The XMOS chips are quite close to a transputer, though sadly not terribly open.
Also, even modern FPGAs aren't fast enough to "bit-bang an LVDS/HDMI/CSI interface with little more than an amp"... they all have dedicated, hardwired hardware for it if they support it at all.
Find something else (that came out after the 80s) that makes it as easy to get started in programming.
Yeah, they can just plug it in and start tapping away... oh wait, no they can't, because they don't have keyboards and monitors since it's "not a fucking desktop pc" and apparently doesn't need them. Whoops.
As a mathematician, you ought to understand global optimization encountering local minima in a high-dimensional space.
Is there anything out there that doesn't use simulated annealing to reduce the chance of getting wedged in an undesirable local minima somewhere these days?
As a side note, if your best anti-boycott source is someone who uses an imaginary word as a gender-neutral pronoun and an implausible scenario to argue that boycotts don't work, you might want to find a better source.
What exactly is so implausible about the scenario there? It's a simplification to make the discussion clearer, obviously, but it's essentially the same as the very real problem of (say) Walmart offering lower prices than their competitors through unethical practices that most people would object to. Which, funnily enough, was the exact problem that boycotts were being offered up as a solution for.
Ah, this tactic. The nice thing about this particular bullshit derailing tactic is that there's always someone else who's worse off, so you can use it to effectively stonewall any discussion of any social problem and make sure nothing gets done about any of them. The other nice thing is that - by definition - anyone who can actually talk about their problems is better off than someone who can't, so you can use it to stop anyone talking about issues that affect them.
It's a very convenient way of looking like you care about the poor, the disenfranchised,... whilst you're actually making sure that nothing gets done to help them. Not very imaginative though; been done before a billion times.
The current "hate" is of the sort "I don't want a ground zero Mosque just like a Japanese wouldn't want Disneyland Hiroshima"
No, the current "hate" is of the sort "Any mosque built in New York City is a Ground Zero mosque and a deliberate and malicious attempt to mock good (Christian) Americans, because it's impossible that there might be groups of Muslims in New Yorn City who actually want to practice their religion, and even if they are they need to respect our nutty theories". Can you see how that kind of dehumanisation is likely lead to other, more nasty forms of hate?
Errrm, they already do search competing video services too. They have done since before video search was integrated in the main search page. Try searching for South by Dave Otto (just plucking a random video off the Vimeo front page) for example.
They're competitors who don't want to compete on a level playing field. I've seen a whole bunch of these so-called vertical search engines, and Google delayed far too long in downranking them - not only were they useless, they'd got so good at gaming Google's search results that they were starting to make Google itself useless for many searches. I've no doubt they managed to make a bit of money by making the Google results useless and hoping people would click their ads in desperation, but it was a pretty awful experience for actual users. That's before we even get started on Microsoft's filing attempting to force Google to make its search less functional than Bing's. (They're using the exact same stuff they complain about Google doing as a major selling point of Bing, called "Bing Instant Answers").
Moreover, a majority of "search" boxes default to Google, as opposed to a customer making a choice.
At least they allow consumers to make a choice. Microsoft's been paying various mobile phone providers to set search on the phones they sell to Bing and not allow users to change it, for instance. They're the only Android phones out there which don't allow you to change your search provider despite Google creating Android.
It's entirely relevant, because I'm pretty sure that (as one of the main organisations pushing the EU to fine Google) Microsoft's actually relying on the fact that it's trivial to switch away from Google search in order to benefit from these antitrust actions. If the EU does place restrictions on Google, Bing will suddenly have better search results than Google by virtue of still being allowed to give relevant context-specific results for things like maps. I expect they have the advertising campaign all set up and ready to go - they've already advertised it as a way in which Bing is better than Google, now they can use the EU to make that true.
That's not good enough. The point of antitrust law is to keep all markets competitive and driving innovation. For that to happen people have to be free to choose the best search engine for them and the best social network and the best maps, etc.
