the seemingly random bug is in fact deterministic and only triggered under certain unintentionally well-defined conditions.
The faulty code is of course fully deterministic. The resulting output may be completely arbitrary.
Are any bugs truly "random"? I always thought computers were deterministic machines.
If your code contains a state machine and the code has a bug where it in some conditions references invalid or uninitialized memory to determine it's next state, then the bug may appear quite random. In fact, it may appear to be several different bugs.
This is particularly fun when doing cross platform programming, where some platforms always zero initializes memory upon allocation causing programmers who develop on those platforms to think everything is peachy, only to have the code promptly crash or worse when run on platforms which does not zero initialize memory.
They should have just used MongoDB. I hear it's web scale.
Web scale or not, I have no idea. But I do think they've got the best bug report ever in their tracker.
If you don't have experience with a platform and can't debug on it, how can you offer a trustable software for it?
Because we use portable libraries and code, and we have plenty of testers.
What app? I have yet to use a Qt app on OS X which wasn't a complete clunker.
To be fair, our GUI demands are very modest. Project is LuxRender, a physically-based open-source renderer. The GUI is mostly just for visualization of the resulting render and tweaking tonemapping and other post-process parameters.
So, why you didn't contribute to fix this if you have access to the library source code?
We didn't have a dedicated developer on OSX, more like an enthusiastic user who could compile it but not so much code. Sometimes he could Google some workarounds other times we did a workaround in the blind.
In either case we did not feel comfortable hacking the wxWidgets internals, as we had no OSX experience or ability to debug.
With Qt this isn't an issue, as we mostly don't have to worry about stuff not working on OSX if it works on Windows and Linux.
Some users really want the perfect look of native widgets
Yeah, I get that. But given than the OSX offering from wxWidgets was pretty much broken on a constant basis, not-quite-native-but-functional Qt widgets won the day over broken-every-other-week wxWidgets.
I exaggerate slightly, but the lack of proper OSX support was the main driver to Qt for us.
1. Native widgets (especially important under OS X).
Ironically this is the reason we moved our cross-platform OSS app away from wxWidgets to Qt. The native widgets just didn't work properly and it was a pain to fix. We made the move some 4 years ago or so, and I can't say we've noticed we're missing something...
I use Crashplan - it doesn't need to be on all the time, and your neighbours computer doesn't need to be on all the time (the one that has your USB disk plugged into it).
Indeed! You have two options. Either via network or physical disk. If you do it via network, Crashplan will perform the backup when both PC's are online. If you need to restore you can copy the backup repository from your neighbor's computer onto a physical disk and restore from that at home.
Alternatively you can simply use a couple of USB disks, set up as two separate destinations for the backup set in Crashplan. Keep one at home and one at your neighbor. Once a week or whatever you swap them. Crashplan will automatically detect the disk when you plug it in and start syncing the backup.
The best part of this is that the data is encrypted in either case, and IIRC you can do all this using a free account. The paid options only matters if you also want to store the data in "the cloud".
Ummm
I seem to remember a LOT of attempts in a number of deep dark places around the planet, but can't remember any instance where anybody maintained that they'd actually detected a puppy.
Yes they have. Were you thinking of dark matter? If so, the latest results show nothing. A review paper from this summer discussing the hunt can be found here.
Jitsi, despite its being written written in java, is a better deal.
Does it support calling landlines across the globe? That's the primary use I and my family have for Skype. I couldn't find anything immediate on the Jitsi page.
I really don't understand why you wouldn't want sugar in an energy drink.
A friend of mine drinks sugar free red bull when he needs a kick. He's got diabetes, so limiting the sugar intake is key.
Thank you for the reply, we're really looking forward to this.
A GPL-based project I contribute to wanted to become a member of the SFC, however it seems they have a large backlog of applications and are understaffed. It's been over 2.5 years since we've applied and we've yet to hear anything.
So, does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives?
We're not large, but could grow if we could get some framework for donations going. As such the financial side is our primary interest. We've decided against personal paypal accounts etc as we've had bad experience with this in the past, hence wanting something tied to the project.
Black holes are not particularly special; the event horizon isn't some solid barrier things crash into. It's merely the point of no return, beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.
That's the conventional view. However lately an argument has been presented which essentially says that if you pass the event horizon you'd burn up in a massive "firewall". And from what I gather, the argument has been very hard to dismiss...
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams
