Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms.
What, except for Denmark which is over 20%? And Spain which is slightly over 10%, with a few other European countries such as Germany expected to pass 10% in the next few years.
I don't have anything against nuclear power, but obviously wind has its very important place in a sustainable future making up 20%-30% (up to eventually potentially around 50% as the grid becomes able to support it) of all power generation, while leaving the rest for nuclear, solar, etc. Wind has competitive cost comparable to nuclear however you spin it, and obviously less risks.
I could agree that nuclear still has a place in the near to medium term future if you consider the risks of nuclear to be in any case preferable to burning coal (as I do), but I don't follow why your support of nuclear has to translate into criticising (somewhat inaccurately) the very valuable place of wind power in our future.
This DRM/security etc stuff that Apple has for the iphone has only been a royal pain in inconviencing me during my development of the games..... however as soon as any of my games have been released, pirated copies have instantly appeared on the internet/bittorrent. The existence of these hacked copies is not really something that has bothered me at all, but in any case, the point is, that all this DRM only tends to inconvenience the honest user/developer, while not stopping the 'thieves' anyway.
The same logic of DRM only inconvencing honest users without stopping piracy has also applied in my experience with CDs (the last CD I bought in a shop had copy-protection mechanisms preventing me from ripping it, so I had to download it illegally just to put it on my computer+mp3-player, which made me realise there was no point left in legally buying the things), DVD-region-based-restrictions (I live abroad, and I stopped renting DVDs in germany and switched to downloading movies, as I got so sick of the DVDs available in germany mostly not having the original-english audio at all due to licensing crap) etc
What's also worth mentioning however, is that the quality of education in some of these post-communist countries has now plummeted - I was in the Ukraine a year or so ago and the stories of the quality of 'university' education there are shocking (in one computer science paper the entire 'assessment' for the paper was to translate parts of a computer science textbook from english to ukrainian so the professor could publish it under his name and get recognition for that.... which meant that the students became experts in running translation software - often translating english -> russian, and then russian -> ukrainian, using translation software, as direct translation software didn't exist, with surely extremely entertaining results).
What's most telling about the drop in quality is that many other countries will now recognize university degrees from the Ukraine only if they were obtained _before_ the fall of communism there.
But yeah, so I'm not sure how much the quality of the education systems in these countries relates to their performance in such competitions - I attended the world programming contest (a different but similar event) twice and remember the Russian programmers were really a league apart from us, however I did hear tales that their teams had really been training full-on for it for a long time, whereas I guess for us the we were primarily focused on our degrees or other things, and the contest was more a side-interest, and thus it reminded me more of soviet athletes pumped with steroids, that is, I wouldn't neccessarily expect those Russians to have received better overall educations than us, but possibly the Russian universities/government saw the competition as a way for them to gain prestige (whereas US universities which had once dominated the competition didn't tend to do so well but didn't really care so much for it either).
Its amazing how many games are being released for the iPhone *every day*.... just like the iPhone (/iPod touch) platform is supposedly used more for reading eBooks than all the eBook readers together, I think the same is happening for games.
Of course while the majority of games are pretty budget right now (people in for the quick money), there's some real gems, and some are really making innovative use of the iPhone's touch interface which provides a lot of new gaming possibilities, and definitely suits some kinds of games more than others. My picks so far would have to be Galcon and Fuzzle - both highly underrated (or under-popular would be more correct) games.
A further bug I noticed after posting that is that I can't navigate forwards, only backwards. Time to go back to a stable version I guess.... so are other people having the same problems?
I was using RC2 which worked alright, although I actually preferred the way older versions did some things, like I don't like the way you have to scrolling through tabs now, instead of just making them smaller.
But with RC3 any URL I enter is opened in the first tab - its impossible to open pages in other tabs it seems. I'm amazed how this kind of massive bug made it into a release candidate.
I just can't wait to see how well AMD will do once it goes 65nm and changes to DDR2. Power consumption will probably drop by a significant amount proving once again that the AMD design is better. They actually are better with 90nm and DDR memory in most benchmarks.