Except in this case it'll have the opposite effect, because people want search engines to actually give them useful information and (this is the kicker) the company leading the anti-trust complaint against Google knows this, because they're a Microsoft subsidiary which provides part of the equivalent functionality in Bing.
Apple doesn't require AT&T to charge extra for FaceTime over cellular, but I'm pretty sure that's not actually what the comment you're replying to says. They did deliberately add special code to allow carriers to charge extra for it or disable it altogether which certainly makes them complicit at the very least..
Yeah. In particular, the iOS 6 update apparently breaks web standards (and a number of web applications) by incorrectly caching HTTP POST reponses that it's forbidden from caching by the HTTP specification. It also apparently manages to break HTTP polling which a lot of web applications still rely on. And that's even before getting into the obvious user-visible breakage like maps...
Unless I'm missing something, that comment's a reply to someone asking whether the update process for Android phones which had official updates to the latest version was as smooth as Apple's update process. To which the answer is indeed yes, and it's been that way since back when Apple's updates were still multi-hundred-megabyte monstrosities that required a computer and a very reliable Internet connection (since they apparently couldn't resume downloads).
Well, Apple did put in a lot of effort to make sure that, unlike on other platforms, there's no way for users to downgrade back to an older version if they realise that the new version is horribly broken...
Actually, I don't think it used to be against the rules to (say) use the Twitter APIs to automatically create a summary of your own tweets each day and post them to your blog, or dispay them in a live sidebar, or anything else you'd like. It was only the recent API rules change that forbade all that. According to the current rules, the only way you're allowed to export your own tweets from Twitter is manually to a file on your own computer. Any other method of exporting, including automating the download-new-file process, is now verboten.
Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems.
Of course, it's now against the rules to use the Twitter API to detect tweets about earthquakes and notify you about them. You can data-mine Twitter after the fact in order to create nice news stories about how Twitter was the first to know about the earthquake (so long as you pay them lots of dosh), you just can't do anything useful with that at the time.
Perhaps you'd care to explain why the politicians who are "losing elections because of fraud" and passing these laws are also systematically shutting down DMV offices in poor, black areas and opening more in white Republican-leaning areas, even though that increases the odds of their supposedly important anti-fraud measures getting thrown out by the courts? Actually, you don't need to, because all the available evidence shows that voter fraud is far too rare to affects the results and that the actual way these politicians will benefit from voter ID laws is because they disenfranchise groups likely to vote for their opponents. Unless they're stupid the politicians passing these laws know that.
Because requring ID to vote gives politicians another incentive to put up further hurdles to obtaining ID in order to disenfranchise groups likely to vote for the opposition, and in fact they have done so in some states for exactly this reason? Voter ID requirements aren't a side distraction from the issue of unfair hurdles to getting ID, they're actually part of the problem.
In many places it used to be the case that only property owners could vote. This made it much more likely that only those with the best interests of their community could vote.
No. No it didn't. In particular, we abolished that requirement here in the UK (for men anyway) because after the First World War it was obvious that the Government had acted against the best interests of a very large chunk of the population who couldn't vote and many of them had actually died brutally and pointlessly at a young age because of that. Also, the survivors probably knew that and were trained to fight and use guns.
It absolutely is a deliberate, intentional attempt to disenfranchise black people - to the point that Republican politicians and administrators in some states are systematically shutting down DMV offices in poor, Democrat-leaning, mostly black areas in order to make it even harder for the people they don't want to vote to get the ID they're no requiring in order to vote.
Boycotts don't work. See for example questions 2.7 and 2.7.1 here. Even if a supermajority of people believe that something a company is doing is wrong and horrific, there are some pretty fundamental economic reasons why a boycott don't work that seem to be borne out by their actual failure to drive companies out of business over things that the majority of the population do actually care about.
Pretty much. For instance, the Nvidia-developed and nominally open source nv driver for their graphics hardware was full of cryptic magic numbers dotted everywhere and seriously lacking in comments.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't pay any payroll taxes on assembly-line robots, since robots are neither on the payroll nor indeed human.
