The number of tablets and smartphones exceeded 300 million in USA alone last year[1]. Add to it the e-book readers and game consoles. The total number of PC installations is considered to be 600 million world wide. Including business/work machines, where the browser ballet is decided by corporate policies. Right now more non-PCs are accessing the internet than PCs.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/12/technology/cellphones_outnumber_americans/index.htm
OK, Microsoft strong armed the PC makers into avoid installing Netscape and competing office suits. They had a pricing policy that has deep discounts for not installing competing products. Clear abuse of monopoly powers and the PC makers succumbed to it. Fine. It is all old story now.
The PC makers are paying for their sins now. In fact paying for it for some time now. Dozens of them have gone under. The few who are left, Dell, HP+compaq, toshiba, are struggling. They all agreed to have identical offerings and chose to compete on price. Not a single one of them thought, "OK I will bite the extra cost of individual licensing, but install FiredFox+Noscript and pitch it as more secure PC and go for higher margins. In fact I will throw in OpenOffice and GIMP and virtualDub and Handbrake and pitch it as a fully functional PC". No, they did not. They all fell in line with Microsoft. Reduced to competing purely on price, with their margins cut severely, without any brand differentiation or brand identity the PC makers became as indistinguishable as costermongers, blood orange purveyors and the fish and chips vendors on the Piccadilly circus. Serves them right. Now Microsoft wants to get into hardware business and finish them all off.
But it does not matter any more. PCs are not the most common devices that use the internet. With smartphones, tablets and e-books all having internet capabilities, even if IE regains the monopoly marketshare in PCs it would not matter anymore. With google docs and other on line free tools for document creation available, most households will never ever buy MsOffice suites. Many small companies and some medium companies are switching to alternatives to Microsoft Office. So, make no mistake, Microsoft will continue to make lots of money for a long time to come. But they do not have the power to stifle the whole industry for their personal gain. Idiotic product managers in Microsoft wont be able to make venture capital funding disappear for promising new technologies by press release and vaporware any more.
And as usual the wheels of government have turned slowly and coming in to rescue us after we have fought back the menace all on our own. Where were they when Microsoft subverted document standards? Where were they when Microsoft deceptively named its shit OOXML? Where were they when we were down and the outlook looked gloomy? These are not the U S Cavalry riding into rescue at the crucial moment. They are the Bollywood cops who come into arrest the villain after the hero has single handedly defeated the villain and his thousand thugs with machine guns with bare hands, just as the credits start rolling.
Actually the return on investment to RNC is even better. With DNC, you get to steal and void jail and your investors get stiffed. That is all. With RNC, you get to keep what you stole, your investors' losses will be made good by the government, you not only avoid jail time, you might get nominated to run for the President of USA.
I looked up in Wiki. Looks like there have been many suggestions for a singular version of they. Thon (that one), ze, e, etc have been proposed in the past along with emasculating he to make it gender neutral.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go play Sherlock Holmes with some strange method written by an Indian contractor whose only comment on it was "This move thing around."
Oh, that comment? I know that guy. It must have been written by Lakshmanan Sivaramakrishnan Sethuraman Aiyer. He had the policy, "no comment I write would be longer than my name".
Djikstra said, "Always debug the code, not the comments". No one updates the comments. Including me. The number of hours I have wasted in debugging code because I trusted the comment written in the function or the algorithm is countless.
When I was in grad school my thesis guru believed in a tool called fweave and ftangle. You write code in a c like syntax, along with comments that are regular TeX or LaTeX files. Then send the code through fweave and you get a regular TeX formatted document that can be viewed in ghostscript or printed postscript. Send the code through ftangle, you get a valid FORTRAN code that can be compiled and run.
It worked for him because he keeps getting a stream of grad students and the code project has to be perfectly documented for the next student to continue the work. But in companies where technical specialists can occupy a position for many many years along with constant pressure to add features, the first thing that get dropped is code documentation.
