Neither Java, Ruby nor Python are true contenders to C++ when it ever comes down to raw performance. They are surely more elegantly designed languages, although they have their own sets of flaws. D is an interesting language with many good ideas, but there's no decent IDE support for it and there's the standard library confusion as well (and the incompatibilities between D1 and D2). Once compilers like GDC are mature enough it'll actually be usable for serious work.
Well, C is sort of fine if you stick to really procedural code and don't do things like reinventing OO like gtk+ does (I hate that). And I really can't say anything about Scheme.
Bottom line; There's a place for C++ in between all of these languages you name: C++ programs can be amazingly fast if done right (no virtual machine and more importantly, no GC getting in the way at exactly the wrong time) and easier to get right than equivalent C programs if you're able to sacrifice some performance - you're able to do that in 90% of your code on average).
Encrypted connections to unidentified endpoints are not safer than unencrypted connections because there's no way to detect a man in the middle, unless you obtained the certificate also through a separate secure channel (in this case you can add it to your browser's certificate store and never get a warning again). But I fully agree that some browsers have become far too annoying in the way their UI handles such a situation.
The summary does indeed make it sound as if the guy was banned from playing a game that was already installed and running, thus being banned from using something already in his possession. After all, there is a login screen in the game. There is a bit difference between being barred from downloading something and being barred from actually using it after it was purchased and installed.
No, this is wrong. Yeasts metabolize sugar in two stages and get energy out of both. The first breaks sugar down to ethanol, the second breaks down ethanol, but requires oxygen. The trick is that yeasts can live from the energy gained in the first stage and do not absolutely have to process the ethanol. So keep them closed off from fresh air and you start getting alcohol in your beer.
Well, I'm still failing to see nVidia putting their money where the mouth is on that one. The last time I checked their OpenCL implementation, a lot of the demos that were ported over from CUDA ran slower - 10 times slower in the case of the volume rendering example. So this is not how you get to impress people who are solely concerned with performance. Oh, and unlike the CUDA compiler, the in-process OpenCL compiler even segfaulted on me within about 4 hours of playing with nVidia's OpenCL implementation (on trivial, but most likely incorrect input). The CUDA compiler never did that (although it still tends to generate plain wrong code from time to time). This was a couple of months ago, so I don't know if nVidia came around to fix the performance issues by now. I'd really love to see that.
One more thing: after porting the code over to CUDA the host code became way shorter (about 1/4 of the OpenCL code) and the whole experience from that point forward was way more pleasant...
Because nVidia has CUDA firmly entrenched in the scientific community by now. And CUDA almost works by now, that is, the most glaring bugs have been eradicated. Oh, and it even works on Linux!
Does AMD have support for doubles on their chips by now? Honest question here. It's a practically useless feature for graphics, but it makes a lot of sense for scientific computing.
There is a simple catch: performance. Some parts of Flash are really highly optimized (like the vector rendering engine - yup, that was once the primary purpose of the whole beast...). I highly doubt that any potential HTML5 counterpart to these parts reaches even remotely the same performance. End result: choppy animation, poor battery life, you name it.
It's worse than this: There would be no absolute simultaneity anymore, either. You'd get the full ugliness of the relativity of time in trading (well, just the SRT part of it, but still...). Given that the systems involved in trading have easily length scales of several meters involved, events that are mere picoseconds apart cannot be ordered chronologically anymore in an absolute fashion. The only thing that remains is a relative order at which they were observed and that is different depending on where in the system you are.
Bottom line: if anyone would try to attempt trading at timescales even close to that, this would end up in front of a judge sooner or later and then the judge's head would squarely explode while listening to expert witnesses talking in detail about what I just outlined.
If the processes involved are similar to what they are here (different country, so not sure), it is entirely possible to circumvent such guidelines by postulating requirements that only a single preferred vendor can meet. It's just the art of being specific enough. So if there is a "best tool for the job" it must have some properties that other don't and that you can simply require without alternative and even without decent explanation.
