.Net is just a specification and a bunch of languages. There is an open source implementation of.Net itself and certainly many open source projects written in C#. "Rejects windows for open source" would have been a more appropriate headline. I hope they still use some kind of language with bounds checking and type safety, given the dangers of buffer overrun exploits in a national stock trading system.
How is it your eye is incapable of discerning the difference between muddy and clear, but it's capable of watching a movie on the tiny iPhone screen?
Go ahead and try watching that iPhone at a distance between your couch and TV.
This guy does some good-old-fashioned book research and hand math to figure out that we can probably set a lower bound of 324MP on what the human eye can pick up across its central vision.
Caught up in the same megapixel craze as digital cameras I see. Your optics is most probably not up to par to read slashdot on home HDTV, zoom functionality has been left out and your CPU can only handle 4-8 objects at once when compressing the video for interpretation. With this constraint, wouldn't you rather focus on image composition rather than resolution?
And you know what? Most people will still not notice any difference, especially if they have to shell out for HDMI 50.0 monster cable or put up with quantum encryption DRM. Human eye doesn't have a terribly high resolution and frankly sharpness of graphics is behind so many factors that make a movie/TV show worth watching that it will never be a deciding factor. I don't see any difference in enjoyment of watching a dated James Bond movie vs the latest action flick, except the former is usually more witty. I do avoid any media that I can not watch or rip on my laptop or iphone.
Yes, but should we also ban manufacturing cars unless they can be safely driven by blind? That's what we are doing with websites right now - every page, no matter how obscure, must be accessible. Just like we might ask blind to take a bus or taxi, we could require providing data as either plain text or machine readable format so that some tools can be used to access it.
I think we both agree it's dumb to write everything in assembler. Few people did with serious software in IBM PC days. This keyboard debouncing C code will run for less than a millisecond and let CPU sleep until the user does something. However, the CPU-intensive, battery guzzling code tends to be focused in video/audio/sensor processing and involve mathematical transformations of manageable complexity. This code will be especially vulnerable to compiler's inability to retain stuff in registers in multithreaded environment.
As for $5M/year, I suspect you can retain this guys services for somewhat less. But even that amount is trivial for the only mobile OS that can handle realtime facial recognition without a plutonium battery.
Microsoft would be just protecting their own reputation when unknowing users of pirated installs are complaining less about Windows instability and others see fewer attacks from zombie farms. If you created a problem such as IE6, you should do everything in your power to solve it rather than ranting about others. Good for karma, good for pocketbook.
With heart implant there would be no resuscitating as such. Repair or recharge would be a more appropriate term. With artificial circulation or oxygenation some tissues in your body can be kept alive long after major organ failures. The only question is the point at which your brain is not functioning well enough to justify the setup.
In both cases you will anyway go soon, so why not do whatever you enjoy? That's what Patrick Swayze said in one interview - smoking may have caused his pancreatic cancer but stopping now sure won't make it go away.
would you be worried walking around with a piece of charcoal in your pocket
A smoldering piece of charcoal near my privates all day would make me jittery, yes. Inert one would worry me about as much a piece of lithium incased in safe container and not capable of discharging energy without extreme heat applied first.
Oh, and a kilogram of fat? that's 37.7 megajoules.
Yes, but what is the maximum discharge rate that occurs in a biological system? We seem to have pretty good safeguards against runaway oxidation, even then some people do die from thermal circuit malfunctions. Besides fat is much less dense than typical battery material. Not sure if I want an ultralight iphone with a huge bulge in midsection.
Lastly, if you're still worried about carrying "too much energy" around in your pocket in the form of an electricity, just remember that E=mc^2. So a single gram of material of any form carries 89.87 terajoules of energy.
So would you feel comfortable carrying this material around in the circumstances where a significant portion of this energy can be readily released? Me, I am not going anywhere near a smartphone with positron circuits.
This is just an excuse not to optimize your stuff:-)
Compilers may be good at spotting local optimizations or rearranging instructions to best utilize CPU pipeline. In fact, it would be great to use optimizing assembler that does the same on hand-optimized code. However, they really suck at figuring out what exactly you are trying to do. Every time you call a function or have even a slightly complicated construct that uses pointers, the compiler has to discard all the variables and intermediate results stored in registers since it has no idea which memory locations have been updated. In your own assembler code, you can keep values in registers even across synchronization primitives in multi-threaded programs, since you have some idea on what the other threads will be updating and when.