Doing a search-replace on your message gives, I think, an equally valid but equally pointless form of wishful thinking / trolling:
Yes, well I can't wait to see how well INTEL will do once it improves its design to match AMDs. Power consumption will probably drop by a significant amount proving once again that the INTEL manufacturing process is better. They actually are better with their crappy Pentium IV design and no integrated memory controller in most benchmarks.
Lets just stick with comparing what actually is available. I'm no great Intel fan - I bought a dual-core AMD just a month back, but if Intel had had a better option at the time, I would have gone with Intel rather than waiting to see how AMD did with the 65nm process or whatever.
Theres a lot of inherent aspects of the Java language which limit how fast it can be, regardless how well the VM is implemented. And many of these are avoided by C#, thus the comparison with C# is not entirely accurate.
Some examples are the inability to free objects manually (like C#'s dispose or how C/C++ forces one to do things), generics still working with objects, the design of the string class and many string operators, the (in my opinion) flawed design philosophy behind swing (thats the killer which makes all the windows apps so slooow and makes C# apps look so fast in comparison).
Despite all of this I still use Java for when speed isn't everything, i.e. for any database-backed application where the slowness of Java tends to be irrelevant compared to the database bottlenecks.
> 2) Place a few units on eBay for super-high prices, hoping people will believe the 'hype'
Right, because the prices people bid for the item on ebay are determined by the seller. Or does your conspiracy involve Microsoft selling Xboxes to itself as well?
>3) Make sure you don't produce enough units to meet demand
Right, because its in Microsoft's interests to sell as few units as possible before the PSP-3 comes out I take it?
Incredible. Microsoft makes a computer much more powerful than most peoples desktops, sells it for half the price of the average desktop (selling at a significant loss to themselves), and surprise surprise theres more demand than supply to begin with, thus it must somehow be a Microsoft conspiracy??? Best-Buy takes advantage of the demand to try and force bundles on people (since they presumably aren't allowed to raise the sell-price to match demand as normally happens when demand outstrips supply), thus Microsoft is somehow evil???
Theres no great hype I'm aware of. Here in Germany I could walk into a store now and buy one if I so wanted. The only 'hype' is the people that have to have the newest, latest gadget. They've only got themselves to blame, although at the end of the day they've still got a great deal given that its selling at below cost.
> It's the same business model as the Oil/Gasoline companies. That's why you can't "buy" anything anymore, you have to "license" it. Because when you license it, they can make you pay for it forever, and raise the price whenever they feel like it.
Riiight.... a great analogy. Because the oil/gas companies force you to buy gas-guzzling SUVs right? And then you have to 'license' the oil from them I guess. Not quite following you there sorry. But I'm sure its connected with Iraq and some neo-conservative plan right?
I've played it... its fun, but nothing greatly different from other RTSes. A few peculiarities to make it interesting for a while, but if you play it a lot I'm sure it boils down to just as much micro as Warcraft III (and similar strategies etc as well). For a few weeks entertainment (depending on how intensively you play - for me with a full-time job a few weeks at least) for someone who likes RTS games in general its worthwhile.
I would ignore the 'first D&D RTS' claims - once you get past appearances its not much closer to D&D than Warcraft. And unfortunately the more magic etc you throw into such a game, the more micro-ing is required (personally I always find games with lots of magic + heroes etc initially attractive, but due to the inevitable micro-ing required for such games I tend to end up playing the more strategic games like Kohan longer). And the dungeons are just an excuse to lean the games towards creeping which inevitably makes the games more of a race.
But I would also ignore the 'another C&C clone' trolls. If its your kind of thing, its worth a play as long as you don't expect too much over existing RTSes. It is definately different, but its not D&D, and if you play any of these RTSes too much they inevitably all boil down to the same thing. Its inherent in the name _real-time_ strategy that time is of the essence, and thus micro etc becomes ever more important once the basic strategy+tricks are understood.
