Here in the US, what would we do with the millions of illegal immigrants? Do they get a minimum income as well? Also, how do we know that this won't eventually be means-tested, or that the poorest won't eventually get additional benefits once we find out that a single mother with 12 kids is in real danger of starving to death? Would the government actually close down all it's welfare offices, or would all those people just find some other busywork to do, negating all the supposed cost savings?
It's one of those ideas that sounds really good in theory, but I wonder how well it will hold up in the real world, with all its messy corner cases.
Does minimum income preclude short-term unemployment benefits? If so, doesn't this mean that someone with a well-paying job that has a more expensive mortgage is very likely to lose their house if they lose their job and don't have enough of a cushion in savings? This seems like a much worse deal for the middle class. The rich earn enough that they don't care, and it's a heck of a boon to the poor, especially the working poor.
A lot of people talk about the reduction in overhead. Is Finland willing to stick to this and eliminate a large number of government jobs, so as to reduce overall government expenditures? Because that's what people are really talking about when they talk about "streamlining" - cutting government employee overhead. Otherwise there would be no cost savings.
I can appreciate the straightforward nature of this system, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the first ones to try it out. I'm sort of hoping that it's adopted so we can see if this is economically viable at all. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that what you might start to see is later some sort of "means testing" when the money runs short, or additional welfare programs stacked on top when people realize that the basic income really isn't enough to live on. At that point, you're essentially back to where you started.
In the far east (by which you mean China, right?) nearly all of the DVDs you see sold are unauthorized copies. You can buy them for just slightly more than the cost of the disks and packaging themselves. That's easy to do when those selling them didn't have to invest any money in creating the content on that media.
I'm not trying to justify region locking or defending the media conglomerates, but sales of digital media in China is a horribly skewed example.
Schools - For obvious reasons That reason eludes me, I know momentum keeps many schools using paper but if you do it right digital should be cheaper and better and do a better job or preparing the kids for the real world
E-books make a lot of sense, and some types of homework and assignments can be exchanged both ways digitally. It's pretty much inevitable that this will happen. However, keep in mind that kids still need to learn how to write with pencil, pen, and paper, or they'll be dysfunctional in the real world.
Also, logically speaking, it *should* be cheaper, but remember when we paid as much or more for a digital copy than a paperback (thanks largely to collusion)? It's likely to be that way at first as publishers desperately try to hold onto their little fiefdoms.
Well, true, but AC said OS, not kernel. I'm pretty sure I could have found an equally valid example even if we restricted it to the kernel.
It's just that the premise itself is ridiculous. I mean, a billion people use Linux nowadays, so it's fine to cut a feature so long as it only impacts 300 million or fewer people?
I remember a reading about metrics collected by Microsoft on features most commonly used in their Office products. What they found was that, apart from a handful of the most obvious features such as "Open", "Copy", "Paste", and "Save", the use of features flattened out very, very quickly, in terms of percentages. As such, it would really no sense to create a version of MS Word that only had the "most commonly used 70% of features", because that subset of features would tend to differ wildly from user to user.
I have a suspicion that you'd find the same to be true of features in the Linux kernel. There are obvious features that everyone has to use, but among all the "optional" features, I wouldn't be surprised to find find that the usage curve tends to flatten out fairly quickly.
I think there's probably a reason the most popular Linux distros are *not* the stripped down models, but the more fully-featured distros.
No, it's not weird. You just seem to be confused by the description of "lower level hardware access".
These aren't vendor-specific extensions. This is simply a redesigned API that eliminates a lot of the software bottlenecks, allowing developers to get a bit closer to the hardware in a GPU-independent manner. You're still programming to a common API. It's just that the API better reflects what a 2015-era GPU can do, rather than impose a lot of software overhead that isn't really needed.
Even several years ago, game developers were hitting pretty hard against the constraints of 32-bit memory limitations. The only reason they didn't switch to 64-bit gaming was that too many people were still were running 32-bit OSes on their otherwise perfectly capable 64-bit systems.
Nowadays, it just doesn't make sense to constrain the entire game because of technology holdouts like that. Games are incredibly resource intensive, and will gladly consume all the RAM you'll give it.
Where are you seeing that assumption made? As far as i can see, the article and summary both clearly make distinctions between conditions in Bejing and throughout the country as a whole.
For instance:
Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold.
Agree that people should watch that documentary though - it's very good.
If he's actually working 100 hours per week for years at a time, he has NO life... period. You realize that's over 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Or if he wants one day off a week, that's well over 16 hours a day.
