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Is that a relative of T'Pol? I guess funding the Vulcan economy is only logical.

Apple now has 20% of the market and 90% of the profits. Measuring units is a bit like counting songs published on Spotify while ignoring the number of plays. For both those numbers to be true Apple must be making about 40 times more profit per sale than Android.

Company convinced of their own success, at least in their own marketing materials. News at 11.

I see you're a bit late to the party but I can inform you that here on /. it's been the year of Linux for some time already.

I use chip-and-pin today, do I really care if the "chip" ends up being a smart watch or cell phone? Not really. I just wouldn't allow it to pay without confirmation. On my own device I wouldn't mind using a fingerprint scanner instead of PIN either, just swipe my watch and push the "pay" button/scanner and I'm done. I have two debit cards today, I'm honestly not sure what the code on the second one is because I never use it.

You don't have to hide the extensions in order to make the GUI not change them. Just prevent the user from editing that part of the filename.

You are describing some sort of standard for magic cookies. This could easily be merged with the existing use of magic cookies.

There is however somewhat of a standard now: the first 4 bytes are a 4-letter code for the file type. Lots of image formats, in particular, use this.

Unix-like has stupid warts too, try creating a file named "-r" in a directory full of important sub-folders then delete it.

  % rm -- -r

Sorry, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. They're giving twenty people - ten in experiment group and ten in the control group 30 minutes to do a bit of analysis. And they measure minutes to apply a few changes, without any qualitative measure on how the code is growing. There's very little proof that the refactoring they did made any sense, the sample size is so low you'd never get reliable results and pretty much what you can conclude is that refactoring doesn't make hackjobs easier. Never thought so, that just involves finding the place something's happening and hack it. If it's a good idea, well... it works there and then.

Well somebody has to be the first at discovering something before somebody else can confirm it. And yes, in human years it might take a while to build another billion dollar project to do that. Science works on incomplete information, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to do science on. Has anybody independently verified the Higgs boson yet? All the exoplanets discovered recently? Probably not. That's always how it will be at the leading edge of science.

Somehow I find that implausible, I expect China to take the whole country or not at all. South Korea would be to worried about a conventional or nuclear counter-attack on Seoul to do much of anything while China could probably swoop in and install a new authoritarian regime that by NK standards would seem like heaven, all they need to do is bring them into the 21th century. After that I'll think it'll be a bit like Life of Brian:

Not if you're talking game performance rather than compiler performance I think. From what I understand games generally compile their shaders to native instructions long before they're used, it's not just-in-time compilation like when you download javascript on a page and do it on the fly as you execute, more like delayed traditional compilation until you can optimize for this particular hardware like Gentoo ebuilds.

However, the IR instructions is probably much simpler than the source language, for example Java has tons of classes but only ~200 opcodes. It would make graphics drivers not quite, but a lot more like CPUs running "assembler-ish" code instead of being huge graphics libraries. Basically you're moving most of what's OpenGL/DirectX today over into the application. Stallman might not approve but it might mean more AAA games being able to run on a thin OpenGL Vulkan shim than Mesa.

Especially since the bytecode is supposed to be hardware neutral, it is the compilation from bytecode that will have to do the aggresive optimizations to adapt to the target architecture.
You can have very simple bytecode that doesn't need much processing, and while technically compilation is really compiled, but that wouldn't make sense here.

They've come full circle:
1. AMD announces Mantle, a low level graphics API which may give consoles an edge over the PC.
2. Microsoft panics and announces DirectX 12, aiming for pretty much the same thing.
3. Khronos Group panics and announces OpenGL Vulcan, aiming for pretty much the same thing.
4. AMD announces there'll be no public SDK of Mantle, use OpenGL/DirectX.

So in the end we'll probably have feature parity again. How important it is remains to be seen, outside of drawcall benchmarks it's unclear how much real world difference it makes, what is certain is that it exposes a lot more of the complexity to the developer. That of course gives you more room to optimize, but it remains to be seen how many will be able to take advantage of it.

On the bright side, it might actually mean there's less code that needs to be written and that open source might catch up a bit, it says it'll run on top of all platforms that support OpenGL ES 3.1 which might become a much bigger goal than OpenGL 4.x.

Dictionary definition of Yahoo: A person who is very rude, loud, or stupid.

It amazes me that technically knowledgeable people choose names that limit their success.

TeX is 3 letters from another alphabet!

Gimp means: Usually Disparaging and Offensive. A term used to refer to a person who limps or is lame.