And this is the real problem: the perception that someone who goes to a trade school is less valuable than someone with an academic qualification. It's perceived as better to have a degree from a third-rate university than a good vocational qualification.
It is really hard to write an exam that properly tests understanding. It is very easy to write one that tests memory. Consider the history of the first world war. It's really easy to write questions like 'when did the UK enter the war' or 'list three causes of the war' and it's easy to write a mark scheme for them but these only test memory. Better questions would be things like 'If you were a general at the Battle of the Somme, what tactics would you use?' or 'If you were a time traveller tasked with avoiding the Second World War, how would you do it? Justify your actions.' If you set a question like this, it's relatively easy for you to mark it consistently (although harder than for the simple rote memory questions), but it's almost impossible to define a marking scheme that can be applied by hundreds of teachers across the country and still give consistent scores.
It's become cliche to point out that Apple stole the Mac GUI from Xerox
This is 'stole' meaning 'paid a big chunk of Apple stock in exchange for it and then added original features like the desktop metaphor with the trash can, the menu bar, window title bars and others?' Do you, by any chance, work for the MPAA?
I prefer the Frank Herbert solution. The winning lawyer in a case that goes to court is require to ritually kill the losing lawyer, and invoking legal rules is grounds for summary judgement against you. It gives both sides' lawyers a strong incentive to settle amicably out of court...
WARNING: Anonymous Coward is a known paid shill! The above post was almost certainly funded by the GNAA as part of their smear campaign against Apple and Microsoft.
I think the only one of those that isn't in ZFS is 'Hybrid Block compression', which isn't so important because creating a new filesystem in ZFS is very cheap (about as hard as creating a new directory).
ReFS supports named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas
So, you mean, it supports a subset of the features of NTFS? Uh, yay?
It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
I've only used it in the UK, France and Belgium, and in all of these places Google Maps is a joke in comparison. The level of detail on OSM is so much better that it astonishes me that anyone would use Google Maps. If OSM isn't any good in your locale and you have a phone with GPS, maybe you should think about contributing...
Why would you think they are pro-open? Google Maps implemented its own user-submitted-content system and doesn't share this with the wider community. In contrast, MapQuest and Bing Maps both cooperate with OSM and provide them with data.
They're also not ahead of their competitors. I was looking for a place near the station in my home town a while ago. On OSM, the building is numbered. On Google Maps, the road that the building is on was completely missing. If you look at the Google Map of Paris, you get blobs for the buildings. On OSM they are all numbered (really useful when you have an address that you're trying to find!). When you zoom right in, the detail on OSM is usually far better than Google Maps.
No one would bother shipping a Google Maps app for Android if they didn't get a kickback from Google - there are several open source mapping apps using OSM data that do a much better job.
Does Google offer guest Wi-Fi access at any of their locations?
Yes, but they require you to sign in. They also log and monitor all traffic on their networks, so it should be relatively easy for them to identify who is responsible.
Note that Evil Microsoft permits OpenStreetMap to trace its aerial photography to generate maps, and uses OSM data, and cooperates in several other ways with OSM, while Don't-Be-Evil Google tries to pretend that OSM doesn't exist and pushes Android handset makers to include Google Maps instead of an OSM app (in spite of the fact OSM has more detailed maps everywhere I've tested them) and does not share any of their mapping data - including user-provided data - with the community.
No, you're supposed to allocate and use a power of two. If you have a 34 bytes structure and a 20 bytes structure that are usually used together, then allocating them separately will waste 42 bytes of memory. Allocating them together will waste 10 bytes. Allocate a lot of them and this 30-byte-per-structure saving is a lot.
This is even more true for buffers. The example he gave was for a JavaScript string. This allocates a buffer that the string can grow into. If a string is any length between 512 and 1023 characters then it should be allocating a 1024 byte buffer for it, but instead was allocating a 2048 byte buffer, and when it got to 1024 bytes it was freeing this and allocating a 4096 byte buffer for it.
I want firefox to use up as much of it as it can to improve my browsing experience
RTFA. When FireFox has an off-by-one error in its JavaScript string concatenation code that causes it to allocate twice as much memory as it needs for JavaScript strings, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory. When FireFox is storing decompressed images in memory that never actually make it to the screen, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory.
Most of the techniques in TFA were of general interest to anyone working on a large project, not just to FireFox.
I don't see your on-topic post. I see an article about software engineering techniques used to reduce memory consumption, with FireFox used as a case study. You then post about how FireFox protects your privacy. This is about as on-topic as a post saying that you use Android because you prefer the user interface in an article about a new feature in the Linux kernel improving battery life on ARM.
Creating FaceBook in the EU would have been difficult. A company that exists for the sole purpose of collecting information about individuals and selling it to third parties would be under a lot of scrutiny for data protection violations.
