The best things to open source in this scenario are the things that you would buy from a third party, if you trusted the supplier enough. For proprietary software, a second source is almost always impossible. For hardware, it's often quite difficult, depending on the component. Switching from Intel to AMD is quite easy in a lot of cases, switching from a Qualcomm SoC to a Samsung one is more effort. Switching other components can be very hard. Service companies are a lot easier (switching from one law or accounting firm to another is much easier than retooling a production line).
Apple's involvement with LLVM is quite a good example here. Their ecosystem absolutely depends on high-quality compilers existing for OS X and iOS. With Classic MacOS and early versions of OS X, they outsourced this to Metrowerks, who produced quite a competent IDE and set of tools. Then Metrowerks, their sole supplier, was bought by Freescale and development on the Mac versions basically disappeared. They had some involvement in GCC development inherited from NeXT, but GCC was problematic for IDE integration (the parser is designed in such a way that it's impossible to use for syntax highlighting, for example - it does constant folding very early so you can't differentiate 4 and 2+2 in the source). They decided that they needed to bring compiler development in-house, but it was a lot cheaper to do so as part of an open source ecosystem. Apple now contributes something like 40% of the code to LLVM and that vast majority of what other people do directly benefits them, so they're effectively halving their costs. And, of course, giving away the IDE and compiler tools for free (rather than charging, as Metrowerks did) makes people more likely to start developing for Apple platforms.
It's not always about spite, it's often defensive. If you're competing in one market and a competitor has a big advantage by having a near monopoly in a complementary market, then your best strategy is to commoditise their market and open source is usually a good way of doing this.
Really? How does a shell script get notifications from the kernel that the swap space is almost full? Or are you suggesting that they should write a program that gets the notify(3) events, but then replace the three lines of C required to create a file and add it as swap with a shell script?
Huh? The no-ship in Chapterhouse was stolen from the Honoured Matres in Heretics. Ix began building no-ships in God Emperor, there are no references to their existence before then.
Try this. Launch the same applications on Yosemite and Snow Leopard and see how quickly to can tell which one is the currently active one. After SL, they dramatically reduced the visual clues (the big shadows on the active window that made it stand out were 'ugly') and they've reduced more each release. After SL, the instances where I typed things into the wrong window jumped up for me. It's a shame, because Apple used to be the company that measured this stuff...
OS X users the same underlying functionality from a UNIX-like VM subsystem, but has a dameon that monitors the amount of used swap space and creates new swap files when they're required. This gives you the flexibility of the Windows model, without the complexity in kernel space.
Timed wakeup (i.e. try to lock, time out if you fail).
Adaptive mutex behaviour (spin in userspace for a bit before calling the kernel).
Can atomically be released when you sleep on a condition variable and reacquired when you wake.
Give up? So did the developers of the Microsoft C++ stack, which is why their std::mutex uses something custom, whereas implementations for POSIX systems just use pthread_mutex.
Well, except that NT4 had a fun bug with the uptime counter, so if you actually did manage to go around 47 days without a BSoD, you'd get one when the counter overflowed. The fact that it took several years for anyone to discover this bug shows how 'eliminated' BSoDs really were by NT4. Oh, and NT4 moved the graphics drivers back into the kernel (including font rendering, which is why the TTF parsing vulnerabilities found a year or two ago were kernel exploits on Windows), so there was a lot more badly-written software running in kernel mode. I mostly got BSoDs on NT4 from the Soundblaster drivers - Creative Labs should never be allowed near ring 0.
They do now, but mostly because that's what's cheap. For high-end stuff, OS bypass is the buzzword of the day and as more of that stuff starts to be moved into userspace it becomes plausible to have a tiny OS and get rid of a lot of the complexity of something like a UNIX kernel ('lighweight linux or BSD' is amusing, given that the kernel of either is several MBs).
