Supposedly cops are trained in their job, particularly in the safe handling of firearms and their responsible usage, I would hope; whereas random people aren't.
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. Many occasional gamers like to spend an hour or two a week (say) playing games. With most MMORGs or online FPSs this is impossible, you either play all the time or not at all, especially since there is a monthly fee associated with it. If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
My theory is that online multiplayer games will saturate their audience pretty soon, if it hasn't happened already. How many MMORGs can you play at once?
Interestingly the vast majority of the the French nuclear parc is based on a design licensed from Westinghouse. The patent has now expired though.
Re:Goodstein's colleague seems to disagree
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
According to Goodstein, yes coal can be turned into something ressembling oil, but it will pollute more due to the presence of sulphur & heavy metals in coal.
Most analysts now say that we will probably not run out of oil shortly, but that oil price will continue to rise, precisely because of what you say: to continue to get oil we will need to start exploiting sites that are too expensive to exploit now.
We may not run out of oil but it will get more and more expensive, perhaps to the point where alternatives will start to look good.
If a thousand people each contributed 15,000 lines, the ledger is not that skewed, in particular if the 300 lines really are important.
In the Linux kernel you can easily have 15,000 lines that are not that hard to write (some well documented device driver, say) and 300 that are excruciatingly difficult, say the core of the memory allocator.
I've biked down to 0F / -17C; with adequate clothing it's OK as long as the road is not iced up. My breath was freezing in my beard, but due to the exercise I wasn't feeling cold.
How about a single photon? if you send a single photon through the 2-slit experiment, it interferes with itself to appear on the other side still as a single dot on the screen. However the probability of the position of the dot on the screen is proportional to an interference pattern.
In the many-world interpretation, the world splits into two universes, one where the photon goes left, and the other where it goes right. Then the photon in the universe where it went on the left interferes with the photon in the universe where it went right, and it produces an interference pattern in both universes.
Now if you observe the photon at the one of the slit, say the left one, to find out which way the photon went in our universe, the universe actually doesn't split in that case, and no interference pattern is observed.
This is consistent with experiments, but this is just an interpretation.
In the Western world we have trouble understanding that sexual abuse of Iraqi men by American women is seen as significantly far worse than the killing of Iraqi or American civilians.
This is all I meant. The parent was saying, in essense, sure abuses were commited, but the abused people are still alive, whereas an innocent American man has just been beheaded.
You should work for Deutche Gramophon, not post on Slashdot, see nice famous article from C't article on that topic; summary:
In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128 kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.
If you include source code of a patented technology in a source Linux distribution, such as Gentoo, that would constitute "incitement to infringe" because users of that distribution can reasonably expect to use the software in source form for something productive.
Including patented technology, even in source form only, in an application also constitues "incitement to infringe" because most people would simply compile the application and reasonably expect to be able to use it.
Including patented technology in a general-purpose library such as glibc, even in source form, can also constitute "incitement to infringe" for the same reason, unless reasonable precautions are taken to make sure users of that library are aware of the patent issues. This is exactly the route that VTK has chosen, and before that libtiff (for the LZW patent), etc.
However creating a library that contains patented code and releasing that, by itself does not constitute either patent infringement or incitement. There needs to be contributing factors. Essentially it must be made clear that the library is for study/research.
> at least the the Iraqi prisoners are still breathing
1- Some Iraqis were in fact killed in those prisons, 25 of them according to local newspapers. Were their death nice and peaceful? We don't know yet. The female private we saw in all the pictures was interviewed yesterday and said worse abuse was committed than the one we saw. She didn't give specifics.
2- Spoken as a true westerner. Some of the victims interviewed on TV said they'd rather have been killed. Interview of people in the Iraqi street I saw this morning was saying that forcing people to have simulated sex was in fact far worse than killing them.
To the victims it does make a difference that they are still alive. In terms of outrage in the Arab world it couldn't be worse. See how much coverage the death of 10s of thousands of civilians in the Iraq pacification campaign has had, and how much coverage this is generating.
