According to MySQL's site, Oracle and MySQL comprise around 52% of the of all deployed databases. If you don't understand that authorizing a deal which would enable a company which already controls 47% of the market share to form a company that controls such a dominant stake in the database market is bad for the market then you would most certainly benefit from investing a couple of minutes thinking about this subject.
Amen. I don't understand how can anyone bitch about the awesomebar, particularly those we expect to be very comfortable with the command line interface. Thanks to the awesomebar I can finally side-step a great deal of trivial searches which I had to rely on search engines to perform by simply "starring" a link and then typing any word remotely related to it on the text widget. How cool is that?
Unless your PhD is about abortions and their motivations then your attempt at argument from authority is at least unwarranted for. On the other hand, if you find it reasonable to simply claim that all abortion is somehow murder, while ignoring all reasons that lead to it, particularly the life-threatening ones, then as easily as you try to impress everyone with your PhD claims I also put in question not only the truthfulness of that statement but also if you really have an education with a scientific background, let alone biology.
I believe the people behind autopackage will disagree with you. Nonetheless, I don't see how universal binaries would get rid of those non-issues. So, besides universal binaries being a solution looking for a problem, exactly what problems do they actually solve?
Some people may claim that Linux may have some shortcomings but certainly the way that distributions handle support for multiple platforms and also the availability of binaries targeted at a certain platform surely isn't one of them. Linux already runs on a long list of platforms and software distributions already handle themselves quite nicely by building platform-specific packages, which also include all sorts of platform-specific binaries the applications will ever need. So, besides the empty "but Apple has them" rational, exactly what drives the need for universal binaries on linux?
Was this before or after the public backlash against such a damaging PR fuckup? This is the difference between "they may be, after all, a decent, level-headed group" and "those evil-doers are desperate to minimize the shitstorm they cast their way due to their arrogance and greed".
If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes.
You keep using that word. I don't know it means what you think it means. Theories don't "hold". Theories are verified and verifiable explanations of the behaviour of natural processes. If you have a plausible explanation that you still need to validate either by physical observations or by logical deductions then what you have is an hypothesis.
Come on, the words have very specifically defined meanings. Please don't add to the confusion.
Actually, that's a fundamental aspect of GPGPU's migration from an interesting oddity to a serious option (if not the obvious choice) in the number crunching world. Just to give you an example, I'm a structural engineering major and, for my graduate thesis, I'm on the process of developing a pair of structural analysis programs (finite elements method applications), a type of problems which basically consist of solving considerably large linear equation systems. That sort of problem is right up GPGPU's alley. Yet, although it's a very affordable piece of technology and, as it was already demonstrated, would bring massive performance improvements to this sort of problem, after analysing the options it was found that, at least at this moment, it would be better to focus on relying on multiple-CPUs through multi-threading instead of jumping into the GPGPU's bandwagon. One of the main reasons that forced GPGPUs not to be seen as a serious option was, in fact, their underwhelming support for double-precision math.
There were a hand-full of issues behind that decision. One of them was that some GPGPU platforms fail silently, which, in practice, means that you start crunching numbers with less than the expected mantissa and therefore you get considerably larger rounding errors,. This is something that may bring disastrous results. Another issue is that even in some cases the announced double-precision support of some products was a bit flawed, as it failed to comply with IEEE 754, the standard for floating-point arithmetic. Although it didn't complied due to only a hand-full of issues, to rely on GPGPUs to crunch numbers when they don't conform to that standard would mean that someone would be forced to spend a considerable time formally checking what effects that non-compliance would have on the project being developed. That means that that would take precious man-hours from projects which may already be poorly manned, not to mention that that task would be rendered to waste as the next GPGPU generation would either fully support with IEEE 754 or, in the worst case scenario, fail to support it in some other aspect, which would mean that the poor chap assigned to verify the effects of the product's non-compliance would be forced to do everything from scratch, once again.
So, to sum things up, GPGPU's support for double-precision math is, in fact, great news. It means that everyone may have it's own personal vector-processing super-computer on his desktop. Heck, even on laptops. That may not mean much for the proverbial joe-sixpack (at least not beyond the "oohh... shiny graphics" side of things) but being able to crunch a lot more numbers on the same time frame means the world to anyone writing/using number-crunching software, which is a lot of people.
if computers didn't had such a long boot time then there wouldn't be such a need for suspend to RAM, let alone suspend to disk. A basic auto desktop session save feature, which is already present for years in DEs such as KDE, would do the trick just fine, no added tech needed nor extra kernel voodoo.
If you believe that barrelfish, midori and singularity are "new technology" then you don't have a clue about what has been done in the tech world. Microkernels? Done. OSs based/written in managed code? Done. Capabilities-based OSs? Done.
