Before boycotting, you need to formulate a realistic plan that would cause boycott to end. Currently, if Palestinians control a certain territory it is used to continuously launch rockets on Israel. If they are allowed to share land, they blow themselves up in public places. What exactly would you have Israel do? Where is a Palestinian government that is strong enough to stop violence if a particular deal is put into place?
We don't need servers or robots to have human intelligence. Already have 7 billions of those, including access to superhuman intelligence in the form of of many smart people collaborating with assistance of technology. Also humans have been around forever, and we still suck at human rights. Got to square those away first before having to worry about rights of other intelligent species (and having them respect ours).
What we need now is computers that are good at tasks that we suck at, like repetitive processing on huge amounts of data.
About the only exception is space exploration, where humans are not available for real time remote control due to speed of light. Still, we don't want a Mars probe to get bored and lonely, or make it's own survival the first priority. So cloning our own kind of intelligence, which was shaped by natural selection for self preservation, is not the best approach.
Not that I think any of this is likely, but sufferers should be able to relieve their physical or psychosomatic symptoms by dressing up in a Faraday cage. Don't see any harm if they feel better and don't demand the rest of the world go back to stone age.
* Open to possibility that people with various metal implants in their body would be actually sensitive.
You are getting the PC for fun (gaming) right? So consider the process of building the hardware and customizing software part of that fun. You get to learn about various technologies available in 2015 and the art of putting them together. If you go with Linux and spend effort to customize your system, you are also getting marketable CS knowledge. All in all, the enjoyment of the process is worth the price of a few games even if you can't compete with Dell purely on price.
In fact, Christian minorities have a number of special rights under the law, including representation in the parliament. Exactly what kind of country are we trying to become?
The whole purpose of shooting raw images is to do advanced processing later. However, any such processing involves creative choice which alters the image to the taste of the person doing the processing. It's easy to alter the white point and have some journalistically important details lost in the shadows.
Also in a high stakes case suspected forgery, it may be possible to detect forged images by looking at minute noise and encoding choices made by a particular camera model. Faking these details well enough to fool the experts would be beyond the expertise of most would-be forgers.
Of course, Reuters could ask for RAW files themselves and have even more fidelity/authentication potential. But those files are huge, many journalists do not have a fast internet connection where they work, and the publisher would need expertise on RAW workflows.
All in all, I think it's a reasonable decision and will be successful against unintentional/unconscious alterations and causual forgery.
Python provides no true concurrency due to global interpreter lock. Java is not suitable for realtime due to unpredictable GC, while C/C++ is not suitable for anything which should never crash or return random results due to memory corruption. None of mainstream languages make automatic use of multiple cores and GPU - explicit provisions must be made by programmer to parallelize part of the program, often with error prone semantics and a separate language like OpenCL.
Yes, those are hard problems, but it's also 2015 and we can come up with powerful compilers and JIT virtual machines. Going back to less concurrency than plain old shell scripts where '&' starts a true separate process is not an answer.
Really? Every browser window or tab should hang if Javascript in one of them is slow? Loading and decoding an image for one of the icons on screen should prevent the UI from processing touch events? Many of those problems have been solved by important applications ad-hoc, but sane behaviour by default would be great.
Nothing has to be made final, subclasses just need to obey the contract declared by superclass. This can be accomplished, in the worst case, by making everything synchronized.
Make default for loop potentially parallel and have compiler complain if it can not prove that by either code inspection or, as a last resort, explicit annotation on the loop or methods that it calls. Then introduce an sfor keyword for when you really have to make things sequential.
Multithreading requires every instance of concurrent execution to be micromanaged by the programmer, leading to a lot of code which is not parallelized in practice. Potential concurrency should be the default case for, say, all for loops and serialization an explicit paradigm that a programmer is aware of. Coupled with strong compile time checking that can detect safe and unsafe code.
Mainstream programming languages are still sequential by default and the likes of OpenCL are too hard to learn for simple tasks. UI code is still single threaded in most systems, and that drags most computation into that thread as well through programmer laziness. It's time for languages which are parallel by default and where ability to parallelize a loop is verifiable at compile time. Yes I know FORTRAN is much closer to that then C/Java, but that's due to being primitive to a degree that will not fly in 2015.