It should be painfully obvious that we are getting a war of civilizations.
I pretty much agree with everything you said, thanks for the cogent response.
Yes there are better tools than CVS both proprietary and free, at least on paper, however the really enormous savings that SCMs deliver for most developers are already available in CVS. These are: versionning (and hence backup from mistakes), collaborative environment with conflict resolution and remote access. CVS does not have nice branching or even nice renaming, which are its main drawbacks. The rest (distributed repository, atomic operations, etc) are not nearly as important. Like I said in 12 years of using CVS I've never had an instance of a problem generated by non-atomic operations, and we do use CVS quite strenuously.
Of course if I could do quick and easy renaming in CVS I would use the feature, instead I only do a renaming when I really need to. Same with branching. I've actually done branching with CVS and it does hurt a bit, but it is possible to maintain concurrent versions of the same software and backporting of patches is possible. Again if I could do that more easily in CVS I would do branching more often, whereas now I only do it when I really need to.
However I don't have the impression that any of the above is impacting productivity *that much*. Being cautious and conservative sometime actually helps. On the other hand I vividly remember the time before CVS as compared to now. It is like night and day.
At the moment I'm not looking at changing my SCM not so much because I'm totally satisfied with CVS but because I don't know which one to pick. On paper they are all better, but is it true in practice? With the switch to a different SCM goes the loss of the changelog. I don't want to change again in a year's time if the new tool is worse or not satisfactory or poorly supported. At any rate my own FLOSS project is on sourceforge, so I'll have to continue using CVS anyway, and for the work projects, they involve a lot of users, and I can't make that decision lightheartedly and toss away years of experience with CVS.
This is like the Java apologists who come up with a silly Fibonacci benchmark to show that *in some instances* Java can be faster than C. Except that if you rewrite the C a little bit then it smokes Java again.
In real-world applications as opposed to toy benchmarks, the Intel compiler is at best 5% faster than GCC, and yes SPEC benchmarks are toys. Hardware companies come up with special compilers for these benchmarks that basically work on nothing else. Remember that the SPEC numbers are posted by the companies, not by independent third parties.
I personally undertook to port a large image analysis library to work well with icc after very optimistic benchmarks, and at the end the speedup was not even noticeable. This was after a lot of effort to write the programs in such a way that the compiler could detect loops that were parallelizable, etc, and this was after making sure that the compiler *was* doing the parallelization (it said so while compiling). Needless to say this was very disappointing.
In our application all was left was to try and optimize the various algorithms, and we did get a factor-of-two speedup from that, at the expense of generality, which was all we were after.
There is no doubt that icc optimizes better, but for general-purpose computation it is not what it's all cracked up to be. Furthermore it's not hard to find benchmarks where gcc performs actually better than icc.
In summary, don't believe the benchmarks, do your own studies on your own software.
This reminds me of the silly software comparison charts that one finds in PC magazines and of some not-very-honest adverts in the same mags. The journalist lists a number of feature each piece of software has and puts a bright green tick in the right column where the feature is implemented and a nasty red cross where it's not. At a glance one is able to see which is the better piece of software. Not.
Yes CVS lacks lots of features that may be important in some software projects, on the other hand it is pretty much bug free, has seen a huge amount of usage, is very simple to use (it takes me all of 5 minutes to get a new user up to speed with it), has no silly file locking, has a simple text-based repository which is in fact very robust.
I never tire of saying that I've been using CVS for nigh on 12 years now, that I've also used SCCS, raw RCS, and Perforce, which everyone swears by.
By and large CVS is the simplest to use and does get the job done. Whereas I couldn't get any of my users to use RCS and that a lot of them don't like Perforce because of the individual file locking feature. I have had exactly zero problem with CVS, and this is an experience that is reflected pretty much around the globe.
Regarding the issues that SourceForge has, I'm not sure it would be helped by switching to another source control system. Sourceforge doesn't appear keen to try, they must have good reasons for it.