For example I have been shipping my product for 16 years now. So many of the functions I write are fleeting and have low half-life. They often start out as a debug function to help me understand some issue, which might not even get checked in. But a few get checked in, first invoked in debug builds alone, then in release builds under env flags, then slowly they morph into sanity check function or an audit method, then a verification procedure, then eventually a special case detector for some feature. When it was first written it does not appear to be worth commenting well. By the time it is part of the feature, it is considered too late to spend resources to comment it.
If science books are going to include examples of evolution, then, to provide balance, they must include examples of devolution. Creationists and fundamentalists should be cited as examples of the Theory of Devolution, which claims human beings are degenerating and they will eventually become chimpanzees or gorillas.
English language has shown remarkable tolerance in accepting foreign words. When the scripts agree it even accepts foreign words as spelled in the source language even if it messes up the pronunciation rules of English. Rendezvous, San Jose, are examples.
But why is there no attempt to borrow sentence construction and syntax from other languages when there is a clear benefit? So many languages have a gender neutral third person singular pronouns. For example Tamil has/avan/aval/avar/athu/ to mean/he/she/he or she/it/. Being Indian, I know Geeta is a typical Indian female name. But I cant tell a male first name from a female first name in many European, South American, Chinese and African cultures. And there are names used by both males and females in all languages. Gone with the wind had Ashley as a man's name. Agatha Christie wrote a whole mystery based on the idea Evelyn is a name used by both males and females. I think it was "Why didn't they ask Evans?" or Evil under the sun. Cant remember. There was an Indian MP by the name Kumari Anandan. Kumari with a short a is his home town used as first name. But with a long a, his first name translates as "Miss" in Hindi! He was assigned quarters along with female MPs and got routinely placed in railway sleeper coaches reserved for women!
English desperately needs a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Time to coin a new word, something like "ce" to mean he or she. It could pronounced "see" half way between he and she.
Wish there is a bugzilla to file a ModReq on the English language.
Yes, that was my point. Tamil, a non IE language remembers the flood and sea level rise as a natural non catastrophic event. Most other civilizations also remember it as a routine change. But IE alone records it as catastrophic apocalypse.
When the last ice age ended and the sea levels rose, it was a gradual process that happened over decades. So it was just seen as a natural thing in most communities. For example the Tamil language is spoken in peninsular India. It has literature mentioning towns (South Madurai, Kaviri Poom Pattinam) that were taken by sea, river (Pah-truli) taken by the sea etc. They believe the first grammar book in Tamil composed by Sage Agastiyar has been swallowed by the sea and the present grammar book was composed by his student Thol Kappiar. Nothing dramatic, simple narration. The sea used to be over there, now it is over here.
But the folk memory of the flooding of the ending of the ice age recorded in Indo-European languages is very dramatic. It is sudden. It is by an angry God displeased by the sinfulness of mankind, and only one person was spared. It is the story of First Avatar of Vishnu in Hindu scriptures. Lord Vishnu takes the avatar of a fish and saves one man, Manu, from the impending global flood that kills all. The well known Noah's story is common to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Mesapotamian flood legend is similar too.
The conjecture is that, during the ice age, the Mediterranean sea was lower, and the straits of Bhosporus was actually an isthmus connecting Asia Minor with Europe. As the sea levels rose, the Med over-topped the isthmus and flooded into the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake at that time. The southern and the eastern shores of the lake had gradual slope and was populated by agricultural settlements. As the lake level started rising relentlessly the few who took to the boats survived. Those who could not bear to leave their beloved agricultural fields and homes were left stranded and were drowned. The folk memory of the survivors morphed into the Noah's and other flood legends.
I wonder how the flood and the rising of the sea levels is remembered in the northern branches of the Indo-European family.
Let us see first if we can use a horse as a surrogate dam for a zebra. If that is not possible, it is going to be impossible to bring to life a mammoth. There are lot more issues. Elephants are born without digestive bacteria. They get a seed stock by eating the excreta of their mothers when they are three days old. Stuff like that.
The DNA sequence alone is not enough to recreate the extinct species. Even if we recover the DNA perfectly. The embryo development is a complex process. Unless you have a surrogate uterus at the right temperature that douses the embryo with the right chemicals at the right time, it would not develop normally.
