I don't speak Swift, but if I understand his first point correctly, each variable is introduced by a keyword anyway, so the most vexing part doesn't occur.
That would go a long way towards answering the first question, btw.
I did some work on parallelizing FORTRAN in the nineties. It never went very far; our parallelizing compiler ran out of swap space when you fed it anything larger than a twenty-line program. Not that swap space was all that big in those days, but it was clearly not useful in a real-world context. There were some good ideas, but also a great many realities that tended to break those good ideas.
Today I'd say, but this is after not looking at it very almost two decades, that the granularity at which the compiler is able to work is too fine; parallelism works better when you have larger chunks of work to deal with, which is still very much a programmer job. And at those fine granularities, dependencies (not to mention Amdahl's law) kill your efforts at parallelization.
So, in my opinion, it was oversold in the first place, and it turned out to be much harder than expected. But it sure sold those research grants...
And I quote: "without having to deal with people that tell them they are... on the wrong distro." See? There you go already.
They don't get a holy war about whatever runs when the computer starts
Yet somehow, it's the very first question posted under this topic.
There are applications.
See? That's what I mean! You don't care what people actually need to do with their computer, there are a few applications so they should just shut up. What kind of shitty attitude is that? You didn't even ask "what do you need?", you just blindly assumed that whatever it is, surely there must be something.
Hardware does connect and 'just work'. Including printers and video cards.
Why are you asking the obvious? Users don't want 10 desktop environments, 25 window managers, or a holy war about whatever shit runs when the computer starts. They want applications. They want their hardware to connect and 'just work' (including printers, video cards, and everything else they can currently buy for Windows without a care in the world). They want to never, ever open a shell and type a 'simple' command. And they want all of that, without having to deal with people that tell them they are stupid or on the wrong distro.
Contrary to popular believe, to most people computers are about more than just a browser and office application. There is always something else they also use, something that just happens to be unavailable on Linux. And sure, maybe they can find alternatives. But why would they, considering that the status quo is that they have already solved the problem and they can already do whatever it is they want to do?
Your argument is that they should leave the proven, working, stable, comfortable system they know behind, and join a club of bearded hippies whose idea of freedom is to not have a working GPU. Good luck with that.
Linux on the server is fine; it's what it is made for, what it's good at, and where it belongs. Linux on the desktop will never, ever happen, as far as the general population is concerned.
Presumably they are enjoying a snack and some wine - about 100m away from your "ecological repercussions for centuries to come". Maybe they'll have a chance to see some of the amazing nature that has sprung up in the exclusion zone.
That $235b includes absolutely everything they could think of tacking on, btw. Including such gems as "higher unemployment in the region", "cost of energy from replacement sources", all neatly projected and added up over 30 years.
Anyway, I agree we need to end our reliance on nuclear power, and move to thorium instead - at least until we are ready for working fusion. Or is that still too nuclear for you?
Those are UTF8, a standard for encoding characters that was designed in 1992. Here you can see a graph showing adoption of UTF8 on the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One might expect nerds to adopt such technical standards before other people, but apparently slashdot is run by posers, not actual nerds.
Gotta agree with that. Went looking for a way to change my IP address and only found a large switch letting me turn airplane mode on or off. Really fucking useless on a desktop.
Did it at least transform into an airplane when you pressed it?
It was always a load of BS, and everybody knew it. The use of the word "start" wasn't all that bad a design choice - people looking at a computer the first time get a powerful hint where to... start. So where else could you have put the "shutdown" button? Consider the options:
1. Permanently allocate screenspace for a second button, with only a single function: "stop" (or whatever you want to call it). That makes no sense at all: the start button takes up a lot of valuable screenspace, but offers a huge amount of functionality as well. The stop button uses the same amount of space, but offers only a single function, so you're both making it easier to trigger by accident, and eating into the space available for window tabs - which wasn't actually all that great to begin with, given the resolutions available at that time.
2. Rename the start button to something more neutral, like... "stuff"? "control"? What exactly could you put there that is both concise, and a powerful affordance for a first-time user? Eventually they settled on an icon, which I feel is a step back: it works only if you already know what it does (which you do largely because you were trained to look for that functionality in that spot by the earlier start button); just by looking at it you have no way of figuring out it is more than mere decoration. But yeah, it got rid of the mocking at least. Congrats, everyone who ever made that stupid joke......or...