Simple example: want to buy only nVidia GPUs for some reason? Just state that you need CUDA support and you're set.
A "Stiftung" is a legal entity, but not a for-profit company in the usual sense. It's purpose has to be charitable and it's main function usually is to provide funding towards that goal. Plus, they may get tax exception. So the Document Foundation is aiming for creating a legal entity that actually is designed things like what they are doing.
I don't know if there is a minimal amount of money required for creating a Stiftung (I could look that up). But by German law, founding of for-profit companies is difficult. Either you end up liable for your company with everything that you own privately (your house, your car, you name it) or you have to provide a considerable amount of money as initial company funding. The minimum that you can currently get away with is 10000 euros for a Unternehmergesellschaft (haftungsbeschränkt), which has to be raised to 25000 euros during operations. That's not a fee that you pay. It's just the mandated initial capital. So requiring 50000 euros for a Stiftung does not seem out of the ordinary to me.
I know that for example in GB you can get a Ltd. for a few hundred pounds and 1 pound of required minimal capital. But that's not something that you ultimately want: nobody will trust such a company enough to make business with it in good faith. So this required minimum capital is actually a good thing.
Still this does not explain why onPause() should be called if the user starts tapping on the other screen. Unless there is a part of the Android interface that assumes that there is only one foreground activity (i.e. a function that is able to query for that), I don't see a problem with making existing apps work properly on dual-screen setups on the OS level. Independent state changes don't really count.
About "good" being relative: that's what the Elo rating was invented for. It allows ranking of players against each other based on the results they achieve against each other. A victory against a highly rated (good) player is worth more than one against a poorly rated player.
Then how do you propose to implement Drag and Drop in a toolkit-agnostic fashion without knowledge of what's under the mouse cursor? You need full knowledge of window geometries and z ordering to find out the drop target. Only the wayland server can provide that information. And this is therefore where the core part of that feature must reside.
Besides, not integrating all that into a single solution may easily lead to the situation the audio system in Linux is in: tons of incompatible solutions, each of them flawed in a major way. It's better to avoid that from the start.
How will Wayland ever be able to run decently on nVidia cards? Nouveau is not a real option yet (it's not yet decent enough for anything beyond accelerating desktop compositing) and nVidia doesn't plan to support EGL on Linux. So how will Ubuntu fix that? I'm really curious about that.
And how does Wayland plan to implement Clipboard and Drag and Drop functionality? Haven't seen that anywhere in the tiny amount of code that Wayland currently is.
Replacing X is not a bad goal, but getting there is hard. Just writing some code that defers the hard part about graphics to a driver and omits all the rest doesn't cut it. Let's just wait and see where this thing goes.
I agree with you that plain image processing is bloody hard to get working reliably. Making it work in uncontrolled conditions is additional orders of magnitude harder.
As far as I understand it - not having looked into it too closely - the image data is mostly interpreted based on expected human poses extrapolated from previous frames using a 3D skeleton. That is, it's not just image recognition. There's a (statistical?) model of human movement in there as well and as far as I understand it, the image data without this particular model wouldn't make any sense at all. Not wanting to research this more deeply I'd estimate that possible poses that fit to the picture (which may be a lot) are weighted by how likely it is that the human body could have shifted into that position since the last frame and the most likely one is picked.
Actually, there are a couple of PhD theses that went into this PrimeSense stuff. They were done in around 2003 to 2007 I think. One of the last Kinect stories featured here on/. was a look back at the product development and it listed the names of some people hinted at their academic works. The people got subsequently hired to work on this stuff. Looking that up will give you a start in researching the science/tech background. The basis is hard science and it has been published. It works not because it does pure image recognition, but because it tries to fit a sophisticated model of a human body into the data gathered from the image. Seemingly, this adds enough reliability to turn it into a consumer device.