Many seemingly pointless exercises in math lead to surprising breakthroughs. Graph partitioning is a very active area of research. Imagine creating an index on a ultra large database with pairwise "and" condition on many pairs of fields. Then finding multiple "and" or "or" condition based records within minimal traversing and merging of the index files. Who knows it might actually lead to dramatic speed ups of queries in large data bases.
Just because it is not mentioned in the article, it does not mean it does not exist. 1000$ a month for all child benefiicaries. Some tuition payments are there. What I don't know is, if this is in addition to the standard group life insurance offered at most companies. Typically 3X to 5X salary for between $10 and $25 a month. Typically capped at 1X = 50 to 75K. If it is in addition, it is great, but again worth about 20$ a month. If it is in lieu of, then meh, INBD.
Unit tests just check the actual outcome to expected outcome. This will guard against stupid regressions and not coding for all code paths. But in scientific computations, there are times when the code is tolerant of minor errors. For example errors in off diagonal terms of a matrix might not affect the solution much. In Math they talk about strong conditions and weak conditions. If f(a) should be equal to f(b), if you test for it in every point in the domain it is strong test. If you test for the integral of f(a) is equal to integral of f(b) it is a weak test. Unit tests are mathematically weak tests. Strong test is based on audit methods
For example if I am writing some algorithm to split a polygon into pieces, take some time to write code to calculate the area of pieces, and check against the area of the original, validate this code in the mickey mouse development example. Have it under a flag to disable it before shipping the product or during profiling and benchmarking. But all through the development, as we proceed from mickey mouse development code (5-10 polygons), to larger examples (100-1000 polygons), and then to benchmark examples (10000-1000000 poly) and then on to stress test examples (10 million poly) to completely insane input (100 million poly) examples, this code should be testing every decomposition at the deepest level. Would throw an exception and stop it if it is not within tolerance.
During early development the audit methods would on all the time. Then it gets turned on only for the overnight runs and the test suite runs on the test machines. When I ship the product I know the polygon decomposition code has been tested individually for at least 100 to 200 million polygons at least 300 or 400 times. This is how strong and reliable code is developed.
Most comments here talk about taking breaks to do minor calisthenics to keep the circulation and other minor ailments away. Or about eye strain etc. But one of the most important thing doing the heavy lifting during coding is the brain. And one has to rest and sharpen the brain too. Long hours are brutal on the brain. Brain during waking hours keeps lots and lots of stuff in local temporary memory. These experiences and lessons must be transcribed to long term storage. That happens during the sleep. Continuing long hours without sleep will dull your brain and the code will be buggy. I have my pet theory almost all the bugs are coded in between 1 PM and 3 PM, when the body is digesting lunch and brain wants to go to sleep. So try to work at least a power nap in it. Slogging for long hours without break would lead to very low productivity near the end.
This is especially true while debugging. Only when you stop looking at code start thinking about something else things work out. Countless number of times, I log out at 5PM to catch the 5:15 trolley, while walking back thinking about "pick dry cleaning, running low on coffee but can last another day, today is karate class day for the kid.." it would suddenly strike me, "wait a minute, in this function I am deleting invalid bodies, but the caller's caller of this function is looping through the body list, that is why the grandparent's loop is crashing in the next increment of the loop index". Such things have happened so many times. I think coding is done in many small bursts of activity with lots of thinking in between. Long coding sessions are not likely to be very productive.
They will sue the unemployed coder for 400 million dollars. Some CXO will certify in good faith he hopes to collect the money. S&P will accept the certificate and rate the credit worthiness of the company AAA. Goldman Sachs will use S&P rating to sell the company to some poor smuck, your 401K mutual fund or my pension fund or our municipalities long term fund at 400 million over the true worth. Everyone involved in the racket will award themselves huge bonus, consultation fee and commissions. That is how 400 million dollars of profits are created, transferred to private individuals and the corresponding 400 million dollar loss for the counter parties are socialized. Either small investors, or government institutionalized investors, or straight forward government bail out. We are always the counterparties who are on the losing end of every such gigantic whoppers.