No, they should be allowed to say whatever they want. If, however, the views that they express do not reflect those of their employer (the general population), then they should be fired. Then they can continue to say whatever they want, as private citizens.
No, the problem is brand new accounts using a distortion of the facts to push an agenda (pro or anti a specific company). The problem was never that Microsoft added new features to IE. Individual vendors adding things to their browsers is how we got all of the features of the modern web - including images! The problems were that they implemented features that were tied closely to Windows (e.g. ActiveX: run a Windows x86 binary in a web page) and that they pushed their developer tools, which generated IE-specific output that was incompatible with other browsers.
The standard way of adding new features to the web, since it's creation, has been for one vendor to add them to a browser, for users to experiment with them, and if they're useful for them to be implemented by multiple vendors and standardised.
and you'd have to wait 2-3 Months to get one rather than 2-3 weeks!!
There's some precedent for this in the UK. Some of the original Sinclair systems were sold for almost exactly the cost of production. They'd take the money, put it in the bank for a month, then buy the parts and build the machine for you. The interest that the money earned in that month was their profit margin.
Microsoft got an ex-IBM person to run their patent strategy. There's an old story about when Sun was a startup. They got a visit from some IBM lawyers, who said 'we have these 7 patents that you infringe, and we'd like you to sign a cross-licensing deal with us'. The Sun guys looked at the patents and systematically demolished them. The IBM lawyers replied that, yes, these patents might be invalid, but asked if they were willing to bet the company on the fact that none of the other IBM patents were valid and covered Sun's activities. They weren't, and Sun signed the agreement, albeit with slightly better terms than were originally offered.
Microsoft originally built a purely defensive patent portfolio. It was there incase anyone sued them. Then they decided to adopt the much more lucrative IBM strategy...
I still miss NeXT. After they acquired Apple, their mission went from 'make the best computer possible with the current technology' to 'make a computer that doesn't suck quite as much as the competition.' In the race to the bottom, there doesn't seem to be a replacement for the old NeXT.
Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible. It always depresses me that we collect glass bottles, smash them, heat them to a high temperature, and then use the result to make... glass bottles.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the protest is to raise awareness about SOPA / PIPA. You can lay pretty good odds that Slashdot readers are already aware of them...
And, if you RTFA, it talks about tuning the heuristics involved and improving the memory usage without adversely impacting user experience.
And this is the real problem: the perception that someone who goes to a trade school is less valuable than someone with an academic qualification. It's perceived as better to have a degree from a third-rate university than a good vocational qualification.
It is really hard to write an exam that properly tests understanding. It is very easy to write one that tests memory. Consider the history of the first world war. It's really easy to write questions like 'when did the UK enter the war' or 'list three causes of the war' and it's easy to write a mark scheme for them but these only test memory. Better questions would be things like 'If you were a general at the Battle of the Somme, what tactics would you use?' or 'If you were a time traveller tasked with avoiding the Second World War, how would you do it? Justify your actions.' If you set a question like this, it's relatively easy for you to mark it consistently (although harder than for the simple rote memory questions), but it's almost impossible to define a marking scheme that can be applied by hundreds of teachers across the country and still give consistent scores.
It's become cliche to point out that Apple stole the Mac GUI from Xerox
This is 'stole' meaning 'paid a big chunk of Apple stock in exchange for it and then added original features like the desktop metaphor with the trash can, the menu bar, window title bars and others?' Do you, by any chance, work for the MPAA?
I prefer the Frank Herbert solution. The winning lawyer in a case that goes to court is require to ritually kill the losing lawyer, and invoking legal rules is grounds for summary judgement against you. It gives both sides' lawyers a strong incentive to settle amicably out of court...
WARNING: Anonymous Coward is a known paid shill! The above post was almost certainly funded by the GNAA as part of their smear campaign against Apple and Microsoft.
I think the only one of those that isn't in ZFS is 'Hybrid Block compression', which isn't so important because creating a new filesystem in ZFS is very cheap (about as hard as creating a new directory).
ReFS supports named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas
So, you mean, it supports a subset of the features of NTFS? Uh, yay?
It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
Oh, it was a joke. Sorry.
I've only used it in the UK, France and Belgium, and in all of these places Google Maps is a joke in comparison. The level of detail on OSM is so much better that it astonishes me that anyone would use Google Maps. If OSM isn't any good in your locale and you have a phone with GPS, maybe you should think about contributing...
Why would you think they are pro-open? Google Maps implemented its own user-submitted-content system and doesn't share this with the wider community. In contrast, MapQuest and Bing Maps both cooperate with OSM and provide them with data.
They're also not ahead of their competitors. I was looking for a place near the station in my home town a while ago. On OSM, the building is numbered. On Google Maps, the road that the building is on was completely missing. If you look at the Google Map of Paris, you get blobs for the buildings. On OSM they are all numbered (really useful when you have an address that you're trying to find!). When you zoom right in, the detail on OSM is usually far better than Google Maps.
