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User: gnupun

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  1. Re: Oracle on Google Takes the Fight With Oracle To the Supreme Court · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    That's just 2 functions/methods. What if you designed thousands of methods, classes and their intricate relationships. The API is hit with developers and then a Google-like company simply comes along, takes your API headers, reimplements it, and starts selling products based on your work, without paying you a dime. Do you think that's fair, or legal?

  2. Re:Unicomp on The Greatest Keyboard Ever Made · · Score: 1

    I don't get what all the hype is about. I bought a used model M from ebay, and the keys were much harder to press than a cheap squishy keyboard. It was also quite loud. Disappointed...

  3. Re:Nobel prize for Microsoft advancement on Nobel Prize In Chemistry Awarded To Trio For Microscope Advancement · · Score: 1

    If they use the principles of physics to create technology that helps biologists and doctors scan the human body better than before, shouldn't it be a Nobel prize in biology or physics?

  4. Re: Yes yes yes on One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Software Or Robots By 2025, Says Gartner · · Score: 1

    We also need to separate jobs as being the sole provider of resources to the obsolete (in the future) humans. This can be accomplished, obviously, using robots and software.

  5. Re:The story on AIDS Origin Traced To 1920s Kinshasa · · Score: 1

    but it didn't spread because the people involved died quickly (not necessarily due to HIV, but due to the brutal nature of life in those places and times),

    For this to be true, for millions of years, people infected with the chimp virus did not have sex with females and did not live in a village type community where they could spread the disease. Instead, they lived a harsh, secluded life, devoid of human contact before dying. Is that true?

  6. Re:The story on AIDS Origin Traced To 1920s Kinshasa · · Score: 1

    HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, ... which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat.

    Okay, was there no monkey meat business before 1920s? Why did it make the jump only at that time? How exactly does a virus change from a chimp version to a human version?

  7. Re:What would I have instead? on UK Copyright Reforms Legalize Back-Ups, Protect Parody · · Score: 1

    To add to my previous reply, copyright laws have benefited publishers tremendously. The author, who spent decades of his/her life mastering the art of writing, only got paid for 70ish years (with a pittance royalty rate of 5 to 12%). Meanwhile, publishers and retailers have profited tremendously by simply printing and distributing those books for hundreds of years, and still do.

    If you prefer books in paper form, you either have to borrow from a library or pay the publisher and retailer. But you can also download the book, for free, from many websites, so that has probably reduced publisher profits.

  8. Re:What would I have instead? on UK Copyright Reforms Legalize Back-Ups, Protect Parody · · Score: 1

    But are you really able to get those books for free?

    Yep, I just download them from Project Gutenberg. I wonder what year they get to host free movies?

  9. Re:Hardware isn't Progressing on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 1

    You get 80% of the performance of a $570 i7 if you buy a $125 i3. For $250 you could get a dual processor i3 that was faster than an i7

    True, but Intel and AMD are creating artificial constraints that prevent you from running dual i3 cpus on a system. Today, to run a two-processor setup, you have buy an expensive workstation motherboard, expensive ECC DRAM, and lastly very expensive Xeon class CPUs that support multi processing. Such a system would easily exceed 2-3 times the price of a desktop i7 system.

  10. Re:YOU'RE AN IDIOT on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 1

    The days where "hand-coded assembly" was actually faster than optimized C/C++ are long gone. Modern CPU pipelining and out-of-order execution simply isn't something you can optimize for in your head any more.

    Plus, don't forget that most of the Windows kernel was written back in the day when every instruction cycle mattered, and MS took that very seriously (and they certainly hired top talent in the Gates days).

    Win95 had a lot of asm stuff, but NT (and 2k and xp) did not have much asm clever code because it contained mostly portable C. When NT was released, it was more stable and architecturally better than win95. But win95 was faster on the then current hardware because it had a lot more asm code than NT. When the hardware got faster, NT's slowness became less apparent.

    Hand-coded assembly will always beat compiled code, but it costs 10-20x to create and maintain that stuff. That's why OSes are written in C (and also the fact that C is portable among multiple processors). Even in modern OSes like windows 10, linux or freebsd, you'll find many performance critical routines written in asm.

  11. Re:YOU'RE AN IDIOT on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 1

    WHAT, SPECIFICALLY was added?

    Who knows? But with each progressive version of iOS, os x or windows, the time taken to complete the same task INCREASES for unknown reasons (except to make hardware and software vendors more money). Note that the task has not been visibly improved or changed, but somehow its performance is a lot lower on older hardware.

    If windows were to be rewritten in hand-coded assembly, and all fluff features were removed, who knows, the overall system performance might increase 3x.

