The real news is at the end of the article, past the sensationalism:
However, we think we've helped her get back to school.
Verizon says it will dispatch a technician to try to assist her accessing the internet without using the Windows-only installation disk.
MATC also says it promises to accept any of Schubert's papers or class documents using whatever software she has installed.
It's really more a matter of awareness. We know that you don't need a Windows-only installation disk (sic) to access the Internet, nor do you need MS Office to save MS Office compatible files (if they even need those instead of say, a PDF), but most people don't.
Large uptick in Qt usage?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The only complaint I've seen before about Qt is that it's too expensive for proprietary apps, and that's not an issue anymore. I won't be surprised to see a large uptick in Qt usage now, and that's a big plus for cross platform apps, as Qt is quite portable.
Here's a comparison between the Toledo Athlon X2 4600+, 4400+ and 4200+. You'll note that in most cases the performance boost from 4200->4400 is negligible (~1% or less), while the jump from 4200 (or 4400) to 4600 is typically ~10%, as would be expected from the clock speed boost. Given that the extra cache is expensive (a lot more than an extra 1%, too), I don't blame them for dropping it.
When the Athlon X2s came out (and before the Core 2s came out), I researched all of this and ended up buying a 4200+, noting that the 4400+ was worth basically no extra performance (but cost $100 more at the time), which is why I know this off the top of my head.
Intel slapped tons of cache on their P4s and Core 2s because it was an effective way of masking the poor memory access speeds (due to the lack of an integrated memory controller). For AMD, the extra cache made basically no difference in performance, so it was a waste to add it. Go back and compare the original Athlon X2 4200+ (2.2 Ghz, 512K L2 cache per core) with the 4400+ (2.2 Ghz, 1M L2 cache per core), you'll notice there's basically no performance difference, and the 1M cache models were promptly dropped.
I put Game! together in my free time, and initially it had exactly zero art. A couple artists came upon it and liked it enough to start contributing art, and thus it actually has quite a lot of art now.
Web based games allow for very rapid evolution, and also means you can start putting it in front of users way earlier than usual. It doesn't take a lot of code to make something useful either, I'm still the only coder on Game! and that's just in my spare time. In comparison to game studios with several hundred people all working on a game compared to a few people working part time, it's amazing what you can still get done.
I have an old Zaurus SL-5500 PDA with 64MB of memory, and I run X on it continuously. X adds so much functionality, why would anyone choose a framebuffer-based display instead?
Nothing's wrong with X, but people hate things they don't understand, and most people perceive X as old and complicated, therefore it must be junk. It doesn't matter if it's the best solution for the problem at hand.
Linux is all about reinventing the wheel. FOSS is all about reinventing the wheel.
Quite the opposite, actually. Proprietary software is all about reinventing the wheel and then selling it under sufficiently restrictively terms that everyone else is forced to reinvent the wheel.
For example, no more than about 10% of all proprietary Windows applications use standard Win32 widgets, the vast majority prefer to roll their own instead. Not even Microsoft uses their own interface libraries, just compare IE 7, WMP (anything after 6.4) and any version of MS Office or Visual Studio released this century.
In sharp contrast, all of the apps on my KDE desktop use standard KDE/Qt widgets, the only exceptions being apps that were originally proprietary (Blender, OpenOffice and Firefox).
That's a great example of sample bias. The answer to FAQ #15 states that Game! doesn't work well in IE.
That it does, but I'm only counting unique hits to the front page. So an IE user that looks once and never returns counts the same as a Firefox user that plays every day for a year.
I'm not saying the results aren't biased (though it's not as simple as you make it out to be), but rather to take them (and the article's) with a grain of salt.
When you (as the developer) can't even count on primitive types being the same size all over, it makes writing portable software a huge pain in the ass.
Speaking as a developer, it really doesn't. If you actually need a specific size of variable (rare), just use one of the standard types that's guaranteed to be that specific size.
If you're assuming that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) (or similar) on all platforms and getting bitten, then that's your own stupid fault for making dumb assumptions.
You know that OOo is primarily written in C++, right? Base (the database thingie that appeared in 2.0) and the help system use Java, but that's pretty much it. You don't even need Java installed to run OOo, try it, you probably won't notice the difference.
