Why would they need to release separate binaries? Windows has supported universal binaries through.NET for a while. They're a bit of a hack, but they do work. Basically, you have a tiny.NET program in the first section of the PE file, which then detects the architecture and launches the correct version.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms on x86 to run on arm
Why? The abstract machines that ARM and x86-32 present to C programmers are almost identical. The only difference is performance. For example, some shift sequences are cheaper on ARM, unaligned loads / stores are a lot more expensive (require a trap to the OS if the compiler doesn't spot them and add two loads and a rotate) on ARM. All of the basic types are the same size, it's the same endian, and the alignment restrictions are almost the same (you can do unaligned loads and stores on both, but they're slow, so don't).
Porting C code from x86 to ARM is a lot easier than porting it to x86-64. It's vastly easier than porting it to SPARC64.
Which is ironic, considering Windows 8 is only the second OS in their line of (otherwise commendably simple) numerical naming scheme. Wouldn't had been a problem if they'd stuck with their unfathomable non-numbered "Windows FooBar" naming system (Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows CE).
NT doesn't belong in that category. They had Windows 1, 2, and 3. Alongside 3, they had NT 3, which was the 32-bit equivalent of Windows 3. NT 3.x could run (mostly) the same apps as 3.x, but could also run 32-bit versions. Unfortunately, lots of people had legacy DOS apps that wouldn't run on NT (and couldn't without a virtualised 32-bit DOS environment, which was beyond the capabilities of the hardware at the time), so they couldn't just move everyone on to Windows NT 4. They had to release an interim version, which could run 32- and 16-bit apps. For some strange reason, they called this 95. It was meant to be the last DOS-based release, but they kept slipping. NT 5 was branded 2000 in an attempt to make it look like the successor to 95, 98, and so on, but it had some backwards compatibility problems with the 9x line, so they released NT 5.1 as XP. NT 6 was Vista and NT 7 is just plain Windows 7.
I looked at Gmail for business last week - there's an SLA of 99.9%.
Good to know - I'll point that out to the company that insists I have a Google-hosted email account with them. I use the IMAP interface, and half the time I look at my mail client there's a little exclamation mark next to the gmail server and it fails to connect. I'd believe 70%. 99.9%? Not a chance.
Battery technology hasn't improved much at all over the course of my life.
Then you must be about three years old. AA rechargeables I bought a decade ago were rated at 650mAh and had a memory effect that quickly built up if you didn't fully discharge them. Now, for about the same price, I can get 1800mAh ones, with a barely noticeable memory effect.
For my undergraduate course, we had to implement something like Elisa. It took about 10 lines of Prolog, and was more plausible that this bot. Pick up any introduction to Prolog book and you'll see something similar in one of the early examples.
Okay, I just watched that scene again. At one point, there were three ships on screen (including the Borg Cube). Pretty much every shot was a close-up of a ship being destroyed. This 'big' battle includes a total of about 40 space ships. That would count as a minor skirmish in B5.
When I first saw Best of Both Worlds, the battle of Wolf 359 was the major letdown for me. You have the mighty federation scrambling to defend its heart, and all it can muster is this tiny fleet? It seemed really pathetic. Now compare it to The Battle of the Line, where Earth Alliance is in a similar situation, defending Earth against the Minbari. The detail on the ships is much lower, but here you get a feeling of a world doing everything possible to defend itself.
I'm not surprised. Tomorrows World did a program in the late '90s with three humans and some bots. You could connect to their server and either talk to one of the humans or a bot (but not know which) or read the transcripts and vote on them. Lots of the transcripts were people going through incredibly formulaic conversations of the kind that you get in learn-to-speak-English books, so it was difficult to tell if they were human or not. As I recall, Craig Charles got fewer human votes than one of the AIs, but the other two humans all got more votes than the AIs. The percentages were similar though.
It's very easy for a program to seem human if you restrict the topics of conversation enough. The difficult bit is following a free-form dialogue, and cleverbot fails here just as badly as any other attempt that I've seen.
