Graphics cards are, nowadays, a bit more than 3D gaming. Nowadays there are a number of markets that companies such as NVidia may cater and are of fundamental importance, such as smartphones/tablets (remember Tegra?) and HPC (remember CUDA/OpenCL?).

What these markets have in common is that linux is the only reason they exist and are relevant. Windows is,at the very best, a "also ran" in mobile devices. In the HPC world linux is essentially the only game in town. In fact, there is currently only a single entry proprietary OS entry in the Top500 list.

Do you expect NVidia to abandon any of those markets in protest of Linus Torvalds pointing out that NVidia sucks at supporting linux? Think again.

Why should Nvidia subscribe to the projects "goals and visions"? Thats the projects concern, not theirs.

NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".

But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".

I've had problems with a NVidia card that I have, and the last time it gave me problems was with the latest upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04. With this upgrade, NVidia's very own proprietary driver either rendered 3D scenes excruciatingly slow or never rendered them at all, instead presenting only a black window. Strangely enough, 2D rendering worked without any noticeable hitch.

The fix came only about a month ago, with an upgrade to NVidia's proprietary driver.

I'm no Knuth biographer, but every single interview and presentation given by Knuth that I ever saw, he always spoke like that.

Going back to basketball, some people talk tons of shit about players such as Derrick Rose for not being very articulate, accusing him of being a moron, a retard and even autistic. Yet, people such as Knuth are also not very articulate, and no one in their right mind would accuse Knuth of being a moron. That says something about being prejudiced.

There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until

...until industrial production is affected by the skyrocketing costs and the whole economy of Japan faces a recession caused by the increased production costs and lack of ability to compete in the economic field.

In alternative, they can simply turn on a couple of the 50 power generators they have just sitting there, that never exhibit a single problem in their entire existence.

I wonder what's the best option.

It's basketball. Really, does anybody with a working brain really give a screw about this game?

I had a sarcastic reply but instead I'm going to simply say this: Donald Knuth was a basketball coach. See him talk about his baskeball coaching experience here.

There is no doubt that "everything will correct itself". This isn't up for debate.

What's up for debate is how will the correction happen. The whole point of this is in whose terms will this correction happen: will this be in humanity's good terms, by limiting growth and guaranteeing access to limited resources, will it be in humanity's bad terms, with wars for stuff such as access to food and drinking water and the accompanying indiscriminate killing of very large numbers of people, or will it be in nature's terms, with everyone simply dying off due to lack of subsistence.

It is in everyone's best interests that this adjustment is made on humanity's terms, to preserve quality of living and avoiding large scale deaths. Hence, reports such as the one reported here.

Because people listen to that hyperbole and then find out the population growth isn't "explosive"

I don't know about explosive, but right now it is in fact tigthly correlated with exponential growth. And the thing about exponential growth is that its essentially explosive in nature, as itsdoubling time is constant, and that it only ceases to be exponential to assume a form of a logistic function if either political measures are put in place to stunt growth in our terms, or nature naturally limits the amount of people that can actually live by imposing its own terms.

This is a natural fact which is widely know for over a century and no one in their right mind actually disputes this. So, why would calling a spade a space invalidate the whole message?

So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another?

The idiots behind this project explicitly don't care about the legality of censoring the web, or any accountability of their decisions. From the Clean IT project website:

This is nice and all - but I find in practice that people who are all gung-ho on patterns spend most of the time up in a sky where what they say is correct, but not terribly relevant to getting things done. To use your example, if you talk about an observer pattern rather than describing the mechanism, you are providing much less information about what you're doing.

Any reference to a specific design pattern is nothing more than a reference to very concise but detailed description of the mechanism. An adequate parallel is referring to specific construction techniques, such as Berlin/king post retaining walls. Instead of wasting time and effort describing how the construction process works, what are the pros and cons, what materials to use, how to phase the construction, how to design them and other necessary but tedious information, we simply refer to it through a proper name.

So, by referring to individual design patterns, we are actually providing much more information in a concise manner, due to the fact that if someone is really interested in more information then that person is free to pick up any reference on the subject and wrap their head around it.

Really 64-bit is what people are after for desktops and laptops today.

That is only relevant if you wish to access more than 2 or 3GB of RAM per process. If you consider that the majority of netbooks being sold only come with about 1GB of RAM, then 64-bit CPUs are essentiallly meaningless. And this even without considering PAE stuff.

This doesn't make sense, and I am lead to believe that you actually don't know what a design pattern is. After all, no matter how complete a programming language or library might be, you still need to put stuff together, and when you put stuff up together you better choose to put them together in the best way possible, that actually solves your problems.

To better explain what design patterns are, we can compare them to a more mundane field: civil engineering/construction. You see, while a programming language and API represents the individual building materials used in construction, such as mortar, concrete, steel rebar and I-beams, design patterns represent a specific way which these buildig materials are put together and made to work, such as reinforced concrete slabs, prefabricated joists, trusses, columns, beams, etc... It is helpful to think of a construction project in terms of individual components, by decomposing the entire structure into structural elements and the construction techniques that are used to implement them, than wasting time thinking about how you will arrange individual pebbles in a concrete mix, or how a rebar will be gripped by the concrete.

So, in essence, design patterns provide you with a very convenient and useful way to think about pre-made solutions to specific problems, while saving you the time and need to reinvent the wheel each time you need to create a new component.