I looked at i7 motherboards a few days ago, and the prices on them are absolutely absurd. Basically, they range from $300 to $500, plus they require DDR3 memory, which is still several times more expensive than DDR2 memory, so you toss in 12G of memory (~$550-$800 for DDR3) and you're already well over $1000... just for the motherboard and RAM!
In comparison, you can grab an AM2 motherboard for anywhere between $70 and $300, and you can drop in 8G of matched DDR2 for a paltry $200. Even ignoring the fact that Phenoms cost less than i7s, you've already saved nearly $1000, though you end up with slightly less RAM.
To be honest, I think you'd have to be crazy to build an i7 system over a Phenom system at the moment, or you just really like spending $1000 for another 10-20% more speed.
The first example is all about so-called "semantic web" technology. And the thing is, Google's index does contain the data you'd need to build semantic context about, as in your example, what a "BMW" is.
But that info Google makes available via its API to anybody willing to pay a couple cents.
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that they made that information available. I've made a mental note for future reference.
people used to buy cars outright, now a large percentage lease them instead, no huge outcry happened.
There's two key differences here, one is that a car has actual tangible value which (typically) decreases over time, by leasing you cover the cost of the depreciation on the car over the time period you use it. If you leased software, it would cost you $0, because software doesn't lose value over time, and the cost to duplicate software is vanishingly close to $0.
The other key difference is that leasing a car allows you to drive a nicer car than what you could afford by buying outright. Most people don't have $50k to drop on a new car, but a fairly large portion of people could easily afford to pay $25k over 3 years on a lease for the same new car. In stark contrast, if you buy MS Office by the hour, you'll probably get a less functional product. The product will probably stop working after a year or two, even if you have more quarters to put in, and will likely require a working Internet connection at all times, not to mention a steaming load of DRM.
You're confusing context-sensitive advertising with behavioral targeting.
Actually, I think with data like Google has, you can also make context-sensitive things better. For example, say someone searches for BMW, a naive context-sensitive engine would display ads about BMWs, but you can go beyond that, a BMW is a car, so you can display ads about cars too, and if your engine is really good, it'll know that BMWs are high end luxury cars, and not to show ads about beat up used Fords, for example. That information is obvious to most humans, but not obvious to a computer, but I suspect you can extract it from user data.
To me, behavioural targeting would be going the other way, so to speak. So, if we reuse the car analogy from above, say someone searches for cars, Google could look at that user's past searches and determine that they're likely interested in high end luxury cars and not beat up used Fords, so it displays ads for a variety of high end luxury cars along with a search for cars, but only for that particular user. Google might know that a different user shops exclusively at Wal-Mart, and thus when they search for cars, ads for beat up used Fords are probably more appropriate than those for high end luxury cars.
I have a similar site that I wrote (pre-audioscrobbler). Granted it's crap, but I have mountains of data also. Closer to 1 tb than hundreds of tb. The question is, how do you monetize the data?
If you could (accurately) answer that question, then you'd act upon the answer...
Why do you think Google ads are Google's bread and butter as far as cashflow goes? The reason is that Google has a treasure trove of user data, probably more than anyone else, so they can really make contextual ads work. Anyone can write an ad engine, but not everyone has access to mountains and mountains of user data.
You might be surprised at how important context is when you're trying to promote something. Say you're trying to promote an online RPG like Game!, if you took a random collection of people, probably less than 5% of them would be interested in playing, but if you can target gamers specifically, that number might jump to 50%. If you're paying for every impression, that makes a world of difference.
So not only do you need to understand your audience, you also need to effectively target them. Now, how do you do that? Data mining of course, and the more data the better.
Pretty much all data has value, figuring out how to turn that data into money is extremely subjective and might involve some black magic, and definitely requires luck too.
Yes, all of the current X drivers use DRI/DRM, except for the proprietary Nvidia drivers. The proprietary Nvidia drivers apparently have their own memory manager implementation and do not use the DRI/DRM infrastructure, likely because large swaths of the code are shared among all platforms Nvidia supports (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and the other thing).
A memory manager for the graphics memory is very useful because it allows direct rendering and direct redirected rendering and such.
A definite step in the wrong direction.
One of the things I've always liked about *nix is the separation between kernel and graphics.
No matter how horked X is, I the system always boots in text mode console and work to repair X or a driver, install new software, etc, and even accomplish things with Mutt and links2.
Then, when I'm ready to "go graphical", simply run startx.