Then you might be interested in Majesty and Majesty 2, strategy games in which your units are totally autonomous. You control them by giving them monetary incentives and sometimes helping them out with magic (which also costs money). Each type of unit also has its own character in addition to strengths and weaknesses, so they react differently to your incentives. It's quite fun to play actually and not that high on actions per minute.
I'd be surprised if the Gecko rendering engine would be suitable for WYSIWYG rendering of a print document on screen. This is a troublesome problem because layouting and rendering works differently for very low resolutions (screen) as it does for high resolutions (print). Remember those Word documents that looked awful on screen with e.g. phantom whitespaces between characters in a word, but would look OK on paper? That's the kind of problem you have to solve in a word processor. And Gecko simply doesn't need to do that.
Powerpoint 2007 is horrible WRT having presentations open side-by-side. It's possible, though. The thing is: Unlike the other Office 2007 programs, Powerpoint is still MDI, with the inner window buttons hidden at first. Go to the View ribbon and the look at the "Window" section. These are your standard MDI window commands: arrange, cascade... use them to make the inner windows actually visible as such. Once you do that, you even get inner window buttons in the top right corner of the ribbon once you maximize one of these windows again.
heise.de, a major German tech news site ran a test for precicely that reason about two weeks ago: they added an AAAA to heise.de in addition the normal AA record. Out of the thousands of visitors they have each day less than 10 were unable to reach that site in that configuration and wrote in about their problems and only one turned out to be unfixable because of a router misconfiguration somewhere else in the network. Since they advertised their test weeks ahead and asked users to report any problems they might experience during the test, the number of complaints they received is pretty low. So the argument of mixed AA/AAAA records not working properly of users is luckily losing its credibility, it seems.
Where did I say that roads with speed limits are inherently safe?
Have you been driving in Germany yet? If not, my guess is that the kinds of situations you get on the highways there are hard to imagine. Seeing one car pull out behind a truck going at 100km/h while there's another car going 160-180km/h or sometimes even faster approaching from behind and getting far too close far to fast is normal. Very often, the faster going drivers are reckless enough to brake at the very last moment to come down to the slower speed with some 5 or 10 meters to spare between the bumpers and staying that close behind.
Those German highways without speed limits are dangerous and demand the driver's full attention because there's almost always a car nearby that is going much faster or much slower than you are (except when traffic is really dense, of course, in which case this degenerates into a massive stop-and-go where you're constantly changing from standstill to speeds up to 100km/h and back in a constant, rather tight cycle). It's quite stressful to drive on these roads for a couple of hours.
Still, my guess is that the high demands on the drivers keep all of them so much more focused that the end result is a bearable rate of accidents. Actually, I find that I'm much more inclined to doze off on the wheel when I'm abroad on a highway with speed limit where everyone is going in a straight line at the same speed (did I mention that there's barely a highway segment in Germany that's really straight; I've heard that this is actually on purpose, but I'm not certain).
Funny enough, even Avatar contains shots that are 2D to 3D conversions. These mostly in the last part of the final battle. Weta Digital did those and they may still have a short breakdown video on their homepage which proves that. The trick they used was to time-shift the same take to get a fake stereo effect out of it. I'm still surprised that this is working at all.
As far as I can see, the patent is not about the OS shutdown in general, but the very specific way in which it is done in Vista and Win 7. Particularly, this involves the full-screen notification that some applications are preventing the system from shutting down that you eventually get after clicking the shutdown button, and the surrounding OS behaviour towards such applications (recognizing which running programs warrant putting up the prompt, signaling/terminating them...). This is not the traditional Unix shutdown stuff in any way, so unless you give the user the choice on shutdown to kill processes that don't want to quit by themselves yet, you should be rather safe. Still, this is yet another software patent:-(.
Personally, I find this full screen thing rather annoying anyway, mainly because Firefox interacts badly with it, showing its own exit prompt on shutdown and being overlaid with the that fullscreen prompt, preventing me from clicking the save and exit option in Firefox.