America once had a great capitalism. Now we have the system where no matter what risk the rich insiders take, all the profits are theirs and all the losses are ours. A system where the ruling elites are protected from the consequences of their actions, where they can rig the game so that they win no matter what, is how societal collapse begins. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" discusses specific case studies showing how it collapses. Greenland colonization from Iceland, Pueblo Indians, Easter Island were what he discusses in great detail.
Most used games end up in landfills, polluting our water supply and threatening our air quality. But a disconcertingly large portion of them are shipped to low wage countries like India, China or Phillipines. There rag pickers with no protective equipment, no purify, no bounds checker, not even a basic UMR checker pick them apart and make piles and piles of code. Toxic code, with no input validation, teeming with buffer over runs, wild pointers, Freed Memory Reads/Writes, spaghetti code, with tons and tons of long jumps and GOTO calls, at some instances code with even COME FROM calls are being pulled and recycled. Please take care of your used games and recycle them properly paying some attention to Mother Earth.
I have been with Firefox from the days it was called Mozilla, then I was using Netscape, then switched to Phoenix and then to Firefox. I have been pushing firefox + noscript to friends and family for years. But sadly, now I am on Chrome mostly. Main problem seems to be a random freeze by Firefox that locks the entire machine. I don't have than many add ons. Just no script nothing else. But still, once in about 20 minutes, the user interface will hang, no window can refresh, the entire UI locks up. Then firefox finishes whatever it is doing, and then everything is hunky dory again fro 20 minutes. Eventually gave up debugging it and moved to Chrome.
If someone knows why it happened, please let me know, I will go back to FireFox.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of tablets and smartphones exceeded 300 million in USA alone last year[1]. Add to it the e-book readers and game consoles. The total number of PC installations is considered to be 600 million world wide. Including business/work machines, where the browser ballet is decided by corporate policies. Right now more non-PCs are accessing the internet than PCs. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/12/technology/cellphones_outnumber_americans/index.htm
Glossary: Gora = the color white in Hindi, here it stands for white people.
The PC makers are paying for their sins now. In fact paying for it for some time now. Dozens of them have gone under. The few who are left, Dell, HP+compaq, toshiba, are struggling. They all agreed to have identical offerings and chose to compete on price. Not a single one of them thought, "OK I will bite the extra cost of individual licensing, but install FiredFox+Noscript and pitch it as more secure PC and go for higher margins. In fact I will throw in OpenOffice and GIMP and virtualDub and Handbrake and pitch it as a fully functional PC". No, they did not. They all fell in line with Microsoft. Reduced to competing purely on price, with their margins cut severely, without any brand differentiation or brand identity the PC makers became as indistinguishable as costermongers, blood orange purveyors and the fish and chips vendors on the Piccadilly circus. Serves them right. Now Microsoft wants to get into hardware business and finish them all off.
But it does not matter any more. PCs are not the most common devices that use the internet. With smartphones, tablets and e-books all having internet capabilities, even if IE regains the monopoly marketshare in PCs it would not matter anymore. With google docs and other on line free tools for document creation available, most households will never ever buy MsOffice suites. Many small companies and some medium companies are switching to alternatives to Microsoft Office. So, make no mistake, Microsoft will continue to make lots of money for a long time to come. But they do not have the power to stifle the whole industry for their personal gain. Idiotic product managers in Microsoft wont be able to make venture capital funding disappear for promising new technologies by press release and vaporware any more.
And as usual the wheels of government have turned slowly and coming in to rescue us after we have fought back the menace all on our own. Where were they when Microsoft subverted document standards? Where were they when Microsoft deceptively named its shit OOXML? Where were they when we were down and the outlook looked gloomy? These are not the U S Cavalry riding into rescue at the crucial moment. They are the Bollywood cops who come into arrest the villain after the hero has single handedly defeated the villain and his thousand thugs with machine guns with bare hands, just as the credits start rolling.
Actually the return on investment to RNC is even better. With DNC, you get to steal and void jail and your investors get stiffed. That is all. With RNC, you get to keep what you stole, your investors' losses will be made good by the government, you not only avoid jail time, you might get nominated to run for the President of USA.
