I know for a fact that Nvidia supports "full 128-bit (4 component) floating point precision throughout the entire pipeline". Why isn't nvidia getting slapped with a lawsuit as well?
nVidia, last I knew, had a fairly broad cross-licensing agreement with SGI, mainly as a result of settling the suit between them about 6 years ago.
Why doesn't SGI have a patent on integer-based textures/framebuffers? Probably because its rediculous to patent the use of a specific numerical type. Its like saying SGI invented floating point numbers. Rediculous.
Because they didn't invent "integer-based textures/framebufers". They did, however, come up with the first working implementation of a floating point framebuffer and patented it.
The message format is exactly Jabber (just load up ethereal if you don't believe me), but the discovery mechanism is based on Rendezvous. The conversations themselves happen peer to peer (the ones I've seen are on port 5298, but since the port is specified through multicast dns that could probably be anything). Creating a client for linux would be easy, but the most difficult part would be setting up the multicast DNS. Mandrake 10.0 ships with a multicast DNS responder but afaik no other linux distros do.
Just look at who's predicting that Novell will be aquired. It's Laura Dido, the same analyst that said SCO had a case. Why should anyone believe her now anymore than they did on the SCO code thing?
You mean this circular dependency? It's been fixed. Also note that they don't recommend doing selfupdate-cvs anymore. Instead, do selfupdate-rsync once to set the mode to rsync and then just do "fink selfupdate" from then on.
The point wasn't whether Mandrake was deserving or not of your money. It was that if you're going to use their CD, then, yes, you have recieved value from them and I believe that does give them some leeway to say what can or can't be done with their iso images.
Also, why should Mandrake be the ones to make the money off open source software? What about the countless programmers who give up their time and energy to create most of the software in the first place? They are living, breathing people as well. Most of them are not getting a finacial reward, so what exactly entitles Mandrake?
Feel free to gather all the software yourself and put it together in a coherent distribution. I personally think it's worth a lot to not have to do that and to have everything just work, which is what Mandrake has done.
I'm tired of people confusing any constraining in a language with being handcuffed.
I didn't say anything about being handcuffed. Sure, Java and other OO languages are Turing complete. You can write anything you want in them. Whether you should or not is another matter. Basically, you should always, as much as possible, use the right tool for the job. Sometimes, heck, even a lot of times, OO works well. But there are sometimes where it doesn't and for those times you're much better off using a language better suited to what you're trying to do.
As an example of using the right tool for the job, have you ever tried to write a real-time 3D application in Java. Yes, I know all about Java3D. But take a look at their simple example of a spinning 3D cube. Every few seconds, it will pause, just for an instant, and then restart. Why? Because the garbage collector is running in the background, and, iirc, the GC Java uses is mark and sweep, which is most certainly not real-time. If you could change out the garbage collector implementation with something like a train GC, it might be better, but, at least with current implementations, that's not possible. So, for something like that, I'll stick to a language where I can control what happens when, because it's the right tool for the job.
Its support for functional constructs is very limited. In particular, the lack of type inference and proper lambdas makes functional code painful to write.
That is actually being addressed by the Boost library. Boost is basically a testing ground for future additions to the language so if it works out there it's a good chance it will get added to the standard in a few years as an add on library, similar to the STL. For lambdas, take a look at The Boost Lambda Library, especially the examples. Other stuff about function objects and higher-order programming can be found here.
(or rather vector::const_iterator) is supposed to mean. I suppose vector is a templated class, but how does::const_iterator come up with a type name -- I thought:: either references a static field or a class member function?
No, classes can have types too. In this case, a vector::const_iterator is an iterator over the vector type that can point to anything in the container (the vector) but cannot change anything in it. A read-only pointer, if you will.
And what is the deal with the sort(,) as a free-standing function? Following OO principles, shouldn't the vector object v know how to sort itself with a call to v.sort()? And what the heck is this const_iterator type anyway that you can do ++ and * on it -- looks an awful lot like a pointer -- oops, I forgot, you can overload ++ and * to make "safe" operations on what are really objects look like "dangerous" pointer operations which the C/C++ community is in custom of using.
C++ is not just an OO language. It's a multi-paradigm language. In addition to OO, you can also do procedural , functional or generic programming. The key is to use the right tool for the right job, not to force everything into the OO model.
As far as iterators looking like pointers, there's a reason for that. They're modeled after pointers! This way a regular pointer can be used with any generic algorithm (like sort).
C++ is not just Bach. It's the entire classical genre. Java, while nice for some things, just falls short at most things. All things do not fit into the object oriented model and trying to put them there when they don't belong is a recipe for disaster. While I disagree with your characterization of Java as Mozart, I will say this. I learned Mozart when I was a beginning music student. After too long, though, it became predictible and downright boring. There was so much more I wanted to do with music. So, I branched out to Beethoven or Strauss. From there I went to even more exotic things like Bartok or Shostikovich. I felt much more fulfilled as a musician and could express things I never could while just playing Mozart. C++ is like this. It's not just OO or procedural or functional or generic. It can be whatever you want it to be and after using it for a while, other languages just don't match up.