What Microsoft is doing is reimplementing old concepts on Microsoft's own technology (C#, CIL, etc) and then using the test code that has been produced by those projects as a marketing tool. So when Windows is known to be plagued with security bugs and, therefore, viruses... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new singularity project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to security. Very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. So when Windows is known to have lacklustre support for multi-processor/multi-core systems... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new barrelfish project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to multi-core systems. Once again, very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant.
After all, although they announce so many of these research projects, all Microsoft is able to dump into the market is a series of Windows NT clones. So why is this even news?
Braidwood, which is expected to offer anywhere from 4GB to 16GB capacity, will only raise the cost of a PC by about $10 to $20 per system, according to Jim Handy, the Objective Analysis analyst who authored the report.
When comparing that cost increase with the overall cost of a brand new PC it doesn't raise any red flag. Nonetheless, what it must be said is that, as this brainwood technology "resides directly on the motherboard" (i.e., it's yet another component embedded in a motherboard) , this technology will increase all motheboard cost by $10 to $20. That means that this brainwood technology is an excuse to ramp up current motherboard prices from around 20%.
Call me old fashioned but I prefer my hardware cheap without any unnecessary bells ans whistles. In fact, is this technology even capable of doing what the marketing blurb states it does? Nowadays it's hard to purchase a HD with capacity less than 200GB. Is a 4GB buffer really capable of successfully buffering all that data?
By adopting Qt they do away with the need to develop and maintain their own personalized cross-platform code, which may be seen as a source of resource waste. Moreover, Firefox is a C++ project. By relying on Qt instead of GTK they end up making the project simpler to manage and also reduce the project's complexity, which means the project becomes simpler to read, understand and, as a consequence, hack.
You also need to read up on what software Firefox is built on, which obviously includes GTK. You could also check the requirements for any firefox package such as the ones provided for Debian and Ubuntu, which clearly mention GTK and their companion libs.
Another detail that would be nice to know is if Mozilla will take advantage of this major version rewrite to finally drop GTK in favour of Qt. Personally I can only see good things in that migration.
A composite material is nothing more than a non-homogeneous material. Composite materials are engineered to take advantages of some material's properties while mitigating it's disadvantages with some other material's properties. For example, reinforced concrete is a composite material. It is formed by concrete and rebar. Concrete is very cheap, moldable and considerably resistant to compressive forces but has a limited tensile resistance and has very limited elasticity (it suffers from fragile, even explosive rupture) and steel, although is very expensive, is extremely resistant to any sort of force (it's main failure mode isn't necessarily through achieving it's plastic limit but through buckling) but has a few shortcomings such as it's vulnerability to fires. So, by joining the two materials and creating reinforced concrete you gain the possibility to create a new type of material which is also considerably cheap, isn't fragile, is resistant to heat and presents elastic behaviour. It's win/win.
And by the way, composite materials are already extensively used in aeronautics and even space exploration. Probably you are thinking about the new organic materials that Burt Rutan likes to employ and now Boeing is trying to implement.
Concrete is also very porous. A good concrete mixture (obtainable in controlled conditions in laboratories) has about 3% of it's volume consisting of voids, let alone the water that is trapped in the mixture. Those voids fill up with all types of water, from air moisture to ground water (see capillarity). Adding to that the fact that all concrete has countless cracks in it of various sizes and shapes that easily reach the middle of the structure's section and enable air to contact with the steel bars... Let's just say that concrete itself may not be a good conductor but that it's voids and cracks don't need it to be in order to conduct electrical current through any structural element made of concrete.
Why would you have to repurchase application licenses to upgrade Windows?
I wasn't referring to application licenses but OS licenses. If want to replace your current windows version with some other (let's say, the 64 bit one) you need to pay for those licenses.
You do realize that just because an application was "built for 32-bit platforms" doesn't mean it'll magically perform terribly on a 64-bit machine, right?
The point is that running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit platform doesn't give you any advantage whatsoever. That in turn means that an office entirely equiped with 32-bit systems, from OS to every single application, doesn't have absolutely any incentive towards an OS upgrade just for the sake of it being 64-bits. If there isn't a single incentive to justify all that money spent on an upgrade other than bragging rights about running a 64-bit OS then such an upgrade would only mean that a lot of money was thrown down the drain. That, in business, is a no-no.
You failed to understand that re-purchasing a vast set of licenses for some 64-bit OS just for the sake of it being 64-bit when your entire portfolio of applications and hardware (you need drivers) was built for the 32-bit platform... Well, it doesn't make any sense. It means that you intended to migrate your office from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS without any other justification beyond "I felt like it", which carries a hefty price tag and absolutely no technical justification.
And moreover, the claims that 32-bit apps "just run fine on 64-bit windows" are made from the same people who claimed that your Windows XP apps "just run fine on Windows Vista" and we saw how that panned out.
