Because, when it comes to car commercials, ad agencies are bound by so many rules and regulations regarding depictions of reckless driving and such things that it becomes almost impossible tp create a cool car commercial without running the risk of going to court over it (both the ad agency AND car manufacturer).

And yet, this commercial had zero driving at all!

Ok, the statement I made in my third sentence above is imprecise to the point of being inaccurate. The exact property, as described by Wikipedia:

The original proof shows that for overlapping reads and writes to the same storage cell only the write must be correct. The read operation can return an arbitrary number. Therefore this algorithm can be used to implement mutual exclusion on memory that lacks synchronisation primitives

So the part about not needing "properly arbitrated memory access" is mostly true—a read that collides with a write to the same location can return garbage. Writes still must update memory properly, and presumably must be sequentially consistent.

My first encounter with Leslie's work was Lamport's Bakery. It's a serialization primitive with some surprising properties. For example, it doesn't require properly arbitrated access to memory as the initial value read from memory on entrance to the "bakery" actually doesn't matter!

Dr. Lamport was actually kind enough to reply to an email of mine regarding said primitive. I was optimizing a version of it for a multiprocessor device we were making where I work, and I had come upon what I thought was a clever optimization. (I actually vectorized a portion of the algorithm by way of the "unroll and jam" transformation, so I could test the state of multiple processors in parallel, rather than in serial order as described in the algorithm.) He actually took the time to respond to my email, and was quite gracious. His reply:

In the Bakery Algorithm, process i must wait until a certain condition holds for each other process. The order in which it checks for the different other processes does not matter. So, the algorithm can be parallelized in the manner you suggest.

The only time I was more thrilled on a topic like this was when Dr. Knuth replied to mail I sent him regarding a particular algorithm in Volume 4 of TAOCP. I actually received a hand written reply. Well, he hand wrote notes on a printed copy of the email I had sent to his TAOCP feedback address. Dr. Knuth also encourages me to let all my friends know how much I like TAOCP. So, consider yourself informed: I think Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series is worth its weight in gold, and if you consider yourself a computer scientist or computer engineer, you should consider getting yourself a copy, and investing the time to at least skim it. (Let's face it, to truly understand everything in there would require as much time as Don put into writing it.)

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

The question to ask is - if what you say is true, then why do studios record in these higher bitrate and higher bit depth formats? If they record in analog, they will again record the music in a high bandwidth medium like reel tape.

Then the second question is - if studios record in these high bandwidth formats, why can we not listen to music in the same format as well?

A decade ago, record companies would compress the music because storage and bandwidth was expensive.
However, with current tech and internet speeds, that should not be an excuse.

Heck, video content providers are able to stream high quality videos that consume a magnitude higher levels of bandwidth and storage space. There is absolutely no excuse why audio fidelity of source music should be needlessly compressed or butchered nowadays. And I really don't care if it is needless data. All I am asking is to give me the same file that the studio uses.

Most of these online shops are not really an ecosystem. And that is really the problem.

Everyone keeps getting into the endless audiophile debates. You have one camp that disses everything that has the audiophile and calls it snake oil. Then you have the audiophiles that go into objective vs subjectives debates, and what not. Then you have the tech folks (and we have plenty) who want to correct everyone else and go into Nyquist/Shannon, signal processing, even harmonics, DAC internals, ESS Sabre chips, oversampling, and what not.

The real tragedy in all this is that we *still* don't have a good "ecosystem" that lets people download or stream studio quality music *with enough choice*, and be able to play back the music with sufficient fidelity that respects the quality of the source music.

This doesn't exist. Period. Instead you have this massively screwed up system where you either have esoteric knowledge of audio playback, audio components, internal workings, be able to differentiate between various capacitor types, analog circuitry, DAC chips, speaker drivers. Then be able to differentiate bullshit from fact, spend a ton of money with failed experiments swapping out audio components. Even then, the main battle remains. Hunt around or ask around for source music that is well mastered or well recorded. And guess what - most of the music will not even be in the genre you like or artists you like. Then figure out how/where you can legally download or purchase this music.

