The sad truth is that you can kill people with a cricket bat if you try hard enough. Disposing of nukes, or guns or cricket bats won't stop violence. The only way to ensure lasting peace is through diplomacy and not engaging in international dipshittery.
Do you really think that you can find more skilled people willing to work for free than Microsoft can hire, given that Microsoft have vast amounts of money.
Note the word skilled. Most software is not something a total amateur can muck in and fix because they will do more harm than good. Most companies think that programmers (on average) only become productive after a few months on the job. In fact their productivity continues to increase until two years on the job. By that point a programmer is a sort of guru on the subsystem they worked on.
Now Microsoft can afford to hire a lot of people, pay the ones who become gurus very well and sack the ones who don't make it. Given this steep learning curve, it seems pretty naive to think that giving average members of the public source code actually buys you much.
Actually, I'm sure it doesn't. I've released open source stuff myself. Tens of thousands of people have downloaded it, and hundreds of people have reported it working or not working. I've only had one bug report that suggested a fix, and that was a bad integer type caste that was obvious to anyone that didn't write it.
The code I at work is much worse than this. Even experienced people can quite easily break it when they change it. In practice companies only allow a small number of people even inside them to touch code because that is the only way to stop it being destroyed. Especially these days where people build big systems in C and and very scared of security and stability issues.
Most programmers are actually pretty awful - if you assign a bug to them they will most likely not be able to fix it properly without breaking something else. Only a few percent are actually guaranteed manage. Those people are usually very busy though, it's not like many of them have the freetime to work on things they are not paid for.
Of course quite a lot of the core group in any open source project are paid. However then it comes down to a bidding war for skills and Microsoft have far more money that the open source companies, because they can still sell software as opposed to just services.
Of course the GPL doesn't prohibit you from selling software, but it does prohibit you from keeping your source secret. That means that anyone else can come in and take that source, compile it and undercut you on the binary. So you're pretty much forced to sell services and provide the source/binaries for free. However that business model, combined with OSS's low market share means that the open source world will inevitably have less money than Microsoft, who make $50 for every PC sold with a Windows OEM license.
What's interesting about that graph is that it shows a decrease at all scales. I can agree that a drastic drop after IPO is expected. If the business was sound though, you'd expect it to reach some equilibrium level. Ok, the general stock market variation would be superimposed on that to some extent. LNUX isn't like that though, it looks like it's still dropping.
Developers with the most signoffs Andrew Morton 1422 13.7% Linus Torvalds 1366 13.2% David S. Miller 483 4.7% Jeff Garzik 331 3.2% Greg Kroah-Hartman 269 2.6% Al Viro 241 2.3% Paul Mackerras 232 2.2% Andi Kleen 177 1.7% Mauro Carvalho Chehab 170 1.6% Russell King 166 1.6% Adrian Bunk 120 1.2% Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 119 1.1% Ralf Baechle 117 1.1% James Bottomley 109 1.1% Patrick McHardy 96 0.9% Jiri Slaby 94 0.9% Avi Kivity 87 0.8% Josef Sipek 79 0.8% Paul Mundt 78 0.8% Gerrit Renker 78 0.8%
It drops off I'd say exponentially. I'd guess there are much more people working on Windows 7 at Microsoft.
This shows the benefit of Microsoft's development model. They have an (effectively) open beta so everyone interested will have downloaded the beta and tested it. Closed source, signed binaries and software that phones home (or DRM as slashdot inaccurately calls it) means that they can give away the beta and be confident that most (note: not all) people will stop using it when it expires and buy the full version.
In the meantime the software is going to be widely used and people will check for exploits like this. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow as ESR pointed out. There are more eyeballs on Windows 7 than Linux, and more programmers working to fix the bugs the eyeballs find, because Windows is a multibillion dollar product. Even more profoundly, it's not just bugs that getting fixed. Any features in Vista that irritate people, like UAC are getting changed as well. That can only happen with commercial software. If it was FOSS the developers would just tell us that security was important and we mere users were idiots for not understandind this. With Windows they were forced to change things improve security in Vista and userfriendliness in 7.