I am not saying that some kind of parallel language can not be used. A FORTRAN dialect with parallel DO loops and matrix operations that directly utilize GPU can be optimized nicely. Nor should C/Objective-C/C#/Java/Python be excluded entirely from the platform. I am sure a program written in these will not cause undue battery drain while addressing a 10 digit LCD or sending a 130 character SMS message. But if you are trying to implement real time face recognition on built in camera, you better roll up your sleeves and not expect Microsoft compiler or radioisotope battery to save your ass.
More options are good. There are many users who are forced to keep IE6 for work access to intranet sites and yet may want Google wave for personal use. This way they can access all their sites without having to remember which browser is for which and deal with different sets of bookmarks and cookies. What alternatives do Microsoft and Mozilla foundation propose for this group of people?
Batteries have to store enormous energy and be able to release it at high rate. It pretty much follows that there will be cases where energy is released at too high a rate for your safety, no matter what is the underlying technology. Do you really want to be carrying an even more powerful bomb in close proximity to your private parts for most of the day?
Personally, I would rather think of my phone as a remote desktop client for servers whose power supplies are safely away from my cajones. And for cases where that's not possible, such as real time video augmentation, we should start programming mobile clients with the same care we used for hand-optimized assembler on original IBM PCs until CPU technology catches up in speed per watt.
This is how top level management would like things to be, but people who merely know how to lay bricks in predefined places or run prescribe scripts do not make good programmers or sysadmin. Programming or managing a system that satisfies its users requires more architect skills than that of a brick layer.
Rather than ranting at people, why don't you suggest your own solution? Oh, right. That's because you don't have one.
On the contrary there are a number of simple solutions. For example, reward sales people based on repeat visits by customers they helped rather than immediate commission from the sale. Customers who get fleeced eventually get clued in my friends and relatives and stop coming and spending money in the same store. Why do you think brick-and-mortar stores are folding even when most people need face to face help with choosing and and using a computer? Why are Apple stores multiplying despite this general trend?
First of all how is it Microsoft's fault that users do not upgrade their browsers?
1. They didn't update IE 6 for 5 years which, coupled with their market dominance, allowed lots of crafty websites to accumulate 2. There is no migration path for users of older, but still common, windows versions 3. There is no way to install IE 6 and IE 8 side by side, let alone specify automatic use of old rendering engine just for specific websites. 4. IE 7 and 8 introduced distributive UI changes with no way to bring back the industry standard menu bar and a normal looking toolbar.
See, most popular Linux distros "look like Windows", i.e. come with KDE or GNOME as the default desktop to appeal to the Windows crowd, to make them feel at home, so that their learning curve isn't too steep.
In that case, it's a colossal marketing blunder. You don't sell/drive adoption of a product by mimicking look and feel of a competitor, you got to create a distinct brand image and say that youth is better. MacOSX certainly doesn't look like Windows. To really have a chance for major gains, Linux should try to uniquely appeal to at least a subset of users who are missing some functionality in Windows and OSX.
For example, instead of ribbon, firefox could allow complete access of all menu functionality by typing a command in address bar, such as "bookmark", "new window|nw http://www.cnn.com/", "print", "find mykeyword" and so on. Very UNIX-like and can give access to functionality not found in any commercial OS.
This has nothing to do with getting caught. Smart people without scruples realize that you can make more money running a dicey but technically legal hedge fund that robbing a bank. Nothing portable that you could steal would be worth a billion bucks and items on top of the scale - art pieces, nuclear material, etc - would be risky to sell and result in huge law enforcement resources dedicated to solving the crime.
As evil as record labels are, they are certainly the responsible party for fulfilling their contracts with artists. Go to court and demand that they pay the same kind of penalties that they demand from file sharers. Let them go out of business or price iTunes downloads out of most teenager's budgets and independent musicians may have a chance.
How is it that a police officer can enter your vehicle or home without a warrant if he or she believes a crime has been, is being, or will be committed?
You mean in hot pursuit, to prevent evidence from being destroyed? I don't think there would be many situations like this that would facilitate installing a GPS tracker.
How is it that a police officer can run 24/7 surveillance of video and audio without a warrant when he or she is investigating a suspected crime?