You don't really understand the consequences of doing kernel mode setting then. None of your use cases will be impacted by the addition of kernel mode setting, except that you'll be able to more easily get different resolutions out of your virtual consoles (you can already do that with framebuffer consoles, sometimes, depending on the hardware, and what driver you're using with X (if any)).
Slashdot Mirror
You could always give Game! a shot instead. It should be snappy, even on dialup.
I prefer this:
The real news is at the end of the article, past the sensationalism:
It's really more a matter of awareness. We know that you don't need a Windows-only installation disk (sic) to access the Internet, nor do you need MS Office to save MS Office compatible files (if they even need those instead of say, a PDF), but most people don't.
The only complaint I've seen before about Qt is that it's too expensive for proprietary apps, and that's not an issue anymore. I won't be surprised to see a large uptick in Qt usage now, and that's a big plus for cross platform apps, as Qt is quite portable.
Here's a comparison between the Toledo Athlon X2 4600+, 4400+ and 4200+. You'll note that in most cases the performance boost from 4200->4400 is negligible (~1% or less), while the jump from 4200 (or 4400) to 4600 is typically ~10%, as would be expected from the clock speed boost. Given that the extra cache is expensive (a lot more than an extra 1%, too), I don't blame them for dropping it.
When the Athlon X2s came out (and before the Core 2s came out), I researched all of this and ended up buying a 4200+, noting that the 4400+ was worth basically no extra performance (but cost $100 more at the time), which is why I know this off the top of my head.
The large majority of all development is maintenance.
Intel slapped tons of cache on their P4s and Core 2s because it was an effective way of masking the poor memory access speeds (due to the lack of an integrated memory controller). For AMD, the extra cache made basically no difference in performance, so it was a waste to add it. Go back and compare the original Athlon X2 4200+ (2.2 Ghz, 512K L2 cache per core) with the 4400+ (2.2 Ghz, 1M L2 cache per core), you'll notice there's basically no performance difference, and the 1M cache models were promptly dropped.
Bzzt! P4s are terrible, even a single core of the lowest end Intel quad core (Q6600) will crush most, if not all P4s.
I put Game! together in my free time, and initially it had exactly zero art. A couple artists came upon it and liked it enough to start contributing art, and thus it actually has quite a lot of art now.
Web based games allow for very rapid evolution, and also means you can start putting it in front of users way earlier than usual. It doesn't take a lot of code to make something useful either, I'm still the only coder on Game! and that's just in my spare time. In comparison to game studios with several hundred people all working on a game compared to a few people working part time, it's amazing what you can still get done.
You don't need to escape the space in the regex.
Nothing's wrong with X, but people hate things they don't understand, and most people perceive X as old and complicated, therefore it must be junk. It doesn't matter if it's the best solution for the problem at hand.
Linux is all about reinventing the wheel. FOSS is all about reinventing the wheel.
Quite the opposite, actually. Proprietary software is all about reinventing the wheel and then selling it under sufficiently restrictively terms that everyone else is forced to reinvent the wheel.
For example, no more than about 10% of all proprietary Windows applications use standard Win32 widgets, the vast majority prefer to roll their own instead. Not even Microsoft uses their own interface libraries, just compare IE 7, WMP (anything after 6.4) and any version of MS Office or Visual Studio released this century.
In sharp contrast, all of the apps on my KDE desktop use standard KDE/Qt widgets, the only exceptions being apps that were originally proprietary (Blender, OpenOffice and Firefox).
That's a great example of sample bias. The answer to FAQ #15 states that Game! doesn't work well in IE.
That it does, but I'm only counting unique hits to the front page. So an IE user that looks once and never returns counts the same as a Firefox user that plays every day for a year.
I'm not saying the results aren't biased (though it's not as simple as you make it out to be), but rather to take them (and the article's) with a grain of salt.
Well, Microsoft would be delighted to hear about the browser stats for Game!, then...
Based on unique hits to the front page:
Speaking as a developer, it really doesn't. If you actually need a specific size of variable (rare), just use one of the standard types that's guaranteed to be that specific size.
If you're assuming that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) (or similar) on all platforms and getting bitten, then that's your own stupid fault for making dumb assumptions.
On the contrary, Microsoft churns out new libraries at a frightening pace, it's just that nobody uses them.
You know that OOo is primarily written in C++, right? Base (the database thingie that appeared in 2.0) and the help system use Java, but that's pretty much it. You don't even need Java installed to run OOo, try it, you probably won't notice the difference.
