Automatic memory management is great when you need to write something that'll run quickly and then die. It's not so good when you need to write software that needs to work with a varying, but potentially large amounts of data and continue to run.
Besides which, it makes developers sloppy, leading to all sorts of performance problems. Automatic memory management doesn't mean the developer doesn't think about how to manage memory. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about memory leaks. However, software developed without memory management considerations will hog up all of the system's resources and eventually fail to run.
I'm speculating, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to thank the increased competition from Chrome for this.
It's about time they dropped their delusions about their marketshare loss due to Chrome's features (or lack thereof) and realized it's the speed that attracts people. It was the same with IE5. Its speed made people continue to use it. Its security problems made people look for alternatives, Firefox being the popular alternative at that time, but Chrome offers both and that's why people switch to it despite the loss of functionality.
That would be completely true if machines don't have any swap. Most people have a fairly large swap however--larger than their amount of actual physical memory--and on the same disk as their data.
What this means is that the larger your footprint, the higher the chance of part of your program loading from the hard disk when you're context switching. Sure, a program with a smaller memory footprint has the same issues, but when there's less of it on disk (even if the percentage is the same), the perceived context switch time scales exponentially. The keyword is perceived of course, but that's what's important when it comes to interactivity.
Yes, ideally, you won't hit the swap if all of your running processes fit into your existing physical memory. However, unless you're running as some kind of device driver, that's not what actually happens. Some part of your program will end up in swap so long as you have one. This is because the OS proactively moves less-often-used portions into swap in the background, to free up space for anything you might launch in the future (writing to the hard disk is more time-consuming than reading, so the OS is not going to wait until a new process comes along before it finds out you have no more physical RAM and starts writing to the hard disk--it will make sure newly launched processes will come up in a reasonable time).
All in all, the lower your memory footprint, the better. Of course, lowering memory at the cost of increasing some kind of hard disk cache of your own is bad, and you're better off leaving it in RAM and to the OS to decide what goes into swap. That's not lowering memory, but reallocating it. But if you can actually do so, there's no reason not to reduce your footprint.
If your store is the only one in the world to sell beans, and you decide not to sell a type of bean from one particular supplier, then you're guilty of anti-trust practices.
In Apple's case, note that there are vertical and horizontal monopolies. Apple's is a vertical monopoly.
I'm not surprised Obama hasn't brought an anti-trust suit against them though. Apple's another one of those "too big to fail" companies.
To be fair, Lindows was a trademark infringement suit, which is a completely different thing. And, according to the wikipedia article, Microsoft eventually paid to acquire the Lindows trademark.
I don't know about Microsoft versus any of the other brands you mentioned. I know Oracle has filed a patent lawsuit against Android (Google), and Apple constantly files patent suits against its competitors, but I don't remember Microsoft actually using its patent portfolio offensively against those two entities. Do you have a link that references them?
I do know Microsoft tried to, via SCO as its proxy, bring a copyright infringement suit to certain Linux vendors. We all know how that ended up. I also know they've entered into patent agreements with Novell (and paid of Corel, among other things), to try to intimidate vendors into paying them for using Linux or getting out of developing for it outright. But I don't recall Microsoft actually initiating any patent-related lawsuits directly or indirectly against another major player.
If you have any specific cases in mind, I'd be more than happy to be enlightened though.
He's right if the U.S. government's objective is to promote freedom and democracy. The cables certainly show the rampant corruption in the world, the injustices everywhere, and that the United States government recognizes and responds to them.
However, Obama is actually more interested in stability in the region, and will do everything to maintain that regardless of what it takes to achieve that stability. There's a reason one of the most repressive governments in the world is considered a close ally, while a democratically-elected president is constantly being vilified.
The leaked cables has actually caused the opposite effect. And because of the instability of the middle east region, oil and thus gas prices are higher than they otherwise should be. High gas prices are detrimental to an economy trying to dig itself out of a recessionary hole. Which the egg-on-his-face notwithstanding, is why Obama is generally against such whistleblowing.