Frank Herbert's son later teamed up with a sci-fi author and published some books which wrap up the story and also explain some of the events that happened before the Dune books take place. Supposedly from his father's notes. Not everyone considers these books canon. The catastrophe, however, is revealed but at this point it mostly seemed the first book had some parallells with the Middle East.
The reason that many don't consider it canon is that it directly contradicts not just small events in the originals but the entire premise. In Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was an ideological struggle against people who were willing to delegate their thinking to machines without considering the long-term social consequences (hmm, still seems pretty relevant) and ended up being controlled by oligarchs who controlled the machines. The outcome was an overreaction against machines, banning even simple calculating engines. In the cash-in novels, it was recharacterised as a war against a two-dimensional and completely unbelievable machine intelligence.
The final revelation in the sequels was then that this machine intelligence had survived and had been building an empire in secret all of the time that humanity had been building their own and eventually decided that it wanted to destroy all of the humans (why? Because that's what evil robot overlords do! Obviously). These books could have been written by the Bene Gesserit sister that Leto just managed to restrain himself from killing in God Emperor, for her stupidity. He explained that humanity had moved past the point where machines could be a threat (remember: they were never a physical threat, the threat was always stagnation and decay as humans delegated more and more to machines until there was no point in continuing to live).
The point of the scattering in Leto's Golden Path was that humanity would spread out so that nothing could be an existential threat (the old Empire had more or less stopped expanding and didn't have exponential growth to protect it). Part of the point of Chapterhouse was that the conflict that was going on, in spite of engulfing more worlds than the Empire in the time of Dune, was a tiny sideshow - nothing that happened would affect humanity and the descendants of humanity as a whole. The big hint about the changes that were happening out of the empire was the extent to which the Honoured Matres and Futars had diverged from what was considered human. The implication was that they were the ones that had diverged the least and were no longer able to compete with far more predatory creatures that had evolved from humans.
What do you think they introduced that made sense? The House series ended up having to do a load of hard resets that just didn't make sense (the no-ship technology appearing a few thousand years early? Well, just brush it under the rug - we all know that technologies are developed in a vacuum and so if you cover up an invention that has all of its prerequisites it won't be reinvented for a long time). The only redeeming feature of the House books was that they weren't as bad as the Butlerian Jihad series.
A much milder Christian version was some Puritans who banned Christmas
Minor clarification, but Puritans didn't ban Christmas, they banned the non-religious parties and traditions rooted in Saturnalia that had become associated with Christmas. Puritan Christmas involved spending most of the day in Church. They certainly tried to ban fun at Christmas (and at most other times), but not the Christian festival.
A better solution would be a standard form of QR code for WiFi configuration info, so you just point your camera at something and now you have WiFi credentials.
38MB sounds only a bit larger than just ICU (31MB on my machine), so Qt isn't adding much there. ICU is used by most GUI frameworks (Microsoft has their own version, but OS X ships it as part of the standard install) and includes things like fast unicode collation (locale-aware sorting is hard!) and fast unicode regular expressions. Most apps that need to work in places that aren't just the English(ish)-speaking parts of North America need most of that functionality.
This is true, but it's also completely irrelevant. Safari uses WebKit, including WebCore and JavaScriptCore. All of the Safari features that are not part of WebCore and JavaScriptCore are entirely user-facing and irrelevant to web developers. If you look at what's actually included in the WebKit nightly builds, you'll see that it's a build of Safari.
I also use Safari, though I'm still pissed off with them for combining the URL bar and search box (which means that I keep typing one-word search terms and having it try to resolve them as domains, which then go in my history and so become the subject of autocomplete. The only way to avoid it is to get into the habit of hitting space at the end of a search, which is no saving on hitting tab at the start to jump to the search box). Chrome doesn't properly integrate with the keychain. I use Firefox on Android (self destructing cookies makes it the first browser I've used with a sane cookie management policy), but overall the UI for Safari does exactly what I want from a browser: stay out of the way.
TFS is nonsense though. Developers don't know what's going to be in the next version of Safari? Why don't they download the nightly build and see?
