Yes, you do need a Voice Maintenance Package to upgrade to Voice 2.0 (tm). Please send in your old larynx packed in ice, $10.99 for shipping and handling, and 13 box tops from specially-marked boxes of Captain Crunch to receive your Voice 2.0 Upgrade.
I introduced a niece and nephew (ages 11 and 7) to Machinarium recently, and so far they've really enjoyed it. Definitely one of the best adventure games made in recent years.
Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the lives and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.
I have to wonder whether the editors got trolled. Even beyond confusing a hash with a cipher, a number of things about the post seem to suggest it might have been crafted feigning total ignorance as a joke.
Any ideas what this means for Skype's future involvement in the development of the Opus codec? I think the SILK patents are already irrevocably taken care of, but will Skype still be developing and promoting an open-source codec under its new overlords?
The Commission primarily appears to suffer from a lack of reading comprehension, amnesia regarding what it said earlier, and not being fully aware of its competences
Competences? What competences? This is the European Commission we're talking about, right?
A quick Google search only turns up one serious discussion about the possibility of a ThumbEE - oriented Dalvik. The only reply wasn't very optimistic about it, saying that a 16-cycle mode switch between ThumbEE and regular instructions makes it unlikely to be worth it.
More's the pity- I really think VM guys and processor design folks need to get their heads together.
Lots of people grumbling about how they think CDs are inferior etc. I don't get why.
Sony plucked this guy from an operatic career, and his passion for sound quality made a big difference. The CD standard is pretty darn nice, especially compared to cassettes, and this guy was responsible for a lot of the push to make it a market reality. He also provided a lot of good leadership for Sony in other ways (getting them into gaming, for instance) and was an important supporter of the arts.
After his retirement Sony has had a lot more trouble both avoiding being evil (rootkit saga!) and finding vision. Furthermore, while Philips and Sony designed the CD standard around engineering constraints and human perception, media formats since that time have instead been designed around marketing (OMG this says 192 kHz! it must be 4 1/3 times as good as CDs!) and content protection/DRM. I certainly wish more companies would find executives like Mr. Ohga.
Right now the 64-bit JRE is not an overall win unless you really need lots of memory per app. Java is really pointer-intensive, and doubling the size of pointers hurts. The 64-bit JRE does some on-the-fly compression to try to minimize the pain by using pointer compression (for instance, at most 40 or so bits of your pointers are used on current architectures, so it'll try to use that fact), but it's still gonna hurt.
Why would the word length and ABI of the apps you build in native-compiled languages using NetBeans depend on NetBeans? I'm sure you can just set it up to pass the relevant options to the compilers &c.
you could just go diesel and skip this business entirely. More than half of the vehicles sold in Europe are diesel; it just makes more sense fuel-economy wise. We need to get with the program on this side of the pond.
I still think copyright assignment makes sense for this project for a whole host of reasons.
At the same time I think the acquisition shows the beginning of why people were quite right to be hesitant about assigning copyright on their contributions to Sun. People with the Document Foundation hold up the increased number of contributions they've gotten without requiring copyright assignment as a reason not to have it. Of course, to a large extent it's been moot since they don't hold the copyright to most of the project. But I think that to the extent copyright assignment has been a factor, almost all of those put off by a Sun/Oracle copyright agreement would have been ok with assigning copyright to a well-governed nonprofit.
I know it's a rather long shot, but I still think the only unambiguously positive outcome for all this is that Oracle hands copyrights and trademarks over to the Document Foundation or a newly-chartered organization quite similar to it, they become the copyright holder, they reintroduce copyright assignment, and their charter provides a strong enough guarantee about openness and licenses that people feel secure in contributing under those terms.
A decade ago, the GIMP was one of the jewels of open source, something everyone would show off to others as an example of what open source development could accomplish. But it's been so short of manpower that it's largely stagnated for quite a while. They could really use some help. See Nordholt's latest blog entry for some related thoughts.
This has been modded quite a bit, but as of this writing I didn't get any Funny mods- it was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I suppose that last point was too serious.
However, I really would like to see more cooperation and sharing of ideas between the best and brightest (Bright-est?) of those trying to replace C++ and its descendants with something better. There are plenty of candidates out there, but it will take a concentrated effort to arrive at something (or quite possibly two things, one language for native code and one for VMs) which can really take the place of languages which are so entrenched.