I looked up in Wiki. Looks like there have been many suggestions for a singular version of they. Thon (that one), ze, e, etc have been proposed in the past along with emasculating he to make it gender neutral.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go play Sherlock Holmes with some strange method written by an Indian contractor whose only comment on it was "This move thing around."
Oh, that comment? I know that guy. It must have been written by Lakshmanan Sivaramakrishnan Sethuraman Aiyer. He had the policy, "no comment I write would be longer than my name".
When I was in grad school my thesis guru believed in a tool called fweave and ftangle. You write code in a c like syntax, along with comments that are regular TeX or LaTeX files. Then send the code through fweave and you get a regular TeX formatted document that can be viewed in ghostscript or printed postscript. Send the code through ftangle, you get a valid FORTRAN code that can be compiled and run.
It worked for him because he keeps getting a stream of grad students and the code project has to be perfectly documented for the next student to continue the work. But in companies where technical specialists can occupy a position for many many years along with constant pressure to add features, the first thing that get dropped is code documentation.
For example I have been shipping my product for 16 years now. So many of the functions I write are fleeting and have low half-life. They often start out as a debug function to help me understand some issue, which might not even get checked in. But a few get checked in, first invoked in debug builds alone, then in release builds under env flags, then slowly they morph into sanity check function or an audit method, then a verification procedure, then eventually a special case detector for some feature. When it was first written it does not appear to be worth commenting well. By the time it is part of the feature, it is considered too late to spend resources to comment it.
If science books are going to include examples of evolution, then, to provide balance, they must include examples of devolution. Creationists and fundamentalists should be cited as examples of the Theory of Devolution, which claims human beings are degenerating and they will eventually become chimpanzees or gorillas.
But why is there no attempt to borrow sentence construction and syntax from other languages when there is a clear benefit? So many languages have a gender neutral third person singular pronouns. For example Tamil has /avan/aval/avar/athu/ to mean /he/she/he or she/it/. Being Indian, I know Geeta is a typical Indian female name. But I cant tell a male first name from a female first name in many European, South American, Chinese and African cultures. And there are names used by both males and females in all languages. Gone with the wind had Ashley as a man's name. Agatha Christie wrote a whole mystery based on the idea Evelyn is a name used by both males and females. I think it was "Why didn't they ask Evans?" or Evil under the sun. Cant remember. There was an Indian MP by the name Kumari Anandan. Kumari with a short a is his home town used as first name. But with a long a, his first name translates as "Miss" in Hindi! He was assigned quarters along with female MPs and got routinely placed in railway sleeper coaches reserved for women!
English desperately needs a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Time to coin a new word, something like "ce" to mean he or she. It could pronounced "see" half way between he and she.
Wish there is a bugzilla to file a ModReq on the English language.
Yes, that was my point. Tamil, a non IE language remembers the flood and sea level rise as a natural non catastrophic event. Most other civilizations also remember it as a routine change. But IE alone records it as catastrophic apocalypse.
The Hindu and the mesapotamian flood legends are older than the Old Testament. They must all have a common ancestor.
But the folk memory of the flooding of the ending of the ice age recorded in Indo-European languages is very dramatic. It is sudden. It is by an angry God displeased by the sinfulness of mankind, and only one person was spared. It is the story of First Avatar of Vishnu in Hindu scriptures. Lord Vishnu takes the avatar of a fish and saves one man, Manu, from the impending global flood that kills all. The well known Noah's story is common to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Mesapotamian flood legend is similar too.
The conjecture is that, during the ice age, the Mediterranean sea was lower, and the straits of Bhosporus was actually an isthmus connecting Asia Minor with Europe. As the sea levels rose, the Med over-topped the isthmus and flooded into the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake at that time. The southern and the eastern shores of the lake had gradual slope and was populated by agricultural settlements. As the lake level started rising relentlessly the few who took to the boats survived. Those who could not bear to leave their beloved agricultural fields and homes were left stranded and were drowned. The folk memory of the survivors morphed into the Noah's and other flood legends.
I wonder how the flood and the rising of the sea levels is remembered in the northern branches of the Indo-European family.