Only of public spaces, not inside of your home. This should eventually be restricted as webcams on every street corner with automatic facial/speech recognition would create a bit too much surveillance of everyone.
How is it that a police officer can tow a vehicle, search a vehicle, or even confiscate a vehicle whithout a warrant when he or she believes it has been used in the commission of a crime?
Yes, there is an unfortunate and overbroad exception on search of cars that supposedly have reduced privacy expectations compared to homes and personal possessions. However, a right to search does not automatically give right to covertly place surveillance equipment.
Next time you go to the doctor, ask about their cash prices for various services. Think about how many you could pay for out of pocket if you had too. What common expenses would you be willing to give up to address those problems, if you had to? Eating out? Your cable tv/internet connection? Would you put off a computer upgrade? Sell the shiny new car and drive a beater?
Wow, your plan sounds great for economy! Restaurants, car manufacturers and computer manufacturers will do great business when every customer is asking him/herself weather they will get cancer costing $1M to treat sometime down the line.
Wow, you would rather break up families for no reason except not having enough money to buy health insurance than pay a small tax for providing a fallback insurance for an age group which rarely falls sick. Clearly we have an irreconcilable difference in values which can not be settled through logical discussion. You might however consider the following flaws in your proposal:
1. Do you really think there is enough adoption market for already seriously ill kids from lower socioeconomic background to go to individuals wealthy enough to cover their medical expenses? 2. Do you consider children torn away from their moms and dad by policeman to be "free"? How about parents who are forced to go hungry to pay for their kids medical insurance?
Maybe not, but the rest of us very much have business complaining about whereabouts and passengers in our cars automatically recorded by each passing truck. Stick to GPS/sensor data for your own rig.
Because talking to police will not in any way undo the consequences of your actions or make you a better person in future. It will only force you to spend the time that could be used to do both getting raped in the shower.
On the other hand, working 80 hours per week for the rest of your live and donating all your salary to charity that helps future victims/potential perpetrators of your crime would be a fairly meaningful way to accept the responsibility. Scale this down for lesser crimes, ie leave money for repair of any property you damaged in a car accident.
Slashdot Mirror
.Net is just a specification and a bunch of languages. There is an open source implementation of .Net itself and certainly many open source projects written in C#. "Rejects windows for open source" would have been a more appropriate headline. I hope they still use some kind of language with bounds checking and type safety, given the dangers of buffer overrun exploits in a national stock trading system.
How is it your eye is incapable of discerning the difference between muddy and clear, but it's capable of watching a movie on the tiny iPhone screen?
Go ahead and try watching that iPhone at a distance between your couch and TV.
This guy does some good-old-fashioned book research and hand math to figure out that we can probably set a lower bound of 324MP on what the human eye can pick up across its central vision.
Caught up in the same megapixel craze as digital cameras I see. Your optics is most probably not up to par to read slashdot on home HDTV, zoom functionality has been left out and your CPU can only handle 4-8 objects at once when compressing the video for interpretation. With this constraint, wouldn't you rather focus on image composition rather than resolution?
And you know what? Most people will still not notice any difference, especially if they have to shell out for HDMI 50.0 monster cable or put up with quantum encryption DRM. Human eye doesn't have a terribly high resolution and frankly sharpness of graphics is behind so many factors that make a movie/TV show worth watching that it will never be a deciding factor. I don't see any difference in enjoyment of watching a dated James Bond movie vs the latest action flick, except the former is usually more witty. I do avoid any media that I can not watch or rip on my laptop or iphone.
Actually this is one case where search, audio and comments can be easily made accessible to the blind.
Yes, but should we also ban manufacturing cars unless they can be safely driven by blind? That's what we are doing with websites right now - every page, no matter how obscure, must be accessible. Just like we might ask blind to take a bus or taxi, we could require providing data as either plain text or machine readable format so that some tools can be used to access it.
I think we both agree it's dumb to write everything in assembler. Few people did with serious software in IBM PC days. This keyboard debouncing C code will run for less than a millisecond and let CPU sleep until the user does something. However, the CPU-intensive, battery guzzling code tends to be focused in video/audio/sensor processing and involve mathematical transformations of manageable complexity. This code will be especially vulnerable to compiler's inability to retain stuff in registers in multithreaded environment.
As for $5M/year, I suspect you can retain this guys services for somewhat less. But even that amount is trivial for the only mobile OS that can handle realtime facial recognition without a plutonium battery.