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Neither Java, Ruby nor Python are true contenders to C++ when it ever comes down to raw performance. They are surely more elegantly designed languages, although they have their own sets of flaws. D is an interesting language with many good ideas, but there's no decent IDE support for it and there's the standard library confusion as well (and the incompatibilities between D1 and D2). Once compilers like GDC are mature enough it'll actually be usable for serious work.
Well, C is sort of fine if you stick to really procedural code and don't do things like reinventing OO like gtk+ does (I hate that). And I really can't say anything about Scheme.
Bottom line; There's a place for C++ in between all of these languages you name: C++ programs can be amazingly fast if done right (no virtual machine and more importantly, no GC getting in the way at exactly the wrong time) and easier to get right than equivalent C programs if you're able to sacrifice some performance - you're able to do that in 90% of your code on average).
Encrypted connections to unidentified endpoints are not safer than unencrypted connections because there's no way to detect a man in the middle, unless you obtained the certificate also through a separate secure channel (in this case you can add it to your browser's certificate store and never get a warning again). But I fully agree that some browsers have become far too annoying in the way their UI handles such a situation.
The summary does indeed make it sound as if the guy was banned from playing a game that was already installed and running, thus being banned from using something already in his possession. After all, there is a login screen in the game. There is a bit difference between being barred from downloading something and being barred from actually using it after it was purchased and installed.
No, this is wrong. Yeasts metabolize sugar in two stages and get energy out of both. The first breaks sugar down to ethanol, the second breaks down ethanol, but requires oxygen. The trick is that yeasts can live from the energy gained in the first stage and do not absolutely have to process the ethanol. So keep them closed off from fresh air and you start getting alcohol in your beer.
Well, I'm still failing to see nVidia putting their money where the mouth is on that one. The last time I checked their OpenCL implementation, a lot of the demos that were ported over from CUDA ran slower - 10 times slower in the case of the volume rendering example. So this is not how you get to impress people who are solely concerned with performance. Oh, and unlike the CUDA compiler, the in-process OpenCL compiler even segfaulted on me within about 4 hours of playing with nVidia's OpenCL implementation (on trivial, but most likely incorrect input). The CUDA compiler never did that (although it still tends to generate plain wrong code from time to time). This was a couple of months ago, so I don't know if nVidia came around to fix the performance issues by now. I'd really love to see that.
One more thing: after porting the code over to CUDA the host code became way shorter (about 1/4 of the OpenCL code) and the whole experience from that point forward was way more pleasant...
Because nVidia has CUDA firmly entrenched in the scientific community by now. And CUDA almost works by now, that is, the most glaring bugs have been eradicated. Oh, and it even works on Linux!
Does AMD have support for doubles on their chips by now? Honest question here. It's a practically useless feature for graphics, but it makes a lot of sense for scientific computing.
There is a simple catch: performance. Some parts of Flash are really highly optimized (like the vector rendering engine - yup, that was once the primary purpose of the whole beast...). I highly doubt that any potential HTML5 counterpart to these parts reaches even remotely the same performance. End result: choppy animation, poor battery life, you name it.
It's worse than this: There would be no absolute simultaneity anymore, either. You'd get the full ugliness of the relativity of time in trading (well, just the SRT part of it, but still...). Given that the systems involved in trading have easily length scales of several meters involved, events that are mere picoseconds apart cannot be ordered chronologically anymore in an absolute fashion. The only thing that remains is a relative order at which they were observed and that is different depending on where in the system you are.
Bottom line: if anyone would try to attempt trading at timescales even close to that, this would end up in front of a judge sooner or later and then the judge's head would squarely explode while listening to expert witnesses talking in detail about what I just outlined.
If the processes involved are similar to what they are here (different country, so not sure), it is entirely possible to circumvent such guidelines by postulating requirements that only a single preferred vendor can meet. It's just the art of being specific enough. So if there is a "best tool for the job" it must have some properties that other don't and that you can simply require without alternative and even without decent explanation.