If it means protecting and extending the Windows monopoly. Microsoft is not so stupid as many of the posters have claimed in pursuing this strategy. Their goal is quite simple - to protect and expand their monopoly.
They've succeeded already with PDAs (look at Palm using Windows in its latest Treo), are working hard on mobile phones, and can't afford to miss the console market as the whole 'home entertainment system' could well be the next big growth area and they can't risk missing out on a chance to extend their monopoly into this area as well.
$4 billion Microsoft can more than afford. Losing their monopoly and letting in the competition, whatever the market, they can't.
I don't have a Nintendo handheld, but I do have my own dog who will forever think he's just a little puppy. Besides that, I've already spent hundreds of dollars on him, I can ACTUALLY pet him, ACTUALLY feed him, and ACTUALLY watch him and his antics as he tries to "play" (read: hump) the cats. So this sounds even dumber than the Tomaguchi game-thingy.
I don't have Doom 3, but I do have a real rifle and a real BFG and I've spent hundreds of dollars smuggling bombs from my Muslim brothers in Iraq, so I can ACTUALLY shoot real people and ACTUALLY blow them to bits. So this Doom 3 sounds even dumber than the Quake game-thingy.
You don't honestly believe that 'internal memo' from ebay is real do you? Seems rather incredible to me - no company is so idiotic as to ban talking at desks at work, and the way it is written is so ridiculous as if the writer was trying to make obvious that its a joke.
In any case, I don't see what it has to do with 'human rights concerns'.
Other posters have sufficiently rebutted your claim that PayPal is the 'worst on-line payment site ever created', and your Gizmo plug, so I'll resist from arguing those points....
This is the first Ipod where I've really been impressed by the price. 4 gigs of flash alone for $249 is amazingly cheap, and you get a slick player to boot. Of course, some slashdot members will undoubtedly miss the point and complain that the price-per-megabyte is much worse than the 20/40 gigabyte hdd-variants, but compared to other flash players its incredible.
Of course, Apples been buying the flash in bulk masses and thus getting good rates, but you have to give them credit for making a 4gb flash player in a market where 512mb-1gig were previously the tops. In a market with increasing competition Apple had to do something really special to stay on top, and it looks like they've just gone and done it.
Its obviously very difficult to compare two hurricanes. However, regardless of the flooding, it seems reasonable to assume that if more people had been evacuated, then more would have been saved, and I would think levels of evacuation can be relatively easily compared, and it seems like Cuba did a better job of evacuation in preparing for Dennis than was done in this case.
The flooding of course is another matter, but again, the flooding was somewhat predictable, and thus should have been better prevented / prepared for - I'm sure this point will be debated a lot over the next few months, and hindsight is always a wonderful thing, but you touch on the point yourself that the hurricane itself wasn't particularly bad. Surely this is supports the argument that _more_ could have been done to prevent the catastrophe, given that the catastrophe wasn't anything all _that_ unusual in terms of the strength of the hurricane, and given that the resultant flooding was also not that unpredictable?
I would argue that New Orlenas was _not_ completely prepared for a 'normal' hurricane, given that what happened is precisely the result of what a 'normal' hurricane can do to such a sunken city.
Space travel: seems to me that politics (public opinion regarding anything nuclear) is whats holding nuclear rockets back.
Energy production: partly, oil is _still_ too cheap and plentiful to make development of alternatives (such as fusion for which development is extremely costly with uncertain returns) worthwhile. and as with space travel, public opinion regarding anything nuclear hinders fission improving.
Artificial intelligence: the problem is a lot harder than people first presumed ('the brain is just like a complicated computer, so make a computer fast enough and it'll be as clever as a brain', or 'make a neural network with enough neurons' or 'if a computer can win chess its a small step before it can do everything else a human can' was the general thinking) and long-term research into the fundamental problems involved is hard to justify on cost-benefit terms.
