Well you'd still have to take images to tell the current state of the contrast, after all the camera can only "see" through the lenses when taking a picture. Also a binary search is likely suboptimal for such things, an interpolation search is likely to be far more efficient since you presumably have enough information after the first few images to make a good guess as to where in the spanned range the "sweet spot" will be.

As far as I'm aware, emulating Macs is perfectly legal. It's only running MacOS on that emulated Mac that's an issue, because the MacOS license specifically states that it can only be used on legitimate Apple hardware. If you want to run Linux on your emulated Mac though, that's perfectly fine.

Hmm, though I seem to remember that back in the day Macs had required software in ROM as well - and copying that was illegal in most contexts. In fact, I remember some emulator that came with support for a custom expansion card into which you could plug the legitimate ROM chip from your old Mac if you wanted to be completely, unquestionably legal.

Except that unauthorized software copying costs the source company nothing - unlike the Mercedes factory that faces considerable per-unit costs. Meanwhile in the *specific case* of OS, office, and a few other genres of software, vendor lock-in is achieved largely via network effects. Get enough people using illegitimate software on their personal PCs, and companies will tend to use the same thing. And *they* run the risk of license audits, so will tend to buy legal software. If most individuals were acclimated to using Libre Office, do you really think companies would still be inclined to pay the MS Office tax and have to keep track of licenses, etc.?

For non-infrastructure software of course the argument evaporates - Valve gets no benefit from people pirating Half Life.

The differece of course being that nobody has ever been directly hurt by software piracy - at worst someone has been deprived of potential profits. And even that assumes that the infringer would have otherwise resorted to buying the software, which is rarely the case.

Hello,

If one looks at MojoKid's submissions to Slashdot, one notes they exist exclusively of links to articles at HotHardware.Com, which according to the whois data, is registered to a Dave Altavilla of Mendon, MA.

Never to ActiveWin, Ars Technica, HardOCP, Neowin, TechReport, WinBeta or the scores of other web sites which discuss, review or "engage in coordinate PR disclosure" of technology news, but always to HotHardware, never anywhere else.

Are MojoKid and Mr. Altavilla the same person? And why is he (are they?) only posting links to Slashdot to HotHardware,a site which, coincidentally, seems to rely on links to partner.googleadservices.com, www.google-analytics.com/, cdn.taboola.com, tru.am and other advertising and privacy-invasive sites in order to monetize its page views. All these hostnames should be blocked in your hosts file before visiting any links to hothardware.com to ensure you are not being advertised to or tracked (which seem to be very similar, these days).

If MojoKid/Altavilla are going to use Slashdot to generate revenue for themselves, they should at least let Slashdot's management know and note in their submissions that they are sending Slashdotters to a site which they generate revenue from; to not do so is unethical and abusive of Slashdot.

And in case anyone wants to throw a stone at my glass house, I've submitted a grand total of one articles to Slashdot, and it mentioned a free service being offered through the auspices of the IEEE which not just my employer but dozens of our competitors were involved in. Not a single banner ad or privacy-invasive script to be had there at all.

Regards.

Aryeh Goretsky

Not anymore they can't...

Sure it can. In C and C++ you can *specify* that using pass by value, or by pointer to constant object. Granted it's still *possible* to cast away constness, but only reckless idiots do such a thing without being really, really sure it's safe to do so. And so long as you don't jump through hoops to eliminate const-ness you're protected from accidentally changing something that was supposed to be unmodifiable.

Both Pointy Headed Bosses and Slashdot loooove talking about tools. As the posts generally show, both PHBs and Slashdoters have no clue about what Big Data is used for. It's all about the buzzwords and technology, not about use and utility. There are no references to any algorithms.

Heh. I've been doing big data since 2000. Fifteen years experience in a field that's five years old, I like to say. And let me say this: You nailed it. Your whole post, not just the part I quoted. I've used the tools, from Colt to R, and there is no substitute for the ability to analyze and match a business model, data system, algorithms, implementation, and business controls.

On the upside, give me (or, I'm guessing, you) a month or two to develop a big data strategy, and we'll generate large, measurable, improvement in the company's desired performance metric -- using whatever toolset the company is fawning over at the moment. It may not be what sells the PHBs, but it feeds the bulldog.

It is a shame, though, to see so many charlatans diverting so much revenue into ill-conceived projects. Alas.

Who says a "true AI" has to match the way the human brain works? It has to get at least vaguely similar results - but that's likely an entirely independent criteria. And in point of fact, and from what little I know of neuroscience, your description bears absolutely no resemblance to the way the human brain works.

You can bypass the type safety on pretty much any language that doesn't do runtime type checking - which imposes a massive performance overhead by C standards. General-purpose memory management similarly comes in two flavors: manual, or some sort of high-overhead garbage collector. The hardware of the time simply didn't have the available resources to be thrown away on such things - if you wanted them you had Simula and other such "toy" languages that offered nice features at the expense of being so slow you couldn't do any serious work on them.

I do agree that C++ would have benefited from removing some aspects of backward compatibility, or at least had standard compiler warnings available for "deprecated" C functionality. But had they broke backwards compatibility C++ would likely have never taken off - it rose to prominence in large part specifically because it was interoperable with the massive existing C codebase and libraries.

Besides, it's not like modern languages don't have huge holes of their own. I mean Java? Ugh, the performance penalties of having *every* damn thing be a pointer. And I cant even specify that my function definitely won't modify the parameters being passed to it! And how many people go to the trouble (and performance expense) of passing copies of large objects that absolutely must not be modified? "final Thing x" is only equivalent to C's "Thing * const x" - doesn't guarantee a thing as far as the calling context is concerned.

I should have made clear that I do agree the wealth distribution should be more equitable - but that could as easily be accomplished by demanding much higher wages up front. And regardless of method would almost certainly require that the software development industry unionize so that we have enough bargaining power to demand such a thing - just like doctors, lawyers, etc. have done.

And sure you could charge royalties per hammer - it happens all the time. That's exactly what patents are for. But lets take it up a notch, so it a bit more comparable to software, and say I designed a software-free hammer building machine (after all automation pre-dates software substantially). Should I be entitled to a share of profits from hammer sales in perpetuity?

"Hot damn, an LED! We can sell this and eat for a month! Too bad we don't have the technology to actually make these anymore...."

So charge it once a week - nice easy schedule to remember. I have my Samsung flip-phone give an "charge me" alarm every Wednesday evening, and if I still forget it'll probably last until the next Wednesday anyway.