3. Stick the functionality under the start button. Considering that it is the central control panel for the entire OS, adding this one important function here makes a lot of sense. Once you realize the start button actually does a lot more than merely start programs, it makes sense, and people will notice the function here anyway so while it might look a little odd at least they will be able to find it.
Oh, and we could look at what other operating systems do of course. Under Linux it's probably something like "well, you first set the library path to include libshutdown.so, then you open a bash shell with admin rights, and then you can type a simple command like 'sysctrl -fs now up -f4d34ab', but with your macaddress substituted and if that does not work here's a kernel patch..." - I kid, I kid... And on Mac - well, I have no idea really, but I'm guessing it's something like dragging your computer into the trashcan. Am I right?
My Amiga had a power switch. If you wanted the computer to be off, you pressed it and it turned off. And to turn it on you actually had to press the same switch again. In the old days people weren't bothered by that kind of ambiguity, one switch to do two very different things... Of course it wasn't actually labelled "start".
Now, next question. How come small, light cars somehow manage to have worse emissions than buses or trucks? Surely there is no grand conspiracy whereby vehicle manufacturers sit in a smoky room complete with a floating hologram of the planet held under an outstretched hand, and think to themselves "hahaha, those fuckers, we can quite easily sell them clean technology that we already developed for buses and trucks, but what we are really after is ruining the planet (and our own future market, oh, and the place where we and our children live) with the dirtiest technology possible, so we'll stick that in every car"? Surely there are no piles of old engines lying around that must be sold before they can switch to cleaner engines? What's really going on here?
If they didn't change the UI every release, how would you even know it was a different release? And extrapolating from there, how would you get the masses to buy a new Windows version if they couldn't tell the difference?
In terms of features, OS'es have been 'finished' for a long time, with only minor polishing and arcane features that have no relation to anything 99.9% of the market actually does with computers left on the to do list. Yet somehow, people must be convinced to buy these things...
This is a question to everyone who is arguing so passionately in favor of AGW... What have _you_ done? Have you started to drive less? Buy a smaller car, maybe? Heat your house less? Put in led lights?
Or are you only arguing on the internet that something should be done, by other people, paid for by other people - anything really, as long as you don't have to change your way of life?
It would already be massively helpful if people stopped using the word "subsidy" incorrectly. A subsidy is when the government pays a 3rd party for some kind of activity. The government is not paying money to people to pollute, is it? So there is no subsidy, easy or not, either.
This kind of new-speak is exactly why people like me believe that people like you are hiding something. Clearly you feel your argument is not strong enough to stand on its own, so you need to it this sort of BS to support it.
All of this makes me think we most definitely need to run a few experiments on changing asteroid orbits. First, and most importantly, because it gives us experience with doing so that may one day prove absolutely vital to our survival. And second, because setting of nukes in space and messing with the orbits of celestial bodies is just totally awesome.
I imagine the average PC owner would think "XBox exclusive" if they heard that title, and not pay further attention to it. I certainly had no idea there was a PC version. Then again, if it isn't on Steam or Gog, as far as a great many PC gamers are concerned, it doesn't exist.
I was under the impression that setting off a nuke on an impactor only works in movies. In reality there is no atmosphere, therefore almost no shockwave, and the object continues approaching on the same vector and with the same mass.
Quite possibly they know all of that, but that does not mean they can switch to condoning piracy or giving their product away for free. Perhaps the system as it is, is carefully calibrated to offer the maximum word of mouth, while still retaining just enough deterrent to make them the optimal amount of money.
Let's face it, there isn't really anything stopping you from pirating anything. A few token-cases per year get a conviction. Surely they could do better - but perhaps this works best for them as well.
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment.
The article is about development of new high-end CPUs. If it turns out we have reached the end of the line in what's possible, then laptops will be hit equally hard. Mobile CPUs are not that far behind. For the rest of your rant, great job at not understanding the article.
The pundits want to claim that no one wants a powerful client device and just wants all their stuff streamed from the cloud onto a tablet or phone they don't control. I think that's true in the consumer space, but businesses still have use cases for desktops.
