by itself pretty hard). The power supplies are only rated at 20%, 50% and 100%. That is because its hard to build a powersupply that maintains a constant efficiency across such a broad range and behaves as an ideal current source. I've got a couple of pretty good 80+ powersupplies, and my PC often falls below 5% of the rated capacity. At those levels the efficiency goes to crap (say 40% efficient),
My initial attempts at chrome predated the MSI releases, and I just tried the msi again, and its better but still failing at the moment. I suspect that I might be able to convince it to work, but WFT! the msi is helpless without someone going through and tweaking it, and the.exe install is convinced it knows everything about the intended install! At least its defaulting to the apps directory now, even if that isn't the correct location on the target machines.
I'm not running a large enough system to waste another few hours screwing around with it. My configs aren't exactly normal, but they aren't that unusual either.
Whats weird is how FF installs without to much of a hicup or administrator privileges, but chrome requires both msi tweakage and administrator privileges.
Yah, and it wants administrator privileges to install (or did a couple months ago) meaning basically I can't run it on any of my computers because my default users don't have administrator privileges. So I can install it with administrative privileges, but my users can't access it because its buried under some other users profile. It basically needs a custom user profile that is word executable. Bottom line, google for all their "security knowledge" doesn't have a clue about windows security.
I have a couple of GuruPlugs and OpenRD's. One of the openRD's is my NAS/dhcp/etc server. I just spent a week trying to get a newer u-boot to boot from USB with some consistency. Probably 3/4 of my time was spent fighting to get a u-boot and linux build that worked properly together. The remaining 1/4 was actually fixing the problem.
The list of sins on these devices is _VERY_ long. A partial list includes:
First they are sold as "open" devices but the PDF from Marvell just looks like it contains the tech docs. Probably 40% of the chip's peripherals are hidden behind an NDA wall. Do you want to know how to disable a device for power saving purposes? Well that section is completely missing from the public manual.
U-boot for the devices is a complete tree fork. And globalscale/marvell seem to conveniently forget to provide all the necessary patches against their tree to get a particular version to build. Only after people point out that some function that works on the shipped u-boot doesn't work with the shipped/public code do they provide a patch. Even when things "work" they rarely work 100%. The USB support has been unable to boot consistently from USB in any of the public trees. I have a fix, but i'm not sure why it works because, again the docs for the "near" EHCI controller don't exist without an NDA
The linux kernel is in the same mess. probably 50% of the device support isn't in any of the mainline linux trees. So you have to patch 10k+ lines of code in to get things like the graphics subsystem on the OpenRd to work.
Globalscale releases things without consulting the u-boot or LKML folks, so things like the machine ids are completely wrong and keep you from upgrading to a new kernel (actually new u-boots have an undocumented "machid" environment variable for globalscale devices) without upgrading u-boot. Or the reverse. Its an all or nothing proposition. You either upgrade both u-boot and the linux kernel or you upgrade neither.
The devices themselves often have hardware problems. My NAS's OpenRD has a problem with the JTAG (it only works in certain undocumented ways), and the GuruPlugs are well documented to have short lives due to heat problems.
Good luck getting a response from GlobalScale or Marvell about anything, including RMA's for failed devices.
Just about the only good thing about the devices is that the community is strong enough to badger GlobalScale into releasing necessary information. That and there are often people who have hit the same problems. The problem is that no one has gotten all the fixes and instructions consolidated. My fixes for the SATA port only exist in some forum postings, so anyone with more than 4 ports has to google search, get lucky enough to find them, and then roll them into their tree.
As the article suggests, one of the primary problems is that there are 600+ variations of USB controllers, so every board/chip needs to have a custom hacked driver. What ARM Corp needs to do is define some basic peripheral interface standards for PCIe/USB/ethernet/sata/etc and require that vendors making ARM devices stick to the basic specifications so that a common set of drivers can be created.
I've never really seen a decent Java application that didn't suck up RAM, perform sluggishly, or scale dreadfully. Hudson did make me question my thought that Java was a total pile of bull, but even then, I've seen the same kind of app written in PHP or Ruby or Perl that performs the same web-UI task just as well. That makes me think that you're right... the right tool for the job, and that's never going to be Java. If I want fast code, it'll be C/C++. If I want quick development, it'll be a script language. Java falls into the "neither" camp. So I wonder why you still use it if you stand by your arguments:)
Exactly, that has been my attitude, when Sun started pushing java for back-end processing rather than heavyweight UI's. The idea of a crossplatform UI tool was pretty intriguing in the mid 90's. But the results (ugly, slow, apps that didn't look like everything else on the system) were abysmal. Then they started pushing it for backend processing and I was like WTF? Whats the point of cross platform in that case? Its neither a fast IO language, didn't scale worth a crap (its better now) due to library problems, and the GC tended to consume 2x-5x the memory for similar tasks. Plus any kind of hardware interaction pretty much means dealing with the OS/ioctls/etc. For that you really want a language with native C bindings.