Kill off interfaces (even James Gosling admits that they were probably a mistake), add multiple inheritance.
*citation needed* Everything I've seen from Gosling says that pure interfaces are the way to go- even to the extent of getting rid of regular inheritance; see these quips. I don't think anybody who's seriously looking at language design thinks C++- style multiple inheritance is a good idea. Nor does anyone want to resurrect the braindead C preprocessor way of dealing with things.
And what's so bad about:=? The fact that some outmoded languages used it doesn't make it a bad idea. Most of us are familiar with its use as a definition or assignment, and avoiding confusions between = and == could be a plus, especially if (as he seems to propose) the latter is extended to replace use of.equals().
1. Put these guys, Walter Bright, and a few other folks (Alexandrescu? a couple of the best folks from the Java and C# camps?) in a building.
2. Lock the doors from the outside and guard the building until they've come up with the One True C++ Successor (both compilable to native code and a good target for a JIT) and the basic design for its standard library.
3. Profit^H^H^H^H^H^H End the ridiculous situation we have where systems-level programming is held back by 40-year-old braindead technologies like the C preprocessor while the dominant business programming languages are controlled by corporations with terrible track records.
I remember being told some years ago "graphing calculators are pointless toys; do toy problems by hand/ with a $5 calculator and use a system with real computing power to run Mathematica or Matlab for serious problems." With the emergence of dual-core A9 chips, it is now entirely feasible to have considerably more computing power in a graphing calculator than desktops had when I was told that.
The sad story here is that there has been rather little progress in the calculator market since the introduction of the HP48 in 1990.
I certainly agree that it's amazing how many things in c++ flagrantly violate the principle of least surprise. A good example: read these two articles about the assignment operator and weep. The author (who by no means could be accused of being biased against c++) concludes:
I don't know about you, but there's something really scary to me about a language where copying state from one object to another is this complicated. By now, I suspect at least a dozen or two programmers have contributed something new to this discussion. If it takes this many programmers to write a simple assignment operator, think how complicated writing code that actually does something meaningful must be!
The devil truly is in the details, especially in C++ programming.
I'd have to disagree with you about c++0x though. While there is additional complication, many of the added ideas seem to have few "gotchas" relative to most of c++, and it even manages to eliminate a few "gotchas." I didn't learn c++ until last year (mostly have done my programming in Java and MATLAB, with little bits of everything from C to Scheme along the way), and I ended up using gcc's c++0x option because there were a bunch of ways in which c++0x made things less painful and made c++ seem less braindead.
I'm not very happy with the job Hatch has done in recent years, and he clearly has some messed-up ideas regarding IP law, but for most of his career in the Senate he did a rather good job of representing the state, and he's been a voice of moderation on some key issues where many of the republican politicians here are off the charts of extremism. (The state republican party's caucus/convention system has been an effective way of filtering sanity out of the candidate pool in recent years.)
Mike Lee is much more of a worry (though with his tea party rhetoric he's done a lot more angrily waving around copies of the Constitution than telling anybody what he actually proposes to do about things, so for all we know the positions he ends up taking may not be as wacky as one might have guessed from his campaign). Unfortunately, in the current political climate, if Hatch is voted out of office he'll likely be replaced by someone more extreme than Lee has any chance of being.
I think it kind of silly that moz.org folks have caved to the version inflation craze. I find it mind-bogglingly silly that there are folks for whom this matters. I've said it elsewhere, I'll say it again here: to cure all their marketing problems and silence all the naysayers, they should have just rebranded 4.0 as Fïrëföx 11 for its release.
"Is it any better than the stable version of Chrome?" "It's one better."
In related news, SumatraPDF, the primary open-source PDF viewer for Windows, just had its 1.4 release a couple of days ago. In the course of the past ~6 months they've added GDI support so documents can print quickly (rather than sending huge bitmaps to printers), improved performance in all sorts of ways (notably including much-faster zooming and searching), and quashed lots of bugs. They've also added a browser plugin and a Windows Search filter (both optional). So even if you've tried it in the past and it didn't meet your needs, it's likely worth trying again.
Outside of multimedia (e.g. Flash) and JS- both of which I've never seen used in a PDF for anything other than an exploit- the only thing Sumatra lacks at this point, AFAIK, is the ability to work well with forms.