Last I heard, libav had managed to piss off a fairly large chunk of the developer base too through the really disruptive way they handled their fork.
The XMOS chips are quite close to a transputer, though sadly not terribly open.
Also, even modern FPGAs aren't fast enough to "bit-bang an LVDS/HDMI/CSI interface with little more than an amp"... they all have dedicated, hardwired hardware for it if they support it at all.
Find something else (that came out after the 80s) that makes it as easy to get started in programming.
Yeah, they can just plug it in and start tapping away... oh wait, no they can't, because they don't have keyboards and monitors since it's "not a fucking desktop pc" and apparently doesn't need them. Whoops.
As a mathematician, you ought to understand global optimization encountering local minima in a high-dimensional space.
Is there anything out there that doesn't use simulated annealing to reduce the chance of getting wedged in an undesirable local minima somewhere these days?
As a side note, if your best anti-boycott source is someone who uses an imaginary word as a gender-neutral pronoun and an implausible scenario to argue that boycotts don't work, you might want to find a better source.
What exactly is so implausible about the scenario there? It's a simplification to make the discussion clearer, obviously, but it's essentially the same as the very real problem of (say) Walmart offering lower prices than their competitors through unethical practices that most people would object to. Which, funnily enough, was the exact problem that boycotts were being offered up as a solution for.
Ah, this tactic. The nice thing about this particular bullshit derailing tactic is that there's always someone else who's worse off, so you can use it to effectively stonewall any discussion of any social problem and make sure nothing gets done about any of them. The other nice thing is that - by definition - anyone who can actually talk about their problems is better off than someone who can't, so you can use it to stop anyone talking about issues that affect them.
It's a very convenient way of looking like you care about the poor, the disenfranchised, ... whilst you're actually making sure that nothing gets done to help them. Not very imaginative though; been done before a billion times.
The current "hate" is of the sort "I don't want a ground zero Mosque just like a Japanese wouldn't want Disneyland Hiroshima"
No, the current "hate" is of the sort "Any mosque built in New York City is a Ground Zero mosque and a deliberate and malicious attempt to mock good (Christian) Americans, because it's impossible that there might be groups of Muslims in New Yorn City who actually want to practice their religion, and even if they are they need to respect our nutty theories". Can you see how that kind of dehumanisation is likely lead to other, more nasty forms of hate?
Errrm, they already do search competing video services too. They have done since before video search was integrated in the main search page. Try searching for South by Dave Otto (just plucking a random video off the Vimeo front page) for example.
They're competitors who don't want to compete on a level playing field. I've seen a whole bunch of these so-called vertical search engines, and Google delayed far too long in downranking them - not only were they useless, they'd got so good at gaming Google's search results that they were starting to make Google itself useless for many searches. I've no doubt they managed to make a bit of money by making the Google results useless and hoping people would click their ads in desperation, but it was a pretty awful experience for actual users. That's before we even get started on Microsoft's filing attempting to force Google to make its search less functional than Bing's. (They're using the exact same stuff they complain about Google doing as a major selling point of Bing, called "Bing Instant Answers").
Level playing field, my ass.
Moreover, a majority of "search" boxes default to Google, as opposed to a customer making a choice.
At least they allow consumers to make a choice. Microsoft's been paying various mobile phone providers to set search on the phones they sell to Bing and not allow users to change it, for instance. They're the only Android phones out there which don't allow you to change your search provider despite Google creating Android.
It's entirely relevant, because I'm pretty sure that (as one of the main organisations pushing the EU to fine Google) Microsoft's actually relying on the fact that it's trivial to switch away from Google search in order to benefit from these antitrust actions. If the EU does place restrictions on Google, Bing will suddenly have better search results than Google by virtue of still being allowed to give relevant context-specific results for things like maps. I expect they have the advertising campaign all set up and ready to go - they've already advertised it as a way in which Bing is better than Google, now they can use the EU to make that true.
That's not good enough. The point of antitrust law is to keep all markets competitive and driving innovation. For that to happen people have to be free to choose the best search engine for them and the best social network and the best maps, etc.
