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Comment Re:do it before I'm dead of old age (Score 1) 82

I prefer a mission to Europa that includes a submarine to go into the water below the ice to take pics of the little fishies (if any). Yes, Europa is ****far more difficult**** than Mars. But a Mars sample would be cool, will provide excellent comparison to Martian meteoroids from Antartica. Now if we can also send somebody beyond LEO, then we can say (in the words of one of controllers at Houston MOCR after Apollo 8 TLI), "Finally we get to go someplace!"

I prefer building a base on the Moon, then Mars and then we can jump to Europa.

Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 407

We just solved the Roman Concrete formula. One down. But seriously, Javascript by definition isn't concerned with tighly managed edge-cases and memory leaks by design. Those are left to the architect who is designing their code; and by that I mean modifying millions of pre-existing javascript code that is in itself often poorly optimized code.

I seriously doubt most CS majors today have to get knee deep into Assembly and C programming. Most programs opt for C++ and Java while leveraging their respective garbage collection designs. Hopefully, we see Universities and even High schools requiring C/C++/ObjC with LLVM/Clang/LLDB and Compiler-RT when learning their respective languages. I could give a rat's ass about Java.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 195

And C is virtually unreadable to anyone brought up with Smalltalk and Ada, so what's your fucking point? It takes something like three days maximum to get used to prefix notation, so learn it if you want to use the tool, and get over with your irrational and insubstantial syntax preferences.

No one brought up with Smalltalk hasn't been brought up without C. Ada, perhaps, but then again anyone taught Ada was exposed to Fortran and most likely moved to C, which once again predates effing ADA and SMALLTALK. You were far better off with PASCAL as an example.

Comment Re:Refactor? APU? (Score 1) 211

If the refactor is done properly I don't think the OpenCL acceleration would be necessary. Heck, 1-2-3 running on a 486 was pretty speedy.

I'd love to tie in R/Octave and do Numerical Analysis with Calc, so that OpenCL would be very handy indeed, seeing as it uses the CPU/GPGPUs and any other processor/co-processor like DSPs.

Comment Re:Clarification (Score 1) 211

From the article:

Calc is based on object oriented design from 20 years ago when developers thought that a cell should be an object and that creates a huge number of problems around doing things efficiently.

The problem isn't that Calc is object-oriented but was designed such that many things depended on the spreadsheet cell.

OOA/OOD isn't the problem. It's the team of architects who came up with their design using OOA/OOD that is the problem. Lighthouse Design using NeXT's MVC paradigms had Quantrix and Parasheet, Diagram!, Tasmaster, Concurrence [precursor to Keynote] and more. Some of the architects are at Apple and have been working on iWorks.

Comment Re:Right (Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong (Score 1) 211

Actually, the UI for Lotus Improv was quite nice and won some awards.

Its (spiritual) successor, Quantrix Financial Modeler seems to be selling well enough, even w/ a $1,495 price point.

I wish that Flexisheet (an opensource take on this sort of thing) would get more traction.

Correct and Improv was written specifically for NeXTSTEP which made it possible to do what it did. Improv fell apart and couldn't replicate the same MVC frameworks of ObjC/NeXTSTEP on Windows. Quantrix Financial Modeler was purchased and was also originally on NeXTSTEP. I used both at NeXT.

Comment Re:Or you could use rivers and dams for storage (Score 3, Informative) 109

The lost GDP in Salmon exports outweighs the Power exports in Washington State: Grand Coulee's primarily provides power to the US Government facilities, not anyone in Washington State. It also provides power to Arizona. People buy power from Bonneville Power in Washington State. The return of proper salmon runs will currently add > $4 Billion in GDP.

Comment Another Car analogy with Compexity? (Score 1) 381

Sorry, but gas mileage has not sored due to well written, but complex code. It has gotten of the ground [sored my ass] due to forced regulations. The Department of Energy asked every major auto manufacture in 1990 to be part of a DoE Engine efficiency project where everyone must submit a 90mpg automobile. They all did it. Not a single one exists on the market to this day. How come? They weren't forced to release them. They didn't reach improved Carnot engine cycles because of some embedded system: they used different composite materials in the engine block allowing doubling and more heat to burn the fuel more efficiently. End of story.

Comment Re:AMD Financials Summary (Score 3, Interesting) 126

$2B in debt, $1B cash, lost $600M last year, sales dropped 30% last year. They have no assets (spun off their manufacturing facilities). If the next gen consoles do not sell well because of casual / tablet gaming and potential Apple TV games, AMD will be bankrupt in one year and shuttering in two. Spending money on open source drivers is a long term investment - it's not going to get them an additional $600M in revenue next year (>2M additional graphics cards or >5M systemic wins) when PC sales are on the decline.

Right and within 1 year the number of GPGPUs sold via their custom APUs inside Consoles with be 6:1 to 10:1 of your sales. They are in the new Wii, PS4 and XBox. They're expanding their small-to-mid-tier server footprint [beginning to own that space] and with more and more laptops using AMD APUs will begin to own that space. Their partnership with ARM will make them an attractive provider for future Smart TVs, and other embedded products not even yet projected out. AMD is going to be in the black very shortly.

http://www.istockanalyst.com/finance/story/6474155/3-v-checking-fbr-capital-markets-5-50-advanced-micro-devices-inc-amd-price-target ``Later in the report, Rolland added, `Whereas four months ago many investors were questioning AMD as an ongoing entity, today, we believe financial stability has been secured by next-gen gaming APU wins, with potential upside driven by new initiatives like SeaMicro. While AMD's recent woes remain fresh in mind, the business looks as though it has stabilized for now, and cash levels should remain sufficient for the near future.'

Obviously, investors are attracted by the possibility of a 35.8% return within a 12 month timeframe. If Rolland is correct, that's sort of like having your own ATM. Let's examine Advanced Micro Devices' five-year history for price-to-book (P/B), price-to-sales (P/S), and trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) to see if the analyst's price-tag is realistic.

While we have this AMD conversation, the street values the company at 6.98 times its book value; whereas, competitor Intel Corporation (INTC) trades with a P/B value of 2.34. To get to $5.50 based on the current book value of $0.58 per share, AMD would trade at 9.48 times book, well above the five year average of 4.78, but below the max of 17.06.

Since Wall Street expects AMD to lose $0.25 per share in 2013, we'll have to work with 2014's consensus profit estimate of $0.04 for our P/E analysis. A price-target of $5.50 requires a P/E of 137.5; whew, feeling a little light headed from the high altitude. How about you? It is dizzying as AMD's highest P/E in the last five-years has been 22.07. Five-fifty seems to be a little out-of-reach based on P/E. "

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