Windows isn't even a monopoly either. Vistas flaws have seen the OS X market share increase. In response to that they are working hard to fix those flaws for 7.
This is the closed source empire, striking back. Don't expect Window's market share to drop by much if they keep behaving like this.
I don't have a problem with violence in good movies, e.g. I liked Eastern Promises immensely. It has good characters and an essentially redemptive message. What I do I have a problem with is violence in things like Sin City which doesn't really have any message or originality at all. It's like porn really, except its about violence rather than sex.
That said I liked 300. It's all kinds of a bad movie but it's so over the top it was fun. Also most of the recipients of the violence kind of deserved it and the violence was, to use a phrase that is often used about nudity, integral to the plot.
Re:Yeah, but Verhoeven recognized...
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
I don't think it's unreasonable to take the book's "design principle" that only veterans are allowed to vote and project that into a society which is military dominated and expansionist like the movie did, even if that society was not the one the design principle was supposed to create.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)
Verhoeven thought the militarism of the the Starship Troopers and their absolute contempt for their enemies reminds him of the SS troopers that "invaded his homeland". His version of Starship Troopers is a parody. The Federation in the movie are the bad guys, they've started an unnecessary war and vastly underestimated their opponent's strengths. What we're watching at the start of the movie is propaganda from inside a fascist society that is in the middle of its own version of the Nazis defeat at Stalingrad. Now I know the Heinlein was no Nazi, but I think the idea that only veterans can vote would be more likely to lead to an militarist, imperialist society than the libertarian one he presumably favoured. Heinlein's design principle for society was wrong. What I liked about the movie was the way it was marketed as Beverly Hills in space versus big bugs, but it's actually much darker. As Verhoeven put it "we used to to joke that action movies are fascist so I decided to make a fascist action movie".
That article at sff.net you linked to completely misses this. You miss this too, even though after 9/11 I saw numerous conversation on American TV which seemed to echo this scene
NET CORRESPONDENT: Some say the bugs were provoked by human attempts to colonize within the AQZ, that a "live and let live" policy is preferable to war with the bugs... JOHNNY Yeah, well, I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill'em all
The movie even slyly reminds us the 'hero' flunked math. Verhoeven is subverting the action movie idea that the hero is always right and everything would be ok if he had absolute power. The Führerprinzip of most action movies in fact.
It's sort of bizarre that people who claim to like Watchmen because it subverts the superhero idea can't see that the Starship Troopers movie is a parody of the novel, it's not meant to be a faithful adaptation.
The stock price for LNUX (the owner of slashdot) has dropped from $242 at IPO to $0.82 now. Even if you look over 1 year it still seems to show a downward trend - i.e. the 52 week high was 2.18 and the low was 0.32. It's still deflating, just very slowly.
We nearly doubled our average CPM rate during the quarter from $11.28 to $20.63. Our top advertisers during the first quarter included AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Rack Space and HP. (Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)
The things these numbers seem highly optimistic to me. I don't think I've ever clicked on an advert from slashdot. Most of them I block and the ones I don't block I ignore.
It's supremely tasteless, too: a pregnant woman is shot in the stomach by one of our superhero protagonists; two more of them laugh about a man being thrown down a lift shaft; a man is burned alive with cooking fat by a fourth; and a six-year-old girl is torn apart by dogs.
Watchmen is unwatchable - a grotesque squandering of time, talent and technology.
This despicable trash will find an audience among sad sociopaths, deranged pseudo-intellectuals and brutalised, immature men of all ages. I just hope that there aren't enough of them to make it a hit. If there are, God help cinema.
Yeah, I know Daily Mail sucks. But if the first paragraph is accurate, I'd tend to agree with the last one too. Hell it's a fair summary of the sort of people who like movies like Sin City.
Yeah, we get it. Sometimes though you have to wonder if there is much difference between pretending to be in a cult for 'ironic' reasons and actually being in a cult.
