When colleges start being run primarily from private funds, then those providing the funds might stop unless their kids get the degree. It seems that majority of people do not see the folly with this approach.
Nope. The problem is the folly of believing that education should be about getting a piece of paper that allows you to get certain jobs you wouldn't get otherwise.
Which is largely down to the 'professionalisation' of recruitment and the elimination of apprenticeships. A kid who years ago might start out sweeping floors in a hangar and end their career designing a jet airliner is now expected to have a degree before 'Human Resources' will even talk to them.
By encouraging their kids to do well in school and rewarding nerds rather than jocks?
Treating sports as more important than maths, science, etc, seems to be a very Anglo trait; see the British public schools of the Victorian era, for example, where being good at Rugby was considered far more important than being good at academic subjects.
As for the grandparent post, the available evidence would seem to indicate that the more you increase spending on schooling in a first world nation, the worse the results become. In many countries 'teaching' is just a cushy job at the taxpayers' expense where you're impossible to sack even if you're the worst teacher ever... at worst you'll probably be sent off to the glorious heights of admin and get a pay rise in the process.
It's my contention that those who have a nice career and a deep knowledge of math and/or science should consider spending the last few years working as a (fully qualified) teacher.
A while back I was reading an article by someone (engineer, I think) who looked at doing that. Then they discovered they'd have to take numerous training courses to prove they could teach kids about what they'd been doing for years and decided they had better things to do with their life.
If you really want better teachers in schools, you could start by eliminating all the roadblocks that keep them out.
It's not like you can send a "shut off the motor" signal through TPMS.
Some of the people hacking TPMS claim to have been able to send a 'completely brick the TPMS control unit' signal through TPMS from a hundred yards away with a directional antenna. If the firmware is that poorly written, it's unlikely but not inconceivable that they could make the TPMS unit send out crap that would interfere with the operation of other components.
And, either way, most people wouldn't be too happy about having to buy a new TPMS control unit because someone sent bad data to it.
Last week I drove a friend's late-90s Nissan in Mountain View. It's got a plain old mechanical key. On my way out of a store I walked up to a sedan of the same color, unlocked it, and then realized it wasn't even a Nissan.
Yeah, my Lancia key used to work in my friend's Ford door locks. Then again, a screwdriver did too.
I have a really hard time thinking up a scenario where adding a volatile like that would actually be the correct fix, and not just a change that makes the code work by random chance. It sure seems like the actual problem should be elsewhere.
I take it you've never had to program the x87 FPU?
I presume this is a weird consequence of the FPU hiding bits from you and using a volatile forces the compiler to pull the value out of the FPU to memory instead of leaving it in there with the extra bits of precision? If I remember correctly, it's something like 80-bits internally but 64-bits externally, so you can get different floating point results depending on the code the compiler generates..
He's not kidding nor exaggerating at all. If a security fix breaks $foo, then, only because Microsoft and $foo's company is in the USA, can be liable to be sued for it.
When was the last time anyone successfully sued a software company for something like that?
Get cracking, apes, the universe will last billions of years but you won't! Act now!!!!!!!!!
Indeed. If we could extend lifespans to thousands of years, then waiting a few decades until you can launch a monolith to the moon with a rocket you built in your garage would hardly be a problem.
As far as netbooks/tablets go, it makes perfect sense.
How many people will be running Word and Powerpoint on an ARM netbook or tablet? I guess you could use Powerpoint to display a presentation from a tablet, but I can't imagine developing one on there.
Open Source apps are recompiled for ARM. It's got nothing to do with Linux.
Spurious argument. How many non open-source apps does the average Linux user run? How many open-source apps does the average Windows user run?
The only non open-source apps I have running on my Linux systems at home are a few Windows apps in Wine (e.g. Steam and a few games). The vast majority of Windows apps I have installed in the Windows partition on my laptop are closed source, the exceptions being Firefox and Open Office.
They will of course still need to be recompiled, but you may not have to buy it again.
Yeah, because companies are totally going to spend the time porting, recompiling and _testing_ (why does everyone think that you can just recompile the code and ship it without testing?) their software for free. I agree, if you've paid $10,000 a licence they may deign to give you an ARM version as part of that cost and that if you buy a new version of the software you may get both, but I think we can be pretty damn sure that most companies are going to charge you for the ARM version of existing software and at best give a discount if you already own the x86 version.