In the end C++ makes a pretty good "engine" language, and there are far better UI or processing languages.
Fortran beats C or C++ when it comes to numerical computation.
C, yes. C++, is basically a tie when template libraries are used. Over the past ~5 years a number of C++ libraries have become available that are roughly equivalent (some faster, some slower depending on application) to Fortan performance.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is also to be able to render objects that are smaller than the spatial resolution of the view. Think a long distance away you're looking at a guywire of a comms tower.
Yes your right, but as I suggested its a hack to get around lack of resolution. Forcing a fudge factor (a bunch of large grey pixels) in may not always be the best response. Plus, its limited by the oversampling ratio. What i'm arguing is that a display of 2x the DPI will look better than a 2x over-sample. Eventually increasing either the over-sample or the DPI will be insufficient to portray more information. I might even be willing to argue that a 4x over-sample is less helpful than a 2x resolution increase.
To your point about guy-wires, from my office window I can see a ham radio (I assume) antenna in the local neighborhood about a block away. I can't see the guy-wires even though I know they are there. Same thing for the big FM antennas about 4 miles away on the ridge.
The eye is pretty good at picking out jaggies, especially in tough cases (high contrast, thin line, shallow slope against the pixel grid,)
In my case, on the higher res displays, its not the line stepping that is the problem so much as "crawling". In other words, the position of the step is moving around in an otherwise static display. That said, I would take a 2x DPI increase in any application. Of course i'm the guy fighting to turn off clear type cause I can't stand the color bleeding.
For some reason WebOs continues to have the same problem with trailing a generation on the hardware side that Palm did. I remember going into assorted places looking at the Palm OS devices in the late '90s when all the wince machines were color, and the sad little palms were all black/white. Then when they finally came out with a color version the screen looked like it was two generations behind. Sure my palm would go 3 months on a set of batteries vs a daily charge on the wince devices, but they should have been making a color version to sell to the people who wanted color, and a BW version for people that cared about battery life.
That said the OS's have always been better in their own quirky ways. Not necessary better from a bullet list of features, but better from a more carefully thought out perspective.
AA is a crutch to get around a lack of DPI. Take the iphone 4 at 326 DPI, it is 3 to 4x the DPI of the average craptasic "HD" computer monitor. I have a laptop with a 15" 1920x1200 screen. At that DPI Seeing the "jaggies" is pretty difficult compared with the same resolution on my 24". On the 15" can turn AA on/off and its pretty difficult to discern the difference. That monitor is only ~150DPI. I challenge you to see the affects of anti-aliasing on a screen with a DPI equivalent to the iphone 4.
The playstation/xbox on the other-hand are often used on TV's with DPI's approaching 30. If you get within a couple feet of those things the current generation of game machines look like total crap. Of course the game machines have AC power, so there really isn't an excuse. I've often wondered why sony/MS haven't added AA to one of the respun versions of their consoles.
At which point you set your application to use WASAPI in exclusive mode, and get all the low latency you want. A hell of a lot lower than WDM offers in Windows XP. Or you use ASIO.
Both of which are basically the same functionality, the former is just a Microsoft sanctioned API while the latter which works on pre vista machines is not. Again, they fixed the problem for the applications willing to rewrite their audio interface for a new API. Everyone else got screwed. Before vista, sweeping API changes like this would have been rolled into the previous versions of windows to ease developer pain, and provide a clear path forward. Today, if you want to write a new application for windows, you don't have a clear API to use for low latency unless you are willing to throw 45% (or whatever the current XP percentage of windows users is) of your potential customers away, or code for multiple APIs.
I fail to see how a PC with an active wireless network standard enabled, can be considered "disconnected".
Bluetooth has long been a target of undesirable types, its just that a PC is a richer target than most peoples phones full of garbage apps.
Like an audio mixer that lets you set different volumes for each application, instead of each hardware output
I guess I will post on this one too. Turns out that audio mixer adds significant audio latency. Google it!