It's not as simple as that. Medicare in the US is already too expensive, far more per decade than all the discretionary wars, bailouts and other questionable spending. And the coverage is very poor
The Taiwanese system uses smartcards to keep track of expenses and clamp down on fraud. It seems that the US needs to tackle inefficiencies inside the Medicare system before it scales it up to a national health care system like Taiwan. Still if you ignore the siren voices telling you to pour money into a corrupt system and reform it, you could end up spending USD20 per month and getting healthcare that is probably on a par with North Europe, where it costs many hundreds of dollars.
On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rateâ"and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).
Actually even if you don't decide to scale it up, you still need to do something about the inefficiencies, or this will happen
The costs of Medicare doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. According to the 2004 "Green Book" of the House Ways and Means Committee, Medicare expenditures from the American government were $256.8 billion in fiscal year 2002. Beneficiary premiums are highly subsidized, and net outlays for the program, accounting for the premiums paid by subscribers, were $230.9 billion.
Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007, or 16% of all federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense. Given the current pattern of spending growth, maintaining Medicare's financing over the long-term may well require significant changes.
According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019. Shortly after the release of the report, the Chief Actuary testified that the insolvency of the system could be pushed back by 18 months if Medicare Advantage plans that provide more health care services than traditional Medicare and pass savings onto beneficiaries were paid at the same rate as the traditional fee-for-service program. He also testified that the 10-year cost of Medicare drug benefit is 37% lower than originally projected in 2003, and 17% percent lower than last year's projections. The New York Times wrote in January 2009 that Social Security and Medicare "have proved almost sacrosanct in political terms, even as they threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run."
Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is projected to grow dramatically in coming decades. While the same demographic trends that affect Social Security also affect Medicare, rapidly rising medical prices appear a more important cause of projected spending increases. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated tha
Actually if you want a model for the US, Taiwan isn't too bad. They have national healthcare but it is far cheaper than the Euro model. In fact you pay far less taxes in Taiwan than you'd pay in the US, and you still won't lose your home if your kid gets sick.
The most amazing thing about Taiwan's health program is its affordability. Not only is it dirt cheap to see a doctor or dentist (~3USD), but taxes are also far lower than in the US. Back when I was working in the US, I only got to take home about 60% of my paycheck (after my employer paid half the SS). The medical insurance was terrible, too. Just seeing a dentist for a regular cleaning and checkup cost about 200USD after insurance.
Here, in Taiwan, the most I've had to pay in taxes is about 10%. That includes health insurance. It makes me wonder how the heck the US spends all the taxes it brings in
You'd be better off sending them on a team building trip and hiring psychos to kill half of them. That would select for a blend of luck and ass kicking ability which is essential, given that in the long run you want to replace your expensive consultant psychos with employed ones to cut down on the costs of team building trips.
Don't you think this just means that America will have fewer people but those people will be risk takers (and one suspects heart breakers too). Plus, they will be the lucky half of the risk takers. Plus they have a Masters.
The idea is that you only interact with these strings by calling run time library runctions RtlXxx rather than fiddling around with pointers. It's actually quite OK once you learn how it works.
Symbian is obsessed with string descriptors too, and it has far too many types of them. You also need to push them onto a clean up stack so they can be freed if your code "leaves", a sort of pseudo exception.
Even simple string handling ends up incomprehensible gibberish.
_LIT(KFred, "Fred");// Allocate a heap descriptor of max length 4 HBufC* heapBuf = KFred().AllocLC();
_LIT(KCyril, "Cyril"); TPtr ptr(heapBuf->Des());// Modifiable TPtr over heapBuf data area ptr = KCyril();// This would panic because max length (4) is exceeded// Instead, we need to do a reallocation// Leave on cleanup stack in case the realloc fails and a leave occurs heapBuf = heapBuf->ReAllocL(5);// Realloc succeeded, but heapBuf pointer may have changed// We must update the pointer stored on the cleanup stack CleanupStack::Pop();// Push it off// Push it back on again CleanupStack::PushL(heapBuf);
Note this guy knows what he's doing, code from someone who doesn't is much worse than this. Good job he knows that he has to update the pointer on the cleanup stakc beacuse ReAllocL might have changed it.