However, I think its easy to pick on the problems that haven't been cracked in hindsight, while ignoring the ones that have - go back 50 years and people were predicting mass starvation as the world could never support 5 billion people, and no one would have envisaged the world-changing effects of the internet and other telecommunications developments etc. in many ways our world and way of life changes more every year due to new innovations than it did in our great-great-grandparents' entire lifetimes.
Its not too clear to me from the link you posted, but I'll take your word for it (and do a test on my AMD when I find the time).
Thats unfortunate, as the libraries were much preferable to hand-coding assembler (while offering virtually the same performance, at least on Intels). Can anyone suggest any alternate libraries for using MMX etc code in C/C++?
Thats interesting - have you got any links on this? I program code using MMX instructions through the Intel libraries, and wasn't aware of this limitations.
I guess this is a dumb question, but could you give an example or two of how AOP would be used to define/enforce contracts etc, just so I can get a better idea of what you're talking about? What you're saying sounds really interesting, but I can't quite get my head around how AOP as I understand it could be used to do such things.
I've used last month's release as well as the first beta release, and they are nothing like what I would expect from production software.
Sure theres a _lot_ of nice new stuff in there (a lot of which has been around a while in open and non open source java IDEs), but the releases fully deserve their beta / alpha statuses from my experience.
Microsoft's basic problem is that it's unable to release software at anything like regular intervals. Whereas the MacOS is updated once or twice a year, Microsoft is struggling to release Longhorn after what, 5+ years. Ditto for IE. Visual Studio has also been waiting far longer for an update than its competition. Trying to sell your beta software might sound like a solution to this problem, but its not if the beta software really is only beta quality.
In the internet age, where a year can see immense changes and where the companies pushing those changes are no longer Microsoft, either Microsoft has to speed up its processes or its monopoly is bound to slowly fade.
With multithreading becoming an increasing issue in software development, I'm wondering why hasn't there been more focus on visual programming.
Where do I start? The very fact you think that visual programming somehow helps or has anything to do with multithreading shows you've got some massive misconceptions about the whole issue.
To put my spin on the issue, I personally don't think that pure text-editing in terms of VI is the future of programming. However I also get maddened by the people trying to tell me how soon everything will be done in UML.
The point is a large project can be best viewed at and worked on at levels of granularity. If I have everything in text, but want to work at some point at a high-level view in my project, then wading through 100,000's of lines of code makes no sense. For such situations UML can make sense. As do various tools provided my most IDEs - browsing by objects and class heirarchy, JavaDoc, code-folding etc etc.
On the other hand, if I want to program the lower level details, then working with the code is the best way. Theres no logical way this complex stuff can be turned into some nice visual diagram, unless this nice visual diagram contains as much information as the entire text and that would be a complete mess.
Thus we have different tools for different levels of granularity. In any case more important than the tools is that the design is well done, as a bad design will create much more loss of productivity through its accidental complexity than the lack of a nice UML editor will ever save.
When people think of their ideas of 'visual programming' they're essentially thinking along the lines of nice reusable objects which one can combine easily. This is exactly what a nice OO-design will achieve, even if combining the objects visually isn't usually (at least currently) the most practical way to work with them.
Yeah. I think the point here is that we all assume this thing is a hoax, but the experiment that guy did doesn't really reinforce this for me in any way. That Heise article however does appear to be a much better test and thus does reinforce my original suspicions.
I guess some explanation for the TÜV test will come out eventually - it would be interesting to know how much it costs to buy a faked TÜV test for example:). Or maybe the magic only works with cellphones under certain conditions... who knows.
Fair enough. Like I said, its right to be sceptical, and as I suggested the best place to start is by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
When their website was still responding I was able to look at an alleged english translation of the TÜV report (a PDF hosted on their website). Didn't save it though. I don't know whether TÜV is in the habit of publishing such reports (actually, I used to work on www.netinform.de - a TÜV website which hosts some such information, but I can't imagine it'd be available there and wouldn't know where else to look).
If you took 2 minutes to read the company website or the TÜV test report, you'd see that TÜV found that the sticker increased the life of batteries by 18%. Doesn't sound like they only tested 'security' to me.