But more than that, the Windows software I use the most won't ever be available on ARM. I use version 6 of program X because version 7 and later come with awful DRM which randomly 'deactivates' it and crashes in Wine... if it's ever released for ARM then it will be the latest version with the lousy DRM.
Similarly, plenty of companies use old versions of Office because they see no reason to pay for a new one. So buying a new version of Office would eat up any possible cost savings from replacing x86 desktops with ARM.
Windows CE is likely where Windows for ARM will get its initial supply of applications, just like 32-bit Windows can run Win16 apps, and 64-bit Windows can run Win32 apps.
That'll be great for the three people who've been collecting a stack of Windows CE applications for the last decade and want to be able to run them on a different version of Windows.
The rest of the world will see 'Windows' on the box and expect it to run their existing x86 Windows software.
This is just sloppy programming. Let me go out on a limb and say any decent programmer wouldn't do this.
And how many Windows programs, particularly those whose original development started a decade or more back, were completely written by 'decent programmers'?
I've seen all of these problems in code that companies I've worked for had to make portable to 64-bit CPUs and other-endian CPUs.
You have it backwards. Dealing with the underlying CPU architecture is handled comletely by the compiler, and not in the code at all. Porting a C++ program from x86 to ARM doesn't require any programming at all - you just select a different target and recompile.
You have roughly six million programmers who've had to write portable C++ rolling on the floor laughing right now. Merely getting their software to work on 64-bit CPUs as well as 32-bit has been hugely painful for a number of projects I'm aware of which have done stupid things that only worked on a 32-bit CPU and broke as soon as you recompiled the code for 64-bit.
Surprise, you can't run your Linux binary blob compiled for x86 on ARM... same goes for Windows..
Except all those Linux applications are recompiled for ARM by the distro developers, whereas every single Windows application has to be recompiled by its own developers, and then you have to buy it again.
If you can't run your old Windows applications on this new 'Windows', why would you buy it? Joe Sixpack is going to buy a 'Windows' ARM machine, take it home, and then wonder why his old Word CD won't install.
Remember the NT 3.5 family, running on PowerPC, Alpha, x86, MIPS, and supposedly in the lab, SPARC?
We had most of those where I used to work. Of course there were hardly any actual _applications_ for any of those other than x86, so all you got to do was play with the operating system and run any applications you wrote yourself.
x86 is a market with very limited competition where you can make hundreds of dollars of profit on a high-end CPU. ARM is a market with massive competition where you're probably going to be lucky to make $1 a CPU.
Emulating non-x86 on x86 is hard because x86 has so few general-purpose registers - but emulating x86 on something else is relatively easy.
Have you actually written an x86 emulator on 'something else'? I have, and 'relatively easy' is not a phrase I would use... at least, not if you want to get any decent performance out of it.
Admittedly we were having to emulate the entire PC hardware so it could run old DOS apps and not just Windows user-land, so that would make life somewhat easier.
Like maybe the SR-71 "Blackbird"...which certainly looked stealthy, although in reality wasn't.
If I remember correctly, the SR-71 had about the same radar cross-section as a Cessna; but a Cessna on your radar screen travelling more than three times the speed of sound would still look a bit suspicious.
Sony didn't take it over, they were always in charge of SWG from the start. But in 2005 they got a bad case of WoW-envy and decided that ~200,000 subs wasn't enough, since Blizzard had over a million by that point.
No, SWG was screwed by bad design choices from the start. I remember looking forward to trying it out when it was in development, and every few weeks the developers would announce another way that they'd made the game suck.
I did try the free trial before they did the revamp, and I had a hard time finding anything resembling Star Wars (or a game, for that matter) in it. I think I lasted about three days before going back to Everquest. The problem is that by the time they decided to revamp it to bring in new players, those potential new players had already written it off because of the earlier bad design choices.
When colleges start being run primarily from private funds, then those providing the funds might stop unless their kids get the degree. It seems that majority of people do not see the folly with this approach.
Nope. The problem is the folly of believing that education should be about getting a piece of paper that allows you to get certain jobs you wouldn't get otherwise.
Which is largely down to the 'professionalisation' of recruitment and the elimination of apprenticeships. A kid who years ago might start out sweeping floors in a hangar and end their career designing a jet airliner is now expected to have a degree before 'Human Resources' will even talk to them.