So, I went and had a little chat with 'clever' bot to see how clever it was. I thought I'd start off with something a typical five-year-old could answer:
User: Hello.
Cleverbot: Hello!
User: Can you help me with a maths problem?
Cleverbot: Sure, what is it?
User: If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Cleverbot: 9.
User: Seriously?
Cleverbot: What is the formula for the area of circle?
User: What does that have to do with anything?
Cleverbot: When I talk to people I don't know, I tend to ask for their name. It's only polite.
User: I think you managed to fail the Turing test in two questions if I'm generous, may be one.
Cleverbot: My name is Cleverbot?
User: I could write a clevererbot in about 20 lines of prolog. What kind of idiots thought you were human?
Cleverbot: Only one. I don't think I could fit 1,000 people in my living room.
I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...
That speech was from 2009, and that was the first time I'd seen it. Did it get better coverage in the USA? Interestingly, a number of the points he raises directly mirror the writings of people returning from the First World War. A century later, it's depressing how little social progress we've made.
Yes. The first season was done on a small network of Amigas using Lightwave 3D. Later they moved to Alphas. Apparently the deadlines were very tight. There was an article about it in the Amiga Shopper section of Computer Shopper back in the day where they described setting up the renderer to run overnight and having to drop some scenes from the final edit because the renders didn't always come out as hoped and they didn't have time to re-render.
I'm not sure when the switch from Amigas happened, but the CGI quality improves a lot by season 3.
Not really. People have been going on suicide missions for thousands of years without religious motivation. Protecting their tribe and their tribe's way of life has always been enough to convince some subset of the population to die, and there's a good evolutionary reason for this, particularly for if the individuals in question have already passed on their genes. Religion is a convenient excuse to behave like an asshat, but if you take it away then people just find other excuses (national exceptionalism, for example).
B5 had to use CGI instead of sets because they didn't have the budget, so it was used in a few places where Star Trek would just have built a big set. For example, the docking bays are small stages in front of a blue screen and the curved corridor where you see it going up at the back is the same set in front of the same blue screen. These places all look a bit unrealistic. Some are well done, but it's often quite noticeable on a modern screen where the real ends and the CGI starts. On my old TV, and especially after recording on VHS, it wasn't. In the places where other shows used CGI - especially the space shots - I thought B5 did very well. I bought the whole series on DVD and watched it a few years ago. Around season 2 they switched to Alphas for the rendering and after that point the shots still looked pretty good by modern standards. They don't have the realism of something like BSG, but then that was created over a decade later with a much bigger budget.
and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S
The last time Slashdot published statistics (a couple of years back), 51% of its readership was in the US. Hardly the 'vast majority'. That text was there when I started reading Slashdot a decade ago, and probably hasn't been updated since. I wouldn't be surprised if American were a minority on Slashdot these days.
Then they can talk to the person who owns the mall and the parking space and say that the decision will cost them business and may mean that they have to close their shops.
Have you seen what's happened to his career after TNG finished? Basically, nothing except Reading Rainbow. Unlike Wil Wheaton, who has published a lot, been in a load of TV shows and films (and even voiced some of the Romulans in the new Star Trek movie, so seems not to be too out of favour with Paramount).
More likely, he realises that he gets a percentage of every BluRay sale. I'd imagine that Star Trek DVD sales have been slacking recently, but there are enough geeks who will buy the new release, just like they bought the DVDs and VHS tapes before, if it's perceived as better...
Not to mention that B5's special effects weren't all that brilliant anyway
Seriously? B5 had space battles with hundreds of ships at a time when Star Trek rarely had more than one ship on screen at a time. Even the typical shots of the station had lots of commercial traffic floating around. I remember thinking it looked impressive when it was on TV.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by effects though. The internal ones were all pretty poor. Redoing the view from the captain's office (I always thought it was meant to be a painting, but apparently it was meant to be a window into the interior), the shots of the interior, and most of the planetary scenes would be good. The space scenes look dated now, but not too bad.