If the main site is slashdotted, just google for 'batterylife TÜV' - heres for example the first site found - a german article summarising what TÜV found (that it does in fact extend the battery life) - http://www.handy-market.com/news/3253/index.php
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms.
What, except for Denmark which is over 20%? And Spain which is slightly over 10%, with a few other European countries such as Germany expected to pass 10% in the next few years.
I don't have anything against nuclear power, but obviously wind has its very important place in a sustainable future making up 20%-30% (up to eventually potentially around 50% as the grid becomes able to support it) of all power generation, while leaving the rest for nuclear, solar, etc. Wind has competitive cost comparable to nuclear however you spin it, and obviously less risks.
I could agree that nuclear still has a place in the near to medium term future if you consider the risks of nuclear to be in any case preferable to burning coal (as I do), but I don't follow why your support of nuclear has to translate into criticising (somewhat inaccurately) the very valuable place of wind power in our future.
This DRM/security etc stuff that Apple has for the iphone has only been a royal pain in inconviencing me during my development of the games ..... however as soon as any of my games have been released, pirated copies have instantly appeared on the internet/bittorrent. The existence of these hacked copies is not really something that has bothered me at all, but in any case, the point is, that all this DRM only tends to inconvenience the honest user/developer, while not stopping the 'thieves' anyway.
The same logic of DRM only inconvencing honest users without stopping piracy has also applied in my experience with CDs (the last CD I bought in a shop had copy-protection mechanisms preventing me from ripping it, so I had to download it illegally just to put it on my computer+mp3-player, which made me realise there was no point left in legally buying the things), DVD-region-based-restrictions (I live abroad, and I stopped renting DVDs in germany and switched to downloading movies, as I got so sick of the DVDs available in germany mostly not having the original-english audio at all due to licensing crap) etc
What's also worth mentioning however, is that the quality of education in some of these post-communist countries has now plummeted - I was in the Ukraine a year or so ago and the stories of the quality of 'university' education there are shocking (in one computer science paper the entire 'assessment' for the paper was to translate parts of a computer science textbook from english to ukrainian so the professor could publish it under his name and get recognition for that .... which meant that the students became experts in running translation software - often translating english -> russian, and then russian -> ukrainian, using translation software, as direct translation software didn't exist, with surely extremely entertaining results).
What's most telling about the drop in quality is that many other countries will now recognize university degrees from the Ukraine only if they were obtained _before_ the fall of communism there.
But yeah, so I'm not sure how much the quality of the education systems in these countries relates to their performance in such competitions - I attended the world programming contest (a different but similar event) twice and remember the Russian programmers were really a league apart from us, however I did hear tales that their teams had really been training full-on for it for a long time, whereas I guess for us the we were primarily focused on our degrees or other things, and the contest was more a side-interest, and thus it reminded me more of soviet athletes pumped with steroids, that is, I wouldn't neccessarily expect those Russians to have received better overall educations than us, but possibly the Russian universities/government saw the competition as a way for them to gain prestige (whereas US universities which had once dominated the competition didn't tend to do so well but didn't really care so much for it either).
Its amazing how many games are being released for the iPhone *every day* .... just like the iPhone (/iPod touch) platform is supposedly used more for reading eBooks than all the eBook readers together, I think the same is happening for games.
Of course while the majority of games are pretty budget right now (people in for the quick money), there's some real gems, and some are really making innovative use of the iPhone's touch interface which provides a lot of new gaming possibilities, and definitely suits some kinds of games more than others. My picks so far would have to be Galcon and Fuzzle - both highly underrated (or under-popular would be more correct) games.
A further bug I noticed after posting that is that I can't navigate forwards, only backwards. Time to go back to a stable version I guess .... so are other people having the same problems?
I was using RC2 which worked alright, although I actually preferred the way older versions did some things, like I don't like the way you have to scrolling through tabs now, instead of just making them smaller.