Have you seen that picture "\0 RLY"? It's an O RLY owl with no eyes or beak, just feathers.
Having truncated strings with zero bytes for various hacks, that really makes me laugh. Unfortunately Google image search doesn't let you search for "\0 RLY".
I like linux because it gives me flexibility. You like MacOS X because it is easy to use. I like Wordpress because it is simple. You like Joomla because it is adaptable.
Fair enough, but how do you explain all the Macbooks visible at this Drupal Conference?:-)
There were people who were proud to call themselves tech geeks and a few who admitted being near-Luddites, and there was at least one person who called herself a radical technologist. They joined book publishers, librarians and computer consultants, some of whom had come from as far as Ireland and Brazil, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday for something akin to a happening for the Internet age â" Drupal Camp.
"Radical technologists" and self proclaimed geeks all gather and socialise. All of whom are very keen to talk eloquently to the NYT and their blogs about what sort of geek they are and (I'm guessing) very few of whom would be happy coding away on their own.
Taiwan != China. Actually TSMC has been making chipsets for the Atom for some time, so I'm told. The Atom itself was made by Intel, on its latest process. TSMC lags behing Intel in process technology, but apparently that no longer matters for Atom. As anantech put it
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3522&p=2 The other thing to keep in mind is that Moorestown, the first Atom SoC, will be built at 45nm while the first 32nm CPUs are shipping from Intel. Another way of putting it is that Atom processors don't appear to need the latest manufacturing process, just one that's mature and good enough. TSMC is transitioning to 40nm now, so Atom SoCs that are made there won't really be that far behind those made at Intel, if at all.
Actually if you read the rest of the article, there's a deeper reason for this. Historically chips for something like a cellphone take an ARM core and some custom peripherals, integrate them onto a chip and then fab them at somewhere like TSMC. Intel has never done this - they selll chips not IP. In fact one of the reasons the XBox360 moved to PPC was because Intel would not license their core as IP to be integrated into an ASIC. Intel Atoms on a TSMC process would be cheaper, but the real benefit would be (as Anandtech put it)
The Lincroft and Langwell blocks are done by Intel. The PMIC and Evans Peak blocks are partly Intel and partly 3rd party IP that are intermixed. Evans Peak in particular looks like it's going to be home to all sorts of IP depending on the application. A smart phone Atom SoC design might integrate a 3G modem here, while an iPod would opt for something else.
This makes sense if Atom is supposed to be competing with ARM. Maybe in the future they will sell Atoms as a hard macro like Arm do.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't you go to the UK before writing it off, rather than doing so based on a "UK is a policestate" meme on slashdot?
Microsoft are clearly attempting to prevent competitors to the boot menu in Windows.
The sad truth is that you can kill people with a cricket bat if you try hard enough. Disposing of nukes, or guns or cricket bats won't stop violence. The only way to ensure lasting peace is through diplomacy and not engaging in international dipshittery.
You should talk softly but have a really big bat.
Do you really think that you can find more skilled people willing to work for free than Microsoft can hire, given that Microsoft have vast amounts of money.
Note the word skilled. Most software is not something a total amateur can muck in and fix because they will do more harm than good. Most companies think that programmers (on average) only become productive after a few months on the job. In fact their productivity continues to increase until two years on the job. By that point a programmer is a sort of guru on the subsystem they worked on.
Now Microsoft can afford to hire a lot of people, pay the ones who become gurus very well and sack the ones who don't make it. Given this steep learning curve, it seems pretty naive to think that giving average members of the public source code actually buys you much.