Realistically, to really do B5 some justice, I'd like to see someone make a genuine attempt at a reboot
Why? The B5 timeline has a lot of scope for other shows without needing a reboot. The Dilgar war, the Telepath war, any of the timeline after the fall of Earth or during the (second) fall of Centauri Prime would make a great setting for a show in the B5 universe.
In The Beginning was okay, but it failed quite badly by trying to put the characters from the TV show into the prequel. Sheridan had to be there because the only reason he was on B5 was his actions during the Earth-Minbari war, and we already knew from flashbacks why Sheridan was there, but most of the others seemed entirely pointless.
Crusade started really badly, because JMS wanted to do something episodic, and he's not very good at that, and it was cancelled just as it was starting to do better. Legend of the Rangers started well, but never made it past the pilot. A show following a group of rangers as tensions with the Centauri increase could work well, as could a prequel during the Dilgar War (as long as it avoided bringing back any of the characters from the original series).
Or you could just go to the web sites in question and they will just give you the public keys without needing any hacking!
More importantly, if you have compromised the web server, then you can upload your own CSR for any of their customers' domains and get a signed certificate back...
But then they'd probably be out of the area designated for the exercise. And, as another poster pointed out, it's common to abort exercises because of equipment failure, rather than keep using the failed equipment and make it harder to diagnose the fault. Part of the point of exercises is to check that everything is reliable. When you find something that isn't, you stop and fix it. In a war situation, you'd just switch to the backup system (INS in this case).
When was the last time you saw a Jew doing manual labour? You know, building a house, digging a road, planting and picking crops, etc.
I don't know. I've never stopped at a construction site and said 'excuse me, are any of you people jews, by any chance?' Perhaps we should make them wear yellow stars so that they're easier to spot.
Even having the loser pay doesn't always help. When I was a student, one of my friends sued the university because she fell over and injured her head. She tripped over a small curb, and a lawyer argued that it was the university's liability because the area wasn't properly lit and the curb wasn't sufficiently marked. She just wanted the university to paint a white line and fix the streetlamp to make sure no one else would trip in the same place (at dusk, it was hard to see the raised bit of the path).
When the lawyer took the case, she had to buy insurance. This cost about £800. If she lost, it would pay out the cost of all legal fees incurred on both sides, plus the £800 cost of the insurance. If she won, then the £800 would be included to the legal costs that she claimed. She lost, although the university did fix the light and paint a white line, so she was happy with the outcome, but it didn't cost her anything. The insurance paid out the £800 that she spent plus the legal fees on both sides. The lawyers got paid. The university wasted some time, and presumably the insurance costs went up slightly to cover the loss.
I rarely buy DVDs anymore, because I realised that there are very few things that I want to watch more than once, but I rent them and the rental price is reasonable. In the UK, however, I still have to wait about a year between something being available to pirate and it being available to rent on DVD.
It's the same with films. At home, I have a projector and a reasonable sound system. My local cinema charges about as much to watch a single film as I pay to rent a dozen DVDs and their sound system has the levels set so high that there's horrible distortion whenever the sound gets loud. And here's the funny bit: studios delay releasing the DVD so that it won't cannibalise cinema ticket sales. That means that they believe that, given the choice between renting or buying the DVD and going to the cinema, a lot of people would chose the DVD. Their business model is to intentionally not give people what their market research shows that they want. And yet they have the nerve to blame piracy.