But with RC3 any URL I enter is opened in the first tab - its impossible to open pages in other tabs it seems. I'm amazed how this kind of massive bug made it into a release candidate.
Yes, well I can't wait to see how well INTEL will do once it improves its design to match AMDs. Power consumption will probably drop by a significant amount proving once again that the INTEL manufacturing process is better. They actually are better with their crappy Pentium IV design and no integrated memory controller in most benchmarks. Lets just stick with comparing what actually is available. I'm no great Intel fan - I bought a dual-core AMD just a month back, but if Intel had had a better option at the time, I would have gone with Intel rather than waiting to see how AMD did with the 65nm process or whatever.
Theres a lot of inherent aspects of the Java language which limit how fast it can be, regardless how well the VM is implemented. And many of these are avoided by C#, thus the comparison with C# is not entirely accurate.
Some examples are the inability to free objects manually (like C#'s dispose or how C/C++ forces one to do things), generics still working with objects, the design of the string class and many string operators, the (in my opinion) flawed design philosophy behind swing (thats the killer which makes all the windows apps so slooow and makes C# apps look so fast in comparison).
Despite all of this I still use Java for when speed isn't everything, i.e. for any database-backed application where the slowness of Java tends to be irrelevant compared to the database bottlenecks.
> 2) Place a few units on eBay for super-high prices, hoping people will believe the 'hype'
.... a great analogy. Because the oil/gas companies force you to buy gas-guzzling SUVs right? And then you have to 'license' the oil from them I guess. Not quite following you there sorry. But I'm sure its connected with Iraq and some neo-conservative plan right?
Right, because the prices people bid for the item on ebay are determined by the seller. Or does your conspiracy involve Microsoft selling Xboxes to itself as well?
>3) Make sure you don't produce enough units to meet demand
Right, because its in Microsoft's interests to sell as few units as possible before the PSP-3 comes out I take it?
Incredible. Microsoft makes a computer much more powerful than most peoples desktops, sells it for half the price of the average desktop (selling at a significant loss to themselves), and surprise surprise theres more demand than supply to begin with, thus it must somehow be a Microsoft conspiracy??? Best-Buy takes advantage of the demand to try and force bundles on people (since they presumably aren't allowed to raise the sell-price to match demand as normally happens when demand outstrips supply), thus Microsoft is somehow evil???
Theres no great hype I'm aware of. Here in Germany I could walk into a store now and buy one if I so wanted. The only 'hype' is the people that have to have the newest, latest gadget. They've only got themselves to blame, although at the end of the day they've still got a great deal given that its selling at below cost.
> It's the same business model as the Oil/Gasoline companies. That's why you can't "buy" anything anymore, you have to "license" it. Because when you license it, they can make you pay for it forever, and raise the price whenever they feel like it.
Riiight
Logic on slashdot gets better by the day.
I've played it ... its fun, but nothing greatly different from other RTSes. A few peculiarities to make it interesting for a while, but if you play it a lot I'm sure it boils down to just as much micro as Warcraft III (and similar strategies etc as well). For a few weeks entertainment (depending on how intensively you play - for me with a full-time job a few weeks at least) for someone who likes RTS games in general its worthwhile.
I would ignore the 'first D&D RTS' claims - once you get past appearances its not much closer to D&D than Warcraft. And unfortunately the more magic etc you throw into such a game, the more micro-ing is required (personally I always find games with lots of magic + heroes etc initially attractive, but due to the inevitable micro-ing required for such games I tend to end up playing the more strategic games like Kohan longer). And the dungeons are just an excuse to lean the games towards creeping which inevitably makes the games more of a race.
But I would also ignore the 'another C&C clone' trolls. If its your kind of thing, its worth a play as long as you don't expect too much over existing RTSes. It is definately different, but its not D&D, and if you play any of these RTSes too much they inevitably all boil down to the same thing. Its inherent in the name _real-time_ strategy that time is of the essence, and thus micro etc becomes ever more important once the basic strategy+tricks are understood.
