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Comment Re:memresistor? (Score 1) 172

The difference between persistent and temporary storage is important. Being able to have 128GB of RAM in a laptop that consumes no power when not being read or written would be a huge win (one of the reasons phones have limited RAM is that DRAM draws power all the time) would be very nice.

Comment Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score 1) 292

I did scraping before (and note that we aren't talking about screenscraping here, but rather website scraping) - I once wrote a scraper that presented an entire online forum as a newsgroup. Based on my experience with that, and on the layout of the RCW website, scraping this particular thing is absolutely trivial.

I agree that we shouldn't have to do that. I'm just saying that I find it doubtful that they do it to extract money from people, because I just don't see that working well when it's so easily scraped. If someone were to hire me to do that, it'd probably take me something like a few hours, and I wouldn't ask more than $200 for such a job.

Comment Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. (Score 1) 292

All I can say is that I regularly look up RCWs pertaining to different things where I have doubts or am just curious about it, and so far I haven't found any trouble finding the relevant bits.

From a lawyer's perspective, perhaps this all is still missing crucial bits. If providing, say, a single-page HTML download would be immensely useful, then sure, they should do it (especially as they already likely have some kind of script along these lines, as you do have a single-HTML option for individual chapters).

Comment Re:Correct link to TRA (Score 1) 119

An alarming number of those hold for Chromium and they all stem from one core issue: Google developers do not understand how to design APIs. A lot of the bundled projects could be entirely separate repositories and shipped as shared libraries if they did, but gratuitous API churn means that they have to keep copies of things like v8 and Skia for Chrome and build the whole thing at once. It's fine to do the aggregate build thing if you want LTO, but it should be a performance optimisation, not a requirement of the software engineering workflow.

Comment Re:I disagree with some of these points (Score 2) 119

It depends a lot on the codebase. Codebases tend to accumulate cruft. Having people refactor them because their requirements are different to yours can help, as can having a project developed without key product ship dates as the driving force. The bigger barrier is culture though. It's really hard to have a group of developers that have been working on a project for 10 years in private move to developing in public. In the list, he actually gives different numbers of fail points, more for projects that were proprietary for longer than they were open, which makes a lot more sense than the summary in the 'article'.

The one that I disagree with is 'Your source builds using something that isn't GNU Make [ +10 points of FAIL ]'. I disagree for two reasons. The first is that it implies using GNU make features, which likely means that you're conflating building and build configuration (which should gain some fail points). The projects that I most enjoy hacking on use CMake and Ninja for building by default (CMake can also emit POSIX Makefiles that GNU Make can use, but I take his point to mean that gmake is the only command you need to build, so the CMake dependency would be a problem). LLVM still more or less maintains two build systems, though the autoconf + gmake one is slowly being removed in favour of the CMake one. If I make a small change, it takes Ninja less time to rebuild it than it takes gmake to work out that it has nothing to do if I don't make any changes.

I'd also disagree with 'Your code doesn't have a changelog' - this is a GNU requirement, but one that dates back to before CVS was widely deployed. The revision control logs now fill the same requirement, though you should have something documenting large user-visible changes.

Comment Re:No kidding. (Score 1) 259

As for "web page", AJAX apps do exactly this

AJAX provides a mechanism for delivering the XML. How many popular web apps can you name that completely separate the back end and the front end and provide documentation for users to talk directly to the back end and substitute their own UI or amalgamate the data with that from other services? Of those, how many provide the data in a self-documenting form?

Comment Re:How soon until x86 is dropped? (Score 1) 152

There's no problem with the decoder. The A8 is an older chip. The A7 is an updated version of the A8 (smaller, more power efficient due to various tweaks and extended to support a newer version of the instruction set so that it can be used in big.LITTLE configurations with the A15. Oh, and with SMP support, which the A8 lacked, though the A9 had). The A8 is not faster than the A7.

Comment Re:Not the best summary... (Score 1) 195

As I was saying: If your kids are immunocompromised, they have a lot more to worry about than measles. That is, there are many other diseases they have to worry about besides the few we can vaccinate against.

Why do you keep talking about immunocompromised people? The measles vaccine, for example, only works in about 95% of cases, the other people are not immunised. They have no other autoimmune issues and, unless exposed to the measles virus, will have no issues.

Almost everybody in "the entire population" who is vaccinated is protected by the vaccine and hence not "vulnerable". So "the entire population" doesn't become more vulnerable.

If immunity drops below about 93% for measles, then the population no longer benefits from herd immunity. This means that anyone who is not immune (including those 5% who were vaccinated but didn't receive the benefit) is at a much higher risk of being infected. It also means more infections, which increases the probability of the disease mutating, which affects everyone. People who are infected then have compromised immune systems and so are likely to suffer from other infections, which can then spread to the rest of the population.

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