If it is remotely comparable to Flash, it'll work on FreeBSD, but only if you install Linux emulation, 100GB of compatibility libraries, and kldload a binary blob that will crash your desktop every 6 hours. And it will run on i386 but not on amd64... Or, to avoid all this cruft, it'll run perfectly fine on Windows, running in a VirtualBox (or qemu) session inside FreeBSD/amd64.
Amen to that. But... isn't it STILL groupthink if we say that we then belong to the group of World Citizens (as opposed to the group of tribalists/nationalists/religionists/etc...)?
And it is already nearly so since every thing ever invented or created always builds on the cumulative knowledge of all the discoveries and developments of the past and the recent past is nearly completely patented, copyrighted and locked down. Locked down forever - for all practical purposes from the point of view of a person living less then 100 years.
Let's see it from an evolutionary standpoint: societies that allow themselves to be shackled, bound, and immobilized by excessive red tape (including all this IP nonsense) will ultimately go the way of the dodo. I.e. they will become extinct, while other, more dynamic societies, will arise and prosper and replace those dinosaurs that our societies have become.
Because some random dude downloaded the torrent at the time? Let's see: one of the companies is German Telekom. That's the biggest ISP in Germany. Just because they're there, doesn't mean anything at all: it's most likely some of their customers who read the previous Slashdot article and fetched the torrent right away. The same for the other companies. There's nothing to see there, move along.
Thank you Oracle you are taking the way to restore the places of all of us, C/C++ coders, demonstrating that cheap and pseudo(=scripting) programming languages on VM hyper-eavy-overload are NOT always the solution...
Actually, it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. In systems programming, C (and to a lesser extent C++) rule supreme, and that's as it should be. Application programmers are free to choose Java if they so desire, or if they are forced to by existing frameworks. Personally, I'm a huge fan of C and C++, but I'm not afraid to touch Java code every now and then... if absolutely necessary, that is.
There is a second cold war happening right now, except this one has multiple factions.. US/EU on one side with Islamists and their enablers the 'moderate Arab countries' and their Chinese enablers on the other.
The moderate Arab countries are not on the other side. Well, not all of them. They too are heavily targeted by the Islamists in their midst, including them being subject to terror attacks. For example, on one hand, Morocco has been hit by terrorism and is strongly cooperating with the US (as they do since 1789 (!)). On the other hand, Saudi Arabia, while US-friendly too, is STILL spreading their ultra-fanatic Wahabbism, and Qatar is doing a lot of harm with their Al Jazeera TV network (their Arabic channel is particularly toxic). There's a cold war going on, but the dividing line doesn't run the way as some would expect.
... where credit is due. I'm still having his "The UNIX Programming Environment" book from 1984, co-authored by Brian W. Kernighan. Google has undeniably good engineers, but Rob was famous long before Google emerged at all.
It comes down to a remarkably silly technicality that, somehow, China decided to approve.
Maybe China's government has finally come to its senses -- somewhat --, and tries to backtrack a little bit by loosening their grip on the Internet... without losing face. I wished our western governments would backtrack on their biggest red herring as well (draconian Copyright!), but currently I see their stance worsening, instead of getting better (ACTA). Or, said differently, China may be moving in the right direction, while we are sliding backwards in terms of freedom. I guess, we'll meet in the middle someday: we feeling worse, them feeling better.
Just out of curiosity: was the defendant ultimately found guilty, without the jury looking at the central piece of evidence even once? If yes, that would be scary.
But how they will solve the problem I have no idea.
IMHO, the main obstacle is all this x86 legacy code that needs to be implemented by microcode on RISC-like systems. You need a lot of clock cycles for many instructions, i.e. a very high speed internal clock, despite many optimizations in CPU design. Maybe, just maybe, anything non-x86 would run a lot faster without increasing the freq? Rethinking and optimizing the instruction set may yield faster execution paths... at the cost of breaking backward compatibility. For the Unix ecosystem, that's perfectly realistic, for Windows it isn't.
This sort of tech is certainly not going to be in my general-purpose computer any time soon, or ever, because I am simply never going to purchase a computer that doesn't allow me to customize it to my heart's content.
If you can't buy non-DRMed computers in the future, how long do you think you could still use our current breed of open computers before they become hopelessly outdated and obsolete? 10 years? 15 years at most? And then? What would you do if all the market has to offer is vendor-locked stuff?
Anything can be used for torture. What matters is the character of individuals. You don't take away screwdrivers because they *could* be used for torture.
Quite true. However, inventing devices specifically to inflict pain, is something very different from misusing a general purpose device to this end. The whole mentality of painful non-lethal weapons should be questioned: e.g., one could disable people with foam, or by throwing a net over them etc..., which is painless, or one could disable people with painful Tasers. See the difference in attitudes?
H.G. Wells' imagination wasn't on par, considering the future that we have now. His shady Morlocks should've been the hordes of IP-lawyers that are feeding on and eating a (largely) unsuspecting population.
On what grounds? Jules Verne's copyrights expired already... and this despite the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Submarines are in the public domain now, even drug barons use them.
A real developer will learn to understand how a computer works, at a fundamental level, and look at programming languages as different ways to solve a problem.
A real developer should write his or her own (little/micro) OS from scratch, and use it to write his/her job application + host his website. And no, his name doesn't have to be Mel.
Also, if we ever get our act together sufficiently to build solar arrays in space (Lagrange) and beam it back to Earth it'd be useful to be able to move it around as losslessly as possible.
