As far as I know, selling processors and chipsets to other manufacturers making the actual computers is a major business for Intel, probably even much bigger than direct consumer sales. It's damn obvious then, that whatever Intel sells, most of it will be incorporated in a product of its own ans sold again by other companies and that's the whole purpose of Intel producing most of its inventory at all (chipsets etc.).
Taking that into consideration, isn't Intel likely to go medieval at anyone mobbing their most important customers with such a blatantly bogus claim? Sure, LG is big - but probably not big enough to stand chances with Intel if they were to release the hell hou^W^W^W^W^W^W lawyers...
I'm not doing anything to them. Their working conditions are. There's some 15 different *brands* of switches there including a few Chinese "no-names", chained up to 5 in a row to reach far out in the building.
Guess what? Every week some moron manages to make a loop, connect a switch to itself, connect two switches with a telephone cable or do any other unspeakably ass-brained thing that makes CSI investigations look like a piece of cake compared to finding out what's wrong with this network.
And don't even get me started on the fact that every wing of the building is powered from a different phase...
I've been managing a dorm network consisting of two "servers" (routing, PPPoE, some services like network printing etc.), a single industrial rack-mounted swithch and dozens of consumer switches spread all over the building.
And they failed. And then they failed again. And again. Sometimes completely, but usually just a single port, or just "a bit" - it looked as if the switch was working, but every - or every n-th, or every bigger than x - packet got mangled, misdirected or whatever. Or sometimes packets appeared just out of the blue (probably some partial leftovers from the cache) and a few of them made enough sense to be received and reported. Sometimes a switch with no network cables attached to it started blinking its lights - sometimes on two ports, sometimes just on a single one.
Well, I could go on for hours, but you get the idea. What happens at Google happens everywhere, they just have some nice numbers.
Regardless, the article is quite entertaining to read for a networking geek;)
OS developers are not idiots - they KNOW that they are working for free (simplification, I know, there are exceptions, but it's not important now) and they wouldn't be if they didn't want to. If they do - that means they're just fine with that.
Oh, and note that the guy is speaking "open source" - but there's no word of "free software", that makes up quite a bit of Open Source and explains all the aspects of getting paid very well.
They once asked him, why would he do that (as that was dangerous and quite pointless from any practical point of view because there's nothing on top of Mt. Everest and the guy wasn't even a scientist). His answer? "Because it's there."
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that it's what defines a true geek - doing things even if they're pointless by themselves, for the sake of doing them and proving that this or that completely crazy idea is actually doable. And, of course, because they're fun!
Re:Enormous congratulations to them all
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There actually is a lot of scientific advancement, in the form of all the technology that needs to be invented, designed and perfected. If you hava some spare time and do a bit of research, you'll realise that a lot of supposedly everyday items and technologies we use now are possible due to the space races during the Cold War. For example, the materials used for space suits and heat shields were a starting point for some of the today's textiles used for clothing and construction materials for industrial machinery and even some household devices.
Oh, and, well - excuse me for replying to my own posts, but I just can't resist - if you really want to be precise, note that the touchdown was not by any means perfectly momentary. It could have taken even a few seconds, maybe the lander touched the ground, then lifted a few centimeters, then finally rested still on the surface.
You know, even pressing a microswitch like the one in your mouse is not a momentary action from the microcontroller's point of view - it needs an explicit "debouncing" theshold of a few tens of miliseconds because the button really bounces a bit when pressed - by hundredths of a milimeter but still enough to generate a few clicks at once if not debounced.
OK, OK, I promise, I'll not be picking nits anymore today...
I think he meant that the value ("7:53PM EST") given as a reference to the Earth time is precisely (that is, with an implied, practical amount of measurement inaccuracy, but a small and acceptable one even by the scientific standards) in accordance with the actual, momentary act of the lander touching down.
No - because no host I have to use does. That's the problem with such applications and there's nothing you can do if you can't afford a dedicated server. Hell, even collocation would do, but it's nearly as expensive.
I've never seen a wep application with such a horribly contorted, uncomfortable, unwieldy and annoying interface. It's an abomination thrown in the face of UI and usability desingers and knowledgeable admins forced to use it to manage shared hosting accounts under their administration. It lacks any kind of consistency and logic and even encourages making the things worse by not enfocing any of those on the plugins written by the companies that use this bastard child of an administration panel.