  12. Re:What would I have instead? on UK Copyright Reforms Legalize Back-Ups, Protect Parody · · Score: 1

    3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.

    Lulz, if that's the case then I and many other people are simply going to wait for the copyrights to expire and get the books, music and movies for free. The quality of art is steadily deteriorating anyway. So 10-year old art is very likely better than anything modern and we get that for free. Please tell your lawmarkes to change the laws.

  13. Re:The Internet of Things, aka on Factory IoT Saves Intel $9 Million · · Score: 1

    the next giant leap in ubiquitous mass surveillance.

    And to add insult to injury, we are supposed to pay the people spying on us by buying their products.

  14. Re: FP? on David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures · · Score: 1

    ...copied from java.

  15. Re:FP? on David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures · · Score: 2

    A tall person is over 6 foot. that has a nice ring to it. 1.8 metres is not human friendly. A foot is about the size of an adult foot, it makes sense.

    1.8 Metres is just as user friendly as foot when you're brought up in it.

    How about we create a metric friendly unit for human measurement called fut.
    1 fut = 30 cm
    1 fut = 10 dinches
    1 dinch = 3 cm

    So, instead of a height of imperial 5"8' or a non-intuitive 172cm, we get a more intuitive 5.7 futs.

  16. Re:FP? on David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures · · Score: 1

    When Australia converted to metric, the building industry very intelligently decided that mm is to be used exclusively and cm are not allowed.

    So, the specs would say the height of a 5-story building is 18,000 mm instead of 180m ?

  17. Re:This is test equipment not a robot on Robotic Taster Will Judge 'Real Thai Food' · · Score: 1

    Can't they simply hire some thai cuisine experts to taste and certify that a restaurant is up to standards (something like "XYZ restaurant is certified by the govt. of thailand taste testers") instead of building a (pie-in-the-sky) machine? Other countries could should probably do the same.

  18. Re:Intention? on Microsoft Co-opts Ice Bucket Challenge Idea To Promote Coding In Latin America · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Exactly, so if we changed the school curriculum to teach business courses (including sales and marketing) at an early age, there would be competition to companies like microsoft. This would lead to more businesses being created. With more businesses around, there would be intense competition for qualified or even average workers and employee wages would have to rise.

    Right now, business is taught at a very late age to students -- near or above the age of 20 and is often prohibitively expensive. In other words, most people are taught to be employees. People with an aptitude for business should be taught early in the same way math is taught at an early age.

  19. And you keep that low-level control by calling objc from Swift on rare occasions. But for normal apps, objc is quite tedious. Why do you think Apple invented Swift if objc was already good enough? Hint: it wasn't.

  20. I ask in ignorance, why would I design the GUI in obj-C when I have X-tools/interface builder to do all that for me? I just connect the dots, right?

    Interface Builder generates a bunch of boilerplate obj-c code for you. But anytime you need to add your own references etc or do anything other than simple stuff, you have modify that code. It's not as easy to use as C#, VB or Delphi because it exposes all the plumbing of the GUI.

  21. Re:Obj-C on Ask Slashdot: Swift Or Objective-C As New iOS Developer's 1st Language? · · Score: -1, Troll

    Have you actually used objc? It involves writing tons of boilerplate code for the GUI (compared to MS .net GUI code or even Java). Even the smallest mistake in your manual reference counting code means strange errors/crashes down the line. It is also very low level like C which means a lot of time wasted in low level details which is great for systems programming but not your quickie $.99 iOS app.

    There's no reason to use a language more difficult than Java/Python unless you really need the performance.

  22. Re:huh? on 2015 Corvette Valet Mode Recorder Illegal In Some States · · Score: 1

    What about the inside of an employee's cube? Do you still think it's okay to violate someone's privacy just because someone uses your equipment/space?

  23. Re:My Compact Flurorscents die on The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy · · Score: 1

    Do you switch them on/off frequently? If yes, that will probably shorten their life.

  24. Re:Fine! on Microsoft On US Immigration: It's Our Way Or the Canadian Highway · · Score: 1

    In retaliation, we the people should demand that the government ditch all Microsoft products and go open source!

    And how does that solve the problem? Since open source does not pay its developers (in most cases), developers don't get paid whether MS outsources or if open source products are used.

  25. Re:And? on Rosetta Code Study Weighs In On the Programming Language Debate · · Score: 1

    So it's telling us just what we already knew? Interesting.

    Really? I didn't know until now that Ruby was slightly faster than Java or that Python is only slightly slower than C#. This is referring to the graph in the "Which programming languages have the best runtime performance?" Crap study.