Actually, I'm sure it doesn't. I've released open source stuff myself. Tens of thousands of people have downloaded it, and hundreds of people have reported it working or not working. I've only had one bug report that suggested a fix, and that was a bad integer type caste that was obvious to anyone that didn't write it.
The code I at work is much worse than this. Even experienced people can quite easily break it when they change it. In practice companies only allow a small number of people even inside them to touch code because that is the only way to stop it being destroyed. Especially these days where people build big systems in C and and very scared of security and stability issues.
Most programmers are actually pretty awful - if you assign a bug to them they will most likely not be able to fix it properly without breaking something else. Only a few percent are actually guaranteed manage. Those people are usually very busy though, it's not like many of them have the freetime to work on things they are not paid for.
Of course quite a lot of the core group in any open source project are paid. However then it comes down to a bidding war for skills and Microsoft have far more money that the open source companies, because they can still sell software as opposed to just services.
Of course the GPL doesn't prohibit you from selling software, but it does prohibit you from keeping your source secret. That means that anyone else can come in and take that source, compile it and undercut you on the binary. So you're pretty much forced to sell services and provide the source/binaries for free. However that business model, combined with OSS's low market share means that the open source world will inevitably have less money than Microsoft, who make $50 for every PC sold with a Windows OEM license.
150 years from now the machines will be using 'obsolete' humans to do stuff like this.
What's interesting about that graph is that it shows a decrease at all scales. I can agree that a drastic drop after IPO is expected. If the business was sound though, you'd expect it to reach some equilibrium level. Ok, the general stock market variation would be superimposed on that to some extent. LNUX isn't like that though, it looks like it's still dropping.
Well most of the Linux eyeballs are not developers either, people have looked at the authors of signoffs on Linux
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/
Developers with the most signoffs
Andrew Morton 1422 13.7%
Linus Torvalds 1366 13.2%
David S. Miller 483 4.7%
Jeff Garzik 331 3.2%
Greg Kroah-Hartman 269 2.6%
Al Viro 241 2.3%
Paul Mackerras 232 2.2%
Andi Kleen 177 1.7%
Mauro Carvalho Chehab 170 1.6%
Russell King 166 1.6%
Adrian Bunk 120 1.2%
Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 119 1.1%
Ralf Baechle 117 1.1%
James Bottomley 109 1.1%
Patrick McHardy 96 0.9%
Jiri Slaby 94 0.9%
Avi Kivity 87 0.8%
Josef Sipek 79 0.8%
Paul Mundt 78 0.8%
Gerrit Renker 78 0.8%
It drops off I'd say exponentially. I'd guess there are much more people working on Windows 7 at Microsoft.
This shows the benefit of Microsoft's development model. They have an (effectively) open beta so everyone interested will have downloaded the beta and tested it. Closed source, signed binaries and software that phones home (or DRM as slashdot inaccurately calls it) means that they can give away the beta and be confident that most (note: not all) people will stop using it when it expires and buy the full version.
In the meantime the software is going to be widely used and people will check for exploits like this. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow as ESR pointed out. There are more eyeballs on Windows 7 than Linux, and more programmers working to fix the bugs the eyeballs find, because Windows is a multibillion dollar product. Even more profoundly, it's not just bugs that getting fixed. Any features in Vista that irritate people, like UAC are getting changed as well. That can only happen with commercial software. If it was FOSS the developers would just tell us that security was important and we mere users were idiots for not understandind this. With Windows they were forced to change things improve security in Vista and userfriendliness in 7.
Windows isn't even a monopoly either. Vistas flaws have seen the OS X market share increase. In response to that they are working hard to fix those flaws for 7.
This is the closed source empire, striking back. Don't expect Window's market share to drop by much if they keep behaving like this.
I don't have a problem with violence in good movies, e.g. I liked Eastern Promises immensely. It has good characters and an essentially redemptive message. What I do I have a problem with is violence in things like Sin City which doesn't really have any message or originality at all. It's like porn really, except its about violence rather than sex.