Really? Can someone actually work that much for over three years straight and not die or go insane? I suppose it's possible if you consider your work as both entertainment and social life as well.
You're not thinking this through... your hard drive is not going to survive a fire or theft, or you being momentarily stupid and accidentally formatting your disk, or a virus doing it for you, etc.
First... it's a backup, which implies you already *have* a local copy of all your data (preferably two copies). It doesn't matter if your backup provider shuts down. You can just get a new one, and you're backed up again as soon as your files finish uploading. As you saw, this provider is providing months for you to transition over.
Second, if you don't want your backup provider to go away unexpectedly, go with a name you know. For instance, use Amazon S3 / Glacier with a local backup client. They're affordable and you know they're not going to disappear next week. Probably not next decade either. Or one of the other big names is fine too.
I hope you have an offsite backup as well. Because what could possibly happen to that "hard drive in the computer on my desk", right? We all know "the cloud" is ridiculously overhyped, but automatic offsite backup is really one of it's killer applications.
No, don't worry. I haven't seen the DirectX 12 API yet myself (I'm still working in DX9-11 land), but I'm pretty sure all this is doing is making the abstraction layer more closely match the realities of the existing hardware designs. That is, it's not eliminating the abstraction altogether, but making it a much thinner layer, so as to avoid imposing unnecessary overhead.
All the GPUs work in roughly the same manner, because they have to execute the same common shader micro-code. In order to be labeled as "DX11" or "DX12" compliant hardware, a GPU must be able to perform a minimum set of functionality. Moreover, the vast majority of this functionality is accessed via shader languages, and this doesn't change from GPU to GPU.
I'd be surprised if there was any significant divergence at all between different types of GPUs in the code at all. DirectX 12 looks like it's going to be a very good thing, both for developers and for gamers.
I'd guess the reason C is used is because it's still the programming language of choice for operating systems and security libraries. Nearly every commonly-used OS is written in C, and as such, it's the most relevant language to demonstrate such techniques in.
It also happens to be a somewhat low-level language that allows for all sorts of crazy tricks and techniques, especially once you add in the preprocessor. So, win-win, as far as this contest is concerned.
Don't live near any coast, for fear of Tsunamis. Don't life in the Midwest, for fear of tornadoes. Don't live near any fault lines, for fear of earthquakes. Don't live in hot climates, for fear of droughts and wildfires. Don't live in norther climates, for fear of blizzards. Don't live near volcanoes, for fear of eruptions. Don't live in the jungles, for fear of diseases. Don't live on a hillside, for fear of mudslides. Don't live on a river plain, for fear of flooding. Don't live in Africa, as a lion might eat you. Don't life in Canada or Alaska, as a bear might eat you. Don't live in Florida, as an alligator might eat you. Don't live in Australia, since everything is venomous. etc, etc...
There are very few places on earth where nature doesn't occasionally try to kill you.
I'd argue that C++ has to be considered in two different cases, one for library writers and one for library users. Moreover, let's talk about modern C++ (C++14) rather than legacy C++, with all the cruft compatibility with C and older C++ version gives us.
C++ is an incredibly complicated but unbelievably powerful language for writing libraries. It allows high-level abstraction that compiles down to code every bit as efficient as the much more dangerous equivalent C code. A lot of the really complicated parts of C++ are actually intended for library writers, where advanced techniques can make the libraries easier to use, safer, and more efficient at the cost of code complexity. Many programmers believe that they need to master all these subtle and tricky parts of the language in order to properly use C++, but I don't believe that to be the case at all.
The other aspect of C++ is a programmer who mostly *uses* libraries to build new functionality (application-level programming). This sort of C++ is actually fairly straightforward, so long as you have a reasonable knowledge level of the language. That is, you can write classes properly (rule of three, now extended to rule of four), understand scope and resource management (RAII), simple rules for keeping classes exception safe (like the copy/swap idiom), and understand how to make use of the newest features like smart pointers. Modern C++ code can and should be written in such a way that it's impossible to stomp on memory you don't own, and difficult to accidentally leak memory or other resources, and all without losing any significant efficiency compared to C.
I'd say the biggest problem C++ has is that many programmers simply don't understand how to properly break things up into discrete classes and tend to overuse inheritance instead of composition as a means of building complex functionality. As such, you often tend to see nightmarish class hierarchies filled will massive classes that perform dozens and dozens of completely discrete functions, instead of classes composed of smaller classes, each with a well-defined and testable set of operators and behavior. Moreover, you see many programmers combining this with the most dangerous of C behaviors, such as passing around raw object pointers or memory buffers, especially in older legacy code. It's no wonder C++ has a reputation of being a difficult language.