How exactly do they "not allow" it?
By encouraging their kids to do well in school and rewarding nerds rather than jocks?
Treating sports as more important than maths, science, etc, seems to be a very Anglo trait; see the British public schools of the Victorian era, for example, where being good at Rugby was considered far more important than being good at academic subjects.
As for the grandparent post, the available evidence would seem to indicate that the more you increase spending on schooling in a first world nation, the worse the results become. In many countries 'teaching' is just a cushy job at the taxpayers' expense where you're impossible to sack even if you're the worst teacher ever... at worst you'll probably be sent off to the glorious heights of admin and get a pay rise in the process.
It's my contention that those who have a nice career and a deep knowledge of math and/or science should consider spending the last few years working as a (fully qualified) teacher.
A while back I was reading an article by someone (engineer, I think) who looked at doing that. Then they discovered they'd have to take numerous training courses to prove they could teach kids about what they'd been doing for years and decided they had better things to do with their life.
If you really want better teachers in schools, you could start by eliminating all the roadblocks that keep them out.
No. That will be later on a different BluRay edition so you can but it again.
And it will just be a Laserdisc rip like the DVD version.
Which AFAIK is fraud, plain and simple.
How is that 'fraud'? You press buttons on a slot machine and money comes out... where does the fraud come in?
It's not like you can send a "shut off the motor" signal through TPMS.
Some of the people hacking TPMS claim to have been able to send a 'completely brick the TPMS control unit' signal through TPMS from a hundred yards away with a directional antenna. If the firmware is that poorly written, it's unlikely but not inconceivable that they could make the TPMS unit send out crap that would interfere with the operation of other components.
And, either way, most people wouldn't be too happy about having to buy a new TPMS control unit because someone sent bad data to it.
Last week I drove a friend's late-90s Nissan in Mountain View. It's got a plain old mechanical key. On my way out of a store I walked up to a sedan of the same color, unlocked it, and then realized it wasn't even a Nissan.
Yeah, my Lancia key used to work in my friend's Ford door locks. Then again, a screwdriver did too.
I have a really hard time thinking up a scenario where adding a volatile like that would actually be the correct fix, and not just a change that makes the code work by random chance. It sure seems like the actual problem should be elsewhere.
I take it you've never had to program the x87 FPU?
I presume this is a weird consequence of the FPU hiding bits from you and using a volatile forces the compiler to pull the value out of the FPU to memory instead of leaving it in there with the extra bits of precision? If I remember correctly, it's something like 80-bits internally but 64-bits externally, so you can get different floating point results depending on the code the compiler generates..
He's not kidding nor exaggerating at all. If a security fix breaks $foo, then, only because Microsoft and $foo's company is in the USA, can be liable to be sued for it.
When was the last time anyone successfully sued a software company for something like that?
Get cracking, apes, the universe will last billions of years but you won't! Act now!!!!!!!!!
Indeed. If we could extend lifespans to thousands of years, then waiting a few decades until you can launch a monolith to the moon with a rocket you built in your garage would hardly be a problem.
As far as netbooks/tablets go, it makes perfect sense.
How many people will be running Word and Powerpoint on an ARM netbook or tablet? I guess you could use Powerpoint to display a presentation from a tablet, but I can't imagine developing one on there.
Open Source apps are recompiled for ARM. It's got nothing to do with Linux.
Spurious argument. How many non open-source apps does the average Linux user run? How many open-source apps does the average Windows user run?
The only non open-source apps I have running on my Linux systems at home are a few Windows apps in Wine (e.g. Steam and a few games). The vast majority of Windows apps I have installed in the Windows partition on my laptop are closed source, the exceptions being Firefox and Open Office.
They will of course still need to be recompiled, but you may not have to buy it again.
Yeah, because companies are totally going to spend the time porting, recompiling and _testing_ (why does everyone think that you can just recompile the code and ship it without testing?) their software for free. I agree, if you've paid $10,000 a licence they may deign to give you an ARM version as part of that cost and that if you buy a new version of the software you may get both, but I think we can be pretty damn sure that most companies are going to charge you for the ARM version of existing software and at best give a discount if you already own the x86 version.