Now for some things you are right, CVS is not the right tool. We are talking massive complicated and distributed systems like the Linux kernel. In this instance we are talking about sophisticated users and developers who know the value of using the right tool for the right job, even if the tool is more complicated at first. Neither BK nor Arch and not even Subversion are as simple as CVS at first.
CVS is a decent answer to a very important problem. It doesn't have to go, developers need to be aware of the alternatives when they reach the limits of what CVS can do.
If Microsoft wanted to they could develop clean interfaces too. Microsoft's reputation is not that bad, except that it is known that they don't play nice with others.
But still, if they do develop a worthwhile engine, on par with Google or better (they have very good researchers, they are certainly capable of coming up with something) and put it as the default search engine in the next version of Windows and the next service patches, then Google could find itself in trouble.
Microsoft has tremendous leverage with its users by virtue of most of them not being very educated and not caring about interfaces all that much as long as it sort of works.
Don't underestimate Microsoft. I'm sure they can outdo Google if they put their mind to it. They have the clout, the technological know-how, the financial backing, and they are not afraid of playing dirty. Eventually Google will make a mistake ; maybe a key employee will leave for Microsoft, something like that, and anyway Microsoft employs lots of smart people too.
What does Google have that Microsoft cannot duplicate, buy or steal, given enough time and resources?
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly cops are trained in their job, particularly in the safe handling of firearms and their responsible usage, I would hope; whereas random people aren't.
What's the deal with being online?
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. Many occasional gamers like to spend an hour or two a week (say) playing games. With most MMORGs or online FPSs this is impossible, you either play all the time or not at all, especially since there is a monthly fee associated with it. If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
My theory is that online multiplayer games will saturate their audience pretty soon, if it hasn't happened already. How many MMORGs can you play at once?
One word: RSA
Interestingly the vast majority of the the French nuclear parc is based on a design licensed from Westinghouse. The patent has now expired though.
According to Goodstein, yes coal can be turned into something ressembling oil, but it will pollute more due to the presence of sulphur & heavy metals in coal.
Most analysts now say that we will probably not run out of oil shortly, but that oil price will continue to rise, precisely because of what you say: to continue to get oil we will need to start exploiting sites that are too expensive to exploit now.
We may not run out of oil but it will get more and more expensive, perhaps to the point where alternatives will start to look good.
Ignorance is never to be laughed at, because we are all more ignorant than knowledgeable.
Stupidiy, on the other hand...
If a thousand people each contributed 15,000 lines, the ledger is not that skewed, in particular if the 300 lines really are important.
In the Linux kernel you can easily have 15,000 lines that are not that hard to write (some well documented device driver, say) and 300 that are excruciatingly difficult, say the core of the memory allocator.
> "better off buying closed source, at least I know
> the developers are getting paid" philosophy.
Really? Need I say outsourcing? What about all the game development shops where the developers are laid off as soon as the game hits gold?
In my experience closed source software is no guarantee of support.
I've biked down to 0F / -17C; with adequate clothing it's OK as long as the road is not iced up. My breath was freezing in my beard, but due to the exercise I wasn't feeling cold.
A4 = 21 x 29.7 cm
29.7/21 = 1.41429
sqrt(2) = 1.41421..
Pretty damn close.
How about a single photon? if you send a single photon through the 2-slit experiment, it interferes with itself to appear on the other side still as a single dot on the screen. However the probability of the position of the dot on the screen is proportional to an interference pattern.
In the many-world interpretation, the world splits into two universes, one where the photon goes left, and the other where it goes right. Then the photon in the universe where it went on the left interferes with the photon in the universe where it went right, and it produces an interference pattern in both universes.
Now if you observe the photon at the one of the slit, say the left one, to find out which way the photon went in our universe, the universe actually doesn't split in that case, and no interference pattern is observed.
This is consistent with experiments, but this is just an interpretation.
OK, thanks for the pointers, I'll certainly take a look.