I looked at i7 motherboards a few days ago, and the prices on them are absolutely absurd. Basically, they range from $300 to $500, plus they require DDR3 memory, which is still several times more expensive than DDR2 memory, so you toss in 12G of memory (~$550-$800 for DDR3) and you're already well over $1000... just for the motherboard and RAM!
In comparison, you can grab an AM2 motherboard for anywhere between $70 and $300, and you can drop in 8G of matched DDR2 for a paltry $200. Even ignoring the fact that Phenoms cost less than i7s, you've already saved nearly $1000, though you end up with slightly less RAM.
To be honest, I think you'd have to be crazy to build an i7 system over a Phenom system at the moment, or you just really like spending $1000 for another 10-20% more speed.
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that they made that information available. I've made a mental note for future reference.
There's two key differences here, one is that a car has actual tangible value which (typically) decreases over time, by leasing you cover the cost of the depreciation on the car over the time period you use it. If you leased software, it would cost you $0, because software doesn't lose value over time, and the cost to duplicate software is vanishingly close to $0.
The other key difference is that leasing a car allows you to drive a nicer car than what you could afford by buying outright. Most people don't have $50k to drop on a new car, but a fairly large portion of people could easily afford to pay $25k over 3 years on a lease for the same new car. In stark contrast, if you buy MS Office by the hour, you'll probably get a less functional product. The product will probably stop working after a year or two, even if you have more quarters to put in, and will likely require a working Internet connection at all times, not to mention a steaming load of DRM.
Actually, I think with data like Google has, you can also make context-sensitive things better. For example, say someone searches for BMW, a naive context-sensitive engine would display ads about BMWs, but you can go beyond that, a BMW is a car, so you can display ads about cars too, and if your engine is really good, it'll know that BMWs are high end luxury cars, and not to show ads about beat up used Fords, for example. That information is obvious to most humans, but not obvious to a computer, but I suspect you can extract it from user data.
To me, behavioural targeting would be going the other way, so to speak. So, if we reuse the car analogy from above, say someone searches for cars, Google could look at that user's past searches and determine that they're likely interested in high end luxury cars and not beat up used Fords, so it displays ads for a variety of high end luxury cars along with a search for cars, but only for that particular user. Google might know that a different user shops exclusively at Wal-Mart, and thus when they search for cars, ads for beat up used Fords are probably more appropriate than those for high end luxury cars.
If you could (accurately) answer that question, then you'd act upon the answer...
Why do you think Google ads are Google's bread and butter as far as cashflow goes? The reason is that Google has a treasure trove of user data, probably more than anyone else, so they can really make contextual ads work. Anyone can write an ad engine, but not everyone has access to mountains and mountains of user data.
You might be surprised at how important context is when you're trying to promote something. Say you're trying to promote an online RPG like Game!, if you took a random collection of people, probably less than 5% of them would be interested in playing, but if you can target gamers specifically, that number might jump to 50%. If you're paying for every impression, that makes a world of difference.
So not only do you need to understand your audience, you also need to effectively target them. Now, how do you do that? Data mining of course, and the more data the better.
Pretty much all data has value, figuring out how to turn that data into money is extremely subjective and might involve some black magic, and definitely requires luck too.
Yes, all of the current X drivers use DRI/DRM, except for the proprietary Nvidia drivers. The proprietary Nvidia drivers apparently have their own memory manager implementation and do not use the DRI/DRM infrastructure, likely because large swaths of the code are shared among all platforms Nvidia supports (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and the other thing).
The converse, actually. Using DRI/DRM will require GEMified drivers. GEM doesn't really come into play without DRI/DRM.
A memory manager for the graphics memory is very useful because it allows direct rendering and direct redirected rendering and such.
A definite step in the wrong direction.
One of the things I've always liked about *nix is the separation between kernel and graphics.
No matter how horked X is, I the system always boots in text mode console and work to repair X or a driver, install new software, etc, and even accomplish things with Mutt and links2.
Then, when I'm ready to "go graphical", simply run startx.
You don't really understand the consequences of doing kernel mode setting then. None of your use cases will be impacted by the addition of kernel mode setting, except that you'll be able to more easily get different resolutions out of your virtual consoles (you can already do that with framebuffer consoles, sometimes, depending on the hardware, and what driver you're using with X (if any)).