What you've heard is people taking local governments to court and winning. Restrictive covenents are still valid and can cover ham radio antennas. Even under PRB-1 (the FCC ruling that requires local, state, and federal governments to reasonably accomodate ham radio) you aren't guaranteed to be able to do whatever you want (especially, for instance, if you want to put up a large tower at the end of a runway).
I recently bought a house and since there weren't many houses available without restrictive covenents I did a lot of research about this. There is movement in congress to apply PRB-1 to restrictive covenents (which, again, would not allow everything, but rather make homeowners associations reasonably accomodate and not outright ban), but nothing has passed yet.
If you had actually read the URL you posted you would have realized this.
Whatever happened to the original team members from the first season of Scrapheap Challenge? I saw that some of them came back for later seasons, but are any of them still involved with the show?
My wife used to develop e-commerce sites and one day during a code audit the customer asked if the credit card numbers in the database were encrypted. My wife's boss pipes up something like:
"Yes, they're encrypted with the Murpheson Schmidt 128 bit encryption scheme."
(For those who don't know crypto, this doesn't exist.)
In a later episode, at a company party, there was a "raffle" for a Palm III (it was several years ago). The sign said "Enter your business card for a chance to win a Palm III". My wife thought it a little fishy that the company's biggest customer won and her suspicions were confirmed when she later heard her boss (the same one) bragging how he had rigged the contest so the customer would win.
The only diffrence between the 2 is wavelength and frequency (which is only one thing since ethier one can be used to find the other). It's all just elecrtomagnetic radition.
You are correct, but it has been my impression that most people make a distinction between transmissions in the radio range and transmissions in the "light" range, at least enough of a distinction that a case could be made that it is different enough to cause the patent to not be applicable when using infrared.
If a school wants to use the government grants
available to reduce truancy by wireless linking pupil attendance
records on PDAs and handhelds have to first pay Bromcom for the
licence.
Umm... not quite. You didn't read the press release fully. It says:
its patent
relating to the transfer of pupil data in
education by radio
PDAs and handhelds primarily use infrared which is different.
It seems more likely it would apply to a laptop which uses
802.11 (or a handheld with wireless ethernet). This seems
extremely obvious, though. But I suppose if the patent
office will grant a patent for using a laser pointer to
exercise a cat, they'll grant just about anything.
Why is this comment moderated to -1? It is not a troll. Rather, it is someone expressing his view on a particular situation that is relevant to the post it is attached to. Please, someone with moderation points mod this up at least a little bit...
The reason it happened so quick is that most of what went into OpenGL 1.3 has already been around as extensions for quite some time. Mesa had already implemented those extensions and only needed minimal changes to bring it into compliance with the new version of OpenGL.
I was wondering, since autopilot has gotten so sophisticated, even to the point of being able to land planes, that what if the pilot had some way to put the plane into an autopilot mode where the destination could not be changed (or at the very least, not without entering a security code). Then any attempt to change the plane's destination would fail. I can see where this might be a bad idea sometimes, if the pilot needed to do something manually, but could the upside be that something like this today could never happen (or at least, be made much more difficult)?
As many have said before, whether or not the DMCA is a fair law is debatable, but it is a law, and therefore must be enforced.
Enforcement is one thing, but this is altogether different. Let me list the reasons why:
The program was written in Russia, where it is legal.
Dimitry wrote the program, but his company (of which he is only an employee, not a shareholder) did the distribution.
Laws should apply to everyone, including the FBI (Oh? You didn't know that the FBI is Elmcomsoft's biggest customer for the eBook processor?)
Dimitry Sklyarov was chosen only because they thought he wouldn't fight back. If this law were to be correctly enforced, the officers of the company should have been arrested. Any judge with half a brain should immediately throw it out.
"No software on the market is 100 percent secure to determined hackers," said Susan Altman Prescott, vice president for cross-media publishing at Adobe. "We're confident that we are taking all of the right steps on an ongoing basis to incorporate the most sophisticated technologies available."
Rot-13 is certainly one of the "most sophisticated technologies available", eh?
Slashdot Mirror
I know for a fact that Nvidia supports "full 128-bit (4 component) floating point precision throughout the entire pipeline". Why isn't nvidia getting slapped with a lawsuit as well?
nVidia, last I knew, had a fairly broad cross-licensing agreement with SGI, mainly as a result of settling the suit between them about 6 years ago.
Why doesn't SGI have a patent on integer-based textures/framebuffers? Probably because its rediculous to patent the use of a specific numerical type. Its like saying SGI invented floating point numbers. Rediculous.
Because they didn't invent "integer-based textures/framebufers". They did, however, come up with the first working implementation of a floating point framebuffer and patented it.
