Is Dart an open language spec?
The language spec is CCA 3 and ECMA standards tracked. The source code is BSD.
Javascript was not an immaculate conception of Berners-Lee, Torvalds and Stallman. It was a product of Mozilla, blessed by nobody and foisted on the world via the defacto browser of the day. It is also more than flawed enough to justify some competition.
The <script> tag has a "language" attribute for a reason, the curmudgeons of Slashdot notwithstanding.
that piece of software/tech tends to perish
Except when it doesn't. VirtualBox hasn't perished.
A colleague of mine speculated that perhaps Oracle had forgotten about VirtualBox and thus it has been spared the obligatory ruining. Perhaps there is a gang of hard core emulator developers quietly slipping in and out of the building each day, carefully avoiding notice.
Netbeans does actually suck less than Eclipse. That's a low bar, to be sure, but it appears to be acquiring more users than it is repulsing, so there's another counterpoint.
So we're just randomly posting that link to every Slashdot story now?
wouldn't Java be a example of the contrary to this?
Yes, but not the best one. The best would be Oracle's database. Despite the fact that Oracle Database Server is not the result of a 'community-based development model,' the product has a long, ugly history of vulnerabilities. For some reason it fails to be composed of 'low-defect code,' despite apparently having all the best financial incentives. The list of vulnerabilities is long and grows regularly.
The only reason Oracle Database Server has never been the victim of a SQL Slammer type exploit is that it is so expensive that most instances exist only well behind corporate and government firewalls that, if not well maintained, at least exist. Many SQL Server admins apparently don't believe in firewalls.
However, [Solaris] is more of Sun's creation than Oracle's.
Likewise with Java.
Point of order: 32-bit ARM code doesn't even have stack instructions
ARM's generalization of the classic PUSH and POP instructions has always been admirable (at least until they made THUMB which sadly does have these foul instructions,) but the real world uses STMDB (store multiple decrement before) and LDMIA (load multiple increment after) to implement stacks, which is exactly why these instructions exist. 32-bit ARM provides a stack pointer (R13 a.k.a SP as per ARM) and a return address (R14) register. This not merely software convention either; these registers are banked to allow distinct values for these specific registers across processor modes to accommodate the classic call stack in the face of exceptions.
32 bit ARM is every bit as "stack oriented" as anything that has explicit PUSH and POP instructions. There is no pretending otherwise.
Modern ISAs provide large numbers of registers specifically to avoid stack usage
Modern ISAs? Providing a large register file to avoid memory accesses goes back to Berkeley RISC-I (the inspiration for ARM, incidentally) at least. However, what you have then when executing real programs is merely a very limited stack inside the register file. From RISC I: A REDUCED INSTRUCTION SET VLSI COMPUTER:
Our approach is to break the set of window registers (r10 to r31) into three parts (Figure 7). Registers 26 through 31 (HIGH) contain parameters passed from “above” the current procedure; that is, the calling procedure. Registers 16 through 25 (LOCAL) are used for the local scalar storage exactly as described previously. Registers 10 through 15 (LOW) are used for local storage and for parameters passed to the procedure “below” the current procedure (the called procedure). On each procedure CALL a new set of registers, r10 to r31, is allocated; however, we want the LOW registers of the “caller” to become the HIGH registers of the “callee.” This is accomplished by having the hardware overlap the LOW registers of the calling frame with the HIGH registers of the called fmme: thus. without moving information, parameters in mgisters 10 through 15 appear in registers 25 through 31 in the called frame.
What we have here is a hardware accelerated stack based on a large banked register file. An optimization.
Stacks are a software things
If that's true it aligns pretty nicely with Genuinely Useful Ideas In Programming then, no?
And you go too far down that road, suddenly you're teaching FORTH.
Or the JVM instruction set, for something a tiny bit more relevant.
the heap, the hash table, and trees
There is nothing basic about these. Each is the subject of on-going research and implementations range from simplistic and poor to fabulously sophisticated.
An important basic data structure? Try a stack.
Yes, a stack. What majority of supposed graduates of whatever programming related education you care to cite are basically ignorant of the importance and qualities of a stack? Some of the simplest processors implement exactly one data structure; a stack, from which all other abstractions must be derived. A stack is what you resort to when you can't piss away cycles and space on
I think this is a decent milestone. While the reactor design itself is unlikely to ever break even, hopefully they're at least learning enough about efficiently triggering a fusion reaction that they can apply it to more productive designs
This achievement opens the door for future designs. Inertial confinement works; it needs improvement, but we're no longer debating whether it's possible to maintain symmetry or any of the other many doubts the detractors dwelled on.