Let us see first if we can use a horse as a surrogate dam for a zebra. If that is not possible, it is going to be impossible to bring to life a mammoth. There are lot more issues. Elephants are born without digestive bacteria. They get a seed stock by eating the excreta of their mothers when they are three days old. Stuff like that.
The DNA sequence alone is not enough to recreate the extinct species. Even if we recover the DNA perfectly. The embryo development is a complex process. Unless you have a surrogate uterus at the right temperature that douses the embryo with the right chemicals at the right time, it would not develop normally.
The adage is those "who could, innovate. Others litigate". May be Apple thinks differently and asks "why not both?" and it litigates innovatively ;-)
Many seemingly pointless exercises in math lead to surprising breakthroughs. Graph partitioning is a very active area of research. Imagine creating an index on a ultra large database with pairwise "and" condition on many pairs of fields. Then finding multiple "and" or "or" condition based records within minimal traversing and merging of the index files. Who knows it might actually lead to dramatic speed ups of queries in large data bases.
Just because it is not mentioned in the article, it does not mean it does not exist. 1000$ a month for all child benefiicaries. Some tuition payments are there. What I don't know is, if this is in addition to the standard group life insurance offered at most companies. Typically 3X to 5X salary for between $10 and $25 a month. Typically capped at 1X = 50 to 75K. If it is in addition, it is great, but again worth about 20$ a month. If it is in lieu of, then meh, INBD.
For example if I am writing some algorithm to split a polygon into pieces, take some time to write code to calculate the area of pieces, and check against the area of the original, validate this code in the mickey mouse development example. Have it under a flag to disable it before shipping the product or during profiling and benchmarking. But all through the development, as we proceed from mickey mouse development code (5-10 polygons), to larger examples (100-1000 polygons), and then to benchmark examples (10000-1000000 poly) and then on to stress test examples (10 million poly) to completely insane input (100 million poly) examples, this code should be testing every decomposition at the deepest level. Would throw an exception and stop it if it is not within tolerance.
During early development the audit methods would on all the time. Then it gets turned on only for the overnight runs and the test suite runs on the test machines. When I ship the product I know the polygon decomposition code has been tested individually for at least 100 to 200 million polygons at least 300 or 400 times. This is how strong and reliable code is developed.
This is especially true while debugging. Only when you stop looking at code start thinking about something else things work out. Countless number of times, I log out at 5PM to catch the 5:15 trolley, while walking back thinking about "pick dry cleaning, running low on coffee but can last another day, today is karate class day for the kid.." it would suddenly strike me, "wait a minute, in this function I am deleting invalid bodies, but the caller's caller of this function is looping through the body list, that is why the grandparent's loop is crashing in the next increment of the loop index". Such things have happened so many times. I think coding is done in many small bursts of activity with lots of thinking in between. Long coding sessions are not likely to be very productive.
You don't work for Fluent, or do you?
America once had a great capitalism. Now we have the system where no matter what risk the rich insiders take, all the profits are theirs and all the losses are ours. A system where the ruling elites are protected from the consequences of their actions, where they can rig the game so that they win no matter what, is how societal collapse begins. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" discusses specific case studies showing how it collapses. Greenland colonization from Iceland, Pueblo Indians, Easter Island were what he discusses in great detail.
Would be interesting if the judge had ordered the shills to disclose their slashdot ids too. Would be hilarious.
Most used games end up in landfills, polluting our water supply and threatening our air quality. But a disconcertingly large portion of them are shipped to low wage countries like India, China or Phillipines. There rag pickers with no protective equipment, no purify, no bounds checker, not even a basic UMR checker pick them apart and make piles and piles of code. Toxic code, with no input validation, teeming with buffer over runs, wild pointers, Freed Memory Reads/Writes, spaghetti code, with tons and tons of long jumps and GOTO calls, at some instances code with even COME FROM calls are being pulled and recycled. Please take care of your used games and recycle them properly paying some attention to Mother Earth.
Some one faced a problem and thought of using a sling as the solution. His name must be David.
If someone knows why it happened, please let me know, I will go back to FireFox.