That said I liked 300. It's all kinds of a bad movie but it's so over the top it was fun. Also most of the recipients of the violence kind of deserved it and the violence was, to use a phrase that is often used about nudity, integral to the plot.
I don't think it's unreasonable to take the book's "design principle" that only veterans are allowed to vote and project that into a society which is military dominated and expansionist like the movie did, even if that society was not the one the design principle was supposed to create.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I was hoping this wouldn't get screwed up, and signs indicate that it hasn't.
The surest way to screw it up would have been to get Tim Burton or Paul Verhoeven to direct it; they don't seem to be able to make a movie based on a book without wanting to change things and put their own fingerprints on it. (I'd love to watch a Starship Troopers movie. Too bad we didn't actually get one.)
Verhoeven thought the militarism of the the Starship Troopers and their absolute contempt for their enemies reminds him of the SS troopers that "invaded his homeland". His version of Starship Troopers is a parody. The Federation in the movie are the bad guys, they've started an unnecessary war and vastly underestimated their opponent's strengths. What we're watching at the start of the movie is propaganda from inside a fascist society that is in the middle of its own version of the Nazis defeat at Stalingrad. Now I know the Heinlein was no Nazi, but I think the idea that only veterans can vote would be more likely to lead to an militarist, imperialist society than the libertarian one he presumably favoured. Heinlein's design principle for society was wrong. What I liked about the movie was the way it was marketed as Beverly Hills in space versus big bugs, but it's actually much darker. As Verhoeven put it "we used to to joke that action movies are fascist so I decided to make a fascist action movie".
That article at sff.net you linked to completely misses this. You miss this too, even though after 9/11 I saw numerous conversation on American TV which seemed to echo this scene
NET CORRESPONDENT: Some say the bugs were provoked by human attempts to colonize within the AQZ, that a "live and let live" policy is preferable to war with the bugs...
JOHNNY Yeah, well, I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill'em all
The movie even slyly reminds us the 'hero' flunked math. Verhoeven is subverting the action movie idea that the hero is always right and everything would be ok if he had absolute power. The Führerprinzip of most action movies in fact.
It's sort of bizarre that people who claim to like Watchmen because it subverts the superhero idea can't see that the Starship Troopers movie is a parody of the novel, it's not meant to be a faithful adaptation.
To summarize: "Watchmen is like Star Wars. You must experience it at age 18 or younger to appreciate it," is all bullshit.
Well it makes some assumptions about rates of emotional development, it's true.
The stock price for LNUX (the owner of slashdot) has dropped from $242 at IPO to $0.82 now. Even if you look over 1 year it still seems to show a downward trend - i.e. the 52 week high was 2.18 and the low was 0.32. It's still deflating, just very slowly.
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:LNUX
In fact a few days ago the transferred ownership of linux.com over to the non profit Linux foundation.
http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/press/2009/03/03/linux-foundation-to-build-new-linuxcom-community/
What does it all mean? I'm not sure. You have to wonder what LNUX's business model actually is. It seems to be web based advertising e.g. from here
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4701-how-much-is-slashdot-and-thus-va-linux-worth-lnux
We nearly doubled our average CPM rate during the quarter from $11.28 to $20.63. Our top advertisers during the first quarter included AMD, Microsoft, IBM, Rack Space and HP. (Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)
The things these numbers seem highly optimistic to me. I don't think I've ever clicked on an advert from slashdot. Most of them I block and the ones I don't block I ignore.
Actually the Daily Mail review had this
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1159801/Watchmen-Superheroes-sick-slick.html
It's supremely tasteless, too: a pregnant woman is shot in the stomach by one of our superhero protagonists; two more of them laugh about a man being thrown down a lift shaft; a man is burned alive with cooking fat by a fourth; and a six-year-old girl is torn apart by dogs.
Watchmen is unwatchable - a grotesque squandering of time, talent and technology.
This despicable trash will find an audience among sad sociopaths, deranged pseudo-intellectuals and brutalised, immature men of all ages. I just hope that there aren't enough of them to make it a hit. If there are, God help cinema.
