>Synchronisation is normally used to provide consistency of the shared resource but not often used to provide overall ordering with regards to accessing it.
>Hence non determinism. If you can't tell which thread gets to access the shared resource and in which order, the program is no longer deterministic.

I am really struggling to imagine a situation where you need to determine ahead of time the order in which a number
of threads need to access a shared resource in.

If the thing needs to be accessed in a specific order, then doesn't it mean that you should just have one thread
operating on that data, since it's by nature a sequential process, no?

The other scenario is where an item might be transitioned to different states as it's changed by, e.g. the result of
some async io (quite a common scenario). But then you use a state engine to ensure that the thing is in a determined
state at all times - and you never care about which thread's going to access it next because every thread should
be capable of moving the item forward to its desired end-state.

>If you can't tell which thread gets to access the shared resource and in which order
If you need to set the order in which threads are accessing a resource, I think somewhere you're doing
it very wrong. But if you have a specific example of where that's necessary I'd love to hear it.

>There's nothing like desperation for creating passion.

I'd say there's nothing like desperation for creating even more desperation.

And then compromises - i.e. take any old shit job just to pay the rent again.
Then you're back at square one.

Have you ever asked for feedback after an unsuccessful interview?

Sometimes interviews are as much about honing your technique as they
are about answering everything 'correctly'. Getting feedback can help you
discover what you can improve to 'suck at interviews' less.

As someone who's done a fair amount of interviewing of candidates, answering questions
correctly is not always what's made a candidate attractive - attitude counts
for a lot. Showing you care about the subject matter, can tackle problems
you've never encountered before with some imagination and have a general
interest in improving your abilities are all things I look for.

Of course, the more interviews you do, the easier it is to get blasé and jaded so I'd say
give yourself a break if it's getting too much.

I have lived in and out of Switzerland, and have seen the effect
of different democracies at work.

On the whole I don't particularly think the Swiss system works
because of the general education level of the populace, after
all they're just people like anybody else with the same impulses
and failings.

But I have noticed that politics are more stable, unlike in the
UK where I come from. There we seem to lurch from idealogical
left to right with too much frequency and minority or more middle
of the road ideas seem to get drowned out.

In Switzerland they seem to have a main goal of competent rule
first and foremost, striking a balance between the desires of all
citizens and the general needs of the country.

In the UK we seem to strive for competent rule where 'competence'
means 'adheres closest to my way of thinking'

What do you mean by 'interact' ?
What do you mean by 'distribute it'?

When you have multi-threaded system then it's usually easy enough to compartment
(or isolate) the data that each thread is working on and provide locking mechanisms to ensure that
where threads do have to share data, they do so in a controlled deterministic fashion.

If they don't , then that's a bug.
Which brings me back to my original point. If it's too complex to understand what's
going on all the time, then you need to reduce complexity. Or get some engineers onboard
that know how to handle concurrency.

In that case you need to get better engineers!

Computer systems should always be exactly deterministic. Since they operate on a very specific
set of instructions (check source code for details), you should *always* be able to determine how they
will act given a specific set of inputs.

If you can't, then you need to drastically reduce the complexity of your systems to a level that these
poor engineers are comfortable with and then work up from that.

Because, at the end of the day (barring hardware glitches), computers do do exactly what they're told to do.
It's not witchcraft.

Yup, loose indentation is a real problem in Python.

I'm curious to know, how many of the people releasing projects on Sourceforge
or Freshmeat area actually making a profit on their apps?

Also, how do you make lots of money just from supporting an app unless you intentionally
make it hard to use, unstable or force people to do expensive migrations between
each release?

You say there's plenty of money to be made, but I just don't see how.

>Now, admittedly, that doesn't sound impressive but it actually is - too few companies are able to come up with a well thought out plan and to boldly follow it, sadly...

One of those companies (sadly I have to say) is HP. they've certainly stumbled a lot recently, and seem
to have badly miscalculated the popularity and the possibilities that their own tablet could have brought
them. Shame, as HP were such a great company for a while.

Finally, like since Oct 28th

28 Oct 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/28/iphone-4s-battery-apple-engineers?INTCMP=SRCH

Looks like somebody's late for Hate Week

> it will be interesting to see how this new patent will affect the patent wars between Apple and Android vendors.

Hopefully by an immediate challenge and re-examination followed swiftly
by it being revoked.

Didn't Google manage to get a lot of Oracle's Java patents revoked? You'd hope the
same process could be applied.

After of course first forcing Microsoft to license it - so that every winpho sold will
pay Apple a royalty - that would just be poetic justice.

>I like how he still thought he was an innovator

If Jobs wasn't an innovator, then how do you explain the slew of products that started coming
out after he took over? Like the first iMac or the iBook ?

These products were completely revolutionary for the time and were an incredible break from anything
that was being sold at that time - even from Apple.

If he was just a salesman then wouldn't he have just tried to keep selling the same old stuff they had? But he didn't. He
surrounded himself with a team of designers and changed the landscape forever.

Nobody suggests that he designed everything, or came up with all of the ideas, but Apple and it's products are uniquely Jobs.

>Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen.

My Taskbar is at the top of the screen you insensitive clod!

Otherwise you'd be absolutely right.

>Everyone here knows we need (proper) patent reform across the board.

No, everyone knows that America needs proper patent reform, specifically the ability to patent software and business methods.

The rest of the world (Germany and Australia included) have sane enough patent systems that allow you to have a decent design patent so that somebody else can't just come along and copy e.g. your best selling car and sell it as MyCedes.

These protections are sensible and have now been independently upheld in two different countries.

Apple hasn't complained about any of the other myriad tablets that are in the market, so clearly Samsung skirted as close to an acceptable copy as they thought they could get away with, but clearly too close.