I would guess that you do in fact use other patterns, but you actually do so without knowing. That isn't a bad thing, because ultimately what really counts is getting stuff done, and not write some kind of whitepaper announcing to the world that your company's current work is the result of an academically perfect implementation of a wide variety of design patterns.

Nonetheless, I find design patterns to be very important and extremely helpful, mainly because they can be seen as a set of pre-defined solutions to a set of well-known problems. In other words, they represent building blocks which have been adequately studied and therefore provide important properties that are already known beforehand.

Knowing these properties is extremely helpful when designing an application, because it lets you minimize the amount of work you will need to do to add some features, or even completely avoid it. By knowing design patterns you are able to come up with solutions to potential problems simply by identifying them and adopting the adequate design patterns to side-step it.

As an example, let's imagine we were developing some sort of 3D modelling application. We could start by defining that the application would consist of a database component, which stores all the information regarding the model, and a GUI component.

As you are already familiar with the MVC pattern, we could design the database component with as a model and implement any representation of the 3D model as a different view. But let's go a bit beyond that.

In a 3D modelling application, we can expect that for each database component we might have multiple views. In addition, we might have an indeterminate number of components which might need to be aware of any information stored in the database. A nice way to pull this off is to design the database component as an observer pattern. By doing this, you are free to extend the 3D modelling any time in the future to add a new component without any trouble at all. In addition, you are also able to completely replace other components by simply taking them off and plug in a replacement.

A 3D modelling application also needs to provide the user with a way to operate on the 3D model. Yet, more often than not we don't know everything the user wants to do and how he wants to do it. This means that it is a good idea to implement these operators in a way that you are free to add them in the future without being forced to rummage through half the source code tree. A good way to do this is to implement these modelling operators as a visitor pattern. By doing this, you've just defined a generic interface for every operator you might need, and basically you only need to add a single class to implement any extra feature for the 3D modeller. In addition, if you also make sure you also include the inverse operator for every operator then an undo system will pretty much write itself.

The list goes on and on. You can implement your scene graph by employing a composite pattern, you might implement the components to import models from an assorted list of data formats by writing each component as a strategy pattern, you may implement a series of UI animations and input states around a state pattern, etc etc etc.

And the best thing about this is that, by knowing design patterns, you are able to better express what you are doing and what you want others to do by referring to design patterns. For example, instead of talking about implementing a system of callbacks between a server and a set of clients by setting a common interface used to pass messages around and keep all clients coherent with the current state of the server... Just talk about implementing an observer pattern.

So, do familiarize yourself with design patterns. They may not solve all your problems and some of them may not be simple to wrap our head around them, but I assure you that once you do the amount of problems you will have to deal with will reduce significantly.

The UN can't agree on mass murdering dictatorships, Why would they all of a sudden be on the same page wrt the internet?

Oddly enough, this is an argument in favour of UN control. Contrary to what some business interests claim, the internet works perfecly fine and doesn't need any intervention by any state to improve the way it works.

So, if the control over the internet is transfered to the UN, and if the UN essentially stalemates any proposed change to the internet, then we are all in a much better position than we are right now, because it protects the internet at a communication medium which actually works and actually benefits the people, instead of a hand full of corporations.

Boy, aren't we exaggerating.

Before thinking about purchasing a particle accelerator, you have a considerable number of things which you can and must actually do by yourself in order to test the paper's validity. One of those things is actually reading the paper, understanding the theoretical hypothesis which were laid out, analyse the data which was used as a basis for the results presented in the paper, check if it holds out, evaluate the results... You know, the peer review process.

In this context, the need for a particle accelerator only enters the equation if you suspect that the results presented in the paper aren't up to par, and you wish to replicate them to see if you aren't being duped. Even in that case, you still need to run the series of tests which I pointed out.

So, if you actually intend to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson then it's safe to say that purchasing a particle accelerator is the least of your concerns. In fact, how many of those actually involved in reviewing that sort of papers have access to their own personal particle accelerator? And does that stop them from doing it? Precisely.

Notice that you actually don't need access to a particle accelerator to do any of those things. You actually only need to have an academic interest in the subject. If you are interested in scientific problems such as the validity of the Higgs boson and you are curious enough to be willing to spend your time rummaging through articles on the Higgs boson then odds are to actually know something about it, and you are actually in a position to judge by yourself at least a portion of those details.

So, unless you intend to avoid having to think about the stuff and instead you want an authority to tell you what you must believe in, whether a paper is published in a journal or is distributed directly from the site of a university or research institution is actually irrelevant, because you are quite able and willing to turn on your brain and actually do science.

You aren't required to be an expert in the field. If you are interested enough on a given field to actually read the papers then you are certainly already knowledgeable about the subject. Moreover, you certainly are already aware that a paper is supposed to be food for thought, not a textbook.

It isn't intended to replace the peer review process. If all a person wants in journals is that they serve as an authoritative seal of approval which gives him enough confidence to place blind faith on a paper then the logo of a big name institution actually does the same thing. Let's not pretend that that doesn't happen right now with how the logo of companies such as elsevier is perceived and used.

The fact of the matter is this: if someone actually reads papers of a given field and actually cares about how the peer review process works in that field then that person is already quite able to digest that information. If, instead, someone only wants to have someone tell him what to believe, then that's an entirely different problem which the existence of journals does nothing to mitigate.