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User: Cyberax

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  1. Re:How very... on US GPS, EU Galileo to Work Together · · Score: 1

    Sure. As the old saying goes: "Russia has only two friends: Russian army and Russian navy".

    Nobody is going to believe in "international friendship" anymore. Everybody has their own interests, and right now Russia and Europe just have some common interests. That's OK.

    Some people just don't understand how is it possible to work together with Russian without becoming a commie.

  2. Re:Is it worth it? on Indiana Allows BP To Pollute Lake Michigan · · Score: 1

    It's true - a lot of nasty things do not mix well with water. They float on water surface (hint: oil), suffocate fish and pollute shores.

  3. Re:Is it worth it? on Indiana Allows BP To Pollute Lake Michigan · · Score: 1

    Let's see:
    1) Cyanides (a glass of water with 1:4200 mix and you're as good as dead)
    2) Dioxins (AFAIR, it causes cancer in 1:1000000000 ratios)
    3) Good old benzene (carcinogen, 1:4200 is FAR above the safe threshold)
    4) Thiols (1:4200 will make water STINK so much you'll faint) ...

  4. Re:Exactly the problem with GPLv3 on Linux Creator Calls GPLv3 Authors 'Hypocrites' · · Score: 1

    No, you can't.

    TiVO patented their hardware and software, so you'd have to license it.

  5. Re:ORM == good on Canonical Begins To Open-Source Launchpad · · Score: 1

    In all ORMs that I know, you can use plain SQL for complex queries. And it's usually much easier to use plain SQL than ORM's built-in query language.

    But in my experience, 90% of queries are simple "SELECT blah.blah,... FROM blah WHERE blah.blah=?" and ORMs allow to forget about this simple CRUD.

  6. Re:ORM == good on Canonical Begins To Open-Source Launchpad · · Score: 1

    You can have equally stupid example with SQL:

    RecordSet r=db.query("SELECT * FROM product");
    while(r.hasMoreRows())
    {
          Row row=r.nextRow();
          if (row.get(0)<2.99)
              myResults.push(row[0],row[1],row[2]);
    }

    I've seen enough of such WTFs, usually in PHP programs.

  7. Re:ORM == good on Canonical Begins To Open-Source Launchpad · · Score: 1

    I generally use autogenerated schemas (with manually-added indexes and advanced integrity checks) when I'm using Hibernate. I don't remember the time when Hibernate offered bad schema. Usually mapping from object structure to SQL DDL is very simple (you map objects as tables, one-to-many relations as backpointers, etc.).

  8. Re:ORM == good on Canonical Begins To Open-Source Launchpad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your statement is just plain stupid.

    Decent ORMs do nothing but map object operations into SQL statements. SQL from an ORM tool is not going to magically work more faster or slower than a hand-written one.

    Again, decent DB schemas (i.e. fairly normalized ones) map nicely into object models (hell, ER-diagrams used to model relational tables map directly into object diagrams). It's the databases with weird tables without PKs and strange stored procs which do not map well.

    I've worked with Hibernate application handling OLAP operations on 10 terabytes of data without any problems.

  9. Phage therapy on Team Builds Viruses To Combat Harmful "Biofilms" · · Score: 1

    It's a knock-off from phage therapy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy ) which is about 70 years old.

  10. Re:Goto considered harmful? on Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released · · Score: 2, Informative

    See http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131 for explanation. In short, Linus has good reasons to use goto.

  11. Re:Client vs. Server Applications on Windows Loses Ground With Developers · · Score: 1

    Sure. But very often Mac OS X/Linux behave different from Windows for no good reason. We had numerous problems with focus handling, controls being one pixel off grid, etc.

    It's easier with QT/GTK because they draw widgets themselves, so a lot of problem go away. If only GTK was not an ugly mess on Windows and Mac OS...

  12. Re:Client vs. Server Applications on Windows Loses Ground With Developers · · Score: 1

    GTK looks like and behaves like s**t on Windows. We've tried to use it and had a LOT of problem.

    The only other solution is wxWidgets, but it also has big problems with applications behaving differently on different platforms.

  13. Re:Client vs. Server Applications on Windows Loses Ground With Developers · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nope. EACH developer who needs to compile sources which use QT should have a developer license (that's what our legal department said after talking with Trolltech). In practice, it's easier to buy license for every developer.

    BTW, I was wrong with the price. It's $6600 per developer for three-platform desktop edition - http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/pricing

  14. Re:Client vs. Server Applications on Windows Loses Ground With Developers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, you can't (effectively).

    You can have your code under BSD license, because it's less restricting than GPL. But if anyone tries to use your application as a part of a commercial closed-source project, then they will be violating _GPL_ license of QT. Which, sort of, defeats the whole purpose of BSD license...

    You can have QT in BSDs without GPLing the whole thing because of the 'aggregation' clause in GPL.

  15. Re:Client vs. Server Applications on Windows Loses Ground With Developers · · Score: 2, Informative

    QT costs A LOT of money (about $3000 per developer, AFAIR). _AND_ you can't legally use KDE's functions, because KDE is GPLed.

    So, GTK is the only viable alternative (and guess what, most commercial Linux apps use GTK).

  16. Re:Clothes are a cost on Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback? · · Score: 1

    Nope, it's all about how to AVOID ironing. Nerdy enough for me :)

  17. Re:Countdown until AoMP3 reappears in China/Brasil on Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just tried to pay using my Visa. It works.

  18. Re:Countdown until AoMP3 reappears in China/Brasil on Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, it seems that http://www.mp3sparks.com/ already offers all the music from AoMP3.

    So I guess AoMP3 has already reincarnated.

  19. Countdown until AoMP3 reappears in China/Brasil/.. on Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again · · Score: 0, Redundant

    3...2...1

    GO!

  20. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 1

    It's true that complexity of any pseudorandom generator is finite.

    However, you can't readily tell it from its output. It might well be possible, that the Universe uses a simple formula to determine the outcome of quantum events.

    In any case, we can just add hardware-based random number generator to classical computer simulating quantum events.

  21. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 1

    How neurons talk to each other is irrelevant - you can't use classical channels to connect quantum computers. And I can't imagine any quantum channel working across multiple cell walls.

    QCs (if they are present inside neurons) are probably advantageous, but it doesn't mean that they will be the fundamental barrier for creating 'artificial brain'. However, it may be practically impossible to build artificial brain without some sort of QC accelerator (i.e. like videocards - you can build games which use only CPU, but it would be prohibitively slow in practice).

  22. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 1

    What is 'really random number'? Can you define it?

    We can have pseudorandom numbers behaving exactly like real 'random' numbers (though it requires unlimited resources as you get more and more numbers). I.e. you won't be able to distinguish pseudorandom generator and real random source.

  23. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 1

    Nope, Penrose's quantum computers work on a sub-cellular level.

    Thinking about branches requires work of more than one neuron, so quantum computers are not really significant here (they can't talk to each other through cell walls).

  24. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 1

    AFAIR my university's course, Turing machine with random number generator is computationally equivalent to a common Turing machine.

  25. Re:Penrose on Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Penrose was probably smocking crack when he wrote this book.

    You definitely don't NEED quantum computers to reproduce intelligence. That's because IF cells contain quantum computers, then they must work in cycles: load initial data, process it, read data. Reading computation results stops quantum computer (collapses it to one state). Even Penrose admits that quantum computers can't work more than a fraction of second in a living cell.

    Quantum computers can be simulated by classical computers (they're computationally equivalent), so quantum computers are not NEEDED to simulate human mind.

    However, quantum computers might make good accelerators for neural processing (there are several publications on this).