If it means protecting and extending the Windows monopoly. Microsoft is not so stupid as many of the posters have claimed in pursuing this strategy. Their goal is quite simple - to protect and expand their monopoly.
They've succeeded already with PDAs (look at Palm using Windows in its latest Treo), are working hard on mobile phones, and can't afford to miss the console market as the whole 'home entertainment system' could well be the next big growth area and they can't risk missing out on a chance to extend their monopoly into this area as well.
$4 billion Microsoft can more than afford. Losing their monopoly and letting in the competition, whatever the market, they can't.
I don't have Doom 3, but I do have a real rifle and a real BFG and I've spent hundreds of dollars smuggling bombs from my Muslim brothers in Iraq, so I can ACTUALLY shoot real people and ACTUALLY blow them to bits. So this Doom 3 sounds even dumber than the Quake game-thingy.
You don't honestly believe that 'internal memo' from ebay is real do you? Seems rather incredible to me - no company is so idiotic as to ban talking at desks at work, and the way it is written is so ridiculous as if the writer was trying to make obvious that its a joke.
....
In any case, I don't see what it has to do with 'human rights concerns'.
Other posters have sufficiently rebutted your claim that PayPal is the 'worst on-line payment site ever created', and your Gizmo plug, so I'll resist from arguing those points
This is the first Ipod where I've really been impressed by the price. 4 gigs of flash alone for $249 is amazingly cheap, and you get a slick player to boot. Of course, some slashdot members will undoubtedly miss the point and complain that the price-per-megabyte is much worse than the 20/40 gigabyte hdd-variants, but compared to other flash players its incredible.
Of course, Apples been buying the flash in bulk masses and thus getting good rates, but you have to give them credit for making a 4gb flash player in a market where 512mb-1gig were previously the tops. In a market with increasing competition Apple had to do something really special to stay on top, and it looks like they've just gone and done it.
Its obviously very difficult to compare two hurricanes. However, regardless of the flooding, it seems reasonable to assume that if more people had been evacuated, then more would have been saved, and I would think levels of evacuation can be relatively easily compared, and it seems like Cuba did a better job of evacuation in preparing for Dennis than was done in this case.
The flooding of course is another matter, but again, the flooding was somewhat predictable, and thus should have been better prevented / prepared for - I'm sure this point will be debated a lot over the next few months, and hindsight is always a wonderful thing, but you touch on the point yourself that the hurricane itself wasn't particularly bad. Surely this is supports the argument that _more_ could have been done to prevent the catastrophe, given that the catastrophe wasn't anything all _that_ unusual in terms of the strength of the hurricane, and given that the resultant flooding was also not that unpredictable?
I would argue that New Orlenas was _not_ completely prepared for a 'normal' hurricane, given that what happened is precisely the result of what a 'normal' hurricane can do to such a sunken city.
3104 pieces at 1 piece per second is 51 minutes something. So 46 minutes is quicker than 1 piece per second - if thats for one person thats crazy.
Space travel: seems to me that politics (public opinion regarding anything nuclear) is whats holding nuclear rockets back.
Energy production: partly, oil is _still_ too cheap and plentiful to make development of alternatives (such as fusion for which development is extremely costly with uncertain returns) worthwhile. and as with space travel, public opinion regarding anything nuclear hinders fission improving.
Artificial intelligence: the problem is a lot harder than people first presumed ('the brain is just like a complicated computer, so make a computer fast enough and it'll be as clever as a brain', or 'make a neural network with enough neurons' or 'if a computer can win chess its a small step before it can do everything else a human can' was the general thinking) and long-term research into the fundamental problems involved is hard to justify on cost-benefit terms.
However, I think its easy to pick on the problems that haven't been cracked in hindsight, while ignoring the ones that have - go back 50 years and people were predicting mass starvation as the world could never support 5 billion people, and no one would have envisaged the world-changing effects of the internet and other telecommunications developments etc. in many ways our world and way of life changes more every year due to new innovations than it did in our great-great-grandparents' entire lifetimes.
