Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
Windows is hardly the first thing that pops into people's heads when they're looking for compute cluster platforms, but it can do a perfectly reasonable job especially if you already have the devs and sysadmins and license agreements to hand. This is probably more of a dogfooding exercise; I'll bet MS have been using it internally for their own stuff and see no reason not to provide it to everyone else too.
I wonder why OpenMP wasn't good enough though. Maybe it just didn't cover enough of the parallel tasks they wanted. Nonetheless, OMP is well supported by several compilers across several platforms (including several versions of Visual Studio), and OMP code can be built just fine in a single threaded fashion using non-OMP capable compilers. I'll bet AMP doesn't have that same advantage.
I hear C++ is pretty gosh darn popular too. But you know what? I'd rather use Java or C# for most application development than either of them.
Silverlight is basically doomed because MS' strategies increasingly resemble the actions of headless chickens. They had a nice language, some reasonable libraries, a nice set of dev tools and an adequate front end. If they'd managed to push it as a single, unified plaform for desktop, web and mobile they might have gotten somewhere instead of sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt in their own developers!
I wonder how many developers never even bothered to look at silverlight simply because there's no way of telling when it will get canned, wasting years of investment.
I wonder if there's milage in caching some of the OS components on the client machines. Sure, you'd need slightly more expensive and complex and powerful clients, but on the other hand if they booted using a local kernel and userland and then accessed files and applications over the network, think of the bandwidth-saving!
Oh wait. Market forces already did a pretty good job of killing off broad swathes of architectures over the past 20-30 years. If any one architecture was perfect for all workloads and was cheap to license by anyone it would have already succeeded, right? Well, turns out x86/AMD64 are not the be-all and end-all.
I'll point out that you've missed various colours and flavours of MIPS, incidentally. Plenty more microprocessor architectures out there that aren't dead yet, too.
Plenty of stuff to do with image/video processing has been around for years and years. Problem is, only recently has hardware been good enough to do it cheaply and in real time, or near-real time.
You should perhaps be more concerned about:
1. Find someone else with a vague idea of how it might work
2. Obtain the idea from them, and ensure their silence
3. Wait ten years
3. Patent it
and so on as you originally posted.
Ahahahaha.
From the article, "PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript? Sure, some might claim that they are the future..."
Read it and weep. There is very, very little that is meritocratic about software development and tools. It is all accessibility and popularity with the usual dose of not-invented-here, lets-reinvent-the-wheel from each generation of new devs. There is no thought of whether there are better tools and languages out there already.
But don't take my world for it, I like Perl and Erlang.
And which language, do you suppose, will be running the speech recording and natural language processing systems, that must do so much complex work with some soft real time performance restrictions?
My bet is on C for the drivers and C++ for the complex work.
"woe betide anyone who even suggests that an alternative might be better"
If I'm paying for your development time, you will be using a language that is well supported, widely understood and appropriate for the problem domain. You may feel free to use which ever crazy moon language you like for anything you are prepared to bankroll, but I am not willing to have to pay extra for development and potentially vastly more for maintainance because a 'better' yet rarely used language was chosen.
The word you were looking for was 'pragmatism', I believe.
Various people who provide free and paid-for versions of their android applications have a lightweight unlocker, presumably so that the free version would not need to be removed on upgrade and any data associated with it would remain in place.
Not difficult to see who the publisher/author is and spot that there's an issue, but 'unobservant, don't care about technology' has always been the ideal target market for malware authors.
"No difference in coverage means no incentive to improve it (i.e. fill in gaps) since customers can't leave and go to another operator who does cover where the customer wants to use a phone"
Er, by that argument the only thing a company needs to do is to have coverage as good as their competitors. So all we end up with is redundant coverage of the same areas by multiple providers, but no more incentive to cover other areas that a national infrastructure provider would have.
But yes, not having some equivalent of traffic peering on mobile basestations and backhaul seems a bit daft. Guess it says something about how awful and intractable their network management systems are, otherwise I'd expect someone to be doing it already...
GIven stuff like PLBs and simpler things like SPOT devices for doing relatively simple but essential things like request help or (in the case of the latter) check in to say all is well, and given the existence of iridium satphones that are SMS capable, I'm not entirely certain where this product is going to be used. Maybe if they make something as cheap as the SPOT that can send texts, they'll be on to a winner. If not, who will care about them?