Yes, I as a consumer totally want other companies to have full control over my data and my life in their 'cloud'. Hiccup? "Sorry, according to our terms we have no responsibility or obligation to even try to keep your data safe" - and that's that for a lifetime of photos (memories!), legal documents, etc. Or how about "a random person whose identity we won't disclose has filed an unspecified complaint against your account and now we have closed it without possibility for recourse", aka. Facebook syndrome? And I so love lag when I'm gaming, I really want to pay an online company so I can have even more.
There is most definitely still a usecase for desktops at home. I don't need a tiny box with integrated tiny useless keyboard, integrated tiny useless screen, and so many problems getting rid of its heat that it needs subpar parts just to be able to run.
Some people see books as the central repository of human knowledge and culture. They believe that books are our history; the thing that will one day resurrect civilisation if we accidentally wipe it out. And also the final thing we leave behind, a form of immortality even as our bodies perish. _That's_ your motivation: they have a deep love and respect for books and don't want them to be destroyed.
They are the people who lovingly collected a copy of every single book in Skyrim, possibly for each of their mansions just to be safe. They don't play the game for exploring dungeons or exterminating dragons or whatever, they just go around collecting books and building up libraries: https://www.reddit.com/r/skyri...
Those people come up with schemes for ensuring books remain in the collection, stacking them two rows deep or storing them off-site in a locker they pay for by themselves if that's what it takes. For them books don't need motivation; books are motivation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't speak Swift, but if I understand his first point correctly, each variable is introduced by a keyword anyway, so the most vexing part doesn't occur.
That would go a long way towards answering the first question, btw.
I did some work on parallelizing FORTRAN in the nineties. It never went very far; our parallelizing compiler ran out of swap space when you fed it anything larger than a twenty-line program. Not that swap space was all that big in those days, but it was clearly not useful in a real-world context. There were some good ideas, but also a great many realities that tended to break those good ideas.
Today I'd say, but this is after not looking at it very almost two decades, that the granularity at which the compiler is able to work is too fine; parallelism works better when you have larger chunks of work to deal with, which is still very much a programmer job. And at those fine granularities, dependencies (not to mention Amdahl's law) kill your efforts at parallelization.
So, in my opinion, it was oversold in the first place, and it turned out to be much harder than expected. But it sure sold those research grants...
...if they happen to pick Linux Mint Cinnamon...
And I quote: "without having to deal with people that tell them they are ... on the wrong distro." See? There you go already.
They don't get a holy war about whatever runs when the computer starts
Yet somehow, it's the very first question posted under this topic.
There are applications.
See? That's what I mean! You don't care what people actually need to do with their computer, there are a few applications so they should just shut up. What kind of shitty attitude is that? You didn't even ask "what do you need?", you just blindly assumed that whatever it is, surely there must be something.
Hardware does connect and 'just work'.
Including printers and video cards.
Oh, does it? Here, posted today: http://phoronix.com/scan.php?p...
Be sure to read the comments.
They don't need to ever open a shell to type commands.
Are you for f'ing real?
To me, your "not have a working GPU" remark discredits your entire post.
What's that Phoronix post about then?
Linux users can even be hardcore gamers.
Yeah. Playing Nethack.
Current, about 2% of desktop users are on Linux.
I'm not sure why you see that number as being supportive of your position, rather than mine.
Why are you asking the obvious? Users don't want 10 desktop environments, 25 window managers, or a holy war about whatever shit runs when the computer starts. They want applications. They want their hardware to connect and 'just work' (including printers, video cards, and everything else they can currently buy for Windows without a care in the world). They want to never, ever open a shell and type a 'simple' command. And they want all of that, without having to deal with people that tell them they are stupid or on the wrong distro.
Contrary to popular believe, to most people computers are about more than just a browser and office application. There is always something else they also use, something that just happens to be unavailable on Linux. And sure, maybe they can find alternatives. But why would they, considering that the status quo is that they have already solved the problem and they can already do whatever it is they want to do?
Your argument is that they should leave the proven, working, stable, comfortable system they know behind, and join a club of bearded hippies whose idea of freedom is to not have a working GPU. Good luck with that.