Microsoft would be just protecting their own reputation when unknowing users of pirated installs are complaining less about Windows instability and others see fewer attacks from zombie farms. If you created a problem such as IE6, you should do everything in your power to solve it rather than ranting about others. Good for karma, good for pocketbook.
With heart implant there would be no resuscitating as such. Repair or recharge would be a more appropriate term. With artificial circulation or oxygenation some tissues in your body can be kept alive long after major organ failures. The only question is the point at which your brain is not functioning well enough to justify the setup.
In both cases you will anyway go soon, so why not do whatever you enjoy? That's what Patrick Swayze said in one interview - smoking may have caused his pancreatic cancer but stopping now sure won't make it go away.
would you be worried walking around with a piece of charcoal in your pocket
A smoldering piece of charcoal near my privates all day would make me jittery, yes. Inert one would worry me about as much a piece of lithium incased in safe container and not capable of discharging energy without extreme heat applied first.
Oh, and a kilogram of fat? that's 37.7 megajoules.
Yes, but what is the maximum discharge rate that occurs in a biological system? We seem to have pretty good safeguards against runaway oxidation, even then some people do die from thermal circuit malfunctions. Besides fat is much less dense than typical battery material. Not sure if I want an ultralight iphone with a huge bulge in midsection.
Lastly, if you're still worried about carrying "too much energy" around in your pocket in the form of an electricity, just remember that E=mc^2. So a single gram of material of any form carries 89.87 terajoules of energy.
So would you feel comfortable carrying this material around in the circumstances where a significant portion of this energy can be readily released? Me, I am not going anywhere near a smartphone with positron circuits.
This is just an excuse not to optimize your stuff :-)
Compilers may be good at spotting local optimizations or rearranging instructions to best utilize CPU pipeline. In fact, it would be great to use optimizing assembler that does the same on hand-optimized code. However, they really suck at figuring out what exactly you are trying to do. Every time you call a function or have even a slightly complicated construct that uses pointers, the compiler has to discard all the variables and intermediate results stored in registers since it has no idea which memory locations have been updated. In your own assembler code, you can keep values in registers even across synchronization primitives in multi-threaded programs, since you have some idea on what the other threads will be updating and when.
I am not saying that some kind of parallel language can not be used. A FORTRAN dialect with parallel DO loops and matrix operations that directly utilize GPU can be optimized nicely. Nor should C/Objective-C/C#/Java/Python be excluded entirely from the platform. I am sure a program written in these will not cause undue battery drain while addressing a 10 digit LCD or sending a 130 character SMS message. But if you are trying to implement real time face recognition on built in camera, you better roll up your sleeves and not expect Microsoft compiler or radioisotope battery to save your ass.
More options are good. There are many users who are forced to keep IE6 for work access to intranet sites and yet may want Google wave for personal use. This way they can access all their sites without having to remember which browser is for which and deal with different sets of bookmarks and cookies. What alternatives do Microsoft and Mozilla foundation propose for this group of people?
Batteries have to store enormous energy and be able to release it at high rate. It pretty much follows that there will be cases where energy is released at too high a rate for your safety, no matter what is the underlying technology. Do you really want to be carrying an even more powerful bomb in close proximity to your private parts for most of the day?
Personally, I would rather think of my phone as a remote desktop client for servers whose power supplies are safely away from my cajones. And for cases where that's not possible, such as real time video augmentation, we should start programming mobile clients with the same care we used for hand-optimized assembler on original IBM PCs until CPU technology catches up in speed per watt.
Once people get used to certain technology, they tend to resist learning anything significantly different. News at 11:30.
This is how top level management would like things to be, but people who merely know how to lay bricks in predefined places or run prescribe scripts do not make good programmers or sysadmin. Programming or managing a system that satisfies its users requires more architect skills than that of a brick layer.
Rather than ranting at people, why don't you suggest your own solution? Oh, right. That's because you don't have one.
On the contrary there are a number of simple solutions. For example, reward sales people based on repeat visits by customers they helped rather than immediate commission from the sale. Customers who get fleeced eventually get clued in my friends and relatives and stop coming and spending money in the same store. Why do you think brick-and-mortar stores are folding even when most people need face to face help with choosing and and using a computer? Why are Apple stores multiplying despite this general trend?