No one would bother shipping a Google Maps app for Android if they didn't get a kickback from Google - there are several open source mapping apps using OSM data that do a much better job.
Does Google offer guest Wi-Fi access at any of their locations?
Yes, but they require you to sign in. They also log and monitor all traffic on their networks, so it should be relatively easy for them to identify who is responsible.
Note that Evil Microsoft permits OpenStreetMap to trace its aerial photography to generate maps, and uses OSM data, and cooperates in several other ways with OSM, while Don't-Be-Evil Google tries to pretend that OSM doesn't exist and pushes Android handset makers to include Google Maps instead of an OSM app (in spite of the fact OSM has more detailed maps everywhere I've tested them) and does not share any of their mapping data - including user-provided data - with the community.
No, you're supposed to allocate and use a power of two. If you have a 34 bytes structure and a 20 bytes structure that are usually used together, then allocating them separately will waste 42 bytes of memory. Allocating them together will waste 10 bytes. Allocate a lot of them and this 30-byte-per-structure saving is a lot.
This is even more true for buffers. The example he gave was for a JavaScript string. This allocates a buffer that the string can grow into. If a string is any length between 512 and 1023 characters then it should be allocating a 1024 byte buffer for it, but instead was allocating a 2048 byte buffer, and when it got to 1024 bytes it was freeing this and allocating a 4096 byte buffer for it.
academic work shows all urls can be coded in 4-5 bits
5 bits gives a total of 32 possible URLs, so this is only true for very small Internets...
Or do you mean 4-5 bits per character?
Why? Hollywood's total revenue is lower than the top 5 tech company's profit annually. Google could afford to buy the entire music industry.
I want firefox to use up as much of it as it can to improve my browsing experience
RTFA. When FireFox has an off-by-one error in its JavaScript string concatenation code that causes it to allocate twice as much memory as it needs for JavaScript strings, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory. When FireFox is storing decompressed images in memory that never actually make it to the screen, it's not using memory to improve your browsing experience, it's just using memory.
Most of the techniques in TFA were of general interest to anyone working on a large project, not just to FireFox.
I don't see your on-topic post. I see an article about software engineering techniques used to reduce memory consumption, with FireFox used as a case study. You then post about how FireFox protects your privacy. This is about as on-topic as a post saying that you use Android because you prefer the user interface in an article about a new feature in the Linux kernel improving battery life on ARM.
Creating FaceBook in the EU would have been difficult. A company that exists for the sole purpose of collecting information about individuals and selling it to third parties would be under a lot of scrutiny for data protection violations.
No, they should be allowed to say whatever they want. If, however, the views that they express do not reflect those of their employer (the general population), then they should be fired. Then they can continue to say whatever they want, as private citizens.
No, the problem is brand new accounts using a distortion of the facts to push an agenda (pro or anti a specific company). The problem was never that Microsoft added new features to IE. Individual vendors adding things to their browsers is how we got all of the features of the modern web - including images! The problems were that they implemented features that were tied closely to Windows (e.g. ActiveX: run a Windows x86 binary in a web page) and that they pushed their developer tools, which generated IE-specific output that was incompatible with other browsers.
The standard way of adding new features to the web, since it's creation, has been for one vendor to add them to a browser, for users to experiment with them, and if they're useful for them to be implemented by multiple vendors and standardised.
and you'd have to wait 2-3 Months to get one rather than 2-3 weeks!!
There's some precedent for this in the UK. Some of the original Sinclair systems were sold for almost exactly the cost of production. They'd take the money, put it in the bank for a month, then buy the parts and build the machine for you. The interest that the money earned in that month was their profit margin.
Microsoft got an ex-IBM person to run their patent strategy. There's an old story about when Sun was a startup. They got a visit from some IBM lawyers, who said 'we have these 7 patents that you infringe, and we'd like you to sign a cross-licensing deal with us'. The Sun guys looked at the patents and systematically demolished them. The IBM lawyers replied that, yes, these patents might be invalid, but asked if they were willing to bet the company on the fact that none of the other IBM patents were valid and covered Sun's activities. They weren't, and Sun signed the agreement, albeit with slightly better terms than were originally offered.
Microsoft originally built a purely defensive patent portfolio. It was there incase anyone sued them. Then they decided to adopt the much more lucrative IBM strategy...
I still miss NeXT. After they acquired Apple, their mission went from 'make the best computer possible with the current technology' to 'make a computer that doesn't suck quite as much as the competition.' In the race to the bottom, there doesn't seem to be a replacement for the old NeXT.
Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible. It always depresses me that we collect glass bottles, smash them, heat them to a high temperature, and then use the result to make... glass bottles.