Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch 2663 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
Gertz wrote. "In fact, the daily builds of VS are now compiled using Roslyn, all as part of a process that we refer to in the biz as 'dogfooding.'"
My immediate reaction was to search the web to discover if humans can actually eat dog food. Probably not the kind of interest the comment was meant to inspire. Oh yes, I'll also throw him some demerits for verbing an arbitrary noun.
No, it doesn't. No more than using paper/plastic money, at any rate. (Value-Added/Sales) Tax laws work because the seller acts as the tax collector. They have to keep records of what they buy, what they sell and the prices they sell the items at. They're then liable for collecting the sales tax or VAT from the customer and paying it back to the taxman (or offsetting it against their tax deductibles to get a balance that they must pay). Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with this. Dishonest traders will fiddle the books (putting in false sale value, for example, or just writing off stock) regardless of whether customers are paying in cash or for barter value (like Bitcoin is).
As for following the money: that's what a business's set of accounts are for. Again, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Paper money is just as "untraceable", yet you never hear people complaining that it allows for anonymous transactions!
Paraphrasing from Evita here.
I would have started with Monty Python:
It's fun to charter an accountant
And sail the wide accountan-sea
To hide, obscure the funds offshore
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy...
...
It's all tax-decuctible
(we're fairly incorruptible)
We're sailing on the wide accountan-sea
because, ummm, they weren't smart enough to spot the benefits and they're all just living in the past and one day they'll realise that they were wrong and, anyway, it's not Microsoft's fault if the public is so backwards.
You make a very cogent case. I can see why you think people are idiots. Giving up your privacy for all those XB1 features is totally worth it.
It would have been nice if the 802.5.14 folks had engaged a few years ago when the IETF and IEEE were standardizing all of this stuff. From the Wikipedia article:
The requirements for membership in the ZigBee Alliance causes problems for Free Software developers because the annual fee conflicts with the GNU General Public Licence.[13] The requirement for the developer to join the ZigBee Alliance similarly conflicts with most other free software licenses.[14]The ZigBee Alliance board has been asked to make their license compatible with GPL, but the ZigBee board refused. The refusal came, even though Bluetooth had already changed their license to make it compatible with GPL. Linux developers seem ready to abandon ZigBee, and use TCP/IP instead
How far will they go with this liberty stripping?
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On one hand, the responsibility technically is on the user to actually read and accept the terms before clicking on the button
Is it really? I can see that if you're paying for something online, the agreement constitutes a sales contract, but I can't see how using a free service with a boilerplate list of terms and conditions legally binds you to a contract. As far as I know, these click-through EULAs have never been tested in court simply because nobody believes they have any legal basis in contract law.
Of course, IANAL, so I stand to be corrected on this.
about 250,000 objects changed brightness significantly over the 1949-2008 span of the surveys
So I guess that by using Little's result and quantifying what "significant" means, you can calculate the average age of all the stars surveyed? Or can we know only the star formation rate or average lifespan, but not both (in isolation)? Seems fascinating either way.
Reminds me of that joke that was doing the rounds a (long) while back..
Neill Armstrong was once asked why, after landing on the moon and finishing up his historic "one great leap" speech, he finished up his report with a hearty "Good Luck Mr. Gorsky!". A reporter asked him about it once, and after a slight pause, Armstrong recounted the story to him. As a child, he used to live next door to a Jewish couple. One day, while he was playing in the yard, he could hear the neighbours arguing loudly. All he could hear was Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, "Oral sex? Oral sex you want? You'll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"
What's wrong with polenta?
It's got pretty poor nutritional value (eg "While polenta contains numerous vitamins and minerals, it is not classified as a good source for any of them"). It was basically peasant food, the Italian equivalent of potatoes in 1800's Ireland.
Personally, I can't see why people eat it. Buttermilk cornbread (also made from maize), on the other hand ... delicious.
Really? I just don't know, but I'd guess that it should, in theory, be quieter than the PS4 due to not having an internal PSU to heat things up. I guess I'll wait until both boxes are released and make a decision based on actual reviews rather than AC hearsay, TYVM.
In the future with more cloud storage this data will be duplicated enough that it cannot be taken down.
There are plenty of places you can buy fake social networking profiles. These days they're used by PR companies to give their sock-puppet comments some sense of verisimilitude. If things get that bad, I'm sure that companies will step in to fill a gap in the market to provide fake profiles for people who want to protect their privacy. You might not be able to take down all the shit that mentions or shows you, but you can splatter enough fake stuff that you cast doubts about whether that dodgy page you'd rather not have people see is real or whether it's even you. As Lou Reed (channelling Poe) put it, "don't believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear". Facebook? "Stick a fork in it--it's done"
I've read bits and pieces about Delia Derbyshire's amazing work in the BBC and on the Who theme around the place, and it's nice to see her front and centre in this article, and getting some well-deserved recognition.
I've been listening to various versions of the theme as I read the article, from the original to Orbital, to Coldcut to Bill Bailey. It probably sounds a bit sacrilegious to mention the Bill Bailey "version", but it always makes me smile :) I also thought of him when I was reading the "Tape your time" section, as he explains what U2 would sound like without the delay effect on the guitars.
If anything this could make the situation worse for NVidia. Before this, when the programmer had to do their own data transfers, the latency was explicitly there in the source code
I got the same feeling on reading the article. The latencies are still there, but now they're just hidden behind a software translation layer. I'll agree that doing explicit DMA or other main memory <-> device memory transfers is annoying, but we already have a technique for hiding DMA latencies(*), namely double (multi) buffering.
Multi-buffering can, for many problems, not only "hide" the latencies, but effectively eliminate them for all but the first block to be transferred. If this new feature does automatic loop unrolling and transparently adds multi-buffering (or even just double-buffering) when it detects it should be used, then that would be pretty nifty. Unfortunately, judging by the description in the article, this isn't what it's doing, and all we get is blocking, full-latency access to the "shared" memory, with "shared" in quotes because it's only a software abstraction, not a hardware feature. I could be pleasantly surprised, but from the article, it seems like it's only a sop to lazy programmers, and not real shared memory at all.
(*) I'm not actually up to speed on CUDA, so I'm assuming it uses DMA to do data transfers?
Well actually, there was a rumour going around a while back that a certain Sam Sung was working for Apple. I don't know if it was ever properly confirmed/denied.
prosecute someone with solar panels on their roof
Just goes to show what a scam electricity generation is. You know those electrons the electric companies supply on one wire? They suck them back to their plant on the other wire! (then sell them back to you again--the cheek!)
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