Soryy, I didn't mean to be offensive,
In the Western world we have trouble understanding that sexual abuse of Iraqi men by American women is seen as significantly far worse than the killing of Iraqi or American civilians.
This is all I meant. The parent was saying, in essense, sure abuses were commited, but the abused people are still alive, whereas an innocent American man has just been beheaded.
I'm just pointing at the clash of culture.
You missed the 2V thing. Storage is energy, and so measured in Joules or Watt-hours, not mAh, (or if you want, mAh at a given voltage).
Sulphur: 2*4.5 = 9 Wh
NiMH : 1.25*5 = 6.25 Wh
So sulphur is better, if not by that much.
If you include source code of a patented technology in a source Linux distribution, such as Gentoo, that would constitute "incitement to infringe" because users of that distribution can reasonably expect to use the software in source form for something productive.
Including patented technology, even in source form only, in an application also constitues "incitement to infringe" because most people would simply compile the application and reasonably expect to be able to use it.
Including patented technology in a general-purpose library such as glibc, even in source form, can also constitute "incitement to infringe" for the same reason, unless reasonable precautions are taken to make sure users of that library are aware of the patent issues. This is exactly the route that VTK has chosen, and before that libtiff (for the LZW patent), etc.
However creating a library that contains patented code and releasing that, by itself does not constitute either patent infringement or incitement. There needs to be contributing factors. Essentially it must be made clear that the library is for study/research.
Can't resist, sorry
> Now when is somebody going to apologize to us for
> killing 3000 people on September 11
What does Iraq have to do with this? None of the terrorist were Iraqis or had any contact with Iraq.
> or for burning and dismembering 4 US contract
> workers in Falluja, or cutting off this guys
head?
These are the work of terrorists, are you saying that the US should behave like terrorists? Can't you see that violence generates violence?
Hello AC,
> at least the the Iraqi prisoners are still breathing
1- Some Iraqis were in fact killed in those prisons, 25 of them according to local newspapers. Were their death nice and peaceful? We don't know yet. The female private we saw in all the pictures was interviewed yesterday and said worse abuse was committed than the one we saw. She didn't give specifics.
2- Spoken as a true westerner. Some of the victims interviewed on TV said they'd rather have been killed. Interview of people in the Iraqi street I saw this morning was saying that forcing people to have simulated sex was in fact far worse than killing them.
To the victims it does make a difference that they are still alive. In terms of outrage in the Arab world it couldn't be worse. See how much coverage the death of 10s of thousands of civilians in the Iraq pacification campaign has had, and how much coverage this is generating.
It should be painfully obvious that we are getting a war of civilizations.
I pretty much agree with everything you said, thanks for the cogent response.
Yes there are better tools than CVS both proprietary and free, at least on paper, however the really enormous savings that SCMs deliver for most developers are already available in CVS. These are: versionning (and hence backup from mistakes), collaborative environment with conflict resolution and remote access. CVS does not have nice branching or even nice renaming, which are its main drawbacks. The rest (distributed repository, atomic operations, etc) are not nearly as important. Like I said in 12 years of using CVS I've never had an instance of a problem generated by non-atomic operations, and we do use CVS quite strenuously.
Of course if I could do quick and easy renaming in CVS I would use the feature, instead I only do a renaming when I really need to. Same with branching. I've actually done branching with CVS and it does hurt a bit, but it is possible to maintain concurrent versions of the same software and backporting of patches is possible. Again if I could do that more easily in CVS I would do branching more often, whereas now I only do it when I really need to.
However I don't have the impression that any of the above is impacting productivity *that much*. Being cautious and conservative sometime actually helps. On the other hand I vividly remember the time before CVS as compared to now. It is like night and day.
At the moment I'm not looking at changing my SCM not so much because I'm totally satisfied with CVS but because I don't know which one to pick. On paper they are all better, but is it true in practice? With the switch to a different SCM goes the loss of the changelog. I don't want to change again in a year's time if the new tool is worse or not satisfactory or poorly supported. At any rate my own FLOSS project is on sourceforge, so I'll have to continue using CVS anyway, and for the work projects, they involve a lot of users, and I can't make that decision lightheartedly and toss away years of experience with CVS.