Simple example: want to buy only nVidia GPUs for some reason? Just state that you need CUDA support and you're set.
A "Stiftung" is a legal entity, but not a for-profit company in the usual sense. It's purpose has to be charitable and it's main function usually is to provide funding towards that goal. Plus, they may get tax exception. So the Document Foundation is aiming for creating a legal entity that actually is designed things like what they are doing.
I don't know if there is a minimal amount of money required for creating a Stiftung (I could look that up). But by German law, founding of for-profit companies is difficult. Either you end up liable for your company with everything that you own privately (your house, your car, you name it) or you have to provide a considerable amount of money as initial company funding. The minimum that you can currently get away with is 10000 euros for a Unternehmergesellschaft (haftungsbeschränkt), which has to be raised to 25000 euros during operations. That's not a fee that you pay. It's just the mandated initial capital. So requiring 50000 euros for a Stiftung does not seem out of the ordinary to me.
I know that for example in GB you can get a Ltd. for a few hundred pounds and 1 pound of required minimal capital. But that's not something that you ultimately want: nobody will trust such a company enough to make business with it in good faith. So this required minimum capital is actually a good thing.
Still this does not explain why onPause() should be called if the user starts tapping on the other screen. Unless there is a part of the Android interface that assumes that there is only one foreground activity (i.e. a function that is able to query for that), I don't see a problem with making existing apps work properly on dual-screen setups on the OS level. Independent state changes don't really count.
About "good" being relative: that's what the Elo rating was invented for. It allows ranking of players against each other based on the results they achieve against each other. A victory against a highly rated (good) player is worth more than one against a poorly rated player.
Then how do you propose to implement Drag and Drop in a toolkit-agnostic fashion without knowledge of what's under the mouse cursor? You need full knowledge of window geometries and z ordering to find out the drop target. Only the wayland server can provide that information. And this is therefore where the core part of that feature must reside.
Besides, not integrating all that into a single solution may easily lead to the situation the audio system in Linux is in: tons of incompatible solutions, each of them flawed in a major way. It's better to avoid that from the start.
How will Wayland ever be able to run decently on nVidia cards? Nouveau is not a real option yet (it's not yet decent enough for anything beyond accelerating desktop compositing) and nVidia doesn't plan to support EGL on Linux. So how will Ubuntu fix that? I'm really curious about that.
And how does Wayland plan to implement Clipboard and Drag and Drop functionality? Haven't seen that anywhere in the tiny amount of code that Wayland currently is.
Replacing X is not a bad goal, but getting there is hard. Just writing some code that defers the hard part about graphics to a driver and omits all the rest doesn't cut it. Let's just wait and see where this thing goes.
Well, so does Mass Effect 2.
I agree with you that plain image processing is bloody hard to get working reliably. Making it work in uncontrolled conditions is additional orders of magnitude harder.
As far as I understand it - not having looked into it too closely - the image data is mostly interpreted based on expected human poses extrapolated from previous frames using a 3D skeleton. That is, it's not just image recognition. There's a (statistical?) model of human movement in there as well and as far as I understand it, the image data without this particular model wouldn't make any sense at all. Not wanting to research this more deeply I'd estimate that possible poses that fit to the picture (which may be a lot) are weighted by how likely it is that the human body could have shifted into that position since the last frame and the most likely one is picked.
Actually, there are a couple of PhD theses that went into this PrimeSense stuff. They were done in around 2003 to 2007 I think. One of the last Kinect stories featured here on /. was a look back at the product development and it listed the names of some people hinted at their academic works. The people got subsequently hired to work on this stuff. Looking that up will give you a start in researching the science/tech background. The basis is hard science and it has been published. It works not because it does pure image recognition, but because it tries to fit a sophisticated model of a human body into the data gathered from the image. Seemingly, this adds enough reliability to turn it into a consumer device.