First of all how is it Microsoft's fault that users do not upgrade their browsers?
1. They didn't update IE 6 for 5 years which, coupled with their market dominance, allowed lots of crafty websites to accumulate
2. There is no migration path for users of older, but still common, windows versions
3. There is no way to install IE 6 and IE 8 side by side, let alone specify automatic use of old rendering engine just for specific websites.
4. IE 7 and 8 introduced distributive UI changes with no way to bring back the industry standard menu bar and a normal looking toolbar.
See, most popular Linux distros "look like Windows", i.e. come with KDE or GNOME as the default desktop to appeal to the Windows crowd, to make them feel at home, so that their learning curve isn't too steep.
In that case, it's a colossal marketing blunder. You don't sell/drive adoption of a product by mimicking look and feel of a competitor, you got to create a distinct brand image and say that youth is better. MacOSX certainly doesn't look like Windows. To really have a chance for major gains, Linux should try to uniquely appeal to at least a subset of users who are missing some functionality in Windows and OSX.
For example, instead of ribbon, firefox could allow complete access of all menu functionality by typing a command in address bar, such as "bookmark", "new window|nw http://www.cnn.com/", "print", "find mykeyword" and so on. Very UNIX-like and can give access to functionality not found in any commercial OS.
This has nothing to do with getting caught. Smart people without scruples realize that you can make more money running a dicey but technically legal hedge fund that robbing a bank. Nothing portable that you could steal would be worth a billion bucks and items on top of the scale - art pieces, nuclear material, etc - would be risky to sell and result in huge law enforcement resources dedicated to solving the crime.
As evil as record labels are, they are certainly the responsible party for fulfilling their contracts with artists. Go to court and demand that they pay the same kind of penalties that they demand from file sharers. Let them go out of business or price iTunes downloads out of most teenager's budgets and independent musicians may have a chance.
How is it that a police officer can enter your vehicle or home without a warrant if he or she believes a crime has been, is being, or will be committed?
You mean in hot pursuit, to prevent evidence from being destroyed? I don't think there would be many situations like this that would facilitate installing a GPS tracker.
How is it that a police officer can run 24/7 surveillance of video and audio without a warrant when he or she is investigating a suspected crime?
Only of public spaces, not inside of your home. This should eventually be restricted as webcams on every street corner with automatic facial/speech recognition would create a bit too much surveillance of everyone.
How is it that a police officer can tow a vehicle, search a vehicle, or even confiscate a vehicle whithout a warrant when he or she believes it has been used in the commission of a crime?
Yes, there is an unfortunate and overbroad exception on search of cars that supposedly have reduced privacy expectations compared to homes and personal possessions. However, a right to search does not automatically give right to covertly place surveillance equipment.
Next time you go to the doctor, ask about their cash prices for various services. Think about how many you could pay for out of pocket if you had too. What common expenses would you be willing to give up to address those problems, if you had to? Eating out? Your cable tv/internet connection? Would you put off a computer upgrade? Sell the shiny new car and drive a beater?
Wow, your plan sounds great for economy! Restaurants, car manufacturers and computer manufacturers will do great business when every customer is asking him/herself weather they will get cancer costing $1M to treat sometime down the line.
Wow, you would rather break up families for no reason except not having enough money to buy health insurance than pay a small tax for providing a fallback insurance for an age group which rarely falls sick. Clearly we have an irreconcilable difference in values which can not be settled through logical discussion. You might however consider the following flaws in your proposal:
1. Do you really think there is enough adoption market for already seriously ill kids from lower socioeconomic background to go to individuals wealthy enough to cover their medical expenses?
2. Do you consider children torn away from their moms and dad by policeman to be "free"? How about parents who are forced to go hungry to pay for their kids medical insurance?
Maybe not, but the rest of us very much have business complaining about whereabouts and passengers in our cars automatically recorded by each passing truck. Stick to GPS/sensor data for your own rig.
Because talking to police will not in any way undo the consequences of your actions or make you a better person in future. It will only force you to spend the time that could be used to do both getting raped in the shower.
On the other hand, working 80 hours per week for the rest of your live and donating all your salary to charity that helps future victims/potential perpetrators of your crime would be a fairly meaningful way to accept the responsibility. Scale this down for lesser crimes, ie leave money for repair of any property you damaged in a car accident.