Immediately, I can say that all humans are capable of creating works of art (though they may not necessarily be able to appreciate art created by all other humans). Art in this case can be defined as something intentional that triggers an emotional response, though not necessarily something that intentionally triggers an emotional response. It's a fairly broad definition and can encompass things that we typically do not consider art (like a traffic accident), but it sufficiently and succintly defines the term.
Irrationality, which encompasses elements of humanity such as belief, hope, delusion, and wonder are created information, or based upon information created by the individual. The information is (often) false, but it is a creation nonetheless.
The difference between the cream of the crop and the average joe is that the information created by the former has meaning to many other people, while the information created by the latter may only have meaning to the person doing the creating. To give an analogous example, one may laugh at one's own (bad) jokes, but everybody laughs at a comedian's jokes. It sets the comedian apart from the layman. But it does not imply that only comedians are capable of making jokes.
As your premise stands incorrectly, your straw man scatters into the wind.
All kidding aside, computers are certainly great at memorizing and regurgitating information, especially highly complex information with numerous variables involved. However, they're still a ways to go before they can actually create new information. Once they can do that though, that's when AI becomes a reality.
Morality is subjective. Exposing a few million user's names and passwords can be seen as a reasonably moral response to to companies that continue to trample over and strong arm their paying customers.
I don't endorse their actions, but I also wouldn't claim they're morally bankrupt. At the very least, they're doing something they believe is right. Now, if they're doing it for the money that comes with having information on a million users, then that's a different story. But everything points to this just being a form of activism, which makes them no worse than those rabid pro-life activists who spread the personal information about doctors who perform abortion all over the internet.
That having been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. These people might be thinking they're right and doing good things, but the damage they're causing to people are real. And I can't imagine that they won't be on the receiving end of such a situation one day. And at that time, then how they feel about their past actions will be between themselves and their conscience.
I don't think past behavior was blindness in any way, but rather the reasonable expectations of paying customers. I think it is reasonable to assume that large companies will put at least a small amount of effort into securing their users' data, and that any breech wouldn't result in the immediate compromise of that data.
On the other hand, I do hope this will serve to change those who made the assumption in such a way that they will start to think about the consequences of their choices. People weren't forced to submit their information to Sony; they did so as a requisite to engaging in a business transaction with Sony. After this, they hopefully will take a second look at companies that offer services tied to some sort of registration, possibly question its necessity, and maybe as a result, question their own need for the company's product. In the end, I can't find fault in those who signed up for such services in the past, but I do hope they won't so casually do so again in the future after this.
What probably is going to actually happen is that a few people will never buy Sony again though they wouldn't think about the information in their iTunes account or their Xbox Live account, while the rest will simply forget about this whole affair once it's over, and go back to their usual habits again while holding onto their usual assumptions.
Sometimes, it's the infrastructure that's bad. I've had poor or improperly installed wiring take out entire computers when an appliance being used suddenly causes a localized brownout.
Electrical wiring is supposed to be properly shielded (especially the wire that runs from your socket to your appliance), but I've found it to be the worst from experience. They typically aren't so bad as to affect wifi unless the wire is running vertically between base and computer, but they usually interfere with any ethernet cables laying nearby.
For wifi, anything that operates on the same spectrum will interfere with the connection. Baby monitors, cordless phones, cordless peripherals, even the cell phone can be problematic. For this, it is either due in part to the router's antenna design being poor and prone to interference, or the.design of the wireless chip inside the computer itself.
I don't know if these things are limited to the consumer-grade status of the products. It's more likely that businesses already know either via an employee or a consultant what to do and what not to do with the products they bought.
That's true in the states (for now--Obama seems to be on a personal crusade against whistleblowers). However, in British law, libel has much lower requirements to satisfy, and the accused has a much more difficult time proving innocence while facing fairly stiff penalties. It probably stems from not having the freedom of speech explicitly recognized.
IANAL (especially not a British one), but in the Ryan Giggs case, I believe merely mentioning something prohibited by a superinjunction constitutes as libel (you can think of a superinjunction as something like the British equivalent of a National Security Letter).
