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Comment: Re:Didn't Apple just announce this? (Score 5, Insightful) 85

by EvanED (#40163735) Attached to: Is a "Net Zero" Data Center Possible?

No, they didn't.

Roughly speaking, there are three levels of "greenness", for lack of a better word. "Off the grid" means you're totally self-sufficient; probably solar during the day stored to batteries for night, combined with ultra-efficient stuff. "Net zero" means you self-generate a surplus of power sometimes and a deficit others, selling your excess to the power company and buying your need. Being "fully renewable", like what Apple announced, "just" means you're buying all renewable energy. If you read the article you linked to, you'd see that Apple will only be generating 60% of its need, which means it's far from net zero.

I'm not actually sure how much the last means in practice, considering that it's not like they have dividers that say "this electron came from solar so it goes to Apple, while this electron came from coal so it can't." So really what it turns into is Apple giving the power company more money so that hopefully they'll build more renewable sources. Not to say that I don't applaud the decision, and even 60% generation is impressive, but it is indirect.

Comment: Re:free != easy (Score 1) 104

However, it does at least appear to be consistent, which is the most important thing, so its preferences could be considered a publisher's house style and just something you have to get used to.

Actually one other possibility strikes my mind, which is that the style of accidentals in that copy were actually what was used in Bach's time, and the current norm arose later (and was typically retroactively applied to earlier works). If that's true, then this effort could be an attempt to be "true to the original", so to speak.

Of course, this is complete and utter speculation, as I haven't read TFA or anything. :-)

Comment: Re:free != easy (Score 1) 104

It's funny, I was just playing around with a different music editor (Denemo) transcribing some written music. And that piece had a bunch of accidentals that were unnecessary and unbracketed. But it seemed to be somewhat arbitrary; some advisory accidentals were normal accidentals, some were in brackets, and some places I would have expected them based on other uses were missing.

There were advisory accidentals that crossed both barlines and octaves. Dunno if I saw cancels of cross-bar, cross-octave accidentals. :-)

I don't know if this was just sloppy editing or someone actually preferred it.

(Actually to be honest, I played cello in school orchestra for 9 years (basically stopping about a decade ago actually), I actually didn't know that accidentals didn't cross octaves until looking into related issues.)

Comment: Re:I guess perl and python must be dead too? (Score 1) 450

by EvanED (#40118591) Attached to: Free Desktop Software Development Dead In Windows 8

I wouldn't be surprised if some future version of Windows doesn't even allow you to install programs that don't come from some Windows 8 version of the iTunes app store.

I suppose it's theoretically possible that I'll have to bite my tongue later, but IMO you're crazy if you actually think that. Basically MS would have to ignore the largest reason that Windows is where it is, which is backwards compatibility. Yes, there was a lot of monopolistic crap in there too, but that wouldn't have helped if they were making it hard for people to run their old software. But the degree that MS bends over backwards to ensure that old software continues to run goes to ridiculous lengths.

Despite what may be prevailing /. wisdom, MS really has been a developer-friendly company. Their main problem is changing "favored technology" like pants -- one day it's straight Win32, then MFC, then WinForms, then XAML, then Metro, and who knows what buzzwords I've missed. But the old technologies continue to be supported; hell, you can run DOS programs on Windows 7 if you've got the 32-bit version. (I think, I can't verify.) They're happy as long as people are developing on Windows.

If your prediction comes true, it'll be the death knell for Windows.

Comment: Re:Dumbest Decision Ever (Score 1) 450

by EvanED (#40118543) Attached to: Free Desktop Software Development Dead In Windows 8

Actually crazily enough I worked for a (relatively small) company that did mixed platform development, and while there were some copies of the full VS floating around, I'm almost positive most of the day-to-day Windows development happened with the express editions. (Caveat: the build system was SCons, using the MSVC compiler.)

Or maybe that was just my day-to-day dev since I was an intern. :-)

Point being, the express editions really were a surprisingly capable tool on their own.

Comment: Re:Wait, what now? (Score 1) 450

by EvanED (#40118527) Attached to: Free Desktop Software Development Dead In Windows 8

I haven't seen anyone use an IDE more efficiently than what I can do with Emacs and the command-line.

I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...

Comment: Re:32 bit ABI? (Score 2) 385

by EvanED (#40061293) Attached to: Linux 3.4 Released

It's true that most programs won't need 64-bit address space - right now - but that's only as long as their memory requirements are within 2GB.

And a lot of programs this is true, and will "always" be true. Will Emacs ever need more than 2GB for most people?

(And actually it's 4GB on Linux, or at least close to it.)

If that's the case, wouldn't there exist 2 versions of Linux in the tree

It's more like 99% of the code is shared, and changes depending on how you compile it.

wouldn't it make sense for the 32-bit Linux to have a 32-bit ABI, and the 64-bit Linux to have a 64-bit ABI?

That's how it has been, and those configurations will, of course, continue to be supported (in addition to supporting 32-bit apps on 64-bit Linux). They've just added the new x32 option.

Comment: Re:What's wrong with GCC? (Score 1) 711

by EvanED (#39990507) Attached to: FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC

Now now, even I've called RMS a zealot for some of the stuff he's said and done re. GCC (e.g. telling someone who wrote a JVM backend for GCC to delete it not tell anyone he wrote it) along that line.

But my understanding is that GPL v3 introduced some change (that I now forget) to make the license stronger, which means that the FSF is now comfortable with that sort of thing. GCC has had a legitimate plugin interface for quite some time now.

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