Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:He did this to GNUstep as well.... (Score 1) 551

Meanwhile, all the other platforms for which LLVM would be the dominant platform and for which there aren't extant major backers are basically on the hook for whatever way LLVM wants to play it, including extinguishing support for their platform.

No, really, I mean it. Explain in detail how FreeBSD will become utterly unusable if LLVM went closed-source today and deleted any FreeBSD related code from their now-internal repository. Or AMD's OpenCL implementation. Or any other project using LLVM.

Sure, it's technically possible to start up a fork tomorrow. But, realistically, it's also just as possible to recreate MS Windows from scratch.

That comparison is utterly silly. You already have the entire source code for LLVM, and forking it is simply pushing it to another repository. That's the complete opposite of Windows, where you'd have to recreate it from scratch.

Well, either way, you're setting yourself up for the risk of the source going closed and you having to support development yourself.

Well yes, but all that does is put you in the same spot as if you had picked a closed-source component to begin with.

And don't think you're safe with GPL. Any GPL code can be re-licensed (and thus made closed-source) if the copyright holders agree. Of course, exactly as with BSD, the code already distributed under GPL/BSD will stay GPL/BSD.

Comment Re:He did this to GNUstep as well.... (Score 1) 551

Company A extends out project X until a lot of people depend on your variant. Company A close sources future development of project X or incorporate some patented technology without provisions for use in the open source community

But they can't retroactively close the source, so I don't see how the "extinguish" part comes in. If the LLVM guys closes the source tomorrow it does not affect AMD, who's using LLVM for their OpenCL implementation. If it does, please elaborate, because I'm not seeing how.

I'm ignoring patents because software patents are broken and doesn't apply where I live anyway (and hopefully it stays that way).

Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 288

OK, these guys are probably far smarter than I'll ever be, but... the universe clearly isn't staying at a finite size, and playing the universe's expansion in reverse would imply that it started at a single point. How do they account for this?

Various Quantum Gravity theories predict different things here. Some, like Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), predict that over extremely short distances gravity is repulsive. Applied to cosmology (Loop Quantum Cosmology, LQC) this leads to a prediction of a "bounce", where a contracting phase flips into an expansion phase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Comment Re:Extortion (Score 1) 619

You are ripping them off -- they get 0 benefit from you using their commercial service. That's theft.

That's just silly. There is absolutely nothing in the specs that require you to present all the elements in a web page.

Ads are the most dangerous thing on the internet these days. Last year the ad network of a fairly big Norwegian magazine got hacked and for several hours visitors got exposed to a drive-by-download specifically targeting the largest bank in Norway.

Users just had to have a slightly outdated Java version installed and enabled. No interaction by the user required besides simply visiting the site. And it just so happens the very same bank requires Java for it's login procedure...

As such I see ad blocking as my #1 anti-virus/malware tool.

There are a few sites I frequented which detect my ad blocker and prevents me from reading more than the blurb and I respect that. When I forget and try to access the article and get the "please pay or turn off ad blocker" page instead, I simply close the page and move on.

Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 492

If you got an enum, you can declare a set of that enum, for example:

type
    TParam = (pAaa, pBbb, pCcc);
    TParams = set of TParam;

You can then easily check for membership: if pBbb in Params then ...

However the real power comes from being able to do set operations using + (union), - (difference), * (intersection) and the less than/greater than operators for testing for sub-/supersets, see the documentation for details.

For example, if you want to check if neither pAaa nor pCcc is in Params, you can do

if (Params * [pAaa, pCcc]) = [] then ...

[] is an empty set.

Comment Re:"NAS" hard drives? (Score 4, Informative) 190

Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?

Pretty much yes. The Red have better vibration tolerance, and the firmware is tweaked to fit a NAS workload better. For example, a Green will park the head as quickly as it can which for always-on machines can lead to a Green disk reaching its "Load/Unload Cycle" tolerance in months and die prematurely. The Red will not do this.

There's also a difference in how they handle unreadable sectors and such errors which makes the Red play nicer with hardware RAID controllers. An unrecoverable read error in a Green can cause the whole array to go down.

Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 1) 194

You have to get used to that. In functional programming, parentheses are usually used to denote function calls.

I really have tried, but it's just too terse for me.

At this stage I'm pretty certain I won't grok a functional language until someone invents a functional language that doesn't look like some variation of Brainfuck or similar.

Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 2) 194

Looking over the official tutorial pages, the syntax is really different than anything I've done before. It looks hard to learn.

Indeed. And what's with this obsession amongst the functional language developers to try to use the least amount of characters possible? We're no longer in the 1960's where verbose source code took a lot of valuable space.

For example, when I read

fun double n = 2 * n

I see a function called double which implicitly takes a parameter n and returns true if n = 0, and false otherwise. Would it have killed them to separate the parameter from the "body", and used proper names? For example:

function double(n) = 2 * n

Comment Re: These idiots remain idiotic (Score 1) 388

You'd need offline viewing capabilities, and Netflix has said they will never offer that.

No you don't. The vast majority of people who watch "pirated" movies are online 24/7 with good enough pipes for streaming.

I've got Netflix and HBO (Nordic). Last sunday I wanted to watch the new XMen movie with my gf. Brick and mortar stores aren't open here on Sundays, so no chance there. And of course neither Netflix nor any other similar streaming service available to me carries it yet. But the pirated Bluray is out there, and it would have taken me just 15 minutes or so to download a rip and start playing it on my TV.

No, what I think they need to do is to make a "movie-Steam" Netflix hybrid. That is, a rich catalog of movies for a monthly fee. Then allow me to pay money for early access to new releases. Once I pay I get to keep access to that movie.

And by early access I mean when the first Bluray hits the street. Because that's when people can get the pirated version.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...