So all power to Pono and Neil Young's initiative if they are truly able to pull off this ecosystem. If they can let people access and listen to studio quality music and listen to it "at near studio quality" - that is nothing short of a revolution.

I just checked it now on my end and it seems to be fine. Maybe it was just a transient failure?

$ host eztv.it
eztv.it has address 162.159.244.249
eztv.it has address 162.159.243.249
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f3f9
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f4f9
eztv.it mail is handled by 10 ezmail.es.
$ grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.4.4
nameserver 8.8.8.8

Don't try this at in a University of Texas parking lot. They'll fine you for it. When it happened to me, it was something like $35. "Improper Method of Parking," or some such bunkum. Oh, and Texas requires front plates, so you've already lost that aspect anyway.

I wonder if that was what was up with a truck I saw a few months back, with a huge ol' camera on the side. It was just a boring black pickup truck, and just one camera on the driver's side.

I've seen the Google Car, and it was much smaller, painted rather obviously, and had cameras facing multiple directions.

It refers to the C Run Time, aka. the C standard library. Back in the day, only C programmers were able to operate radar. Nowadays, they can monitor radar with jQuery and node.js.

I find it funny that so many people like you are jumping up and down trying to come up with reasons why whatsapp sucks. Have you even used the app for starters? Why don't you try and figure out why the damn thing is so popular instead? As it is, Slashdot seems to be filled with posters who want to show their cleverness and prove why anything innovative is either done wrong, or how someone else has done something vaguely similar, or why it should never have been built in the first place.

At least greybeards like you don't need to get into this as well.

Whatsapp is successful because it is by far the best user experience you can find in any app. It does not require a login, is as lightweight as it gets, works very very well even in dog slow internet connections or in underpowered phones or even old feature phones, and messages get sent super fast and very reliably. It allows you to share text, images, and videos to a single person or to a group of people.

It just works. Very very well. It is the Google of messaging. From what I hear, the developers focus more on obsessing on the minutest of details and making sure any new feature works reliably, instead of getting into a rat race of introducing a new feature every sprint or every month. And that is what the competition does. They make creaky bloated software, and try to fix lack of usage by making their software even more creaky by introducing more features.

It is ironic that except for search and maybe email, even the mighty Google does not get this simple concept. Try using their chat, hangout, plus apps for example. The user experience is pathetic.

Did the OTA process itself cause the instability, or would your device been just as unstable had you updated it over a cable? My comments regarding OTA updates are meant to apply to the OTA aspect only, not whether the update itself is good. That is, for a given update X, do you deliver that update via a programming cable plugged into the ECU at the dealership, or do you deliver that exact same update OTA. That was the point in debate.

Or is your (unstated) argument that by lowering the barrier for making updates (ie. OTA is easier and cheaper than calling everyone into the shop), that would tempt auto manufacturers to take shortcuts in their QA process in the name of getting updates out there more quickly?

Johnny Carson? Every one of his jokes was original? He mined Vaudeville humor and brought it to TV. He didn't even start the Tonight Show.

Elvis Presley? All of his hits were written by others. Let's face it: He made his money and fame bringing black music to white people.

James Brown? Definitely an original, whose life unfortunately went off the rails at some point.

Ok, that's enough rant. Every one of those folks earned their place on a stamp. I just wanted to point out your double standard. It's easy to dismiss one person or another with cherry picked criteria.

If you walked up to a random 20 or 30 something on the street today and asked them if they knew who Carson, Bergman, Presley, Brown or Jobs was, I imagine Steve would beat out most of them.

I'm no Steve Jobs fanboy. (I've never owned an iPhone or iPod, and I'm posting this from a Linux box.) But even I can recognize the reality of the situation.

No, he doesn't...