Granted, the twitter user probably doesn't only post from a phone, and even if so, the police can profile the user by correlating enough posts of the user to the location data, but a layer of obscurity is better than nothing.
I'd personally use TOR and a TOR-only account if I wanted to write something that might get me into trouble, but that's just me.
That depends on whether he entered Thailand with his US or Thai passport. If he goes in with his US passport, he's afford all the protections that any other US citizen can and should expect from Thailand (which could be none at all--it depends on the country's laws and treaties). If he uses his Thai passport (assuming he still has it), he's SOL.
...an evolution as opposed to a revolution. It'll probably be an upgrade rather than a replacement. The PS3 capability-wise was revolutionary compared to the PS2. The PS4 may only seek to improve upon it by fixing the PS3's existing faults while adding more capabilities. I'd be surprised if the PS4 wasn't backwards-compatible with PS3 only because the PS4 will be so technologically similar.
Besides which, I think that'd be the wisest path for Sony to take for their next generation console. The PS3 has only started to gain traction among mainstream gamers now, as the Wii and the 360 are hitting their respective limits. It wouldn't be good to come up with some completely new system that suddenly everyone who had bought a PS3 wouldn't be able to use. Instead, it'd be better to offer something that PS3 users might be willing to eventually upgrade to, while still attracting new users with the existing PS3 and eventually PS4 game library.
Slashdot Mirror
Automatic memory management is great when you need to write something that'll run quickly and then die. It's not so good when you need to write software that needs to work with a varying, but potentially large amounts of data and continue to run.
Besides which, it makes developers sloppy, leading to all sorts of performance problems. Automatic memory management doesn't mean the developer doesn't think about how to manage memory. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about memory leaks. However, software developed without memory management considerations will hog up all of the system's resources and eventually fail to run.
Take that, all you naysayers who says there's no way someone can shoot lasers out of his eyes!
I'm sure even Wegmans has the occasional disgruntled employee crying for unionization, but I don't think anybody takes those people seriously.
But for some reason, when it comes to Apple, suddenly it's newsworthy.
I'm speculating, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to thank the increased competition from Chrome for this.
It's about time they dropped their delusions about their marketshare loss due to Chrome's features (or lack thereof) and realized it's the speed that attracts people. It was the same with IE5. Its speed made people continue to use it. Its security problems made people look for alternatives, Firefox being the popular alternative at that time, but Chrome offers both and that's why people switch to it despite the loss of functionality.
That would be completely true if machines don't have any swap. Most people have a fairly large swap however--larger than their amount of actual physical memory--and on the same disk as their data.
What this means is that the larger your footprint, the higher the chance of part of your program loading from the hard disk when you're context switching. Sure, a program with a smaller memory footprint has the same issues, but when there's less of it on disk (even if the percentage is the same), the perceived context switch time scales exponentially. The keyword is perceived of course, but that's what's important when it comes to interactivity.
Yes, ideally, you won't hit the swap if all of your running processes fit into your existing physical memory. However, unless you're running as some kind of device driver, that's not what actually happens. Some part of your program will end up in swap so long as you have one. This is because the OS proactively moves less-often-used portions into swap in the background, to free up space for anything you might launch in the future (writing to the hard disk is more time-consuming than reading, so the OS is not going to wait until a new process comes along before it finds out you have no more physical RAM and starts writing to the hard disk--it will make sure newly launched processes will come up in a reasonable time).
All in all, the lower your memory footprint, the better. Of course, lowering memory at the cost of increasing some kind of hard disk cache of your own is bad, and you're better off leaving it in RAM and to the OS to decide what goes into swap. That's not lowering memory, but reallocating it. But if you can actually do so, there's no reason not to reduce your footprint.
Nah, the treasury department is practically run by Goldman Sachs.
If your store is the only one in the world to sell beans, and you decide not to sell a type of bean from one particular supplier, then you're guilty of anti-trust practices.