But more than that, the Windows software I use the most won't ever be available on ARM. I use version 6 of program X because version 7 and later come with awful DRM which randomly 'deactivates' it and crashes in Wine... if it's ever released for ARM then it will be the latest version with the lousy DRM.
Similarly, plenty of companies use old versions of Office because they see no reason to pay for a new one. So buying a new version of Office would eat up any possible cost savings from replacing x86 desktops with ARM.
Windows CE is likely where Windows for ARM will get its initial supply of applications, just like 32-bit Windows can run Win16 apps, and 64-bit Windows can run Win32 apps.
That'll be great for the three people who've been collecting a stack of Windows CE applications for the last decade and want to be able to run them on a different version of Windows.
The rest of the world will see 'Windows' on the box and expect it to run their existing x86 Windows software.
This is just sloppy programming. Let me go out on a limb and say any decent programmer wouldn't do this.
And how many Windows programs, particularly those whose original development started a decade or more back, were completely written by 'decent programmers'?
I've seen all of these problems in code that companies I've worked for had to make portable to 64-bit CPUs and other-endian CPUs.
You have it backwards. Dealing with the underlying CPU architecture is handled comletely by the compiler, and not in the code at all. Porting a C++ program from x86 to ARM doesn't require any programming at all - you just select a different target and recompile.
You have roughly six million programmers who've had to write portable C++ rolling on the floor laughing right now. Merely getting their software to work on 64-bit CPUs as well as 32-bit has been hugely painful for a number of projects I'm aware of which have done stupid things that only worked on a 32-bit CPU and broke as soon as you recompiled the code for 64-bit.
Surprise, you can't run your Linux binary blob compiled for x86 on ARM... same goes for Windows..
Except all those Linux applications are recompiled for ARM by the distro developers, whereas every single Windows application has to be recompiled by its own developers, and then you have to buy it again.
If you can't run your old Windows applications on this new 'Windows', why would you buy it? Joe Sixpack is going to buy a 'Windows' ARM machine, take it home, and then wonder why his old Word CD won't install.
Remember the NT 3.5 family, running on PowerPC, Alpha, x86, MIPS, and supposedly in the lab, SPARC?
We had most of those where I used to work. Of course there were hardly any actual _applications_ for any of those other than x86, so all you got to do was play with the operating system and run any applications you wrote yourself.
x86 is a market with very limited competition where you can make hundreds of dollars of profit on a high-end CPU. ARM is a market with massive competition where you're probably going to be lucky to make $1 a CPU.
yeah, and everytime I use Open Office on Ubuntu I feel like I've gone back in time about 6 to 10 years....
So it took you back to the last version of Office that was any good, then?
Emulating non-x86 on x86 is hard because x86 has so few general-purpose registers - but emulating x86 on something else is relatively easy.
Have you actually written an x86 emulator on 'something else'? I have, and 'relatively easy' is not a phrase I would use... at least, not if you want to get any decent performance out of it.
Admittedly we were having to emulate the entire PC hardware so it could run old DOS apps and not just Windows user-land, so that would make life somewhat easier.
Like maybe the SR-71 "Blackbird"...which certainly looked stealthy, although in reality wasn't.
If I remember correctly, the SR-71 had about the same radar cross-section as a Cessna; but a Cessna on your radar screen travelling more than three times the speed of sound would still look a bit suspicious.
We agreed to sell the F35 to our allies, canceling the project would be an political nightmare.
The British, at least, can't afford to buy them, so for them a US cancellation would be a political win.
If they want a game with the depth of WoW, they aren't going to make do with a flash/iOS type game instead just because it's cheaper.
'Rat Killer Deluxe' has as much depth as any MMO I've ever played.
Sony didn't take it over, they were always in charge of SWG from the start. But in 2005 they got a bad case of WoW-envy and decided that ~200,000 subs wasn't enough, since Blizzard had over a million by that point.
No, SWG was screwed by bad design choices from the start. I remember looking forward to trying it out when it was in development, and every few weeks the developers would announce another way that they'd made the game suck.
I did try the free trial before they did the revamp, and I had a hard time finding anything resembling Star Wars (or a game, for that matter) in it. I think I lasted about three days before going back to Everquest. The problem is that by the time they decided to revamp it to bring in new players, those potential new players had already written it off because of the earlier bad design choices.