The separate volume controls are nice, for the once in a million times I'm listening to music and watching youtube videos, but its a real deal breaker for people that want low latency audio.
Like desktop rendering that is accelerated by your GPU
One step forward, two steps back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay-gqx18UTM
There are a bunch of videos/benchmarks like this, basically the GDI in vista/7 is a dog. Which might not be a problem except that basically all windows apps outside of games are GDI.
Its not just passwords, in a lot of places (like for example Texas) there is mandatory blood draw for people accused of DWI. They call it "no refusal weekends" or some such. You don't have the right to refuse, they will forcibly draw it if you resist.
Doctors will tell you that Medicare and especially Medicaid pay far below the rate of private health insurance. One doctor compared his Medicaid patients to "working for free."
Maybe, but my step father does almost exclusively medicare/medicaid work. Its hard to generalize about medicaid, as the states are involved. Medicare on the otherhand pays pretty well when compared with insurance. The raw numbers are generally a little less, but my mother who does all the paperwork says that medicare is a much better deal as she can do dozens of medicare claims in the time it generally takes to do a single insurance claim, as the paperwork is usually much more straightforward. Then there is the issue of getting paid. Medicare is reliable, the insurance companies? Not so much. In the end they don't like private insurance because its just to mush hassle.
So, while my parents aren't getting rich and living in expensive houses/etc, they are doing just fine. When compared to some other professions they are doing extremely well. Working for a decent wage, and working for free are two different things. The doctors, claiming they are working for free should try getting a PhD in physics.
A quick google search turned up this.. Look at page 3
http://www.cchap.org/storage/newsletter-three-files/article%201.pdf
You are absolutey, incredibly, incorrect when you say "...pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth.."
Really? Do you know how the SGR is computed? Lets see...
The statute specifies a formula to calculate the SGR based on our estimate of the change in each of four factors. The four factors for calculating the SGR are as follows:
(1) The estimated percentage change in fees for physiciansâ(TM) services.
(2) The estimated percentage change in the average number of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries.
(3) The estimated 10-year average annual percentage change in real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
(4) The estimated percentage change in expenditures due to changes in law or regulations.
https://www.cms.gov/SustainableGRatesConFact/Downloads/sgr2012p.pdf
With medicare everything is a formula, but the underlying values being plugged into the formula are correlated with a number of things, including most importantly doctors fees and "locality cost of business". Guess who sets those values? Now if you feel that medicare is underpaying you, what is the best way to get more money from medicare? Well raising your retail rates of course, because you can get ahead of the curve by raising your rates in expectation of your costs in one or two years time. In other words, you overprice your retail numbers, so that you get paid sufficiently from medicare next year. Of course, the same game applies for insurance companies too, which use formulas directly correlated to the medicare payment schedule. The end result is very few people are paying the retail numbers, but the majority of the patients are isolated through medicare/insurance which are basing their numbers on the retail costs.
Generally your are correct, but the first picture is totally misleading. Three things.
First, medicare/medicaid are a serious problem, 20 years from now. That said, its nothing that cannot be fixed with a few tweaks to the funding and eligibility models. The fundamental problem is that the government pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth. Naturally, this an under damped response curve which will do what they always do, break the system. Furthermore, tweaking the benefits model would do wonders too. For example, deprioritizing old people with terminal medical conditions to avoid spending a shitload prolonging lives for two months.
Secondly, this is a picture of the federal budget, not actual spending. If it were actual spending, you would see a significant uptick for things like the recent wars, which have been completely funded as emergency spending bills to keep them out of the general budget.
Finally, besides all the funding that happens outside of the budget, is the fact that the majority of the money in the non defense and other categories end up falling into either DHS (the actual department of defense, rather than the department of war) or are auxiliary costs of the department of defense (think veterans benefits, NASA funding benefiting the military, etc). Then you have to consider what percentage of the interest on the debt is a direct result of wars/homeland security costs. The remaining discretionary spending portion for parks, roads, research, etc is less than 5% by some accounts.