In Apple's case, note that there are vertical and horizontal monopolies. Apple's is a vertical monopoly.
I'm not surprised Obama hasn't brought an anti-trust suit against them though. Apple's another one of those "too big to fail" companies.
To be fair, Lindows was a trademark infringement suit, which is a completely different thing. And, according to the wikipedia article, Microsoft eventually paid to acquire the Lindows trademark.
I don't know about Microsoft versus any of the other brands you mentioned. I know Oracle has filed a patent lawsuit against Android (Google), and Apple constantly files patent suits against its competitors, but I don't remember Microsoft actually using its patent portfolio offensively against those two entities. Do you have a link that references them?
I do know Microsoft tried to, via SCO as its proxy, bring a copyright infringement suit to certain Linux vendors. We all know how that ended up. I also know they've entered into patent agreements with Novell (and paid of Corel, among other things), to try to intimidate vendors into paying them for using Linux or getting out of developing for it outright. But I don't recall Microsoft actually initiating any patent-related lawsuits directly or indirectly against another major player.
If you have any specific cases in mind, I'd be more than happy to be enlightened though.
He's right if the U.S. government's objective is to promote freedom and democracy. The cables certainly show the rampant corruption in the world, the injustices everywhere, and that the United States government recognizes and responds to them.
However, Obama is actually more interested in stability in the region, and will do everything to maintain that regardless of what it takes to achieve that stability. There's a reason one of the most repressive governments in the world is considered a close ally, while a democratically-elected president is constantly being vilified.
The leaked cables has actually caused the opposite effect. And because of the instability of the middle east region, oil and thus gas prices are higher than they otherwise should be. High gas prices are detrimental to an economy trying to dig itself out of a recessionary hole. Which the egg-on-his-face notwithstanding, is why Obama is generally against such whistleblowing.
Just yesterday, I used the law of gravity to make myself fall down. So there!
Runaway legal system brakes in time for 22,000 filesharing Does.
This is true of most people.
This is untrue.
All humans are capable of creating information.
Immediately, I can say that all humans are capable of creating works of art (though they may not necessarily be able to appreciate art created by all other humans). Art in this case can be defined as something intentional that triggers an emotional response, though not necessarily something that intentionally triggers an emotional response. It's a fairly broad definition and can encompass things that we typically do not consider art (like a traffic accident), but it sufficiently and succintly defines the term.
Irrationality, which encompasses elements of humanity such as belief, hope, delusion, and wonder are created information, or based upon information created by the individual. The information is (often) false, but it is a creation nonetheless.
The difference between the cream of the crop and the average joe is that the information created by the former has meaning to many other people, while the information created by the latter may only have meaning to the person doing the creating. To give an analogous example, one may laugh at one's own (bad) jokes, but everybody laughs at a comedian's jokes. It sets the comedian apart from the layman. But it does not imply that only comedians are capable of making jokes.
As your premise stands incorrectly, your straw man scatters into the wind.
...here we come!
All kidding aside, computers are certainly great at memorizing and regurgitating information, especially highly complex information with numerous variables involved. However, they're still a ways to go before they can actually create new information. Once they can do that though, that's when AI becomes a reality.
Yeah, but it's contagious.
Morality is subjective. Exposing a few million user's names and passwords can be seen as a reasonably moral response to to companies that continue to trample over and strong arm their paying customers.
I don't endorse their actions, but I also wouldn't claim they're morally bankrupt. At the very least, they're doing something they believe is right. Now, if they're doing it for the money that comes with having information on a million users, then that's a different story. But everything points to this just being a form of activism, which makes them no worse than those rabid pro-life activists who spread the personal information about doctors who perform abortion all over the internet.
That having been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. These people might be thinking they're right and doing good things, but the damage they're causing to people are real. And I can't imagine that they won't be on the receiving end of such a situation one day. And at that time, then how they feel about their past actions will be between themselves and their conscience.