The haters of NIF — and there are many — won't permit followup; they'll have it shut no matter what. For them, the whole idea of seeking energy sources that don't demand energy poverty is inherently illegitimate, and they run the show now. But the work and the results won't die at LLNL; there are other people and other nations that haven't decided to turn themselves into a windmill powered nature preserve.
So we'll have to let them take the ball and run with it. At least it will continue, now perhaps with far more enthusiasm.
and it'll be as good / better than ZFS soon
No. Sorry.
There hasn't been a commit to the official BTRFS tree in over two months. There have only been five distinct contributors during the entire third quarter. The second quarter saw only 70 commits.
That pace is way too slow for a file system with so many 'to be implemented' features. While not dead, at this rate BTRFS will never surpass ZFS in any notable way.
I'm sincerely sorry about that. Linux contributors just aren't getting it done wrt BTRFS, and that's a crying shame; other operating systems should look on in envy at marvelous Linux file systems.
And yes, I should be in there plugging away at it. So should you. But we're not.
That's not Oracle's fault, either. People just don't care enough to put in the effort. We're just here griping about Oracle and the ZFS license issue and poasting about BTRFS being the answer, waiting for someone to do all that brutally hard work.
We're deluding ourselves.
The entire Linux kernel, virtual filesystem, daemons, user commands, etc, are just along for the ride.
A JVM relies heavily on a kernel for scheduling, storage (journalling, RAID, LVM, etc.,) network stack (IP stack, filtering, bridging, etc.) and virtual memory management, at least. All of those capabilities must exist; they weren't created because someone was naive. Either they land in some library used by the guest JVM or they land in the hypervisor.
This isn't to say the now 40 year old IBM LPAR model is wrong. It clearly works, and VMWare is independently evolving into the same thing. But there are some exaggerated claims of simplicity being offered here.
The fact is recent x86 CPUs and chipsets have gained powerful virtualization capabilities, including hardware accelerated IO, MMU and interrupt virtualization. This stuff only began to appear in x86 hardware in late 2005 with important new capabilities such as VMCS Shadowing appearing as recently as Haswell (circa June, this year.)
It isn't surprising that people are creating hypervisors to leverage this power. When hardware manufacturers give you a powerful virtualization platform the question is do you use a legacy OS retrofitted to utilize it[1] or adopt something supposedly better by virtue of being built with hardware virtualization as a given.
Stay tuned.
[1] FreeBSD 10 offers the bhyve type 2 hypervisor the relies on VT-x + EPT. It can virtualize x86, like VMWare could do in the late 90's, but FreeBSD hasn't had to synthesize a virtual sandbox from scratch because the hardware provides the hard parts, and the end result is superior.
we have an agreement which allows us to utilize x264 code in x265
You don't need an 'agreement' to use x264 code because x264 is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.0. What, exactly, is this agreement supposed to permit?
I came up with the exact same summation; too much Indiana Jones. Some parts were great. Bilbo and Gollum under the mountain were truly excellent; it really did the book justice. The trolls weren't bad. The dwarf backstory was ok, going far beyond the book and doing it well.
But damn... Radagast the rabbit sledding superhero? The interminable goblin chase sequence....? wow. The whole mountain giant sequence was an exercise in excessive CGI combined with some unexplainable contempt for continuity. At some point during production someone had to think "wtf is this?"
There are two more. It is conceivable they didn't promulgate these mistakes to the remainder, but given that they've undertaken to stretch this relatively simple story over, what, 7.5 to 8 hours of movie... we could be in for a lot more fail.
I concur with this. NetBeans is not attempting to be a generic GUI application platform; it is a mere IDE so it weighs a lot less than Eclipse. I moved to NetBeans because Maven integration with Eclipse is still half baked after all these years; with NetBeans you just open the Maven project and things work correctly. I stayed with Netbeans because it performs better and just has fewer hairs. Eclipse not spamming
It is Oracle, however. One day it might cost $6000 per "seat."
It seems improbable that a gas giant would
Does it seem improbable to you? Life on Earth evolved in a fluid.
Even if genesis is not possible in a gas giant atmosphere, large planets tend to have lots of moons and, therefore, lots of opportunities for primitive life to emerge. Extremophiles from such a moon could survive a short trip through space to a gas giant's atmosphere. Some small fraction of those would thrive and evolve in the new environment.
I suspect gas giant atmospheres may actually be very fertile. Life is good at producing simple sphere shapes needed for buoyancy. There are probably gas giants with billions of tons of biomass drifting around.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