East bay, somewhere close to company bus stop or BART. Realistically you are looking at 3 hours daily commute for a relatively affordable house in a good school district. Better spend it watching movies in a bus then risking your life daily in traffic.
Due to unfortunate Apple's decision to set price minimum to $0.99, both app stores are flooded with dumb repetitive gameplay not worth paying for. They should have set base price at $9.99. Then, if someone manages to sell 100 copies of an interesting hobby game, they can buy themselves a new iPad and get motivated to do more.
Now it could well be that iOS has more copies of Candy Crush than Android, but I am not missing them in any way. What I wish is that Steam had an Android client with cross-platform play for desktop games with mobile ports, like Talos Principle and Fran Bow. Then each game would be worth more than desktop or mobile port alone, as I wouldn't have to give up big screen or conversely wait until I am home to play.
If there really were a shortage of tech workers, which I don't believe for a moment
I interview at least one person per week for a well known, desirable company. In the last year, not one has been able to write a half a page of code using two hashtables and rational thought - no gotcha insights required. I say there is in fact a huge shortage. Say, anyone wants to apply?
These H1Bs are an infusion of folks who are paid $60K, which is higher than average US income, into US population. They are now travelling, eating out in restaurants, sending their kids to daycare and buying computer hardware and software. When otherwise, they would spend their disposable income in India or whatever country they come from.
The only practical downside is restriction on transferring between jobs, which depress wages for both H1B holders and US citizens. Give folks a year to either find another US job or put their affairs in order and leave. Every other objection is plain irrational prejudice*.
* Obviously, entire 7 billion of Earth population can not move to North America. Luckily not everyone wants so, and imposing a sensible requirement of supporting oneself and earning a lower middle class salary narrows to influx to manageable numbers.
If a 1kg drone falls on my head, it will likely kill me. I am very much interested in knowing who has these, where they are allowed to fly and what is the maintenance record.
Haven't we recently learned that bad/unethical software engineering is devastating for public health? My car is drive by wire. A firmware malfunction on highway would be no less dangerous than a part breaking, and would be much harder to predict and prevent during scheduled maintenance.
Software engineering has critical and non-critical projects just like hardware engineering. I don't see why respect or professional standards should be any different. These days anyone can also design physical objects and print them on 3D printer, and that's fine unless you expect to take your hobby trinket and put it in your car's transmission.
Apple TV and Chromecast are hugely popular products and great stocking stuffers. I guess Amazon is scared of being found a monopoly and desperate to breeze some life into competition by forcing millions of customers to establish an account and form of payment with another online store. I would suggest that they also dump iPhone and Samsung devices and focus more on promoting their Fire Phone.
I am OK with DRM on Tailor Swift songs and proprietory word processors. But copyrighted mathematics? Seriously? Claiming exclusive right to facts and laws of nature?
Obviously, a machine code binary is a form of open source, just not a very useful one. The most open state of a software project is when any outside contributor has exactly same access to knowledge as founder/CEO, including personal one on one attention from key developers. This is impractical in practice. The best we can hope for is that all machine-readable materials are equally available to all contributors.
Having "procedures to follow" does not in any way diminish your moral responsibility to do the right thing. There was another story a while back about a schoolteacher who lost her job. There was left over lunch food and hungry kids whose parents didn't have money to pay for lunch, so she did what any decent person would do. Better to suffer personal hardship than lose your conciousness. And if people keep resisting evil/stupid rules, these will eventually be changed.
Love America, but it appears that if you are black or muslim, odds are stacked against you. If I got sodomized before every air flight or feared for my life during every interaction with cops, I would certainly get the hell out of here. All the attention after the fact is nice, but his parents got to wonder if there son could have as easily been killed by a cop for his homemade clock. Is it too much of a stretch if they shot a 12 year old sitting on a swing with a toy gun?
VW emission cheating scandal would not have happened in a programming team including women and older folks. They would have said "sure this may get us great bonus now, but we might get caught 5 years down the line, and what would that do to our families?". Current business culture rewards short term gains and irresponsibility to customers and shareholders. As computers become more central to immediately life and death tecnologies like IOT and self driving cars, I think the balance will shift.
In the meantime, a great automaker and its thousands of employees are ruined because they didn't put mature, responsible people in charge of a project.