Meh. When I was an undergrad, you really needed to understand netmasks if you wanted to set up a network for multiplayer games. Now, it's much easier (although Windows makes it stupidly hard to create an ad-hoc WiFi network. No idea how people think it's ready for the desktop), and you can do a lot without caring. I can't remember the last time I needed to know about them.
The GPL is "viral" in that if you use even a smattering of GPLed code, you are required to release ALL of your code as GPL as well.
Not true. Go back and re-read the GPL. You are required to release your code under a license that places no more restrictions on it than the GPL. You must also license the combined work under the GPL. It is, however, completely fine to take a few files of GPL'd code, combine them with some BSDL'd code files (as long as those files are not a derived work of the GPL'd code) and ship the resulting program under the GPL. If someone else takes only the BSDL'd files for use in another project then they are not bound by the GPL.
There are two ways in which the GPL is 'viral'. The first is that you cannot change the license of something that you do not own, so any derived works retain the copyright and license of the original. The second is that the GPL is a distribution license and, if you wish to retain the right to distribute it, then you must not distribute it in a way that does not pass on the freedoms listed in the license (meaning that the combined work must grant all of the permissions as the GPL'd parts).
The test says that the class with private members and no setters is intended to be immutable after creation, so that's not a problem. Having a single linked list for the entire grid (rather than a list of lists) is completely insane though. I'd expect a student who actually knew what he or she was doing to be more confused than one that would end up writing code with horrible algorithmic complexity. Looking at the rest of the test, it's not much better. If this is what AP tests look like in the USA, then I'll make sure not to weight it very highly when looking at applicants next academic year.
Slashdot Mirror
From this, I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or an idiot. Read the notify(3) man page and if you have non-trolling questions then let me know.
The best things to open source in this scenario are the things that you would buy from a third party, if you trusted the supplier enough. For proprietary software, a second source is almost always impossible. For hardware, it's often quite difficult, depending on the component. Switching from Intel to AMD is quite easy in a lot of cases, switching from a Qualcomm SoC to a Samsung one is more effort. Switching other components can be very hard. Service companies are a lot easier (switching from one law or accounting firm to another is much easier than retooling a production line).
Apple's involvement with LLVM is quite a good example here. Their ecosystem absolutely depends on high-quality compilers existing for OS X and iOS. With Classic MacOS and early versions of OS X, they outsourced this to Metrowerks, who produced quite a competent IDE and set of tools. Then Metrowerks, their sole supplier, was bought by Freescale and development on the Mac versions basically disappeared. They had some involvement in GCC development inherited from NeXT, but GCC was problematic for IDE integration (the parser is designed in such a way that it's impossible to use for syntax highlighting, for example - it does constant folding very early so you can't differentiate 4 and 2+2 in the source). They decided that they needed to bring compiler development in-house, but it was a lot cheaper to do so as part of an open source ecosystem. Apple now contributes something like 40% of the code to LLVM and that vast majority of what other people do directly benefits them, so they're effectively halving their costs. And, of course, giving away the IDE and compiler tools for free (rather than charging, as Metrowerks did) makes people more likely to start developing for Apple platforms.
It's not always about spite, it's often defensive. If you're competing in one market and a competitor has a big advantage by having a near monopoly in a complementary market, then your best strategy is to commoditise their market and open source is usually a good way of doing this.
Really? How does a shell script get notifications from the kernel that the swap space is almost full? Or are you suggesting that they should write a program that gets the notify(3) events, but then replace the three lines of C required to create a file and add it as swap with a shell script?
Huh? The no-ship in Chapterhouse was stolen from the Honoured Matres in Heretics. Ix began building no-ships in God Emperor, there are no references to their existence before then.
Try this. Launch the same applications on Yosemite and Snow Leopard and see how quickly to can tell which one is the currently active one. After SL, they dramatically reduced the visual clues (the big shadows on the active window that made it stand out were 'ugly') and they've reduced more each release. After SL, the instances where I typed things into the wrong window jumped up for me. It's a shame, because Apple used to be the company that measured this stuff...