Yeah, I know Daily Mail sucks. But if the first paragraph is accurate, I'd tend to agree with the last one too. Hell it's a fair summary of the sort of people who like movies like Sin City.
Yeah, we get it. Sometimes though you have to wonder if there is much difference between pretending to be in a cult for 'ironic' reasons and actually being in a cult.
brainf*ck.
What's with the auto-censordoody? Or are you just a sissy - too shy to use the expletive? And why the heck should I care?
Fixed that for you.
Apaches are kick ass Indians or equally kick ass combat helicopters.
It's not as simple as that. Medicare in the US is already too expensive, far more per decade than all the discretionary wars, bailouts and other questionable spending. And the coverage is very poor
The Taiwanese system uses smartcards to keep track of expenses and clamp down on fraud. It seems that the US needs to tackle inefficiencies inside the Medicare system before it scales it up to a national health care system like Taiwan. Still if you ignore the siren voices telling you to pour money into a corrupt system and reform it, you could end up spending USD20 per month and getting healthcare that is probably on a par with North Europe, where it costs many hundreds of dollars.
e.g.
http://deadlinepundit.blogspot.com/2008/02/taiwans-healthcare-lessons-in.html
On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rateâ"and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).
Actually even if you don't decide to scale it up, you still need to do something about the inefficiencies, or this will happen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medicare_and_Medicaid_GDP_Chart.svg
The US spends around 5% of GDP total on defense. Actually Medicate is already in trouble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
The costs of Medicare doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. According to the 2004 "Green Book" of the House Ways and Means Committee, Medicare expenditures from the American government were $256.8 billion in fiscal year 2002. Beneficiary premiums are highly subsidized, and net outlays for the program, accounting for the premiums paid by subscribers, were $230.9 billion.
Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007, or 16% of all federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense. Given the current pattern of spending growth, maintaining Medicare's financing over the long-term may well require significant changes.
According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019. Shortly after the release of the report, the Chief Actuary testified that the insolvency of the system could be pushed back by 18 months if Medicare Advantage plans that provide more health care services than traditional Medicare and pass savings onto beneficiaries were paid at the same rate as the traditional fee-for-service program. He also testified that the 10-year cost of Medicare drug benefit is 37% lower than originally projected in 2003, and 17% percent lower than last year's projections. The New York Times wrote in January 2009 that Social Security and Medicare "have proved almost sacrosanct in political terms, even as they threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run."
Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is projected to grow dramatically in coming decades. While the same demographic trends that affect Social Security also affect Medicare, rapidly rising medical prices appear a more important cause of projected spending increases. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated tha
Actually if you want a model for the US, Taiwan isn't too bad. They have national healthcare but it is far cheaper than the Euro model. In fact you pay far less taxes in Taiwan than you'd pay in the US, and you still won't lose your home if your kid gets sick.
http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2008/02/ian-williams-on-taiwans-health-care.html
The most amazing thing about Taiwan's health program is its affordability. Not only is it dirt cheap to see a doctor or dentist (~3USD), but taxes are also far lower than in the US. Back when I was working in the US, I only got to take home about 60% of my paycheck (after my employer paid half the SS). The medical insurance was terrible, too. Just seeing a dentist for a regular cleaning and checkup cost about 200USD after insurance.
Here, in Taiwan, the most I've had to pay in taxes is about 10%. That includes health insurance. It makes me wonder how the heck the US spends all the taxes it brings in
You'd be better off sending them on a team building trip and hiring psychos to kill half of them. That would select for a blend of luck and ass kicking ability which is essential, given that in the long run you want to replace your expensive consultant psychos with employed ones to cut down on the costs of team building trips.
Don't you think this just means that America will have fewer people but those people will be risk takers (and one suspects heart breakers too). Plus, they will be the lucky half of the risk takers. Plus they have a Masters.
Sounds pretty badass to me.