Save a few poor people their grief and don't use cPanel,
Repeat after me: a license does not apply to the copyright holder.
That's why Qt can be dual-licensed, that's why a book published under by-nb can be sold by the copyright holder, that's why the copyroght holder can do whatever he wants with the work, even disregarding the license completely - because he's not bound by it.
Well, that depends on the level of autonomy this device has. Maybe it's just a manipulator that turns the movements of a joystick directly into the movements of a scalpel or something, but it could as well receive orders like "cut this piece of tissue" and proceed by itself with exact, self-calculated movements of the blade. I'd say this counts as a form of a robot.
A huge amount of memory is a charm if you are using virtual machines for some serious job. I've got 3GB of DDR2 as of now in my laptop and it's perfectly enough for VMWare with Windows Server 2003 that does the compilation and testing of cross-platform code I write. That amounts to about 1,5GB used when working, 700MB in buffers and ~800MB spare "just in case" or when I want to take a break and do something else for a while without suspending the VM and closing all the stuff I had open. However, add a second VM with OS X and the system gets more than a bit swappy - certainly a bad thing for VMs. Of course, 4GB will do in my case and it will be a cheap upgrade.
Another area of interest are servers. With today's workloads, they need more memory really badly and there's only so much optimization one can do before the only way of solving the problem is just to throw more iron at it. I've got a Compaq Proliant 6400R under my desk, as a test box, that was built in 1999 as a very high-end server (only the 8500 series, a few IBMs, and a few Sun Fire machines were more powerful for a while) and has 4GB of memory - 9 years ago so much memory in a desktop computer was nearly unthinkable, now it's getting quite common. And the servers? 16GB is possible in all but the most basic server motherboards (possible, mind you, not provided as a standard of course), while 64GB and more is not that uncommon. Well, actually, I think that the server industry will be the primary market for DDR3 while it gets cheaper. Especially the kind of servers that cost from $50k (so-called "midrange") up to $4 million a piece (yep, I'm talking about Sun Fire E25K, "just" 288GB as far as memory is concerned...). When you pay that much, the cost of individual pieces becomes irrelevant, the box just has to be up to the job.
There are some Sony VAIOs and high-end ThinkPads (a few really high-end T series models and a few more X series models, especially "t" and "s" variety) that cost even more and definitely aren't gaming laptops, but no one buys them just like that, especially the TPs, they are more of a special-purpose tool than a typical laptop and are usually bought because someone actually needs them.
If your app risks being dismissed by the user for such reasons, you have some serious problems than just the toolkit you are using. Like, well, the app being nothing of particular value usefulness compared to the alternatives or something along these lines.
While you are technically right on those issures, I'd dare to say they're, well, non-issues compared to what Qt offers, save for the Mac version ugliness.
Frankly, I don't see any reasonable, sincere and unbiased way of arguing that a few megabytes more is enough to dismiss a toolkit completely.
As for the Windows development problem, Visual Studio 2008 which is hailed even on Slashdot as the best (or at least one of the best) Windows IDE out there supports C++ just as well as other languages. So what did you actually mean by "moving away"?
And, actually, even the point about Qt being ugly on Mac, while true, is pretty meaningless, as the only other toolkit (AFAIR - please correct me if that's not the case anymore) that has native Mac OS X support is wxWindows and it's about as ugly there.
Widgets in QGraphicsView look *really* promising
on
In-Depth With Qt 4.4
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Graphics View alone is an extremely powerful tool - now it seems to be able to do things no other toolkit comes even close to. I can't wait to use 4.4 in an application I'm developing right now (a game map editor), this feature will allow me to make some parts of the user interface a whole lot simpler and more intuitive, throwing away a bunch of docks and toolbars in favor of a more interactive workspace.
Well, it's configured for a 12.1" laptop TFT (very high DPI, small size - that means very small physical pixels), so I guess it could look bad on a CRT, a low-DPI desktop LCD or one of those panoramic, glossy, high-contrast, low-DPI screens in those huge "laptops" one could use as a doorstop or a blunt weapon... But it sure looks good on a sublaptop, so no problem for me.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, selling processors and chipsets to other manufacturers making the actual computers is a major business for Intel, probably even much bigger than direct consumer sales. It's damn obvious then, that whatever Intel sells, most of it will be incorporated in a product of its own ans sold again by other companies and that's the whole purpose of Intel producing most of its inventory at all (chipsets etc.).