I'm glad that not everyone is charging down the 10" screen route. Like the bigger screen netbooks, big tablets just feel inconvenient to me. 7" is just about small enough to squeeze into a map pocket on a coat; anything bigger than that and I may as well just take a laptop with me.
I feel I may be in the minority though. I like my Dell Streak 5, for example...
Sounds an awful lot like the foundation of a DRM system. Without a trusted platform on which to run, it'll get cracked open. In fact, even if it could be run on trusted hardware, it still might not be secure.
Can't trust anything or anyone, you know.
Your average consumer does not need terabytes of space. Hell, as the iPad has shown, plenty of people don't even need a *physical keyboard*.
There will always be a need for workstation-type things for people who actually work using computers rather than just use them as a slightly dumb replacement secretary. These people are not average consumers. You need to store and process hundreds of gigabytes of photo of video data? You are not an average consumer. Most people don't own dSLRs or HD digital video recorders.
The server and workstation market for drives won't go away, and the article did not imply it would. Have a think about what might happen to the price of harddrives when the consumer market starts to shrink, though.
British humour doesn't translate at all well; even other English speakers (especially in the US or Canada) just don't get it. I expect the same is true for other countries, though naturally they couldn't possibly be as witty as us. Sarcasm seems to be missing from most of the world, for example.
Germans not funny though? Common misconception. The problem is that there is a very clear separation between their 'funny time' and their 'serious time'. Attempting humour in 'serious time' will be met with nothing but confusion. Faced with that sort of response, no-one ever bothers to visit them during funny time.
7 hours a day on a console? Wow. The issue isn't that computer games and associated peripherals mangle you for life, its that parents who take no responsibility for their children are guilty of damaging their children's health. The obvious solution is of course government regulation of games, consoles and phones, right?
I think perhaps you should spend a little time learning about how herpes can be transmitted. It is considerably easier than you apparently believe, and doesn't require barebacking...
Anyway, that aside: SONY != SONY US. The company is guilty of many things of the vertical integrate-y, customer lock-in-y sort and is a firm supporter of the more inconvenient aspects of DRM and the like... but the rootkit was by a particularly stupid subsidiary. The rest of the company is either a little less malignant or at least knows how to hide a rootkit; don't tar them all with the same brush.
Creationism may or may not be valid, but faith in and worship of a creator seems pretty futile and baseless. Colour me agnostic.
In the meantime, I'll content myself with reading this sort of thing on the internet, the result of a couple of hundred years of the application of mathematics and logic and science and engineering that may or may not reflect the real world but seems to have quite tangible results.
"It wasn't us attacking your country, it was evil haxors rooting boxes that are merely hosted here. Who knows where they could be from originally?"
Standard Chinese response, that one. Not that the US would ever do anything even as aggressive as sabre-rattling at the Chinese these days, of course... but if this bit of posturing encourages nations to work a little bit harder to prevent their citizens' computers being used as part of a botnet or the like, so much the better.
Entertaining thought, though... an inadequately secured computer now rather resembles any other piece of dual-use technology. Windows as a munition, anyone?
Given two groups sharing an environment, the one more suited to the conditions will prosper.
Observation 1: Idiots kill themselves all the time
Observation 2: The number of idiots does not seem to be decreasing
Conclusion: The number of idiots is growing faster than they can kill themselves, and the population of non-idiots is failing to outcompete them for any resource that affects population growth.
By posting tedious repetetive comments about how happy Darwin must be about this event, or hilaaaarious jokes about cleaning the gene pool, you more or less put yourself in the 'non stupid' group, the one which is failing to thrive.
You may smugly congratulate yourself on joining the losing team, and await your own Darwin award for utterly failing to prevent your own collective extinction and failing to have a good time whilst doing so,
In order for the judiciary to do its job, the state must be able to apply force to those who have broken its laws. Without the SEAL teams, how might the US executive apply force to people like Osama bin Laden?
Its a nasty job, but someone has to do it. Its also an exceedingly difficult one, and traditionally it seems that most societies treat their most accomplished members with some degree of respect.
Windows, and at least the non-WP7 mobile operating systems sharing the name are open platforms. Anyone could develop software for them, distribute them as they see fit for whatever legal and financial terms they liked.
The same is true of Symbian and OSX and Linux and Solaris and all sorts of other colours and flavours of operating system. Open platforms need not be free (by whatever definition) or open source.
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