Slashdot Mirror
Before boycotting, you need to formulate a realistic plan that would cause boycott to end. Currently, if Palestinians control a certain territory it is used to continuously launch rockets on Israel. If they are allowed to share land, they blow themselves up in public places. What exactly would you have Israel do? Where is a Palestinian government that is strong enough to stop violence if a particular deal is put into place?
We don't need servers or robots to have human intelligence. Already have 7 billions of those, including access to superhuman intelligence in the form of of many smart people collaborating with assistance of technology. Also humans have been around forever, and we still suck at human rights. Got to square those away first before having to worry about rights of other intelligent species (and having them respect ours).
What we need now is computers that are good at tasks that we suck at, like repetitive processing on huge amounts of data.
About the only exception is space exploration, where humans are not available for real time remote control due to speed of light. Still, we don't want a Mars probe to get bored and lonely, or make it's own survival the first priority. So cloning our own kind of intelligence, which was shaped by natural selection for self preservation, is not the best approach.
Not that I think any of this is likely, but sufferers should be able to relieve their physical or psychosomatic symptoms by dressing up in a Faraday cage. Don't see any harm if they feel better and don't demand the rest of the world go back to stone age.
* Open to possibility that people with various metal implants in their body would be actually sensitive.
You are getting the PC for fun (gaming) right? So consider the process of building the hardware and customizing software part of that fun. You get to learn about various technologies available in 2015 and the art of putting them together. If you go with Linux and spend effort to customize your system, you are also getting marketable CS knowledge. All in all, the enjoyment of the process is worth the price of a few games even if you can't compete with Dell purely on price.
In fact, Christian minorities have a number of special rights under the law, including representation in the parliament. Exactly what kind of country are we trying to become?
The whole purpose of shooting raw images is to do advanced processing later. However, any such processing involves creative choice which alters the image to the taste of the person doing the processing. It's easy to alter the white point and have some journalistically important details lost in the shadows.
Also in a high stakes case suspected forgery, it may be possible to detect forged images by looking at minute noise and encoding choices made by a particular camera model. Faking these details well enough to fool the experts would be beyond the expertise of most would-be forgers.
Of course, Reuters could ask for RAW files themselves and have even more fidelity/authentication potential. But those files are huge, many journalists do not have a fast internet connection where they work, and the publisher would need expertise on RAW workflows.
All in all, I think it's a reasonable decision and will be successful against unintentional/unconscious alterations and causual forgery.
Python provides no true concurrency due to global interpreter lock. Java is not suitable for realtime due to unpredictable GC, while C/C++ is not suitable for anything which should never crash or return random results due to memory corruption. None of mainstream languages make automatic use of multiple cores and GPU - explicit provisions must be made by programmer to parallelize part of the program, often with error prone semantics and a separate language like OpenCL.
Yes, those are hard problems, but it's also 2015 and we can come up with powerful compilers and JIT virtual machines. Going back to less concurrency than plain old shell scripts where '&' starts a true separate process is not an answer.
Really? Every browser window or tab should hang if Javascript in one of them is slow? Loading and decoding an image for one of the icons on screen should prevent the UI from processing touch events? Many of those problems have been solved by important applications ad-hoc, but sane behaviour by default would be great.
Nothing has to be made final, subclasses just need to obey the contract declared by superclass. This can be accomplished, in the worst case, by making everything synchronized.
Make default for loop potentially parallel and have compiler complain if it can not prove that by either code inspection or, as a last resort, explicit annotation on the loop or methods that it calls. Then introduce an sfor keyword for when you really have to make things sequential.
Multithreading requires every instance of concurrent execution to be micromanaged by the programmer, leading to a lot of code which is not parallelized in practice. Potential concurrency should be the default case for, say, all for loops and serialization an explicit paradigm that a programmer is aware of. Coupled with strong compile time checking that can detect safe and unsafe code.
How is your SSD speed and thermal envelope doing with make -j20?
Mainstream programming languages are still sequential by default and the likes of OpenCL are too hard to learn for simple tasks. UI code is still single threaded in most systems, and that drags most computation into that thread as well through programmer laziness. It's time for languages which are parallel by default and where ability to parallelize a loop is verifiable at compile time. Yes I know FORTRAN is much closer to that then C/Java, but that's due to being primitive to a degree that will not fly in 2015.