This is like the Java apologists who come up with a silly Fibonacci benchmark to show that *in some instances* Java can be faster than C. Except that if you rewrite the C a little bit then it smokes Java again.
In real-world applications as opposed to toy benchmarks, the Intel compiler is at best 5% faster than GCC, and yes SPEC benchmarks are toys. Hardware companies come up with special compilers for these benchmarks that basically work on nothing else. Remember that the SPEC numbers are posted by the companies, not by independent third parties.
I personally undertook to port a large image analysis library to work well with icc after very optimistic benchmarks, and at the end the speedup was not even noticeable. This was after a lot of effort to write the programs in such a way that the compiler could detect loops that were parallelizable, etc, and this was after making sure that the compiler *was* doing the parallelization (it said so while compiling). Needless to say this was very disappointing.
In our application all was left was to try and optimize the various algorithms, and we did get a factor-of-two speedup from that, at the expense of generality, which was all we were after.
There is no doubt that icc optimizes better, but for general-purpose computation it is not what it's all cracked up to be. Furthermore it's not hard to find benchmarks where gcc performs actually better than icc.
In summary, don't believe the benchmarks, do your own studies on your own software.
> I don't know about `deep unwavering belief` but
> my work was based on a GeForce FX 5600 so all of
> my observations are based on that.
Don't sweat the comment, it's just his sig.
This reminds me of the silly software comparison charts that one finds in PC magazines and of some not-very-honest adverts in the same mags. The journalist lists a number of feature each piece of software has and puts a bright green tick in the right column where the feature is implemented and a nasty red cross where it's not. At a glance one is able to see which is the better piece of software. Not.
Yes CVS lacks lots of features that may be important in some software projects, on the other hand it is pretty much bug free, has seen a huge amount of usage, is very simple to use (it takes me all of 5 minutes to get a new user up to speed with it), has no silly file locking, has a simple text-based repository which is in fact very robust.
I never tire of saying that I've been using CVS for nigh on 12 years now, that I've also used SCCS, raw RCS, and Perforce, which everyone swears by.
By and large CVS is the simplest to use and does get the job done. Whereas I couldn't get any of my users to use RCS and that a lot of them don't like Perforce because of the individual file locking feature. I have had exactly zero problem with CVS, and this is an experience that is reflected pretty much around the globe.
Regarding the issues that SourceForge has, I'm not sure it would be helped by switching to another source control system. Sourceforge doesn't appear keen to try, they must have good reasons for it.
Now for some things you are right, CVS is not the right tool. We are talking massive complicated and distributed systems like the Linux kernel. In this instance we are talking about sophisticated users and developers who know the value of using the right tool for the right job, even if the tool is more complicated at first. Neither BK nor Arch and not even Subversion are as simple as CVS at first.
CVS is a decent answer to a very important problem. It doesn't have to go, developers need to be aware of the alternatives when they reach the limits of what CVS can do.
I don't know,
If Microsoft wanted to they could develop clean interfaces too. Microsoft's reputation is not that bad, except that it is known that they don't play nice with others.
But still, if they do develop a worthwhile engine, on par with Google or better (they have very good researchers, they are certainly capable of coming up with something) and put it as the default search engine in the next version of Windows and the next service patches, then Google could find itself in trouble.
Microsoft has tremendous leverage with its users by virtue of most of them not being very educated and not caring about interfaces all that much as long as it sort of works.
Don't underestimate Microsoft. I'm sure they can outdo Google if they put their mind to it. They have the clout, the technological know-how, the financial backing, and they are not afraid of playing dirty. Eventually Google will make a mistake ; maybe a key employee will leave for Microsoft, something like that, and anyway Microsoft employs lots of smart people too.
What does Google have that Microsoft cannot duplicate, buy or steal, given enough time and resources?