Then you might be interested in Majesty and Majesty 2, strategy games in which your units are totally autonomous. You control them by giving them monetary incentives and sometimes helping them out with magic (which also costs money). Each type of unit also has its own character in addition to strengths and weaknesses, so they react differently to your incentives. It's quite fun to play actually and not that high on actions per minute.
I'd be surprised if the Gecko rendering engine would be suitable for WYSIWYG rendering of a print document on screen. This is a troublesome problem because layouting and rendering works differently for very low resolutions (screen) as it does for high resolutions (print). Remember those Word documents that looked awful on screen with e.g. phantom whitespaces between characters in a word, but would look OK on paper? That's the kind of problem you have to solve in a word processor. And Gecko simply doesn't need to do that.
Powerpoint 2007 is horrible WRT having presentations open side-by-side. It's possible, though. The thing is: Unlike the other Office 2007 programs, Powerpoint is still MDI, with the inner window buttons hidden at first. Go to the View ribbon and the look at the "Window" section. These are your standard MDI window commands: arrange, cascade... use them to make the inner windows actually visible as such. Once you do that, you even get inner window buttons in the top right corner of the ribbon once you maximize one of these windows again.
heise.de, a major German tech news site ran a test for precicely that reason about two weeks ago: they added an AAAA to heise.de in addition the normal AA record. Out of the thousands of visitors they have each day less than 10 were unable to reach that site in that configuration and wrote in about their problems and only one turned out to be unfixable because of a router misconfiguration somewhere else in the network. Since they advertised their test weeks ahead and asked users to report any problems they might experience during the test, the number of complaints they received is pretty low. So the argument of mixed AA/AAAA records not working properly of users is luckily losing its credibility, it seems.
Where did I say that roads with speed limits are inherently safe?
Have you been driving in Germany yet? If not, my guess is that the kinds of situations you get on the highways there are hard to imagine. Seeing one car pull out behind a truck going at 100km/h while there's another car going 160-180km/h or sometimes even faster approaching from behind and getting far too close far to fast is normal. Very often, the faster going drivers are reckless enough to brake at the very last moment to come down to the slower speed with some 5 or 10 meters to spare between the bumpers and staying that close behind.
Those German highways without speed limits are dangerous and demand the driver's full attention because there's almost always a car nearby that is going much faster or much slower than you are (except when traffic is really dense, of course, in which case this degenerates into a massive stop-and-go where you're constantly changing from standstill to speeds up to 100km/h and back in a constant, rather tight cycle). It's quite stressful to drive on these roads for a couple of hours.
Still, my guess is that the high demands on the drivers keep all of them so much more focused that the end result is a bearable rate of accidents. Actually, I find that I'm much more inclined to doze off on the wheel when I'm abroad on a highway with speed limit where everyone is going in a straight line at the same speed (did I mention that there's barely a highway segment in Germany that's really straight; I've heard that this is actually on purpose, but I'm not certain).
Funny enough, even Avatar contains shots that are 2D to 3D conversions. These mostly in the last part of the final battle. Weta Digital did those and they may still have a short breakdown video on their homepage which proves that. The trick they used was to time-shift the same take to get a fake stereo effect out of it. I'm still surprised that this is working at all.
As far as I can see, the patent is not about the OS shutdown in general, but the very specific way in which it is done in Vista and Win 7. Particularly, this involves the full-screen notification that some applications are preventing the system from shutting down that you eventually get after clicking the shutdown button, and the surrounding OS behaviour towards such applications (recognizing which running programs warrant putting up the prompt, signaling/terminating them...). This is not the traditional Unix shutdown stuff in any way, so unless you give the user the choice on shutdown to kill processes that don't want to quit by themselves yet, you should be rather safe. Still, this is yet another software patent :-(.
Personally, I find this full screen thing rather annoying anyway, mainly because Firefox interacts badly with it, showing its own exit prompt on shutdown and being overlaid with the that fullscreen prompt, preventing me from clicking the save and exit option in Firefox.