Except in this case it'll have the opposite effect, because people want search engines to actually give them useful information and (this is the kicker) the company leading the anti-trust complaint against Google knows this, because they're a Microsoft subsidiary which provides part of the equivalent functionality in Bing.
Apple doesn't require AT&T to charge extra for FaceTime over cellular, but I'm pretty sure that's not actually what the comment you're replying to says. They did deliberately add special code to allow carriers to charge extra for it or disable it altogether which certainly makes them complicit at the very least..
Yeah. In particular, the iOS 6 update apparently breaks web standards (and a number of web applications) by incorrectly caching HTTP POST reponses that it's forbidden from caching by the HTTP specification. It also apparently manages to break HTTP polling which a lot of web applications still rely on. And that's even before getting into the obvious user-visible breakage like maps...
Unless I'm missing something, that comment's a reply to someone asking whether the update process for Android phones which had official updates to the latest version was as smooth as Apple's update process. To which the answer is indeed yes, and it's been that way since back when Apple's updates were still multi-hundred-megabyte monstrosities that required a computer and a very reliable Internet connection (since they apparently couldn't resume downloads).
Well, Apple did put in a lot of effort to make sure that, unlike on other platforms, there's no way for users to downgrade back to an older version if they realise that the new version is horribly broken...
Actually, I don't think it used to be against the rules to (say) use the Twitter APIs to automatically create a summary of your own tweets each day and post them to your blog, or dispay them in a live sidebar, or anything else you'd like. It was only the recent API rules change that forbade all that. According to the current rules, the only way you're allowed to export your own tweets from Twitter is manually to a file on your own computer. Any other method of exporting, including automating the download-new-file process, is now verboten.
Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems.
Of course, it's now against the rules to use the Twitter API to detect tweets about earthquakes and notify you about them. You can data-mine Twitter after the fact in order to create nice news stories about how Twitter was the first to know about the earthquake (so long as you pay them lots of dosh), you just can't do anything useful with that at the time.
Perhaps you'd care to explain why the politicians who are "losing elections because of fraud" and passing these laws are also systematically shutting down DMV offices in poor, black areas and opening more in white Republican-leaning areas, even though that increases the odds of their supposedly important anti-fraud measures getting thrown out by the courts? Actually, you don't need to, because all the available evidence shows that voter fraud is far too rare to affects the results and that the actual way these politicians will benefit from voter ID laws is because they disenfranchise groups likely to vote for their opponents. Unless they're stupid the politicians passing these laws know that.
Because requring ID to vote gives politicians another incentive to put up further hurdles to obtaining ID in order to disenfranchise groups likely to vote for the opposition, and in fact they have done so in some states for exactly this reason? Voter ID requirements aren't a side distraction from the issue of unfair hurdles to getting ID, they're actually part of the problem.
In many places it used to be the case that only property owners could vote. This made it much more likely that only those with the best interests of their community could vote.
No. No it didn't. In particular, we abolished that requirement here in the UK (for men anyway) because after the First World War it was obvious that the Government had acted against the best interests of a very large chunk of the population who couldn't vote and many of them had actually died brutally and pointlessly at a young age because of that. Also, the survivors probably knew that and were trained to fight and use guns.
It absolutely is a deliberate, intentional attempt to disenfranchise black people - to the point that Republican politicians and administrators in some states are systematically shutting down DMV offices in poor, Democrat-leaning, mostly black areas in order to make it even harder for the people they don't want to vote to get the ID they're no requiring in order to vote.
Boycotts don't work. See for example questions 2.7 and 2.7.1 here. Even if a supermajority of people believe that something a company is doing is wrong and horrific, there are some pretty fundamental economic reasons why a boycott don't work that seem to be borne out by their actual failure to drive companies out of business over things that the majority of the population do actually care about.
Pretty much. For instance, the Nvidia-developed and nominally open source nv driver for their graphics hardware was full of cryptic magic numbers dotted everywhere and seriously lacking in comments.