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Submission + - Lisp Creator John McCarth dead at 84 (techcrunch.com)

johnjaydk writes: The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night.

Lisp was (and to some extend still is) a radical leap forward and have had a strong influence on a lot of other languages although many still refuse to see beauty between parens.

Unix

Submission + - RIP Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) (boingboing.net)

Dan Dankleton writes: It is being reported that one of the men most responsible for the shape of modern computing, Dennis Ritchie, has died at the age of 70.

Ritchie was one of the main authors of both C and UNIX, and as such his legacy and influence cannot be underestimated.

Comment Re:OMG save the children (Score 1) 541

I have done the same with my boy. Me and the missus weighed up the risks and it was a no brainer. He's 3 months and already had plenty of vaccinations. TB being one oft he most important for now. I knew several older people who had polio as children when I was a child and it radically and not pleasantly altered their lives.

MMR jabs will come soon (at around a year old) and I have NO hesitation in taking these...

OK, I hesitate for just a few seconds. I'll admit that every time I see someone approach him with a needle my instinctive reaction is to punch them in the back of the neck.

I suspect this is true of many people and maybe, in some way, when parents/guardians here about a correlative link they can use that to justify not sticking poor little Charlie with a needle.

If I could vaccinate him against many other vile diseases I would (assuming a very low risk of side effects). For example... cancer causing virus and bacteria, strep, all forms of clap, HIV, malaria, food poisoning... I mean... why not?

Comment Re:Doesn't Optimizing for GPU Exacerbate Fragmenti (Score 2) 307

Ahem...

Add to that this... Most SoC's run a fairly narrow and slow memory bus. Also, GPU's tend to be WAY slower than CPUs...

Fancy racing a 4 * 150Mhz pipe GPU against a 1 Ghz, superscalar CPU with 64/128 bit SIMD extensions?

Who will win?

Answer... the memory bus. You can TRY and get the CPU and GPU to work together but all that will happen is that the memory bus will get swamped and everything slows down.

GPUs can render polys with straight edges. UIs frequently want curved, rounded objects with complex gradients and complex blend modes not supported by GPUs.

TBH the article is nonsense. Android composites using OpenGL. Individual applications render with SKIA for 2D. The SKIA API is deliberately immediate mode to reduce latency (GPU's do not multitask and have rubbish MMUs). All applications are back buffered so they cache bitmaps pretty well. Bitmap copying is minimal.

Maybe a scene graph would help - but you'd increase latency greatly and (if GPU accelerated) you'd make the GPU task switch - not quick on many (most) GPUs.

Also - Poly throughput isn't the problem - fill rate is... (see Memory Bus above).

Burnttoys.

Comment Re:How much more ridiculous does this have to get (Score 1) 402

I'm afraid my language is going to be blunt.

The USA, UK and Italy are prime examples that you can fuck a population sideways, remove their rights, lock a bunch of them up for no apparent reason, allow massive unaccountable kakistocratic companies to buy and do whatever the hell the like in the most inefficient way possible and piss off nearly everyone so long as there's plenty of food, oil and housing.

Cover that and that's all the general population give a damn about. I mean... why the hell would I rebel? I make just about enough to keep me, the wife and kids going, pay the bills... what else do I want? Why should I give a damn that students will have to pay huge amounts of tuition fees very likely making university education the preserve of the elite. Why should I care that my way to "the top of the tree" is blocked by funny handshakes and old-boy networks. Why should I care about the dismantling of the social state. Why should I care that the President owns and corrupts all the media, gets fucked up with coke and whores?

Why should I try and see the future when I'm feed and watered today with a leather chair in the car to absorb my well fed arse...

Why should I give a fuck? I'm alright jack...

Comment Problem with the TV? (Score 1) 305

That doesn't impact the rest of "us"?

Yeah, My girlfriend watches it!

*ZING!*

My computing (big towers + Linux stuff) is relegated to the back room along with the musical gear ('cept the acoustic, natch) for wandering around "computing" I've got me MacBook. That's pretty typical.

When the boy gets a bit older then we'll probably play games together on the TV. Till then... I just use my DS

Comment The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (Score 2) 126

By Aristid Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. Absolutley stunning book. Several (many) of the renderings (the palms in particular) are verging on realistic. It's out of print now and you definitely can't have my copy. I won't give it up!

It turns out it's available here http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop on the interweb for free.

Sadly Lindenmayer died the year before the book was published and the book itself is dedicated to him. It's one of those rare science books that makes a good coffee table book too.

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UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker

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