I'd never argue that C++ is an *easy* language to use. In fact, it's pretty easy to write really horrible, unmanageable C++ code, which I think is probably *worse* than bad C code in many ways. However, *good* C++ is far more manageable and safer than the equivalent C code while being every bit as run-time efficient.
We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.
The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.
If you need to, set aside some of the grant money for some quality peer review. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that you can do everything for free, but let's make effective use of that grant money and make sure the published results are open and accessible for everyone. Hosting the data costs nothing nowadays. This is a racket that should be broken.
Nice rose-colored glasses you're wearing there. Remember how XP was derided as bloated and memory-heavy when it was first released? Remember how it's interface was ridiculed for looking like a PlaySkool toy? How about it's disastrous security record, especially before Service Pack 2 was released? I especially loved that a faulty driver audio driver could end up causing a blue-screen for the entire system. And don't forget about that 64-bit version of the OS that no one used because it wasn't compatible with anything.
Windows 7 is a far superior OS by any reasonable standard. It's basically all the good parts of Vista (better security model, improved driver model, better 64-bit support) but with significantly improved under-the-hood performance optimizations, and a lot of usability improvements.
I don't really see anyone arguing... just discussing the merits and drawbacks of one format vs another. I think most people have long since made their peace with the fact that e-books are here to stay, while a number of people will continue to purchase and enjoy physical books.
Don't conflate art, which is all about presentation, to literature, which is about content. A literary masterpiece remains a literary masterpiece whether it's printed on paper or is digital data in a simple text file. Whether someone can appreciate it only in one form or another says more about the person than the work itself.
Oddly enough, nowadays, the digital copy is probably a closer representation of the author's original creation than a published book. Few modern authors actually use a typewriter or write their manuscripts longhand. Why then, would a printed copy of an electronic manuscript be considered more genuine? Even the painting on the cover was likely a digital creation to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the US, what would we do with the millions of illegal immigrants? Do they get a minimum income as well? Also, how do we know that this won't eventually be means-tested, or that the poorest won't eventually get additional benefits once we find out that a single mother with 12 kids is in real danger of starving to death? Would the government actually close down all it's welfare offices, or would all those people just find some other busywork to do, negating all the supposed cost savings?
It's one of those ideas that sounds really good in theory, but I wonder how well it will hold up in the real world, with all its messy corner cases.
Does minimum income preclude short-term unemployment benefits? If so, doesn't this mean that someone with a well-paying job that has a more expensive mortgage is very likely to lose their house if they lose their job and don't have enough of a cushion in savings? This seems like a much worse deal for the middle class. The rich earn enough that they don't care, and it's a heck of a boon to the poor, especially the working poor.
A lot of people talk about the reduction in overhead. Is Finland willing to stick to this and eliminate a large number of government jobs, so as to reduce overall government expenditures? Because that's what people are really talking about when they talk about "streamlining" - cutting government employee overhead. Otherwise there would be no cost savings.
I can appreciate the straightforward nature of this system, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the first ones to try it out. I'm sort of hoping that it's adopted so we can see if this is economically viable at all. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that what you might start to see is later some sort of "means testing" when the money runs short, or additional welfare programs stacked on top when people realize that the basic income really isn't enough to live on. At that point, you're essentially back to where you started.
In the far east (by which you mean China, right?) nearly all of the DVDs you see sold are unauthorized copies. You can buy them for just slightly more than the cost of the disks and packaging themselves. That's easy to do when those selling them didn't have to invest any money in creating the content on that media.
I'm not trying to justify region locking or defending the media conglomerates, but sales of digital media in China is a horribly skewed example.
Schools - For obvious reasons
That reason eludes me, I know momentum keeps many schools using paper but if you do it right digital should be cheaper and better and do a better job or preparing the kids for the real world
E-books make a lot of sense, and some types of homework and assignments can be exchanged both ways digitally. It's pretty much inevitable that this will happen. However, keep in mind that kids still need to learn how to write with pencil, pen, and paper, or they'll be dysfunctional in the real world.
Also, logically speaking, it *should* be cheaper, but remember when we paid as much or more for a digital copy than a paperback (thanks largely to collusion)? It's likely to be that way at first as publishers desperately try to hold onto their little fiefdoms.
Well, true, but AC said OS, not kernel. I'm pretty sure I could have found an equally valid example even if we restricted it to the kernel.
