Posts by Matt Bucknall

Re: Why VR is doomed to be nothing more than a Niche within a Niche

If you're referring to my comment - It was a reference to the last line of I Like Heckling's post.

Re: This is probably...

Really? This is the most serious WTF moment you've had this year? I envy you.

Re: Oh please, not the tired old "640K" crap

Did 100Mbit ethernet or 54Mbit wi-fi turn out to be adequate? No.

Are consumers moving away from shifting data about in the LAN to shifting it in and out of the cloud? Yes

No, consumers aren't likely to utilize a 1Gbit connection 100% of the time, but when they upload or download something, the preference is likely to be; the quicker the better.

The basis for your argument seems to be about what people need. But the Internet isn't about what people need - Unlikely as it might sound, life can exist without the Internet! It is about what people want.

Re: 32-bit vs 64-bit

Sure, you can have wider registers for SIMD operations (e.g. NEON), but you've got to load and store them somehow. A 64-bit data path throughout your architecture means you can move more data per operation which will benefit SIMD performance, so it is relevant. Incidentally, one of the major features of the ARMv8 architecture is enhanced SIMD support, making it standard and increasing the number of available 128-bit registers.

As mobile apps are generally audio/graphics DSP intensive, an increase in throughput is likely to be more useful to developers than the ability to address a vast and sparsely populated address space.

Re: "too expressive in some ways, with features like closures..."@pjc158

Whether a language is a scripting language or not is related to the level of operations programs written in the language are intended to perform - It has nothing to with the paradigm(s) a language supports. A scripting language can be procedural, object-oriented and/or functional just as much as a systems language can be.

Indeed Javascript is more than a purely functional language, but that really stems from Netscape's insistence that Eich create something that looked more like Java (because that's what the cool kids were using) than Scheme, which is what he had originally wanted to implement and which is more than apparent if you use it functionally.

The point I was originally trying to make was, the primary reason Javascript seems to receive so much bad press is because programmers come to it expecting to be able to structure their code into hierarchies of classes, the way they're used to. They find they have a hard time getting Javascript to work that way, because that's not how it was really intended to be used, so dismiss it as being crap. They fail to discover that, by changing their approach to suit Javascript instead of the other way around, it is actually quite a well thought-out and nice language to work in.

Re: Confusing headline?

Forge:

verb (used with object)

1. to form by heating and hammering; beat into shape.

2. to form or make, especially by concentrated effort: to forge a friendship through mutual trust.

3. to imitate (handwriting, a signature, etc.) fraudulently; fabricate a forgery.

(source: Dictionary.com:)

Re: WTF is with that bar chart?

'What am I missing here?'

It's a Tuesday?

Re: API, not language

Have you ever tried writing any significant amount of code in C using GTK+'s bloated piece of crap GObject system? I shudder to think how many hours of my life I've wasted manually specifying vtables and handling GObject properties. Glad I jumped that ship 20 months ago.

Yes, C is a vastly easier language to understand compared to C++ and can even be a more productive language in some circumstances... But not when you use it to manually implement everything C++ gives you out of the box minus the syntactic sugar.

Re: Lack of faith

Guessing you're aware of the vast array of rep-rap variants out there though right?

Re: red herring

Well of course it was overpriced - That's how retail works! You think I don't know that a camera I pay £400 for costs bugger all for Samsung to manufacture?

There is barely anything inside a tablet computer. In the quantity Samsung makes stuff, the mark up they put on wholesale would cover the production cost of a 7" tablet several times over.

Televisions, phones, tablets and cameras are all essentially the same thing in different form factors these days and are becoming better at inter-operating. Samsung giving away tablets with purchases of other Samsung gear both makes it more likely that a consumer would chose a Samsung product over some other make - Especially at Christmas.. and it also means that a consumer with two inter-operating Samsung products (e.g. a tablet and camera) is likely to buy another Samsung product (e.g. a television) later on or maybe even at the same time.

Re: Intel chip?

For all 3 minutes before it burnt down to the bone.

Re: Get it right next time

How do you make teaching attractive to the talented? Those who are talented in a particular field want to get on with exploring it and pushing boundaries, because they can. Would money really be enough to compensate people of that mindset for the dying inside that they would experience, regurgitating the same old shit, year in year out?

Yes. I was just observing that the USB interface was the one in use and the MIDI ports were being left redundant. Geez you're a hard crowd sometimes.

Re: a version 1 release of ARM

There's probably about as much chance of that happening as them basing IE on WebKit!

Re: Ummm

Didn't spot the 'Joke Alert' icon huh?

Re: Hello Intel

Intel has already been there and got the t-shirt. They inherited StrongARM from DEC, then went on to develop their XScale implementation of the ARMv5 architecture before flogging it to Marvell so that they could focus fully on x86. Can't see them doing a u-turn any time soon (even though they still hold some sort of ARM license apparently).