I don't pirate. If something isn't available in a format that I'm happy with at a price that I'm willing to pay, I just don't buy it. But I can understand people who do pirate. I'd love to see copyright require a bonafide attempt to distribute the copyrighted material.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they need to release separate binaries? Windows has supported universal binaries through .NET for a while. They're a bit of a hack, but they do work. Basically, you have a tiny .NET program in the first section of the PE file, which then detects the architecture and launches the correct version.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms on x86 to run on arm
Why? The abstract machines that ARM and x86-32 present to C programmers are almost identical. The only difference is performance. For example, some shift sequences are cheaper on ARM, unaligned loads / stores are a lot more expensive (require a trap to the OS if the compiler doesn't spot them and add two loads and a rotate) on ARM. All of the basic types are the same size, it's the same endian, and the alignment restrictions are almost the same (you can do unaligned loads and stores on both, but they're slow, so don't).
Porting C code from x86 to ARM is a lot easier than porting it to x86-64. It's vastly easier than porting it to SPARC64.
Which is ironic, considering Windows 8 is only the second OS in their line of (otherwise commendably simple) numerical naming scheme. Wouldn't had been a problem if they'd stuck with their unfathomable non-numbered "Windows FooBar" naming system (Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows CE).
NT doesn't belong in that category. They had Windows 1, 2, and 3. Alongside 3, they had NT 3, which was the 32-bit equivalent of Windows 3. NT 3.x could run (mostly) the same apps as 3.x, but could also run 32-bit versions. Unfortunately, lots of people had legacy DOS apps that wouldn't run on NT (and couldn't without a virtualised 32-bit DOS environment, which was beyond the capabilities of the hardware at the time), so they couldn't just move everyone on to Windows NT 4. They had to release an interim version, which could run 32- and 16-bit apps. For some strange reason, they called this 95. It was meant to be the last DOS-based release, but they kept slipping. NT 5 was branded 2000 in an attempt to make it look like the successor to 95, 98, and so on, but it had some backwards compatibility problems with the 9x line, so they released NT 5.1 as XP. NT 6 was Vista and NT 7 is just plain Windows 7.
I looked at Gmail for business last week - there's an SLA of 99.9%.
Good to know - I'll point that out to the company that insists I have a Google-hosted email account with them. I use the IMAP interface, and half the time I look at my mail client there's a little exclamation mark next to the gmail server and it fails to connect. I'd believe 70%. 99.9%? Not a chance.
I'm sceptical though, since batteries just aren't getting any better in real life
Lots of people keep saying this. I wonder if any of you have ever used a battery.
And then I remembered that in 1965, Tom Lehrer nearly predicted the Reagan presidency in the opening to his song "George Murphy"
No he didn't. Reagan was campaigning to become Governor of California when Tom Lehrer wrote the song. The opening line is a reference to that.
Battery technology hasn't improved much at all over the course of my life.
Then you must be about three years old. AA rechargeables I bought a decade ago were rated at 650mAh and had a memory effect that quickly built up if you didn't fully discharge them. Now, for about the same price, I can get 1800mAh ones, with a barely noticeable memory effect.
For my undergraduate course, we had to implement something like Elisa. It took about 10 lines of Prolog, and was more plausible that this bot. Pick up any introduction to Prolog book and you'll see something similar in one of the early examples.
Okay, I just watched that scene again. At one point, there were three ships on screen (including the Borg Cube). Pretty much every shot was a close-up of a ship being destroyed. This 'big' battle includes a total of about 40 space ships. That would count as a minor skirmish in B5.
When I first saw Best of Both Worlds, the battle of Wolf 359 was the major letdown for me. You have the mighty federation scrambling to defend its heart, and all it can muster is this tiny fleet? It seemed really pathetic. Now compare it to The Battle of the Line, where Earth Alliance is in a similar situation, defending Earth against the Minbari. The detail on the ships is much lower, but here you get a feeling of a world doing everything possible to defend itself.
I'm not surprised. Tomorrows World did a program in the late '90s with three humans and some bots. You could connect to their server and either talk to one of the humans or a bot (but not know which) or read the transcripts and vote on them. Lots of the transcripts were people going through incredibly formulaic conversations of the kind that you get in learn-to-speak-English books, so it was difficult to tell if they were human or not. As I recall, Craig Charles got fewer human votes than one of the AIs, but the other two humans all got more votes than the AIs. The percentages were similar though.