Linux on the server is fine; it's what it is made for, what it's good at, and where it belongs. Linux on the desktop will never, ever happen, as far as the general population is concerned.
Gee, scripting languages being good at quick and dirty, but then failing to deal with high loads. Who would have guessed.
Presumably they are enjoying a snack and some wine - about 100m away from your "ecological repercussions for centuries to come". Maybe they'll have a chance to see some of the amazing nature that has sprung up in the exclusion zone.
That $235b includes absolutely everything they could think of tacking on, btw. Including such gems as "higher unemployment in the region", "cost of energy from replacement sources", all neatly projected and added up over 30 years.
Anyway, I agree we need to end our reliance on nuclear power, and move to thorium instead - at least until we are ready for working fusion. Or is that still too nuclear for you?
Their architecture is still around two millennia later...
Those are UTF8, a standard for encoding characters that was designed in 1992. Here you can see a graph showing adoption of UTF8 on the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One might expect nerds to adopt such technical standards before other people, but apparently slashdot is run by posers, not actual nerds.
I've never used Windows 8, and just watched a video on youtube to see how you shut it down. Suffice it to say, I'm flabbergasted...
Gotta agree with that. Went looking for a way to change my IP address and only found a large switch letting me turn airplane mode on or off. Really fucking useless on a desktop.
Did it at least transform into an airplane when you pressed it?
It was always a load of BS, and everybody knew it. The use of the word "start" wasn't all that bad a design choice - people looking at a computer the first time get a powerful hint where to... start. So where else could you have put the "shutdown" button? Consider the options:
1. Permanently allocate screenspace for a second button, with only a single function: "stop" (or whatever you want to call it). That makes no sense at all: the start button takes up a lot of valuable screenspace, but offers a huge amount of functionality as well. The stop button uses the same amount of space, but offers only a single function, so you're both making it easier to trigger by accident, and eating into the space available for window tabs - which wasn't actually all that great to begin with, given the resolutions available at that time.
2. Rename the start button to something more neutral, like... "stuff"? "control"? What exactly could you put there that is both concise, and a powerful affordance for a first-time user? Eventually they settled on an icon, which I feel is a step back: it works only if you already know what it does (which you do largely because you were trained to look for that functionality in that spot by the earlier start button); just by looking at it you have no way of figuring out it is more than mere decoration. But yeah, it got rid of the mocking at least. Congrats, everyone who ever made that stupid joke... ...or...
3. Stick the functionality under the start button. Considering that it is the central control panel for the entire OS, adding this one important function here makes a lot of sense. Once you realize the start button actually does a lot more than merely start programs, it makes sense, and people will notice the function here anyway so while it might look a little odd at least they will be able to find it.
Oh, and we could look at what other operating systems do of course. Under Linux it's probably something like "well, you first set the library path to include libshutdown.so, then you open a bash shell with admin rights, and then you can type a simple command like 'sysctrl -fs now up -f4d34ab', but with your macaddress substituted and if that does not work here's a kernel patch..." - I kid, I kid... And on Mac - well, I have no idea really, but I'm guessing it's something like dragging your computer into the trashcan. Am I right?
My Amiga had a power switch. If you wanted the computer to be off, you pressed it and it turned off. And to turn it on you actually had to press the same switch again. In the old days people weren't bothered by that kind of ambiguity, one switch to do two very different things... Of course it wasn't actually labelled "start".
We're all proud of you.
Now, next question. How come small, light cars somehow manage to have worse emissions than buses or trucks? Surely there is no grand conspiracy whereby vehicle manufacturers sit in a smoky room complete with a floating hologram of the planet held under an outstretched hand, and think to themselves "hahaha, those fuckers, we can quite easily sell them clean technology that we already developed for buses and trucks, but what we are really after is ruining the planet (and our own future market, oh, and the place where we and our children live) with the dirtiest technology possible, so we'll stick that in every car"? Surely there are no piles of old engines lying around that must be sold before they can switch to cleaner engines? What's really going on here?
If they didn't change the UI every release, how would you even know it was a different release? And extrapolating from there, how would you get the masses to buy a new Windows version if they couldn't tell the difference?