It's just that the premise itself is ridiculous. I mean, a billion people use Linux nowadays, so it's fine to cut a feature so long as it only impacts 300 million or fewer people?
I would strongly argue that if the feature is used by less than 30% of the users, maybe it shouldn't be in the OS at all.
Like accessibility features for disabled users?
I remember a reading about metrics collected by Microsoft on features most commonly used in their Office products. What they found was that, apart from a handful of the most obvious features such as "Open", "Copy", "Paste", and "Save", the use of features flattened out very, very quickly, in terms of percentages. As such, it would really no sense to create a version of MS Word that only had the "most commonly used 70% of features", because that subset of features would tend to differ wildly from user to user.
I have a suspicion that you'd find the same to be true of features in the Linux kernel. There are obvious features that everyone has to use, but among all the "optional" features, I wouldn't be surprised to find find that the usage curve tends to flatten out fairly quickly.
I think there's probably a reason the most popular Linux distros are *not* the stripped down models, but the more fully-featured distros.
It's what everyone uses for downloading Firefox or Chrome on a new Windows machine.
No, it's not weird. You just seem to be confused by the description of "lower level hardware access".
These aren't vendor-specific extensions. This is simply a redesigned API that eliminates a lot of the software bottlenecks, allowing developers to get a bit closer to the hardware in a GPU-independent manner. You're still programming to a common API. It's just that the API better reflects what a 2015-era GPU can do, rather than impose a lot of software overhead that isn't really needed.
How about "cattle drives"? According to unnamed sources, we're all cows.
Moo?
How do you throw a tantrum when you're dead?
You're underestimating the lingering effects of his reality distortion field.
Even several years ago, game developers were hitting pretty hard against the constraints of 32-bit memory limitations. The only reason they didn't switch to 64-bit gaming was that too many people were still were running 32-bit OSes on their otherwise perfectly capable 64-bit systems.
Nowadays, it just doesn't make sense to constrain the entire game because of technology holdouts like that. Games are incredibly resource intensive, and will gladly consume all the RAM you'll give it.
Where are you seeing that assumption made? As far as i can see, the article and summary both clearly make distinctions between conditions in Bejing and throughout the country as a whole.
For instance:
Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold.
Agree that people should watch that documentary though - it's very good.
If he's actually working 100 hours per week for years at a time, he has NO life... period. You realize that's over 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Or if he wants one day off a week, that's well over 16 hours a day.
Really? Can someone actually work that much for over three years straight and not die or go insane? I suppose it's possible if you consider your work as both entertainment and social life as well.
That's actually what I do. I use a NAS device to backup my computers, and it backs itself up to an Amazon S3 folder.
You're not thinking this through... your hard drive is not going to survive a fire or theft, or you being momentarily stupid and accidentally formatting your disk, or a virus doing it for you, etc.
First... it's a backup, which implies you already *have* a local copy of all your data (preferably two copies). It doesn't matter if your backup provider shuts down. You can just get a new one, and you're backed up again as soon as your files finish uploading. As you saw, this provider is providing months for you to transition over.
Second, if you don't want your backup provider to go away unexpectedly, go with a name you know. For instance, use Amazon S3 / Glacier with a local backup client. They're affordable and you know they're not going to disappear next week. Probably not next decade either. Or one of the other big names is fine too.
I hope you have an offsite backup as well. Because what could possibly happen to that "hard drive in the computer on my desk", right? We all know "the cloud" is ridiculously overhyped, but automatic offsite backup is really one of it's killer applications.
No, don't worry. I haven't seen the DirectX 12 API yet myself (I'm still working in DX9-11 land), but I'm pretty sure all this is doing is making the abstraction layer more closely match the realities of the existing hardware designs. That is, it's not eliminating the abstraction altogether, but making it a much thinner layer, so as to avoid imposing unnecessary overhead.
All the GPUs work in roughly the same manner, because they have to execute the same common shader micro-code. In order to be labeled as "DX11" or "DX12" compliant hardware, a GPU must be able to perform a minimum set of functionality. Moreover, the vast majority of this functionality is accessed via shader languages, and this doesn't change from GPU to GPU.
I'd be surprised if there was any significant divergence at all between different types of GPUs in the code at all. DirectX 12 looks like it's going to be a very good thing, both for developers and for gamers.
I'd guess the reason C is used is because it's still the programming language of choice for operating systems and security libraries. Nearly every commonly-used OS is written in C, and as such, it's the most relevant language to demonstrate such techniques in.
It also happens to be a somewhat low-level language that allows for all sorts of crazy tricks and techniques, especially once you add in the preprocessor. So, win-win, as far as this contest is concerned.
