The parliament did for example stop software patents. Yeah, one day there might be another proposal, but for now we don't have them enforced because of the EU parliament.
Reducing energy consumption is also an option. Likely not the most popular one. But living in balance with the environment instead of a constant minus in energy resources should at least not be completely ignored. We don't need the amount of energy we use - it's just comfortable and nice.
Sorry, didn't see I got an answer here a few days ago already. Someone else located the bug faster than me and made a bug-report (WebGL being broken - lot of people notice that one ^^). It seems to be fixed already again in nightly, so now it's just waiting for a new developer version to come out.
sigh I just spend an hour trying to figure out why my emscripten code no longer works. Browsing hacker-news and seeing this post about Firefox. Remembering my Firefox developer edition earlier today mentioned some update on start (FF 58.01b now). And yeah, for some reason it broke some emscripten code (edit: seems now it rather broke WebGL canvas).
Ah yes, you are right, WebGL shaders are translated first to GLSL or HLSL with a lib like ANGLE (https://github.com/google/angle). And that source is then send on to the drivers which compile it again to assembler for the graphic card. And there again are some differences between GLSL/HLSL it seems. If I remember right in GLSL the drivers do the work while in HLSL some DLL from MS produces another intermediate format (which I just found out seems to be even open source: https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler).
First time I hear about wlc. And I'm curious about something. Does wlc only help to write compositors or can Window/3D libraries also access that? For example when writing a 3D library which should run on Wayland - do I have to write support for every compositor out there to get things like input and copy-paste working or is there a common base-library I can use (like wlc maybe)?
I used a live-cd and the whole point of those is that you can try an OS without that OS changing your system. Localtime should be the default configuration and not something the user has to figure out after getting fucked by it.
edit: Or at least give a big warning when changing your users PC clock!!!
Nothing about Wacom tablet driver fix snief. That currently freezes the system and prevents me from updating :-(
Also I really don't like that the live-cd's change my system-clock. I nearly missed closing of shops today because I didn't expect my system time being suddenly wrong. Why do that? It didn't even check any time-server, but simply set my computer clock 2 hours back without any warning!
Makefiles are the reason I use tabs everywhere. No need to switch mentally - or switch editor settings. But I'm rather poor ... maybe Makefile are the reasons for that? I need that correlation betweenn Makefile writers and income!
I don't think there is a misalignment of interest. Robust software is also correlated to the number of users. In my experience there is also no need to worry about not having enough open problems to work on. It could happen in theory I guess, but projects tend to have more open problems and feature wishes than developer time. If your software is used there will always be people asking for more features to work on. You don't get more projects because there are too many problems in your software which need fixing - you get more projects because your software is good and you are known to be the person to fix problems.
You don't have to invent a protocol when using UDP, you can still use a library like enet or raknet which already do that for you. And if it's the better choice it's the better choice and it's not something a programmer can't learn to do.
My experience is that Intel cards produce more problems with OpenGL. But not related to Linux, same on Windows. Part of the reason might be that it's not so common for 3D developers to work with Intel cards so those are less tested.
Yeah, I got the exact same experience at my doctor. I tell them it's not single sound but several and the frequencies are changing all the time. Completely ignoring that assistent then spends a few minutes figuring out the sound frequency (me trying to compare a hissing sound in my ears to a single tune...). Afterwards doctor looks into both ears for a few second and then tells me it's nothing obvious, so there is nothing that can be done about it, but I can get some cortisol for 3 days in case it helps (didn't).
I blame the cookie law. You force millions of websurfers to click daily on OK buttons which basically say "EU make some bloody stupid laws" and you get some advertisment effect in the end.
That the last decision that API's are copyrighted is already the problem. Google - or anyone else - shouldn't have to need to use the fair use argument for this. This is already a law suit which shouldn't be necessary.
Sadly a lot of tools make it harder to work with beziers than necessary. Recently I checked half a dozen open source tools - and only a single one allowed locking the tangents at the points connecting 2 bezier curves. That is trivial to code as you just have to ensure the connecting point and the 2 control points before and behind it form a straight line. And without that using beziers is so much harder because that is the only way to have a smooth curve when connecting bezier-segments and fixing that manually is rather annoying.
The chinese room thought experiment is simply annoying because it doesn't even get the questions right. It basically asks if the hardware becomes conscious/understanding when running software - instead of asking the real question - if the software can gain the understanding/consciousness. The man in the room is just a hardware component replacing a computer processor. But the only place to look for intelligence in this experiment should be in the rule-system, not in the processor executing those rules. As those rule systems decide if the communication makes sense or not. To make a real conversion the rule-system needs flexibility to handle dynamic input and thereby creating a dynamic flow between the inside and outside of the room, but that flow is about symbol manipulation, not about the symbol manipulator. I think no one in AI ever even argued that the hardware part of a computer would gain understanding.
The only good part about this thought experiment is that it makes the hard question of consciousness - how can it arise from physical phenomena - somewhat more obvious. But it's still the same question as for normal human minds and neither an argument for software systems becoming conscious nor against it.
Yeah, that would help a lot. Also might be possible to see where the ball comes back in a little earlier then.
Another little helper would be to draw the level-start-lines not completely up to the border. Because often you can then still route around them all to reach otherwise unsolvable levels.
With external pdf-viewers the browser asked each time before downloading and showing a pdf. Now it displays pdf's by default. That's why an exploit could sneak through as advertisment. It couldn't have done that before.
The society of connoisseurs of random computer art welcomes you to share your master-pieces with each other. The beauty of this abstract art form is in the eye of the beholder... there is no key dear police!
I checked out several free synthesizers recently on an Ubuntu system. None worked on first try. Thought I got half of them working after a while (the others would have needed JACK).
On my Debian system youtube videos stop playing sound once in a while (video continues), thought I suppose it's not pulseaudio's fault (so just a general sound problem).
You asked ;-) (I still agree with you that it got better than it once was)
A lot of modern game frameworks go in a similar direction. It's all about having entity-component systems where the designers (and not the programmers) can put together the objects dynamically. And those all fight with similar problems. One is about making the system cache efficient. Another is about how to add new components. I suppose the latter might be a reason he put so much power into the preprocessor that he even created a VM for that. Current complete solutions tend to have the problem that you have to repeat the class-names of your components often and that type-safety get's lost at some point when ini-files in any format are involved. Having more power in the preprocessor might help to fight this.
I don't know what he has planned for his language, but if I hear about a language that's specific for programming games, then entity-component systems would be the use-case I would have in mind.
About the trust thing - you probably don't often compile code without running it afterwards even now. A format call might be hidden in any library you use.
Check this jobboard it has numbers (daily when you select Job Type Contract): http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/
But unfortunately only for jobs in the UK.