It's very easy for a program to seem human if you restrict the topics of conversation enough. The difficult bit is following a free-form dialogue, and cleverbot fails here just as badly as any other attempt that I've seen.
a turtle cannot be on its back because the only thing that can be on a turtle's back is the world
But from the turtle's perspective, it's on its back on the world...
User: Hello.
Cleverbot: Hello!
User: Can you help me with a maths problem?
Cleverbot: Sure, what is it?
User: If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Cleverbot: 9.
User: Seriously?
Cleverbot: What is the formula for the area of circle?
User: What does that have to do with anything?
Cleverbot: When I talk to people I don't know, I tend to ask for their name. It's only polite.
User: I think you managed to fail the Turing test in two questions if I'm generous, may be one.
Cleverbot: My name is Cleverbot?
User: I could write a clevererbot in about 20 lines of prolog. What kind of idiots thought you were human?
Cleverbot: Only one. I don't think I could fit 1,000 people in my living room.
I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...
That speech was from 2009, and that was the first time I'd seen it. Did it get better coverage in the USA? Interestingly, a number of the points he raises directly mirror the writings of people returning from the First World War. A century later, it's depressing how little social progress we've made.
Yes. The first season was done on a small network of Amigas using Lightwave 3D. Later they moved to Alphas. Apparently the deadlines were very tight. There was an article about it in the Amiga Shopper section of Computer Shopper back in the day where they described setting up the renderer to run overnight and having to drop some scenes from the final edit because the renders didn't always come out as hoped and they didn't have time to re-render.
I'm not sure when the switch from Amigas happened, but the CGI quality improves a lot by season 3.
Not really. People have been going on suicide missions for thousands of years without religious motivation. Protecting their tribe and their tribe's way of life has always been enough to convince some subset of the population to die, and there's a good evolutionary reason for this, particularly for if the individuals in question have already passed on their genes. Religion is a convenient excuse to behave like an asshat, but if you take it away then people just find other excuses (national exceptionalism, for example).
B5 had to use CGI instead of sets because they didn't have the budget, so it was used in a few places where Star Trek would just have built a big set. For example, the docking bays are small stages in front of a blue screen and the curved corridor where you see it going up at the back is the same set in front of the same blue screen. These places all look a bit unrealistic. Some are well done, but it's often quite noticeable on a modern screen where the real ends and the CGI starts. On my old TV, and especially after recording on VHS, it wasn't. In the places where other shows used CGI - especially the space shots - I thought B5 did very well. I bought the whole series on DVD and watched it a few years ago. Around season 2 they switched to Alphas for the rendering and after that point the shots still looked pretty good by modern standards. They don't have the realism of something like BSG, but then that was created over a decade later with a much bigger budget.
and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S
The last time Slashdot published statistics (a couple of years back), 51% of its readership was in the US. Hardly the 'vast majority'. That text was there when I started reading Slashdot a decade ago, and probably hasn't been updated since. I wouldn't be surprised if American were a minority on Slashdot these days.
Then they can talk to the person who owns the mall and the parking space and say that the decision will cost them business and may mean that they have to close their shops.
Have you seen what's happened to his career after TNG finished? Basically, nothing except Reading Rainbow. Unlike Wil Wheaton, who has published a lot, been in a load of TV shows and films (and even voiced some of the Romulans in the new Star Trek movie, so seems not to be too out of favour with Paramount).
More likely, he realises that he gets a percentage of every BluRay sale. I'd imagine that Star Trek DVD sales have been slacking recently, but there are enough geeks who will buy the new release, just like they bought the DVDs and VHS tapes before, if it's perceived as better...