OS X users the same underlying functionality from a UNIX-like VM subsystem, but has a dameon that monitors the amount of used swap space and creates new swap files when they're required. This gives you the flexibility of the Windows model, without the complexity in kernel space.
Windows threading and synchronisation primitives
What windows synchronisation primitive allows:
Give up? So did the developers of the Microsoft C++ stack, which is why their std::mutex uses something custom, whereas implementations for POSIX systems just use pthread_mutex.
Well, except that NT4 had a fun bug with the uptime counter, so if you actually did manage to go around 47 days without a BSoD, you'd get one when the counter overflowed. The fact that it took several years for anyone to discover this bug shows how 'eliminated' BSoDs really were by NT4. Oh, and NT4 moved the graphics drivers back into the kernel (including font rendering, which is why the TTF parsing vulnerabilities found a year or two ago were kernel exploits on Windows), so there was a lot more badly-written software running in kernel mode. I mostly got BSoDs on NT4 from the Soundblaster drivers - Creative Labs should never be allowed near ring 0.
They do now, but mostly because that's what's cheap. For high-end stuff, OS bypass is the buzzword of the day and as more of that stuff starts to be moved into userspace it becomes plausible to have a tiny OS and get rid of a lot of the complexity of something like a UNIX kernel ('lighweight linux or BSD' is amusing, given that the kernel of either is several MBs).
Frank Herbert's son later teamed up with a sci-fi author and published some books which wrap up the story and also explain some of the events that happened before the Dune books take place. Supposedly from his father's notes. Not everyone considers these books canon. The catastrophe, however, is revealed but at this point it mostly seemed the first book had some parallells with the Middle East.
The reason that many don't consider it canon is that it directly contradicts not just small events in the originals but the entire premise. In Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was an ideological struggle against people who were willing to delegate their thinking to machines without considering the long-term social consequences (hmm, still seems pretty relevant) and ended up being controlled by oligarchs who controlled the machines. The outcome was an overreaction against machines, banning even simple calculating engines. In the cash-in novels, it was recharacterised as a war against a two-dimensional and completely unbelievable machine intelligence.
The final revelation in the sequels was then that this machine intelligence had survived and had been building an empire in secret all of the time that humanity had been building their own and eventually decided that it wanted to destroy all of the humans (why? Because that's what evil robot overlords do! Obviously). These books could have been written by the Bene Gesserit sister that Leto just managed to restrain himself from killing in God Emperor, for her stupidity. He explained that humanity had moved past the point where machines could be a threat (remember: they were never a physical threat, the threat was always stagnation and decay as humans delegated more and more to machines until there was no point in continuing to live).
The point of the scattering in Leto's Golden Path was that humanity would spread out so that nothing could be an existential threat (the old Empire had more or less stopped expanding and didn't have exponential growth to protect it). Part of the point of Chapterhouse was that the conflict that was going on, in spite of engulfing more worlds than the Empire in the time of Dune, was a tiny sideshow - nothing that happened would affect humanity and the descendants of humanity as a whole. The big hint about the changes that were happening out of the empire was the extent to which the Honoured Matres and Futars had diverged from what was considered human. The implication was that they were the ones that had diverged the least and were no longer able to compete with far more predatory creatures that had evolved from humans.
What do you think they introduced that made sense? The House series ended up having to do a load of hard resets that just didn't make sense (the no-ship technology appearing a few thousand years early? Well, just brush it under the rug - we all know that technologies are developed in a vacuum and so if you cover up an invention that has all of its prerequisites it won't be reinvented for a long time). The only redeeming feature of the House books was that they weren't as bad as the Butlerian Jihad series.
A much milder Christian version was some Puritans who banned Christmas
Minor clarification, but Puritans didn't ban Christmas, they banned the non-religious parties and traditions rooted in Saturnalia that had become associated with Christmas. Puritan Christmas involved spending most of the day in Church. They certainly tried to ban fun at Christmas (and at most other times), but not the Christian festival.