Taking that into consideration, isn't Intel likely to go medieval at anyone mobbing their most important customers with such a blatantly bogus claim? Sure, LG is big - but probably not big enough to stand chances with Intel if they were to release the hell hou^W^W^W^W^W^W lawyers...
And the phrase "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" isn't exactly unlike the People's Republic of China...
I'm not doing anything to them. Their working conditions are. There's some 15 different *brands* of switches there including a few Chinese "no-names", chained up to 5 in a row to reach far out in the building.
Guess what? Every week some moron manages to make a loop, connect a switch to itself, connect two switches with a telephone cable or do any other unspeakably ass-brained thing that makes CSI investigations look like a piece of cake compared to finding out what's wrong with this network.
And don't even get me started on the fact that every wing of the building is powered from a different phase...
I've been managing a dorm network consisting of two "servers" (routing, PPPoE, some services like network printing etc.), a single industrial rack-mounted swithch and dozens of consumer switches spread all over the building.
;)
And they failed. And then they failed again. And again. Sometimes completely, but usually just a single port, or just "a bit" - it looked as if the switch was working, but every - or every n-th, or every bigger than x - packet got mangled, misdirected or whatever. Or sometimes packets appeared just out of the blue (probably some partial leftovers from the cache) and a few of them made enough sense to be received and reported. Sometimes a switch with no network cables attached to it started blinking its lights - sometimes on two ports, sometimes just on a single one.
Well, I could go on for hours, but you get the idea. What happens at Google happens everywhere, they just have some nice numbers.
Regardless, the article is quite entertaining to read for a networking geek
OS developers are not idiots - they KNOW that they are working for free (simplification, I know, there are exceptions, but it's not important now) and they wouldn't be if they didn't want to. If they do - that means they're just fine with that.
Oh, and note that the guy is speaking "open source" - but there's no word of "free software", that makes up quite a bit of Open Source and explains all the aspects of getting paid very well.
I call FUD.
They once asked him, why would he do that (as that was dangerous and quite pointless from any practical point of view because there's nothing on top of Mt. Everest and the guy wasn't even a scientist). His answer? "Because it's there."
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that it's what defines a true geek - doing things even if they're pointless by themselves, for the sake of doing them and proving that this or that completely crazy idea is actually doable. And, of course, because they're fun!
There actually is a lot of scientific advancement, in the form of all the technology that needs to be invented, designed and perfected. If you hava some spare time and do a bit of research, you'll realise that a lot of supposedly everyday items and technologies we use now are possible due to the space races during the Cold War. For example, the materials used for space suits and heat shields were a starting point for some of the today's textiles used for clothing and construction materials for industrial machinery and even some household devices.
Oh, and, well - excuse me for replying to my own posts, but I just can't resist - if you really want to be precise, note that the touchdown was not by any means perfectly momentary. It could have taken even a few seconds, maybe the lander touched the ground, then lifted a few centimeters, then finally rested still on the surface.
You know, even pressing a microswitch like the one in your mouse is not a momentary action from the microcontroller's point of view - it needs an explicit "debouncing" theshold of a few tens of miliseconds because the button really bounces a bit when pressed - by hundredths of a milimeter but still enough to generate a few clicks at once if not debounced.
OK, OK, I promise, I'll not be picking nits anymore today...
I think he meant that the value ("7:53PM EST") given as a reference to the Earth time is precisely (that is, with an implied, practical amount of measurement inaccuracy, but a small and acceptable one even by the scientific standards) in accordance with the actual, momentary act of the lander touching down.
;)
If picking nits, do it properly.
No - because no host I have to use does. That's the problem with such applications and there's nothing you can do if you can't afford a dedicated server. Hell, even collocation would do, but it's nearly as expensive.
DO NOT use cPanel. Never ever, please!
I've never seen a wep application with such a horribly contorted, uncomfortable, unwieldy and annoying interface. It's an abomination thrown in the face of UI and usability desingers and knowledgeable admins forced to use it to manage shared hosting accounts under their administration. It lacks any kind of consistency and logic and even encourages making the things worse by not enfocing any of those on the plugins written by the companies that use this bastard child of an administration panel.
Save a few poor people their grief and don't use cPanel,
Repeat after me: a license does not apply to the copyright holder.
That's why Qt can be dual-licensed, that's why a book published under by-nb can be sold by the copyright holder, that's why the copyroght holder can do whatever he wants with the work, even disregarding the license completely - because he's not bound by it.