Not to mention that B5's special effects weren't all that brilliant anyway
Seriously? B5 had space battles with hundreds of ships at a time when Star Trek rarely had more than one ship on screen at a time. Even the typical shots of the station had lots of commercial traffic floating around. I remember thinking it looked impressive when it was on TV.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by effects though. The internal ones were all pretty poor. Redoing the view from the captain's office (I always thought it was meant to be a painting, but apparently it was meant to be a window into the interior), the shots of the interior, and most of the planetary scenes would be good. The space scenes look dated now, but not too bad.
Realistically, to really do B5 some justice, I'd like to see someone make a genuine attempt at a reboot
Why? The B5 timeline has a lot of scope for other shows without needing a reboot. The Dilgar war, the Telepath war, any of the timeline after the fall of Earth or during the (second) fall of Centauri Prime would make a great setting for a show in the B5 universe.
In The Beginning was okay, but it failed quite badly by trying to put the characters from the TV show into the prequel. Sheridan had to be there because the only reason he was on B5 was his actions during the Earth-Minbari war, and we already knew from flashbacks why Sheridan was there, but most of the others seemed entirely pointless.
Crusade started really badly, because JMS wanted to do something episodic, and he's not very good at that, and it was cancelled just as it was starting to do better. Legend of the Rangers started well, but never made it past the pilot. A show following a group of rangers as tensions with the Centauri increase could work well, as could a prequel during the Dilgar War (as long as it avoided bringing back any of the characters from the original series).
Or you could just go to the web sites in question and they will just give you the public keys without needing any hacking!
More importantly, if you have compromised the web server, then you can upload your own CSR for any of their customers' domains and get a signed certificate back...
But then they'd probably be out of the area designated for the exercise. And, as another poster pointed out, it's common to abort exercises because of equipment failure, rather than keep using the failed equipment and make it harder to diagnose the fault. Part of the point of exercises is to check that everything is reliable. When you find something that isn't, you stop and fix it. In a war situation, you'd just switch to the backup system (INS in this case).
When was the last time you saw a Jew doing manual labour? You know, building a house, digging a road, planting and picking crops, etc.
I don't know. I've never stopped at a construction site and said 'excuse me, are any of you people jews, by any chance?' Perhaps we should make them wear yellow stars so that they're easier to spot.
Even having the loser pay doesn't always help. When I was a student, one of my friends sued the university because she fell over and injured her head. She tripped over a small curb, and a lawyer argued that it was the university's liability because the area wasn't properly lit and the curb wasn't sufficiently marked. She just wanted the university to paint a white line and fix the streetlamp to make sure no one else would trip in the same place (at dusk, it was hard to see the raised bit of the path).
When the lawyer took the case, she had to buy insurance. This cost about £800. If she lost, it would pay out the cost of all legal fees incurred on both sides, plus the £800 cost of the insurance. If she won, then the £800 would be included to the legal costs that she claimed. She lost, although the university did fix the light and paint a white line, so she was happy with the outcome, but it didn't cost her anything. The insurance paid out the £800 that she spent plus the legal fees on both sides. The lawyers got paid. The university wasted some time, and presumably the insurance costs went up slightly to cover the loss.
I rarely buy DVDs anymore, because I realised that there are very few things that I want to watch more than once, but I rent them and the rental price is reasonable. In the UK, however, I still have to wait about a year between something being available to pirate and it being available to rent on DVD.
It's the same with films. At home, I have a projector and a reasonable sound system. My local cinema charges about as much to watch a single film as I pay to rent a dozen DVDs and their sound system has the levels set so high that there's horrible distortion whenever the sound gets loud. And here's the funny bit: studios delay releasing the DVD so that it won't cannibalise cinema ticket sales. That means that they believe that, given the choice between renting or buying the DVD and going to the cinema, a lot of people would chose the DVD. Their business model is to intentionally not give people what their market research shows that they want. And yet they have the nerve to blame piracy.
I don't pirate. If something isn't available in a format that I'm happy with at a price that I'm willing to pay, I just don't buy it. But I can understand people who do pirate. I'd love to see copyright require a bonafide attempt to distribute the copyrighted material.