Don't live near any coast, for fear of Tsunamis.
Don't life in the Midwest, for fear of tornadoes.
Don't live near any fault lines, for fear of earthquakes.
Don't live in hot climates, for fear of droughts and wildfires.
Don't live in norther climates, for fear of blizzards.
Don't live near volcanoes, for fear of eruptions.
Don't live in the jungles, for fear of diseases.
Don't live on a hillside, for fear of mudslides.
Don't live on a river plain, for fear of flooding.
Don't live in Africa, as a lion might eat you.
Don't life in Canada or Alaska, as a bear might eat you.
Don't live in Florida, as an alligator might eat you.
Don't live in Australia, since everything is venomous.
etc, etc...
There are very few places on earth where nature doesn't occasionally try to kill you.
I'd argue that C++ has to be considered in two different cases, one for library writers and one for library users. Moreover, let's talk about modern C++ (C++14) rather than legacy C++, with all the cruft compatibility with C and older C++ version gives us.
C++ is an incredibly complicated but unbelievably powerful language for writing libraries. It allows high-level abstraction that compiles down to code every bit as efficient as the much more dangerous equivalent C code. A lot of the really complicated parts of C++ are actually intended for library writers, where advanced techniques can make the libraries easier to use, safer, and more efficient at the cost of code complexity. Many programmers believe that they need to master all these subtle and tricky parts of the language in order to properly use C++, but I don't believe that to be the case at all.
The other aspect of C++ is a programmer who mostly *uses* libraries to build new functionality (application-level programming). This sort of C++ is actually fairly straightforward, so long as you have a reasonable knowledge level of the language. That is, you can write classes properly (rule of three, now extended to rule of four), understand scope and resource management (RAII), simple rules for keeping classes exception safe (like the copy/swap idiom), and understand how to make use of the newest features like smart pointers. Modern C++ code can and should be written in such a way that it's impossible to stomp on memory you don't own, and difficult to accidentally leak memory or other resources, and all without losing any significant efficiency compared to C.
I'd say the biggest problem C++ has is that many programmers simply don't understand how to properly break things up into discrete classes and tend to overuse inheritance instead of composition as a means of building complex functionality. As such, you often tend to see nightmarish class hierarchies filled will massive classes that perform dozens and dozens of completely discrete functions, instead of classes composed of smaller classes, each with a well-defined and testable set of operators and behavior. Moreover, you see many programmers combining this with the most dangerous of C behaviors, such as passing around raw object pointers or memory buffers, especially in older legacy code. It's no wonder C++ has a reputation of being a difficult language.
I'd never argue that C++ is an *easy* language to use. In fact, it's pretty easy to write really horrible, unmanageable C++ code, which I think is probably *worse* than bad C code in many ways. However, *good* C++ is far more manageable and safer than the equivalent C code while being every bit as run-time efficient.
We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.
The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.
If you need to, set aside some of the grant money for some quality peer review. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that you can do everything for free, but let's make effective use of that grant money and make sure the published results are open and accessible for everyone. Hosting the data costs nothing nowadays. This is a racket that should be broken.
it was all downhill since XP.
Nice rose-colored glasses you're wearing there. Remember how XP was derided as bloated and memory-heavy when it was first released? Remember how it's interface was ridiculed for looking like a PlaySkool toy? How about it's disastrous security record, especially before Service Pack 2 was released? I especially loved that a faulty driver audio driver could end up causing a blue-screen for the entire system. And don't forget about that 64-bit version of the OS that no one used because it wasn't compatible with anything.
Windows 7 is a far superior OS by any reasonable standard. It's basically all the good parts of Vista (better security model, improved driver model, better 64-bit support) but with significantly improved under-the-hood performance optimizations, and a lot of usability improvements.
I don't really see anyone arguing... just discussing the merits and drawbacks of one format vs another. I think most people have long since made their peace with the fact that e-books are here to stay, while a number of people will continue to purchase and enjoy physical books.
Don't conflate art, which is all about presentation, to literature, which is about content. A literary masterpiece remains a literary masterpiece whether it's printed on paper or is digital data in a simple text file. Whether someone can appreciate it only in one form or another says more about the person than the work itself.
Oddly enough, nowadays, the digital copy is probably a closer representation of the author's original creation than a published book. Few modern authors actually use a typewriter or write their manuscripts longhand. Why then, would a printed copy of an electronic manuscript be considered more genuine? Even the painting on the cover was likely a digital creation to begin with.