Whoops, left out a delimiting quotation mark, should have previewed. Trying again:
I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow HTML5+MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.
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Yes, you do need a Voice Maintenance Package to upgrade to Voice 2.0 (tm). Please send in your old larynx packed in ice, $10.99 for shipping and handling, and 13 box tops from specially-marked boxes of Captain Crunch to receive your Voice 2.0 Upgrade.
I introduced a niece and nephew (ages 11 and 7) to Machinarium recently, and so far they've really enjoyed it. Definitely one of the best adventure games made in recent years.
Reminds me of the famous Bruce Schneier fact:
Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the lives and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.
I have to wonder whether the editors got trolled. Even beyond confusing a hash with a cipher, a number of things about the post seem to suggest it might have been crafted feigning total ignorance as a joke.
Any ideas what this means for Skype's future involvement in the development of the Opus codec? I think the SILK patents are already irrevocably taken care of, but will Skype still be developing and promoting an open-source codec under its new overlords?
What has this got to do with my rights online?
Competences? What competences? This is the European Commission we're talking about, right?
A quick Google search only turns up one serious discussion about the possibility of a ThumbEE - oriented Dalvik. The only reply wasn't very optimistic about it, saying that a 16-cycle mode switch between ThumbEE and regular instructions makes it unlikely to be worth it.
More's the pity- I really think VM guys and processor design folks need to get their heads together.
Lots of people grumbling about how they think CDs are inferior etc. I don't get why.
Sony plucked this guy from an operatic career, and his passion for sound quality made a big difference. The CD standard is pretty darn nice, especially compared to cassettes, and this guy was responsible for a lot of the push to make it a market reality. He also provided a lot of good leadership for Sony in other ways (getting them into gaming, for instance) and was an important supporter of the arts.
After his retirement Sony has had a lot more trouble both avoiding being evil (rootkit saga!) and finding vision. Furthermore, while Philips and Sony designed the CD standard around engineering constraints and human perception, media formats since that time have instead been designed around marketing (OMG this says 192 kHz! it must be 4 1/3 times as good as CDs!) and content protection/DRM. I certainly wish more companies would find executives like Mr. Ohga.
Right now the 64-bit JRE is not an overall win unless you really need lots of memory per app. Java is really pointer-intensive, and doubling the size of pointers hurts. The 64-bit JRE does some on-the-fly compression to try to minimize the pain by using pointer compression (for instance, at most 40 or so bits of your pointers are used on current architectures, so it'll try to use that fact), but it's still gonna hurt.
Why would the word length and ABI of the apps you build in native-compiled languages using NetBeans depend on NetBeans? I'm sure you can just set it up to pass the relevant options to the compilers &c.
you could just go diesel and skip this business entirely. More than half of the vehicles sold in Europe are diesel; it just makes more sense fuel-economy wise. We need to get with the program on this side of the pond.
I'm still waiting for my VW XL1...
I still think copyright assignment makes sense for this project for a whole host of reasons.
At the same time I think the acquisition shows the beginning of why people were quite right to be hesitant about assigning copyright on their contributions to Sun. People with the Document Foundation hold up the increased number of contributions they've gotten without requiring copyright assignment as a reason not to have it. Of course, to a large extent it's been moot since they don't hold the copyright to most of the project. But I think that to the extent copyright assignment has been a factor, almost all of those put off by a Sun/Oracle copyright agreement would have been ok with assigning copyright to a well-governed nonprofit.
I know it's a rather long shot, but I still think the only unambiguously positive outcome for all this is that Oracle hands copyrights and trademarks over to the Document Foundation or a newly-chartered organization quite similar to it, they become the copyright holder, they reintroduce copyright assignment, and their charter provides a strong enough guarantee about openness and licenses that people feel secure in contributing under those terms.
A decade ago, the GIMP was one of the jewels of open source, something everyone would show off to others as an example of what open source development could accomplish. But it's been so short of manpower that it's largely stagnated for quite a while. They could really use some help. See Nordholt's latest blog entry for some related thoughts.
This has been modded quite a bit, but as of this writing I didn't get any Funny mods- it was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I suppose that last point was too serious.
However, I really would like to see more cooperation and sharing of ideas between the best and brightest (Bright-est?) of those trying to replace C++ and its descendants with something better. There are plenty of candidates out there, but it will take a concentrated effort to arrive at something (or quite possibly two things, one language for native code and one for VMs) which can really take the place of languages which are so entrenched.