Well, that depends on the level of autonomy this device has. Maybe it's just a manipulator that turns the movements of a joystick directly into the movements of a scalpel or something, but it could as well receive orders like "cut this piece of tissue" and proceed by itself with exact, self-calculated movements of the blade. I'd say this counts as a form of a robot.
A huge amount of memory is a charm if you are using virtual machines for some serious job. I've got 3GB of DDR2 as of now in my laptop and it's perfectly enough for VMWare with Windows Server 2003 that does the compilation and testing of cross-platform code I write. That amounts to about 1,5GB used when working, 700MB in buffers and ~800MB spare "just in case" or when I want to take a break and do something else for a while without suspending the VM and closing all the stuff I had open. However, add a second VM with OS X and the system gets more than a bit swappy - certainly a bad thing for VMs. Of course, 4GB will do in my case and it will be a cheap upgrade.
Another area of interest are servers. With today's workloads, they need more memory really badly and there's only so much optimization one can do before the only way of solving the problem is just to throw more iron at it. I've got a Compaq Proliant 6400R under my desk, as a test box, that was built in 1999 as a very high-end server (only the 8500 series, a few IBMs, and a few Sun Fire machines were more powerful for a while) and has 4GB of memory - 9 years ago so much memory in a desktop computer was nearly unthinkable, now it's getting quite common. And the servers? 16GB is possible in all but the most basic server motherboards (possible, mind you, not provided as a standard of course), while 64GB and more is not that uncommon. Well, actually, I think that the server industry will be the primary market for DDR3 while it gets cheaper. Especially the kind of servers that cost from $50k (so-called "midrange") up to $4 million a piece (yep, I'm talking about Sun Fire E25K, "just" 288GB as far as memory is concerned...). When you pay that much, the cost of individual pieces becomes irrelevant, the box just has to be up to the job.
Well... Don't take contacts when you're not familiar enough with the technology it requires so that you don't need to struggle with it at all?
Well, it's clear now - those laptops must have been stolen by the manufacturers of frying pans!
There are some Sony VAIOs and high-end ThinkPads (a few really high-end T series models and a few more X series models, especially "t" and "s" variety) that cost even more and definitely aren't gaming laptops, but no one buys them just like that, especially the TPs, they are more of a special-purpose tool than a typical laptop and are usually bought because someone actually needs them.
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
It's still a work in progress, but it's mostly done by now and really well-written as an introductory guide.
Crap, missed "more" and "or" even when previewing. Excuse my sloppiness, I think I need some sleep now.
If your app risks being dismissed by the user for such reasons, you have some serious problems than just the toolkit you are using. Like, well, the app being nothing of particular value usefulness compared to the alternatives or something along these lines.
Mac OS X? I wouldn't consider messing with an X server running along Aqua "native" at all. Sure, they're working on that, but it's still to be done.
While you are technically right on those issures, I'd dare to say they're, well, non-issues compared to what Qt offers, save for the Mac version ugliness.
Frankly, I don't see any reasonable, sincere and unbiased way of arguing that a few megabytes more is enough to dismiss a toolkit completely.
As for the Windows development problem, Visual Studio 2008 which is hailed even on Slashdot as the best (or at least one of the best) Windows IDE out there supports C++ just as well as other languages. So what did you actually mean by "moving away"?
And, actually, even the point about Qt being ugly on Mac, while true, is pretty meaningless, as the only other toolkit (AFAIR - please correct me if that's not the case anymore) that has native Mac OS X support is wxWindows and it's about as ugly there.
Graphics View alone is an extremely powerful tool - now it seems to be able to do things no other toolkit comes even close to. I can't wait to use 4.4 in an application I'm developing right now (a game map editor), this feature will allow me to make some parts of the user interface a whole lot simpler and more intuitive, throwing away a bunch of docks and toolbars in favor of a more interactive workspace.
Well, Apple covered its ass by writing "1GB = 1 billion bytes; formatted size is smaller" on the box.
Well, it's configured for a 12.1" laptop TFT (very high DPI, small size - that means very small physical pixels), so I guess it could look bad on a CRT, a low-DPI desktop LCD or one of those panoramic, glossy, high-contrast, low-DPI screens in those huge "laptops" one could use as a doorstop or a blunt weapon... But it sure looks good on a sublaptop, so no problem for me.