Western has been used to describe Europe for hundreds of years before anyone who knew that the world was round knew the Americas existed.
Why is this moderated troll? Depression is not the same as just being depressed. It very often doesn't have a rational trigger.
The access point that my cableco gave me can do this. Of course, the router crashes after about 10 minutes of use if you actually enable it...
A better solution would be a standard form of QR code for WiFi configuration info, so you just point your camera at something and now you have WiFi credentials.
38MB sounds only a bit larger than just ICU (31MB on my machine), so Qt isn't adding much there. ICU is used by most GUI frameworks (Microsoft has their own version, but OS X ships it as part of the standard install) and includes things like fast unicode collation (locale-aware sorting is hard!) and fast unicode regular expressions. Most apps that need to work in places that aren't just the English(ish)-speaking parts of North America need most of that functionality.
WebKit != Safari
This is true, but it's also completely irrelevant. Safari uses WebKit, including WebCore and JavaScriptCore. All of the Safari features that are not part of WebCore and JavaScriptCore are entirely user-facing and irrelevant to web developers. If you look at what's actually included in the WebKit nightly builds, you'll see that it's a build of Safari.
IO ports. The Beeb had millions of them
The are a good modern alternative (and cheaper than a BBC was, back in the day!). The LPC1768 has the same amount of RAM as the BBC and a bit more flash than the BBC had space on a floppy disk, and has analogue and digital I/O pins, as well as serial (which the BBC had with RS-423), and a few things the BBC lacked (Ethernet and USB).
I also use Safari, though I'm still pissed off with them for combining the URL bar and search box (which means that I keep typing one-word search terms and having it try to resolve them as domains, which then go in my history and so become the subject of autocomplete. The only way to avoid it is to get into the habit of hitting space at the end of a search, which is no saving on hitting tab at the start to jump to the search box). Chrome doesn't properly integrate with the keychain. I use Firefox on Android (self destructing cookies makes it the first browser I've used with a sane cookie management policy), but overall the UI for Safari does exactly what I want from a browser: stay out of the way.
TFS is nonsense though. Developers don't know what's going to be in the next version of Safari? Why don't they download the nightly build and see?
Meh. When I was an undergrad, you really needed to understand netmasks if you wanted to set up a network for multiplayer games. Now, it's much easier (although Windows makes it stupidly hard to create an ad-hoc WiFi network. No idea how people think it's ready for the desktop), and you can do a lot without caring. I can't remember the last time I needed to know about them.
The point of this is not to enforce it, it's so that you can justify doing the right thing to management in the name of standards compliance.
The GPL is "viral" in that if you use even a smattering of GPLed code, you are required to release ALL of your code as GPL as well.
Not true. Go back and re-read the GPL. You are required to release your code under a license that places no more restrictions on it than the GPL. You must also license the combined work under the GPL. It is, however, completely fine to take a few files of GPL'd code, combine them with some BSDL'd code files (as long as those files are not a derived work of the GPL'd code) and ship the resulting program under the GPL. If someone else takes only the BSDL'd files for use in another project then they are not bound by the GPL.
There are two ways in which the GPL is 'viral'. The first is that you cannot change the license of something that you do not own, so any derived works retain the copyright and license of the original. The second is that the GPL is a distribution license and, if you wish to retain the right to distribute it, then you must not distribute it in a way that does not pass on the freedoms listed in the license (meaning that the combined work must grant all of the permissions as the GPL'd parts).
The test says that the class with private members and no setters is intended to be immutable after creation, so that's not a problem. Having a single linked list for the entire grid (rather than a list of lists) is completely insane though. I'd expect a student who actually knew what he or she was doing to be more confused than one that would end up writing code with horrible algorithmic complexity. Looking at the rest of the test, it's not much better. If this is what AP tests look like in the USA, then I'll make sure not to weight it very highly when looking at applicants next academic year.