In terms of features, OS'es have been 'finished' for a long time, with only minor polishing and arcane features that have no relation to anything 99.9% of the market actually does with computers left on the to do list. Yet somehow, people must be convinced to buy these things...
This is a question to everyone who is arguing so passionately in favor of AGW... What have _you_ done? Have you started to drive less? Buy a smaller car, maybe? Heat your house less? Put in led lights?
Or are you only arguing on the internet that something should be done, by other people, paid for by other people - anything really, as long as you don't have to change your way of life?
Externalizing pollution to get an easy subsidy...
It would already be massively helpful if people stopped using the word "subsidy" incorrectly. A subsidy is when the government pays a 3rd party for some kind of activity. The government is not paying money to people to pollute, is it? So there is no subsidy, easy or not, either.
This kind of new-speak is exactly why people like me believe that people like you are hiding something. Clearly you feel your argument is not strong enough to stand on its own, so you need to it this sort of BS to support it.
All of this makes me think we most definitely need to run a few experiments on changing asteroid orbits. First, and most importantly, because it gives us experience with doing so that may one day prove absolutely vital to our survival. And second, because setting of nukes in space and messing with the orbits of celestial bodies is just totally awesome.
I imagine the average PC owner would think "XBox exclusive" if they heard that title, and not pay further attention to it. I certainly had no idea there was a PC version. Then again, if it isn't on Steam or Gog, as far as a great many PC gamers are concerned, it doesn't exist.
I was under the impression that setting off a nuke on an impactor only works in movies. In reality there is no atmosphere, therefore almost no shockwave, and the object continues approaching on the same vector and with the same mass.
Quite possibly they know all of that, but that does not mean they can switch to condoning piracy or giving their product away for free. Perhaps the system as it is, is carefully calibrated to offer the maximum word of mouth, while still retaining just enough deterrent to make them the optimal amount of money.
Let's face it, there isn't really anything stopping you from pirating anything. A few token-cases per year get a conviction. Surely they could do better - but perhaps this works best for them as well.
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment.
The article is about development of new high-end CPUs. If it turns out we have reached the end of the line in what's possible, then laptops will be hit equally hard. Mobile CPUs are not that far behind. For the rest of your rant, great job at not understanding the article.
The pundits want to claim that no one wants a powerful client device and just wants all their stuff streamed from the cloud onto a tablet or phone they don't control. I think that's true in the consumer space, but businesses still have use cases for desktops.
Yes, I as a consumer totally want other companies to have full control over my data and my life in their 'cloud'. Hiccup? "Sorry, according to our terms we have no responsibility or obligation to even try to keep your data safe" - and that's that for a lifetime of photos (memories!), legal documents, etc. Or how about "a random person whose identity we won't disclose has filed an unspecified complaint against your account and now we have closed it without possibility for recourse", aka. Facebook syndrome? And I so love lag when I'm gaming, I really want to pay an online company so I can have even more.
There is most definitely still a usecase for desktops at home. I don't need a tiny box with integrated tiny useless keyboard, integrated tiny useless screen, and so many problems getting rid of its heat that it needs subpar parts just to be able to run.
How does that work on a technical level: do you still use a 24-bit RGB color space, or do you need something else?
If you die while on a visit to France, will the family receive a stripped body?
Thank you for this answer. While it doesn't immediately cause enlightenment at least it gives me something to look for now ;-)
Presumably the people that create an extra test database are not running Oracle, and are therefore free to do so...
Some people see books as the central repository of human knowledge and culture. They believe that books are our history; the thing that will one day resurrect civilisation if we accidentally wipe it out. And also the final thing we leave behind, a form of immortality even as our bodies perish. _That's_ your motivation: they have a deep love and respect for books and don't want them to be destroyed.
They are the people who lovingly collected a copy of every single book in Skyrim, possibly for each of their mansions just to be safe. They don't play the game for exploring dungeons or exterminating dragons or whatever, they just go around collecting books and building up libraries: https://www.reddit.com/r/skyri...
Those people come up with schemes for ensuring books remain in the collection, stacking them two rows deep or storing them off-site in a locker they pay for by themselves if that's what it takes. For them books don't need motivation; books are motivation.