East bay, somewhere close to company bus stop or BART. Realistically you are looking at 3 hours daily commute for a relatively affordable house in a good school district. Better spend it watching movies in a bus then risking your life daily in traffic.
Due to unfortunate Apple's decision to set price minimum to $0.99, both app stores are flooded with dumb repetitive gameplay not worth paying for. They should have set base price at $9.99. Then, if someone manages to sell 100 copies of an interesting hobby game, they can buy themselves a new iPad and get motivated to do more.
Now it could well be that iOS has more copies of Candy Crush than Android, but I am not missing them in any way. What I wish is that Steam had an Android client with cross-platform play for desktop games with mobile ports, like Talos Principle and Fran Bow. Then each game would be worth more than desktop or mobile port alone, as I wouldn't have to give up big screen or conversely wait until I am home to play.
If there really were a shortage of tech workers, which I don't believe for a moment
I interview at least one person per week for a well known, desirable company. In the last year, not one has been able to write a half a page of code using two hashtables and rational thought - no gotcha insights required. I say there is in fact a huge shortage. Say, anyone wants to apply?
These H1Bs are an infusion of folks who are paid $60K, which is higher than average US income, into US population. They are now travelling, eating out in restaurants, sending their kids to daycare and buying computer hardware and software. When otherwise, they would spend their disposable income in India or whatever country they come from.
The only practical downside is restriction on transferring between jobs, which depress wages for both H1B holders and US citizens. Give folks a year to either find another US job or put their affairs in order and leave. Every other objection is plain irrational prejudice*.
* Obviously, entire 7 billion of Earth population can not move to North America. Luckily not everyone wants so, and imposing a sensible requirement of supporting oneself and earning a lower middle class salary narrows to influx to manageable numbers.
If a 1kg drone falls on my head, it will likely kill me. I am very much interested in knowing who has these, where they are allowed to fly and what is the maintenance record.
Haven't we recently learned that bad/unethical software engineering is devastating for public health? My car is drive by wire. A firmware malfunction on highway would be no less dangerous than a part breaking, and would be much harder to predict and prevent during scheduled maintenance.
Software engineering has critical and non-critical projects just like hardware engineering. I don't see why respect or professional standards should be any different. These days anyone can also design physical objects and print them on 3D printer, and that's fine unless you expect to take your hobby trinket and put it in your car's transmission.
Apple TV and Chromecast are hugely popular products and great stocking stuffers. I guess Amazon is scared of being found a monopoly and desperate to breeze some life into competition by forcing millions of customers to establish an account and form of payment with another online store. I would suggest that they also dump iPhone and Samsung devices and focus more on promoting their Fire Phone.
I am OK with DRM on Tailor Swift songs and proprietory word processors. But copyrighted mathematics? Seriously? Claiming exclusive right to facts and laws of nature?
Obviously, a machine code binary is a form of open source, just not a very useful one. The most open state of a software project is when any outside contributor has exactly same access to knowledge as founder/CEO, including personal one on one attention from key developers. This is impractical in practice. The best we can hope for is that all machine-readable materials are equally available to all contributors.
Having "procedures to follow" does not in any way diminish your moral responsibility to do the right thing. There was another story a while back about a schoolteacher who lost her job. There was left over lunch food and hungry kids whose parents didn't have money to pay for lunch, so she did what any decent person would do. Better to suffer personal hardship than lose your conciousness. And if people keep resisting evil/stupid rules, these will eventually be changed.
Love America, but it appears that if you are black or muslim, odds are stacked against you. If I got sodomized before every air flight or feared for my life during every interaction with cops, I would certainly get the hell out of here. All the attention after the fact is nice, but his parents got to wonder if there son could have as easily been killed by a cop for his homemade clock. Is it too much of a stretch if they shot a 12 year old sitting on a swing with a toy gun?
VW emission cheating scandal would not have happened in a programming team including women and older folks. They would have said "sure this may get us great bonus now, but we might get caught 5 years down the line, and what would that do to our families?". Current business culture rewards short term gains and irresponsibility to customers and shareholders. As computers become more central to immediately life and death tecnologies like IOT and self driving cars, I think the balance will shift.
In the meantime, a great automaker and its thousands of employees are ruined because they didn't put mature, responsible people in charge of a project.
I would gladly buy a device with same form factor as current Wii U touch controller, but able to function independently, away from home and TV.