slackito

Depending on which European country it's not necessarily forbidden. "Compliance reasons" may also mean "the company must pay overtime at the appropriate rate" and they just don't want to deal with that.

The fact that you're comparing CUDA to using triangles and shaders makes me think you might be confusing OpenCL with OpenGL.

OpenCL is meant for general computation (the C is for "computing") rather than graphics, like CUDA.

> Pixels are a unit of area like an acre or square meter.

Some computer graphics experts don't agree with this: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf

> there is no mechanism to unionize wait staff, or kitchen staff, dishwashers etc. included

There is, however, a "union" of restaurant owners who lobbies against improving minimum wage and working conditions for restaurant workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Restaurant_Associatio...

Anyone interested in how GPUs work should read the series of blog posts by Fabian Giesen "A trip through the graphics pipeline": https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...

Thanks for the pointer to zopfli. I've used p7zip in the past as a "better gzip", and it gets good results for this one too :D

  $ curl -s http://danlec.com/st4k | gzip -cd | 7z a -si -tgzip -mx=9 compressed.gz
  $ wc compressed.gz 
    14   84 4048 compressed.gz

I did the same for C++. I hate many aspects of the language, and it feels really ugly compared to newer languages like C#, or even D, but it's still my language of choice for some projects (mostly because the tools are mature and almost everywhere).

The GPU doesn't execute Javascript. It runs small programs called "shaders", written in GLSL (the OpenGL shading language), which are compiled on the fly by the graphics driver to something that can be actually executed on the GPU.

I think a valid, although not legal, motivation for that could be "I just want something Microsoft will activate because I want a clean (i.e.: without applying a random crack from the Internet which could install malware) Windows install, at the minimum possible cost".

I'm getting the same from 149.11.24.18 (home Internet connection, Spain) and te-4-4-gblx.sto1.se.portlane.net (from a US-based VPS).

Giving a browser plugin the ability to run any program on the user machine without any kind of validation or prompting is so stupid/evil that they deserve the worst PR backlash they can get.

Also, that's probably the quickest way to get them to release a fix.

In fact, the concept of "freestanding implementation" (as opposed to "hosted implementation", which is a implementation of the full standard) exists in C, and is sometimes used in embedded systems:

  a conforming freestanding implementation is only required
  to provide certain library facilities: those in <float.h>,
  <limits.h>, <stdarg.h>, and <stddef.h>; since AMD1, also
  those in <iso646.h>; since C99, also those in <stdbool.h>
  and <stdint.h>; and since C11, also those in <stdalign.h>
  and <stdnoreturn.h>

(source: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.7.1/gcc/Standards.html)

So yes, a conforming (freestanding) C implementation without printf for embedded systems can exist.

Six months of unemployment per year of employment? Where are these figures from?

For unjustified firing, the employer has to pay 33 days of salary for each worked year (was 45 before the recent labor law reform)[1]

Not even the unemployment subsidy, which is given by the social security and paid for workers with taxes on their monthly pay, is that big (4 months for the first year, and 2 months more every 6 additional months worked, with a limit of 24 months).

[1] http://www.eitb.com/en/news/detail/828511/austerity-measures...

Except for the "g++ >= 4.6" part, AFAIK.

Yes, in control flow hijacking exploits like these ones, you make a given process execute external code (typically a shellcode, i.e. a small piece of code which launches a shell). Any code executed this way runs with the UID of the original process, so a setuid root program is needed to get a root shell.

> For doing data compression has anyone ever heard about using these techniques to generate other things besides 3D game levels?

These techniques are routinely used in the demoscene for making 4Kb/64Kb intros. In this kind of intros almost everything is generated procedurally, not only meshes, but also textures and sound.

If you are interested you can watch one of these examples:

- Elevated (4K intro) Binary: http://www.scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fparties%2F2009%2Fbreak... Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE

- .kkrieger (96K game) Binary: http://kk.kema.at/files/kkrieger-beta.zip Gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5U4hEzZzaE

Why should we go for "fairness" when hunting for food? Using our brains isn't fair? Animals won't show any restraint when using their strengths to kill any weaker prey.

I don't think it's sarcasm (well, I'm not too sure about the colors part). Pretty much every non-alphanumeric symbol has more than one meaning in a language like C++, which (IMHO) makes reading code slower than it could be. For instance, I would really like to have a proper arrow operator instead of "->" for C++ which wouldn't match visually with a "<" placed before in the same line.

Seems to work OK on VLC, no RealPlayer needed :)

>That gives them a huge advantage at programming over someone who just sees computers as a black box.

Nowadays most videogames are played in consoles, which are effectively black boxes (except for some very experienced hackers).

The process reminds me of this post: http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/355-How-I-M...