But open-source projects routinely provide service for a fee. And even if the projects in question didn't provide any direct service to the donating company, just having *written* the software in the first place could easily be considered to be a provision of service.

Yeah... you didn't read TFS, did you? You didn't even read TFTitle.

For the purpose of release testing, though, the only thing you care about is whether or not there was a crash. If there was a crash, don't release. Back out the busted patch and release the working version. Then you can spend your time debugging the busted patch, which requires the logs and all.

It is extremely reactive, so I'd imagine refining it is pretty difficult as well. Also, it is not "right up there on the most abundent element on this planet". It's actually only the 33rd most abundant element in the Earth's crust (out of 78 elements occuring naturally in the crust). Occurrence is only about 20 parts per million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust

It doesn't look like it will fill the niche of either an SUV or a minivan from those pictures. It just looks like a hatchback. Not useful for, say, soccer moms, I'd guess.

They couldn't even afford two lights. Or maybe this was on purpose, as it allowed Pike to have dramatic pauses: "yesssssssss...... I MEAN NO!"

Leaving will only result in the NSA knowing *more* about your activities, of course.

Fucking units, how do they work? Although I think you're just trolling and that you actually do understand how units work.

If they care about performance, why not design custom ASICs?

FTFY

You should not write a C++ interpreter. You especially shouldn't write an interpreter of a language that looks almost just like C++, but is different from it in unpredictable ways, some of which contribute to bad coding habits and/or make normal C++ more difficult to learn.

Strictly sequential files are a bad model for data if most of your time is spent constructing more-and-more elaborate subsets of that data. When we want to examine a subset, we practically have to make a complete copy of all the data falling into that subset. You want to make a small tweak to your selection? Make a new copy all over again.

Cycles are rarely the issue for us in HEP, and when they are, all we need is more nodes to split the problem into smaller pieces (wiki: embarassingly parallel problem). The actual computational needs are (typically) pretty small. The main bottleneck is usually data throughput. We discard enormous amounts of data (that may or may not be useful, depending on who you ask) simply because we can't store it anywhere close to as fast as we can make it (many orders of magnitude difference between the data production rate and the data storage rate). And then, when we're analyzing the data we've taken, our CPUs tend to sit idle while they wait on the disk to read another block of events, which then take a only a few cycles to add in to the necessary histograms. It only gets worse when the data is somewhere far away on the network. And it gets even worse when you want to select a subset of the data -- with our systems you have to make a full copy of the subset.

There are two big wins that modern big data has developed that we could benefit greatly from if the switchover costs weren't too high. The first is distributing data over many disks on many nodes and bringing the code to the data instead of bringing the data to the code. The more disks your data is on, the less you have to wait on seek times. The second is storing the data in a way that is not strictly sequential in a single set of files, so that if you want to look at a subset of the data, you can effectively do that without having to make a copy of that subset.

In high energy physics, we rolled our own big data solutions (mostly because there was no big data other than us when we did so). It turned out to be terrible.

This is exactly correct. Exact position and exact momentum are not properties that a particle may possess simultaneously, no matter how well or poorly you might try to measure them.

You say to yourself something like:

It's actually much cleaner to start from this sort of abstraction and define the more concrete "wave function" from it than the other way around, partly because it allows you to more easily consider state spaces that, for example, don't have any operators with continuous eigenvalue spaces, like the spins of the ions in a ferromagnetic lattice, or the excitations of atoms/molecules in laser cavity.

Check chapter 9, (pages 237 and following), of the second edition of Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Ramamurti Shankar. Or, section 1.6 (page 18-20) and section 3.5 (page 110-118), of the second edition of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths.

I'm sorry that I can't hyperlink to a physical book. But maybe you could go to your local public library and find a copy of one of them.