You are making your assumptions on the base that just because you bought a 32-bit version of an application you will automatically receive the 64-bit version of it, free of charge. That is not the case, as even Microsoft doesn't just give their 64-bit OS to those who bought the 32-bit one. To their eyes it's a completely separate product which the customer must pay in order to access. So if Microsoft doesn't do it then why would companies such as autodesk, adobe or some other big name do the same with their products?
There may not be any technical reason to still hold on to a 32-bit OS but there sure are economical ones. As soon as you have an entire office filled with desktops, each one running tens of thousands of dollars in software that were released only to the 32-bit platform, then you will consider that there is a very good reason to still run a 32-bit system.
Slashdot Mirror
According to MySQL's site, Oracle and MySQL comprise around 52% of the of all deployed databases. If you don't understand that authorizing a deal which would enable a company which already controls 47% of the market share to form a company that controls such a dominant stake in the database market is bad for the market then you would most certainly benefit from investing a couple of minutes thinking about this subject.
Amen. I don't understand how can anyone bitch about the awesomebar, particularly those we expect to be very comfortable with the command line interface. Thanks to the awesomebar I can finally side-step a great deal of trivial searches which I had to rely on search engines to perform by simply "starring" a link and then typing any word remotely related to it on the text widget. How cool is that?
Care to point out any example of crapware that Ubuntu installs by default?
Unless your PhD is about abortions and their motivations then your attempt at argument from authority is at least unwarranted for. On the other hand, if you find it reasonable to simply claim that all abortion is somehow murder, while ignoring all reasons that lead to it, particularly the life-threatening ones, then as easily as you try to impress everyone with your PhD claims I also put in question not only the truthfulness of that statement but also if you really have an education with a scientific background, let alone biology.
I believe the people behind autopackage will disagree with you. Nonetheless, I don't see how universal binaries would get rid of those non-issues. So, besides universal binaries being a solution looking for a problem, exactly what problems do they actually solve?
Some people may claim that Linux may have some shortcomings but certainly the way that distributions handle support for multiple platforms and also the availability of binaries targeted at a certain platform surely isn't one of them. Linux already runs on a long list of platforms and software distributions already handle themselves quite nicely by building platform-specific packages, which also include all sorts of platform-specific binaries the applications will ever need. So, besides the empty "but Apple has them" rational, exactly what drives the need for universal binaries on linux?
Not a Gentoo user, I see.
Was this before or after the public backlash against such a damaging PR fuckup? This is the difference between "they may be, after all, a decent, level-headed group" and "those evil-doers are desperate to minimize the shitstorm they cast their way due to their arrogance and greed".
You keep using that word. I don't know it means what you think it means. Theories don't "hold". Theories are verified and verifiable explanations of the behaviour of natural processes. If you have a plausible explanation that you still need to validate either by physical observations or by logical deductions then what you have is an hypothesis. Come on, the words have very specifically defined meanings. Please don't add to the confusion.
Grudge or not, at least this time it appears that he got the mockup thing right. Meanwhile, if you feel the need to attack the messenger to discredit the message (are you even able to refute the accusations?) then it says more about you than about the messenger.
There were a hand-full of issues behind that decision. One of them was that some GPGPU platforms fail silently, which, in practice, means that you start crunching numbers with less than the expected mantissa and therefore you get considerably larger rounding errors,. This is something that may bring disastrous results. Another issue is that even in some cases the announced double-precision support of some products was a bit flawed, as it failed to comply with IEEE 754, the standard for floating-point arithmetic. Although it didn't complied due to only a hand-full of issues, to rely on GPGPUs to crunch numbers when they don't conform to that standard would mean that someone would be forced to spend a considerable time formally checking what effects that non-compliance would have on the project being developed. That means that that would take precious man-hours from projects which may already be poorly manned, not to mention that that task would be rendered to waste as the next GPGPU generation would either fully support with IEEE 754 or, in the worst case scenario, fail to support it in some other aspect, which would mean that the poor chap assigned to verify the effects of the product's non-compliance would be forced to do everything from scratch, once again.
So, to sum things up, GPGPU's support for double-precision math is, in fact, great news. It means that everyone may have it's own personal vector-processing super-computer on his desktop. Heck, even on laptops. That may not mean much for the proverbial joe-sixpack (at least not beyond the "oohh... shiny graphics" side of things) but being able to crunch a lot more numbers on the same time frame means the world to anyone writing/using number-crunching software, which is a lot of people.
if computers didn't had such a long boot time then there wouldn't be such a need for suspend to RAM, let alone suspend to disk. A basic auto desktop session save feature, which is already present for years in DEs such as KDE, would do the trick just fine, no added tech needed nor extra kernel voodoo.
Oh no, some user on slashdot marked my account as a foe. Now my entire weekend is ruined.