I find that vista/7 broke a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts. In the past the OS components used by most win32 apps had a standard set of hotkeys. Now, it seems the new guys doing UI work at MS don't even know what the hotkeys should be so they don't implement them when they choose to rewrite the UI interfaces. Plus the whole alt/vs ctrl argument barely works anymore. In the past, a key to operate globally would be alt and key, the local application equivalent would be ctrl and key. So Alt-f4 was close application windows, where ctrl-f4 was close MDI child/dialog box. Ctrl-tab, change tab/mdi child, alt-tab change application. Before MS decided "hiding" the keyboard shortcuts for menu items was a good default, most applications made it a priority to make sure every menu item had a keyboard shortcuts. Now its not unusual to find applications that just fail to provide any at all.
most electronic stuff without a 110/220V switch
I'm not sure the lack of a switch indicates compatibility with 110/220 line voltages of 50/60 hz freqs. For that you should read the power supply specs. For the last few years Ive been putting power supplies that work on either in my devices because they costs the same as older ones that are 110 or 220 only. Its automatic in almost all the modern switching designs i've seen. Especially with computers, the only that that's usually required is a power cord change. Its probably a supply chain issue for most companies the same way that you get RoHS stickers and lead free electronics you buy here in the US.
Yah, they have a team studying the issue rather than sitting down and duplicating a few cases and fixing the problems. Frankly, for one case, my personal opinion is they have a serious problem with their garbage collector. Part of the application I maintain has a control panel that ajax requests an image (bunch of graphs) from the server and substitutes it for the previous image. This allows us to do some pretty fancy drawing without moving a ton of data over the network. Leave that thing open and you can see FF's memory usage skyrocket over time. Strangely enough, IE doesn't seem to have a problem. Leave it open for a few days and FF is consuming multiple GB of memory. Closing the tab won't even free it.
You expect anyone who actually works in corporate IT to buy this?
Yah IE8 and IE9, because he couldn't just say IE9 cause it probably won't work on 50% of corporate machines. Unlike every other vendor's browser which do work on XP and w2k3 machines.
If your just talking about file meta data. NTFS as had extensible attribute (basically meta data) on files since at least NT 3.51 (maybe earlier). Plus the alternate file stream system would basically allow any application (aka backup applications, media applications, shell replacements whatever) to extend the concept in any way they wanted.
None of this is new, when I heard about the database filesystem back in 2002/2003 I though WFT, someone at M$ doesn't even know what their current filesystem is capable of. Nothing they were listing wasn't possible with just minor shell tweaks and a couple standardized api's on the existing filesystem. Plus, the whole thing strikes of a fundamental misunderstanding of how OS's manage resources and the fairly tight integration between a filesystem and the virtual memory subsystem in every modern OS.
Sure the concept of a database and a filesystem are pretty similar, in fact you can often substitute one for the other. Its a matter of what the data storage engine is optimized for. Database are optimized to speed up searching and modifying small records of a predefined length. Filesystems are optimized to minimize data access latencies on hierarchical pieces of data that are constantly growing and shrinking.
In fact writing a filesystem that backs its data in a database would be fairly easy. I could probably write a linux FUSE plugin to talk to sqllite in under a week. Making it work well would be another matter.
Many coders to this day hold Delphi 4 to be one of the most productive environments of all time
I will buy that, in fact I would probably put it ahead of current .net platforms as well. Then there was C++ Builder which was basically delphi with ugly syntax. Either way, M$ started switching their API's to COM even before .net. That was the first major change in the M$ API churn. When that happened I pretty much started to write the native platform off because there wasn't any reason that those API's couldn't have been directly C callable with a COM wrapper. Then .net came out, and everyone was like WTF, and it constantly was lagging the platform (64-bit support was probably 1 year after the 2003 64-bit beta), and now with some of the win7 functionality. So it wasn't really a platform either, just a bunch of crap on the platform. Now this, which isn't particularly surprising, it was only a matter of time.
The developer interest in iphone/android proves that there are developers out there looking for a platform to write apps on because M$ has pushed basically every group away at this point.
I don't think I could consider writing a heavyweight application for a MS platform that I expected would have more than a 5 year life. I would probably end up using QT but I would seriously have to evaluate Lazarus.
Elon Musk, particularly with his experience at SpaceX, has become much more sold upon the concept of building everything in-house and reducing the number of external parts suppliers to the absolute bare minimum
You know, that is what is wrong with a lot of engineering in the US. Its being driven by MBA's that think that buying a part from a 3rd party is the same as designing it yourself. Its one thing to cobble parts from hundreds of suppliers together to build something fairly uninspiring. If your actually building something cutting edge or just unusual you quickly discover that things don't often go together in real life like they do on the white board. Time and time again some part of the system wasn't quite designed to handle the abuse your giving it. Sure its rated for X, but is it rated for X given constant load for 24-7, or is it rated for a pulsing load between X and 1/2 X.. Then there is the vendor problem, they sell the part with that rating, because the customer buying 100M of them asked for it, but doesn't really care. So you then have to basically test and analyze each part in sufficient detail that you might just have well designed it yourself.