This is a good idea... but there's one problem with it: if you intercept energy that would otherwise not have reached Earth, and inject it into the atmosphere, it would inevitably cause some (additional) heat problems. How do you dissipate this additional energy on a planetary scale?
I foresee an Internet where in order to be legally allowed to browse a website you must comply with their terms and install software at the sites choosing.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is remotely comparable to Flash, it'll work on FreeBSD, but only if you install Linux emulation, 100GB of compatibility libraries, and kldload a binary blob that will crash your desktop every 6 hours. And it will run on i386 but not on amd64... Or, to avoid all this cruft, it'll run perfectly fine on Windows, running in a VirtualBox (or qemu) session inside FreeBSD/amd64.
Which one do you prefer? qt-hadopi, gtk-hadopi, ... or just that plain old fashioned nvidia/ati binary blob driver for your graphics adapter?
Amen to that. But... isn't it STILL groupthink if we say that we then belong to the group of World Citizens (as opposed to the group of tribalists/nationalists/religionists/etc...)?
Let's see it from an evolutionary standpoint: societies that allow themselves to be shackled, bound, and immobilized by excessive red tape (including all this IP nonsense) will ultimately go the way of the dodo. I.e. they will become extinct, while other, more dynamic societies, will arise and prosper and replace those dinosaurs that our societies have become.
Because some random dude downloaded the torrent at the time? Let's see: one of the companies is German Telekom. That's the biggest ISP in Germany. Just because they're there, doesn't mean anything at all: it's most likely some of their customers who read the previous Slashdot article and fetched the torrent right away. The same for the other companies. There's nothing to see there, move along.
Actually, it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. In systems programming, C (and to a lesser extent C++) rule supreme, and that's as it should be. Application programmers are free to choose Java if they so desire, or if they are forced to by existing frameworks. Personally, I'm a huge fan of C and C++, but I'm not afraid to touch Java code every now and then... if absolutely necessary, that is.
As an old LISPer, I miss DWIM...
So, back to qemu then?
That would be funny indeed. Want to bet how long it would take the MPAA to have the DMCA updated, should anybody really tried to use this loop hole?
The moderate Arab countries are not on the other side. Well, not all of them. They too are heavily targeted by the Islamists in their midst, including them being subject to terror attacks. For example, on one hand, Morocco has been hit by terrorism and is strongly cooperating with the US (as they do since 1789 (!)). On the other hand, Saudi Arabia, while US-friendly too, is STILL spreading their ultra-fanatic Wahabbism, and Qatar is doing a lot of harm with their Al Jazeera TV network (their Arabic channel is particularly toxic). There's a cold war going on, but the dividing line doesn't run the way as some would expect.
... where credit is due. I'm still having his "The UNIX Programming Environment" book from 1984, co-authored by Brian W. Kernighan. Google has undeniably good engineers, but Rob was famous long before Google emerged at all.
But... is the B52 and the nuclear bomb open-sourced?
Maybe China's government has finally come to its senses -- somewhat --, and tries to backtrack a little bit by loosening their grip on the Internet... without losing face. I wished our western governments would backtrack on their biggest red herring as well (draconian Copyright!), but currently I see their stance worsening, instead of getting better (ACTA). Or, said differently, China may be moving in the right direction, while we are sliding backwards in terms of freedom. I guess, we'll meet in the middle someday: we feeling worse, them feeling better.
Just out of curiosity: was the defendant ultimately found guilty, without the jury looking at the central piece of evidence even once? If yes, that would be scary.
IMHO, the main obstacle is all this x86 legacy code that needs to be implemented by microcode on RISC-like systems. You need a lot of clock cycles for many instructions, i.e. a very high speed internal clock, despite many optimizations in CPU design. Maybe, just maybe, anything non-x86 would run a lot faster without increasing the freq? Rethinking and optimizing the instruction set may yield faster execution paths... at the cost of breaking backward compatibility. For the Unix ecosystem, that's perfectly realistic, for Windows it isn't.
If you can't buy non-DRMed computers in the future, how long do you think you could still use our current breed of open computers before they become hopelessly outdated and obsolete? 10 years? 15 years at most? And then? What would you do if all the market has to offer is vendor-locked stuff?
Quite true. However, inventing devices specifically to inflict pain, is something very different from misusing a general purpose device to this end. The whole mentality of painful non-lethal weapons should be questioned: e.g., one could disable people with foam, or by throwing a net over them etc..., which is painless, or one could disable people with painful Tasers. See the difference in attitudes?
The 99 cent one-time fee is a great way to verify user identity by using the banking / credit-card system.
H.G. Wells' imagination wasn't on par, considering the future that we have now. His shady Morlocks should've been the hordes of IP-lawyers that are feeding on and eating a (largely) unsuspecting population.
On what grounds? Jules Verne's copyrights expired already... and this despite the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Submarines are in the public domain now, even drug barons use them.
A real developer should write his or her own (little/micro) OS from scratch, and use it to write his/her job application + host his website. And no, his name doesn't have to be Mel.
Especially since it would be located across a tectonic fault line (Africa is slowly sliding beneath Eurasia there).
This is a good idea... but there's one problem with it: if you intercept energy that would otherwise not have reached Earth, and inject it into the atmosphere, it would inevitably cause some (additional) heat problems. How do you dissipate this additional energy on a planetary scale?
So does Morocco. There are already lot of dams in the Atlas mountains, and more could be built for energy storage.
Like... Flash?