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Comment: Re:Third parties (Score 4, Insightful) 304

Any Libertarian who tried to pull the sort of shenanigans that we're seeing here would be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by his/her own party.

And then the Libertarian would rebrand himself a Republican and run as that.

Plus, it wouldn't matter anyway - after killing off regulations, the large corporations would have an even larger stranglehold on the marketplace, as there would be no anti-trust laws to keep them from colluding, price-fixing, etc. and any competitor who tried to enter the field would be crushed before they could get a foothold.

Comment: Re:Security model? (Score 1) 128

GPUs need to access shared resources that are per-system, whereas CPUs need to limit access to resources on a per-process basis.

If you plan to make the GPU easy to use as a general computing resource (which, according to the writeup, seems to be what they're aiming at) the GPU needs to also be working at a per-process basis and linked to the main system memory so that results are easily available to the main system for I/O, etc.

Of course, even if this is their goal, one question still remains... Will this be useful? It all depends on the apps. I could see this architecture potentially making programming easier for folks who program audio processing software, rendering, or large simulations, especially if they can make the GPU look more like a general purpose processor.

Comment: Re:what tricks? (Score 1) 365

by frank_adrian314159 (#43592113) Attached to: Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?

... it's easy to read if you actually think that way, which IMHO, any practicing programmer should be able to do.

Having used lambda functions since I learned Lisp in the 1970's and having used C++ since the cfront 1.0 days, I can honestly say that "easy to read" is not an attribute that most templated C++ code has, lambda constructs notwithstanding. In fact, many programmers hide templated types behind typedefs for this reason. It's not so much that one could conceive of such a thing being possible, it's just that it's appearance in the wild would be of the same order of likelihood as looking out your window and seeing a black swan.

Besides, even if you do write "pretty" C++ lambdas, the screwing up of syntactic closures and inability to return lambdas involving the same without remembering highly idiosyncratic rules about variable capture lifespan or (even worse) copying semantics (and, copying variables rather than sharing references is almost always a mistake, language design-wise) makes anything more than simple examples useless.

Comment: Re:Old developer don't need to... (Score 1) 365

by frank_adrian314159 (#43591795) Attached to: Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?

Oh, shut up, old man.

OK. Just kidding. As another seasoned software professional (i.e., stick a fork in him and see if he's done yet), I still mourn the fact that the past twenty-five years has been nothing but a rehash when it comes to actual programming technology. Yeah, UI technology (i.e., specification of drawing UI pages and working with events coming in from manual devices) has gotten a bit more abstract, portable, and perhaps, a bit, better, but the underlying programming? Still as awful as ever.

Maybe someday we can move forward from re-inventing wheels. But it doesn't seem to be coming very fast.

Comment: Re:Measure Programmer Productivity? (Score 1) 365

by frank_adrian314159 (#43591705) Attached to: Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?

You forgot Option 4: Buy a pressure cooker, make an IED, and go to a workplace, especially if you can get yourself close to executive row.

The fact that this is a possibility for some of the more unhinged among us, even if it is a reprehensible and quite undesirable one, should worry execs and political leaders more than it seems to. But because those in power seem so unconcerned about this possibility, I still expect to see it become more common while I'm still alive - perhaps with myself as collateral damage from some idiot who got pushed too far.

I guess we can always ban sales of pressure cookers...

Comment: Re:Unable or Unwilling or Unmotivated ? (Score 1) 365

by frank_adrian314159 (#43590979) Attached to: Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?

As you grow older there are more calcium deposits in your brain which is where the term "fossilized thinking" comes from.

As a software developer and manager who went back and got his MSCS at age 53 (with a thesis on statistical learning models of biological neurons, in which I had to learn enough neurophysiology to get around) I believe that you are incorrect with respect to your etymology. Calcium deposits in brains, by the time they are severe enough to have any effect on cognition, are a pathological medical condition, not the norm. And it is not where the term "fossilized thinking" comes from - that is an etymological extension of the notion of one becoming "set in one's ways", fossils being very, very well set.

Comment: Re:UNImprovements since then? (Score 1) 92

by frank_adrian314159 (#43590547) Attached to: How LinkedIn's Project Inversion Saved the Company

... from this user's perspective, the site has got worse.

And now they're asking every single time you log in to troll your other social media sites and email for contacts. I made the mistake of letting it look at my gmail contact list. After that, every single time I logged in it showed me a checkmarked list of every single contact in my gmail contacts not already connected to me in Linked In and asked me if I wanted to add them (there didn't seem an obvious way to stop it doing this once I gave them permission)... At least it did this until the one day I accidentally hit return instead of the clicking the link labeled "Skip this step" (or just hitting the home link). So now I've spammed random people (who I might know peripherally as someone I auditioned for a band position, or had a talk about an item on eBay, or a real-estate agent, etc., etc., etc.) to be my contact, my contact list is cluttered with people I don't care about, and what for? So Linked In can try to boast a thicker contact web than facebook (which I'm sure they're tracking as a metric for advertisers/recruiters/etc.).

So fuck you, Linked In. Your "helpful suggestions", which you can't get rid of, has made yourself less useful to me. Sadly, you're still more useful than any other similar service out there, but keep trying - I'm sure that you'll make your self so useless as to be irrelevant sometime within the next two years.

At least now, it only asks me to connect with random people I've contacted in the past few months.

Comment: This is the kind of article... (Score 3) 103

by frank_adrian314159 (#43550295) Attached to: Two Changes To Quirky Could Change The World

... no one wants to read. It's stupid and about a service that no one who had half a brain would use. Dear God, is there no real news? Click-/Ad-bait is one thing, but this takes awful to a new level. I feel stupider for having read through half the summary. I'd say more, but those who read the whole summary are no longer smart enough to read.

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love"

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