Its not too clear to me from the link you posted, but I'll take your word for it (and do a test on my AMD when I find the time).
Thats unfortunate, as the libraries were much preferable to hand-coding assembler (while offering virtually the same performance, at least on Intels). Can anyone suggest any alternate libraries for using MMX etc code in C/C++?
Thats interesting - have you got any links on this? I program code using MMX instructions through the Intel libraries, and wasn't aware of this limitations.
I guess this is a dumb question, but could you give an example or two of how AOP would be used to define/enforce contracts etc, just so I can get a better idea of what you're talking about? What you're saying sounds really interesting, but I can't quite get my head around how AOP as I understand it could be used to do such things.
I've used last month's release as well as the first beta release, and they are nothing like what I would expect from production software.
Sure theres a _lot_ of nice new stuff in there (a lot of which has been around a while in open and non open source java IDEs), but the releases fully deserve their beta / alpha statuses from my experience.
Microsoft's basic problem is that it's unable to release software at anything like regular intervals. Whereas the MacOS is updated once or twice a year, Microsoft is struggling to release Longhorn after what, 5+ years. Ditto for IE. Visual Studio has also been waiting far longer for an update than its competition. Trying to sell your beta software might sound like a solution to this problem, but its not if the beta software really is only beta quality.
In the internet age, where a year can see immense changes and where the companies pushing those changes are no longer Microsoft, either Microsoft has to speed up its processes or its monopoly is bound to slowly fade.
Where do I start? The very fact you think that visual programming somehow helps or has anything to do with multithreading shows you've got some massive misconceptions about the whole issue.
To put my spin on the issue, I personally don't think that pure text-editing in terms of VI is the future of programming. However I also get maddened by the people trying to tell me how soon everything will be done in UML.
The point is a large project can be best viewed at and worked on at levels of granularity. If I have everything in text, but want to work at some point at a high-level view in my project, then wading through 100,000's of lines of code makes no sense. For such situations UML can make sense. As do various tools provided my most IDEs - browsing by objects and class heirarchy, JavaDoc, code-folding etc etc.
On the other hand, if I want to program the lower level details, then working with the code is the best way. Theres no logical way this complex stuff can be turned into some nice visual diagram, unless this nice visual diagram contains as much information as the entire text and that would be a complete mess.
Thus we have different tools for different levels of granularity. In any case more important than the tools is that the design is well done, as a bad design will create much more loss of productivity through its accidental complexity than the lack of a nice UML editor will ever save.
When people think of their ideas of 'visual programming' they're essentially thinking along the lines of nice reusable objects which one can combine easily. This is exactly what a nice OO-design will achieve, even if combining the objects visually isn't usually (at least currently) the most practical way to work with them.
Yeah. I think the point here is that we all assume this thing is a hoax, but the experiment that guy did doesn't really reinforce this for me in any way. That Heise article however does appear to be a much better test and thus does reinforce my original suspicions.
:). Or maybe the magic only works with cellphones under certain conditions ... who knows.
I guess some explanation for the TÜV test will come out eventually - it would be interesting to know how much it costs to buy a faked TÜV test for example
Fair enough. Like I said, its right to be sceptical, and as I suggested the best place to start is by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
When their website was still responding I was able to look at an alleged english translation of the TÜV report (a PDF hosted on their website). Didn't save it though. I don't know whether TÜV is in the habit of publishing such reports (actually, I used to work on www.netinform.de - a TÜV website which hosts some such information, but I can't imagine it'd be available there and wouldn't know where else to look).
If you took 2 minutes to read the company website or the TÜV test report, you'd see that TÜV found that the sticker increased the life of batteries by 18%. Doesn't sound like they only tested 'security' to me.
If the main site is slashdotted, just google for 'batterylife TÜV' - heres for example the first site found - a german article summarising what TÜV found (that it does in fact extend the battery life) - http://www.handy-market.com/news/3253/index.php