If you believe that barrelfish, midori and singularity are "new technology" then you don't have a clue about what has been done in the tech world. Microkernels? Done. OSs based/written in managed code? Done. Capabilities-based OSs? Done. What Microsoft is doing is reimplementing old concepts on Microsoft's own technology (C#, CIL, etc) and then using the test code that has been produced by those projects as a marketing tool. So when Windows is known to be plagued with security bugs and, therefore, viruses... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new singularity project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to security. Very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. So when Windows is known to have lacklustre support for multi-processor/multi-core systems... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new barrelfish project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to multi-core systems. Once again, very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. After all, although they announce so many of these research projects, all Microsoft is able to dump into the market is a series of Windows NT clones. So why is this even news?
When comparing that cost increase with the overall cost of a brand new PC it doesn't raise any red flag. Nonetheless, what it must be said is that, as this brainwood technology "resides directly on the motherboard" (i.e., it's yet another component embedded in a motherboard) , this technology will increase all motheboard cost by $10 to $20. That means that this brainwood technology is an excuse to ramp up current motherboard prices from around 20%.
Call me old fashioned but I prefer my hardware cheap without any unnecessary bells ans whistles. In fact, is this technology even capable of doing what the marketing blurb states it does? Nowadays it's hard to purchase a HD with capacity less than 200GB. Is a 4GB buffer really capable of successfully buffering all that data?
By adopting Qt they do away with the need to develop and maintain their own personalized cross-platform code, which may be seen as a source of resource waste. Moreover, Firefox is a C++ project. By relying on Qt instead of GTK they end up making the project simpler to manage and also reduce the project's complexity, which means the project becomes simpler to read, understand and, as a consequence, hack.
You also need to read up on what software Firefox is built on, which obviously includes GTK. You could also check the requirements for any firefox package such as the ones provided for Debian and Ubuntu, which clearly mention GTK and their companion libs.
Another detail that would be nice to know is if Mozilla will take advantage of this major version rewrite to finally drop GTK in favour of Qt. Personally I can only see good things in that migration.
And by the way, composite materials are already extensively used in aeronautics and even space exploration. Probably you are thinking about the new organic materials that Burt Rutan likes to employ and now Boeing is trying to implement.
Concrete is also very porous. A good concrete mixture (obtainable in controlled conditions in laboratories) has about 3% of it's volume consisting of voids, let alone the water that is trapped in the mixture. Those voids fill up with all types of water, from air moisture to ground water (see capillarity). Adding to that the fact that all concrete has countless cracks in it of various sizes and shapes that easily reach the middle of the structure's section and enable air to contact with the steel bars... Let's just say that concrete itself may not be a good conductor but that it's voids and cracks don't need it to be in order to conduct electrical current through any structural element made of concrete.
/structural engineer in training
Why would you have to repurchase application licenses to upgrade Windows?
I wasn't referring to application licenses but OS licenses. If want to replace your current windows version with some other (let's say, the 64 bit one) you need to pay for those licenses.
The point is that running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit platform doesn't give you any advantage whatsoever. That in turn means that an office entirely equiped with 32-bit systems, from OS to every single application, doesn't have absolutely any incentive towards an OS upgrade just for the sake of it being 64-bits. If there isn't a single incentive to justify all that money spent on an upgrade other than bragging rights about running a 64-bit OS then such an upgrade would only mean that a lot of money was thrown down the drain. That, in business, is a no-no.
Wasn't strlen() available? The following code would tell you how much memory you needed to hold that string:
char *Str;
size_t length;
length = strlen(Lastname) + 2 + strlen(FirstName) + 1;
Str = malloc(sizeof(char)*length);
snprintf(Str,"%s, %s",Lastname, FirstName)
You failed to understand that re-purchasing a vast set of licenses for some 64-bit OS just for the sake of it being 64-bit when your entire portfolio of applications and hardware (you need drivers) was built for the 32-bit platform... Well, it doesn't make any sense. It means that you intended to migrate your office from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS without any other justification beyond "I felt like it", which carries a hefty price tag and absolutely no technical justification.
And moreover, the claims that 32-bit apps "just run fine on 64-bit windows" are made from the same people who claimed that your Windows XP apps "just run fine on Windows Vista" and we saw how that panned out.
You are making your assumptions on the base that just because you bought a 32-bit version of an application you will automatically receive the 64-bit version of it, free of charge. That is not the case, as even Microsoft doesn't just give their 64-bit OS to those who bought the 32-bit one. To their eyes it's a completely separate product which the customer must pay in order to access. So if Microsoft doesn't do it then why would companies such as autodesk, adobe or some other big name do the same with their products?
There may not be any technical reason to still hold on to a 32-bit OS but there sure are economical ones. As soon as you have an entire office filled with desktops, each one running tens of thousands of dollars in software that were released only to the 32-bit platform, then you will consider that there is a very good reason to still run a 32-bit system.