I don't think past behavior was blindness in any way, but rather the reasonable expectations of paying customers. I think it is reasonable to assume that large companies will put at least a small amount of effort into securing their users' data, and that any breech wouldn't result in the immediate compromise of that data.
On the other hand, I do hope this will serve to change those who made the assumption in such a way that they will start to think about the consequences of their choices. People weren't forced to submit their information to Sony; they did so as a requisite to engaging in a business transaction with Sony. After this, they hopefully will take a second look at companies that offer services tied to some sort of registration, possibly question its necessity, and maybe as a result, question their own need for the company's product. In the end, I can't find fault in those who signed up for such services in the past, but I do hope they won't so casually do so again in the future after this.
What probably is going to actually happen is that a few people will never buy Sony again though they wouldn't think about the information in their iTunes account or their Xbox Live account, while the rest will simply forget about this whole affair once it's over, and go back to their usual habits again while holding onto their usual assumptions.
If magnets should have any health benefits, then all magnets of the same strength would be similarily beneficial.
It's like the speaker wire thing.
hunter2
FYI, for the few who didn't get the reference.
Eh? Your analogy fails. The "addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division" of CS is AND, OR, NOT, XOR, union, intersection, and subtraction.
Word processing and operating systems barely qualifies as an intro to IT, if that much at all.
Sometimes, it's the infrastructure that's bad. I've had poor or improperly installed wiring take out entire computers when an appliance being used suddenly causes a localized brownout.
Electrical wiring is supposed to be properly shielded (especially the wire that runs from your socket to your appliance), but I've found it to be the worst from experience. They typically aren't so bad as to affect wifi unless the wire is running vertically between base and computer, but they usually interfere with any ethernet cables laying nearby.
For wifi, anything that operates on the same spectrum will interfere with the connection. Baby monitors, cordless phones, cordless peripherals, even the cell phone can be problematic. For this, it is either due in part to the router's antenna design being poor and prone to interference, or the .design of the wireless chip inside the computer itself.
I don't know if these things are limited to the consumer-grade status of the products. It's more likely that businesses already know either via an employee or a consultant what to do and what not to do with the products they bought.
When it hits version 10, they can call it LinuX.
That's true in the states (for now--Obama seems to be on a personal crusade against whistleblowers). However, in British law, libel has much lower requirements to satisfy, and the accused has a much more difficult time proving innocence while facing fairly stiff penalties. It probably stems from not having the freedom of speech explicitly recognized.
IANAL (especially not a British one), but in the Ryan Giggs case, I believe merely mentioning something prohibited by a superinjunction constitutes as libel (you can think of a superinjunction as something like the British equivalent of a National Security Letter).
Score 1 for using NAT instead of IPv6.
There is indeed safety in numbers.
Granted, the twitter user probably doesn't only post from a phone, and even if so, the police can profile the user by correlating enough posts of the user to the location data, but a layer of obscurity is better than nothing.
I'd personally use TOR and a TOR-only account if I wanted to write something that might get me into trouble, but that's just me.
That depends on whether he entered Thailand with his US or Thai passport. If he goes in with his US passport, he's afford all the protections that any other US citizen can and should expect from Thailand (which could be none at all--it depends on the country's laws and treaties). If he uses his Thai passport (assuming he still has it), he's SOL.
...an evolution as opposed to a revolution. It'll probably be an upgrade rather than a replacement. The PS3 capability-wise was revolutionary compared to the PS2. The PS4 may only seek to improve upon it by fixing the PS3's existing faults while adding more capabilities. I'd be surprised if the PS4 wasn't backwards-compatible with PS3 only because the PS4 will be so technologically similar.
Besides which, I think that'd be the wisest path for Sony to take for their next generation console. The PS3 has only started to gain traction among mainstream gamers now, as the Wii and the 360 are hitting their respective limits. It wouldn't be good to come up with some completely new system that suddenly everyone who had bought a PS3 wouldn't be able to use. Instead, it'd be better to offer something that PS3 users might be willing to eventually upgrade to, while still attracting new users with the existing PS3 and eventually PS4 game library.