The message format is exactly Jabber (just load up ethereal if you don't believe me), but the discovery mechanism is based on Rendezvous. The conversations themselves happen peer to peer (the ones I've seen are on port 5298, but since the port is specified through multicast dns that could probably be anything). Creating a client for linux would be easy, but the most difficult part would be setting up the multicast DNS. Mandrake 10.0 ships with a multicast DNS responder but afaik no other linux distros do.
Just look at who's predicting that Novell will be aquired. It's Laura Dido, the same analyst that said SCO had a case. Why should anyone believe her now anymore than they did on the SCO code thing?
You mean this circular dependency? It's been fixed. Also note that they don't recommend doing selfupdate-cvs anymore. Instead, do selfupdate-rsync once to set the mode to rsync and then just do "fink selfupdate" from then on.
The point wasn't whether Mandrake was deserving or not of your money. It was that if you're going to use their CD, then, yes, you have recieved value from them and I believe that does give them some leeway to say what can or can't be done with their iso images.
As an example of using the right tool for the job, have you ever tried to write a real-time 3D application in Java. Yes, I know all about Java3D. But take a look at their simple example of a spinning 3D cube. Every few seconds, it will pause, just for an instant, and then restart. Why? Because the garbage collector is running in the background, and, iirc, the GC Java uses is mark and sweep, which is most certainly not real-time. If you could change out the garbage collector implementation with something like a train GC, it might be better, but, at least with current implementations, that's not possible. So, for something like that, I'll stick to a language where I can control what happens when, because it's the right tool for the job.
As far as iterators looking like pointers, there's a reason for that. They're modeled after pointers! This way a regular pointer can be used with any generic algorithm (like sort).
C++ is not just Bach. It's the entire classical genre. Java, while nice for some things, just falls short at most things. All things do not fit into the object oriented model and trying to put them there when they don't belong is a recipe for disaster. While I disagree with your characterization of Java as Mozart, I will say this. I learned Mozart when I was a beginning music student. After too long, though, it became predictible and downright boring. There was so much more I wanted to do with music. So, I branched out to Beethoven or Strauss. From there I went to even more exotic things like Bartok or Shostikovich. I felt much more fulfilled as a musician and could express things I never could while just playing Mozart. C++ is like this. It's not just OO or procedural or functional or generic. It can be whatever you want it to be and after using it for a while, other languages just don't match up.
I recently bought a house and since there weren't many houses available without restrictive covenents I did a lot of research about this. There is movement in congress to apply PRB-1 to restrictive covenents (which, again, would not allow everything, but rather make homeowners associations reasonably accomodate and not outright ban), but nothing has passed yet.
If you had actually read the URL you posted you would have realized this.
Anybody know if Pixlet came from Pixar?
:-)
Considering Pixlet == Pixar Wavelet, I'd say the answer to that question is yes.
And here I was telling my friends you were "Bruce Almighty". :-) Still, glad to see Novell do this.
Whatever happened to the original team members from the first season of Scrapheap Challenge? I saw that some of them came back for later seasons, but are any of them still involved with the show?
(For those who don't know crypto, this doesn't exist.)
In a later episode, at a company party, there was a "raffle" for a Palm III (it was several years ago). The sign said "Enter your business card for a chance to win a Palm III". My wife thought it a little fishy that the company's biggest customer won and her suspicions were confirmed when she later heard her boss (the same one) bragging how he had rigged the contest so the customer would win.
You can do this in VMWare, but I'm not sure it's really the solution you want. :-)
Why is this comment moderated to -1? It is not a troll. Rather, it is someone expressing his view on a particular situation that is relevant to the post it is attached to. Please, someone with moderation points mod this up at least a little bit...
The reason it happened so quick is that most of what went into OpenGL 1.3 has already been around as extensions for quite some time. Mesa had already implemented those extensions and only needed minimal changes to bring it into compliance with the new version of OpenGL.
There are no grievances legitimate enough to take it out this way. Period.
I was wondering, since autopilot has gotten so sophisticated, even to the point of being able to land planes, that what if the pilot had some way to put the plane into an autopilot mode where the destination could not be changed (or at the very least, not without entering a security code). Then any attempt to change the plane's destination would fail. I can see where this might be a bad idea sometimes, if the pilot needed to do something manually, but could the upside be that something like this today could never happen (or at least, be made much more difficult)?
- The program was written in Russia, where it is legal.
- Dimitry wrote the program, but his company (of which he is only an employee, not a shareholder) did the distribution.
- Laws should apply to everyone, including the FBI (Oh? You didn't know that the FBI is Elmcomsoft's biggest customer for the eBook processor?)
Dimitry Sklyarov was chosen only because they thought he wouldn't fight back. If this law were to be correctly enforced, the officers of the company should have been arrested. Any judge with half a brain should immediately throw it out.Rot-13 is certainly one of the "most sophisticated technologies available", eh?
http://www.clark.net/pub/rothman/gacode.htm
I'm not sure what this falls under. Probably "Computer Theft" or "Computer Trespass". (But, IANAL.)