Then of course are all the unexpected problems. Ok, so part Z won't work, and there aren't any alternatives and the vendor doesn't want to design/build a new one for your 1k parts run. So, you have this incredible time slip while you design/build the part from the ground up in house. If you had designed it from the ground up in house, to begin with it could have been included in the schedule, but now your waiting around for 6 months for a new design. The worse thing is when you get that fixed and it moves the problem area somewhere else and you have to repeat the whole process.
Engineering something like this requires very careful worse case planning. Time and time again though the pessimists worse case projections are ignored by the higher levels of optimists in management, especially if there is some kind of 3rd party funding. Maybe its a conscience choice, but it seems many startups run on the most optimistic schedules. Then when they fall flat the investors are given the chance of throwing it all away or putting in more money. Invariably they put more money in. So in the end, it comes down to asking for X and never getting funding, or asking for 1/4X, failing a few times and ending up paying more than X in the long run.
Look at the 80+ specifications (the base level is only 80% which is by itself pretty hard). The power supplies are only rated at 20%, 50% and 100%. That is because its hard to build a powersupply that maintains a constant efficiency across such a broad range and behaves as an ideal current source. I've got a couple of pretty good 80+ powersupplies, and my PC often falls below 5% of the rated capacity. At those levels the efficiency goes to crap (say 40% efficient),
My initial attempts at chrome predated the MSI releases, and I just tried the msi again, and its better but still failing at the moment. I suspect that I might be able to convince it to work, but WFT! the msi is helpless without someone going through and tweaking it, and the .exe install is convinced it knows everything about the intended install! At least its defaulting to the apps directory now, even if that isn't the correct location on the target machines.
I'm not running a large enough system to waste another few hours screwing around with it. My configs aren't exactly normal, but they aren't that unusual either.
Whats weird is how FF installs without to much of a hicup or administrator privileges, but chrome requires both msi tweakage and administrator privileges.
Yah, and it wants administrator privileges to install (or did a couple months ago) meaning basically I can't run it on any of my computers because my default users don't have administrator privileges. So I can install it with administrative privileges, but my users can't access it because its buried under some other users profile. It basically needs a custom user profile that is word executable. Bottom line, google for all their "security knowledge" doesn't have a clue about windows security.
I have a couple of GuruPlugs and OpenRD's. One of the openRD's is my NAS/dhcp/etc server. I just spent a week trying to get a newer u-boot to boot from USB with some consistency. Probably 3/4 of my time was spent fighting to get a u-boot and linux build that worked properly together. The remaining 1/4 was actually fixing the problem.
The list of sins on these devices is _VERY_ long. A partial list includes:
I've never really seen a decent Java application that didn't suck up RAM, perform sluggishly, or scale dreadfully. Hudson did make me question my thought that Java was a total pile of bull, but even then, I've seen the same kind of app written in PHP or Ruby or Perl that performs the same web-UI task just as well. That makes me think that you're right... the right tool for the job, and that's never going to be Java. If I want fast code, it'll be C/C++. If I want quick development, it'll be a script language. Java falls into the "neither" camp. So I wonder why you still use it if you stand by your arguments :)
Exactly, that has been my attitude, when Sun started pushing java for back-end processing rather than heavyweight UI's. The idea of a crossplatform UI tool was pretty intriguing in the mid 90's. But the results (ugly, slow, apps that didn't look like everything else on the system) were abysmal. Then they started pushing it for backend processing and I was like WTF? Whats the point of cross platform in that case? Its neither a fast IO language, didn't scale worth a crap (its better now) due to library problems, and the GC tended to consume 2x-5x the memory for similar tasks. Plus any kind of hardware interaction pretty much means dealing with the OS/ioctls/etc. For that you really want a language with native C bindings.
In the end C++ makes a pretty good "engine" language, and there are far better UI or processing languages.
Fortran beats C or C++ when it comes to numerical computation.
C, yes. C++, is basically a tie when template libraries are used. Over the past ~5 years a number of C++ libraries have become available that are roughly equivalent (some faster, some slower depending on application) to Fortan performance.