Take a look at Go vs. Brand X.
*citation needed*
Everything I've seen from Gosling says that pure interfaces are the way to go- even to the extent of getting rid of regular inheritance; see these quips. I don't think anybody who's seriously looking at language design thinks C++- style multiple inheritance is a good idea. Nor does anyone want to resurrect the braindead C preprocessor way of dealing with things.
And what's so bad about :=? The fact that some outmoded languages used it doesn't make it a bad idea. Most of us are familiar with its use as a definition or assignment, and avoiding confusions between = and == could be a plus, especially if (as he seems to propose) the latter is extended to replace use of .equals().
1. Put these guys, Walter Bright, and a few other folks (Alexandrescu? a couple of the best folks from the Java and C# camps?) in a building.
2. Lock the doors from the outside and guard the building until they've come up with the One True C++ Successor (both compilable to native code and a good target for a JIT) and the basic design for its standard library.
3. Profit^H^H^H^H^H^H End the ridiculous situation we have where systems-level programming is held back by 40-year-old braindead technologies like the C preprocessor while the dominant business programming languages are controlled by corporations with terrible track records.
I remember being told some years ago "graphing calculators are pointless toys; do toy problems by hand/ with a $5 calculator and use a system with real computing power to run Mathematica or Matlab for serious problems." With the emergence of dual-core A9 chips, it is now entirely feasible to have considerably more computing power in a graphing calculator than desktops had when I was told that.
The sad story here is that there has been rather little progress in the calculator market since the introduction of the HP48 in 1990.
I certainly agree that it's amazing how many things in c++ flagrantly violate the principle of least surprise. A good example: read these two articles about the assignment operator and weep. The author (who by no means could be accused of being biased against c++) concludes:
I'd have to disagree with you about c++0x though. While there is additional complication, many of the added ideas seem to have few "gotchas" relative to most of c++, and it even manages to eliminate a few "gotchas." I didn't learn c++ until last year (mostly have done my programming in Java and MATLAB, with little bits of everything from C to Scheme along the way), and I ended up using gcc's c++0x option because there were a bunch of ways in which c++0x made things less painful and made c++ seem less braindead.
You should see a psychiatrist. That level of masochism is really unhealthy.
Bah. Hatch is the least of our worries.
I'm not very happy with the job Hatch has done in recent years, and he clearly has some messed-up ideas regarding IP law, but for most of his career in the Senate he did a rather good job of representing the state, and he's been a voice of moderation on some key issues where many of the republican politicians here are off the charts of extremism. (The state republican party's caucus/convention system has been an effective way of filtering sanity out of the candidate pool in recent years.)
Mike Lee is much more of a worry (though with his tea party rhetoric he's done a lot more angrily waving around copies of the Constitution than telling anybody what he actually proposes to do about things, so for all we know the positions he ends up taking may not be as wacky as one might have guessed from his campaign). Unfortunately, in the current political climate, if Hatch is voted out of office he'll likely be replaced by someone more extreme than Lee has any chance of being.
I think it kind of silly that moz.org folks have caved to the version inflation craze. I find it mind-bogglingly silly that there are folks for whom this matters. I've said it elsewhere, I'll say it again here: to cure all their marketing problems and silence all the naysayers, they should have just rebranded 4.0 as Fïrëföx 11 for its release.
"Is it any better than the stable version of Chrome?" "It's one better."
In related news, SumatraPDF, the primary open-source PDF viewer for Windows, just had its 1.4 release a couple of days ago. In the course of the past ~6 months they've added GDI support so documents can print quickly (rather than sending huge bitmaps to printers), improved performance in all sorts of ways (notably including much-faster zooming and searching), and quashed lots of bugs. They've also added a browser plugin and a Windows Search filter (both optional). So even if you've tried it in the past and it didn't meet your needs, it's likely worth trying again.
Outside of multimedia (e.g. Flash) and JS- both of which I've never seen used in a PDF for anything other than an exploit- the only thing Sumatra lacks at this point, AFAIK, is the ability to work well with forms.
Right, because DNA evidence has never played a role in convicting anyone and never will in the future. Uh huh.
Whoops, left out a delimiting quotation mark, should have previewed. Trying again:
I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow HTML5+MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.