Windows mostly uses counted (unicode) strings in kernel mode
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa380518(VS.85).aspx
The idea is that you only interact with these strings by calling run time library runctions RtlXxx rather than fiddling around with pointers. It's actually quite OK once you learn how it works.
Symbian is obsessed with string descriptors too, and it has far too many types of them. You also need to push them onto a clean up stack so they can be freed if your code "leaves", a sort of pseudo exception.
Even simple string handling ends up incomprehensible gibberish.
http://descriptors.blogspot.com/2005/05/20-how-do-i-use-heap-based-buffer.html
E.g.
_LIT(KFred, "Fred"); // Allocate a heap descriptor of max length 4
HBufC* heapBuf = KFred().AllocLC();
_LIT(KCyril, "Cyril"); // Modifiable TPtr over heapBuf data area // This would panic because max length (4) is exceeded // Instead, we need to do a reallocation // Leave on cleanup stack in case the realloc fails and a leave occurs // Realloc succeeded, but heapBuf pointer may have changed // We must update the pointer stored on the cleanup stack // Push it off // Push it back on again
TPtr ptr(heapBuf->Des());
ptr = KCyril();
heapBuf = heapBuf->ReAllocL(5);
CleanupStack::Pop();
CleanupStack::PushL(heapBuf);
Note this guy knows what he's doing, code from someone who doesn't is much worse than this. Good job he knows that he has to update the pointer on the cleanup stakc beacuse ReAllocL might have changed it.
Have you seen that picture "\0 RLY"? It's an O RLY owl with no eyes or beak, just feathers.
Having truncated strings with zero bytes for various hacks, that really makes me laugh. Unfortunately Google image search doesn't let you search for "\0 RLY".
I like linux because it gives me flexibility. You like MacOS X because it is easy to use. I like Wordpress because it is simple. You like Joomla because it is adaptable.
Fair enough, but how do you explain all the Macbooks visible at this Drupal Conference? :-)
From your link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/nyregion/02open.html?ref=technology
There were people who were proud to call themselves tech geeks and a few who admitted being near-Luddites, and there was at least one person who called herself a radical technologist. They joined book publishers, librarians and computer consultants, some of whom had come from as far as Ireland and Brazil, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday for something akin to a happening for the Internet age â" Drupal Camp.
"Radical technologists" and self proclaimed geeks all gather and socialise. All of whom are very keen to talk eloquently to the NYT and their blogs about what sort of geek they are and (I'm guessing) very few of whom would be happy coding away on their own.
Does that answer your question?
Taiwan != China. Actually TSMC has been making chipsets for the Atom for some time, so I'm told. The Atom itself was made by Intel, on its latest process. TSMC lags behing Intel in process technology, but apparently that no longer matters for Atom. As anantech put it
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3522&p=2
The other thing to keep in mind is that Moorestown, the first Atom SoC, will be built at 45nm while the first 32nm CPUs are shipping from Intel. Another way of putting it is that Atom processors don't appear to need the latest manufacturing process, just one that's mature and good enough. TSMC is transitioning to 40nm now, so Atom SoCs that are made there won't really be that far behind those made at Intel, if at all.
Actually if you read the rest of the article, there's a deeper reason for this. Historically chips for something like a cellphone take an ARM core and some custom peripherals, integrate them onto a chip and then fab them at somewhere like TSMC. Intel has never done this - they selll chips not IP. In fact one of the reasons the XBox360 moved to PPC was because Intel would not license their core as IP to be integrated into an ASIC. Intel Atoms on a TSMC process would be cheaper, but the real benefit would be (as Anandtech put it)
The Lincroft and Langwell blocks are done by Intel. The PMIC and Evans Peak blocks are partly Intel and partly 3rd party IP that are intermixed. Evans Peak in particular looks like it's going to be home to all sorts of IP depending on the application. A smart phone Atom SoC design might integrate a 3G modem here, while an iPod would opt for something else.
This makes sense if Atom is supposed to be competing with ARM. Maybe in the future they will sell Atoms as a hard macro like Arm do.