Tadeu

At some point, we’re just going to have to accept the fact that Valve is all. Where once it was merely a humble game developer, it now has a synonymous-with-PC-gaming storefront, its own series of console-ish boxes, a mini-convention, a virtual reality department, the largest collection of virtual hats on Earth, and every number in human history all the way up to 2. Oh, and now it’s got its own movie too, because why not? Free To Play: The Movie is a high-budget Valve production about three DOTA 2 pros. Color me intrigued. And also purple. I am feeling very purple right now.

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IRL Captain Tightpants Tweeted the above, very rude, picture. What would Zoe say?! (via: blastr) Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

The Bobsled Song

original que fiz, encomendado pelo Danilo Dias

Then and now, Kiev (larger)

NASA says a combo of wind and sand were responsible for forming these V-shaped drifts on Mars. Sure. OR: The crew of the USS Enterprise felt like stamping the Starfleet insignia all over the planet.

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firehose shared this story from A.V. Club.

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O artigo 7 motivos pra você migrar do Whatsapp para o Viber faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

Hoje foi anunciada a compra do Whatsapp. Mark Zuckerberg tirou o escorpião do bolso e manteve sua fama de gastador, investindo cifras astronômicas em serviços com enormes bases de usuários, mas sem uma forma concreta de gerar receita. Foi assim com o instagram, dessa vez foi o Whatsapp. Mas o bilhão pago pela rede social de fotos não foi nada próximo dos 16 bilhões investidos no sistema de troca de mensagens.

Para se ter uma noção do quão bizarro é o montante, isso dá mais de US$33 dólares por usuário. O dinheiro pago equipara o Whatsapp ao valor de mercado de empresas como a Nintendo e a Toshiba. E sabendo que o Facebook sabe cada vez mais sobre sua vida e seus hábitos, eis 7 motivos para que você migre de vez para o Viber:

1) O Viber nunca foi pago. Sempre foi gratuito e nunca mandou mensagem para os usuários informando sobre ter que pagar. O Whatsapp cobra depois de um ano de uso e por mais que os usuários digam que nunca pagaram, nada impede que o aplicativo force a cobrança daqui pra frente.

2) O Viber é muito mais seguro, pois não armazena qualquer informação de suas conversas nos servidores do aplicativo. Só você tem acesso a elas. Além disso, a partir de agora, se você usa o Whatsapp, o Instagram e o Facebook, praticamente tudo o que acontece com a sua vida está nas mãos de Mark Zuckerberg, ou da NSA, quem sabe? Usar o Viber é garantir ao menos parte da sua privacidade.

3) O Viber é mais do que um simples app de envio de mensagens. Nele você pode usar no desktop, fazer ligações de graça, intercalar chamadas entre desktop e celular, utilizar stickers e conversar em todas as plataformas. Com isso, você não se vê obrigado a ficar com o celular na mão o tempo todo, principalmente no trabalho.

4) Propagandas? Nunca houve, nunca haverá no Viber. Não se assuste se de repente mensagens bizarras aparecerem em suas conversas ou anúncios escrotos atrapalharem sua usabilidade no Whatsapp. O Facebook pelo menos é assim, tem mais propaganda que interação real.

5) A criptografia e segurança do Viber é muito superior. O Whatsapp já sofreu diversas falhas de segurança e foi descoberto até mesmo que as mensagens eram trocadas em texto plano, podendo ser interceptadas e lidas na íntegra, sem qualquer esforço.

6) A depender do seu uso, praticamente todas as informações da sua vida estão nas mãos do Facebook. Eles sabem os seus hábitos, os seus gostos, quem é sua família, que lugares você visita, tem suas fotos e você sequer é dono do conteúdo que produz dentro dele. Com a aquisição do Whatsapp, eles poderão ler TUDO O QUE VOCÊ ESCREVE, saber tudo da sua vida e não só possuir essas informações como repassar a terceiros. Eles vão saber até mesmo das suas mais íntimas informações (até quando você fala sacanagem ou envia fotos com nudez). A privacidade das suas informações nunca esteve tão ameaçada. No Viber, você tem um refúgio para os dados que você não quer que sejam monitorados.

7) O Facebook é uma plataforma muito instável. Como provavelmente haverá uma forte integração entre os sistemas, muito dessa instabilidade deve ser sentida no Whatsapp. Será comum ver o sistema lento ou fora do ar, assim como a gente vê todo dia no Facebook.

Em resumo: após essa aquisição, continuar usando o Whatsapp significa dizer que basicamente o Facebook é dono e sabe de tudo o que acontece na sua vida. Eles terão todas as informações sobre o que você faz ou deixa de fazer, fala, gosta, etc. O Facebook sabe os seus segredos mais íntimos. Eles próprios admitem que sabem até quando você vai mudar o status do seu relacionamento. Aqui não, fera!

O Viber é mais legal, mais completo, mais eficiente, de graça e mais seguro. Venham para o lado roxo da força.

O artigo 7 motivos pra você migrar do Whatsapp para o Viber faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

First time accepted submitter paulbes writes "Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook [Wednesday]. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp's discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That's where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom –which brought in a minuscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world's largest social network." Forbes overstates the apparent selling price by a few billion dollars; big numbers, either way. [Update: 02/20 13:51 GMT by T : The $19 billion makes sense, if you include retention bonuses in the form of restricted stock units.] Another reader points out the interesting fact that "Acton — himself a former Apple engineer — applied for jobs at both Twitter and Facebook way before WhatsApp became a wildly popular mobile app. Both times he was rejected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Page 2 is a compilation of stories and news tidbits, which for whatever reason, didn’t make the front page of /Film. After the jump we’ve included 36 different items, fun images, videos, casting tidbits, articles of interest and more. It’s like a mystery grab bag of movie web related goodness.

Header Photo: That Regeneration Was Heavy

20 years later: An oral history of ‘Reality Bites‘

Why ‘House of Cards’ Binge-Watching Disposability is a Feature, Not a Bug

In Case Of White Walkers, Break Glass

The 19 Best Movies That You Didn’t See in 2013 – Find & Watch Them

12 Famous Lines of Dialogue (That Everyone Always Misquotes)

Scott C’s Great Showdown tribute to The LEGO Movie

10 best documentaries of 2013, and the new crop in 2014

Why ‘Winter’s Tale’ Is a Must-See Midnight Movie for the Ages, Not Unlike ‘The Room’

The LEGO Movie: “For Kids of All Ages” (via)

Pilot News: Napoleon Dynamite Star Jon Heder Joins Fox’s Here’s Your Damn Family

Cinematics, An Animated Timeline of Famous Movie Characters

Original 1954 Japanese ‘Godzilla’ Making Rare U.S. Theatrical Run

Bad Droid t-shirt returns

‘Dollhouse’s’ Olivia Williams Joins WGN America’s ‘Manhattan’

Continue Reading Page 2 >>

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This happens every time you eat popcorn! Don't tell me you don't relate. It's more likely to happen with the thin skins that come off the kernel, though.

The same thing also happens to me with rye bread and steak, and a lot of other foods. I guess my teeth are spaced a bit funny. If nothing else, the experience forces me to get out the dental floss -and once you floss one tooth, you may as well floss them all. (It's mighty hard for me to correctly type dental floss instead of mental floss.) This comic is from the Awkward Yeti.

Updated 8/26: Duncan’s question is actually correct and compare_exchange should have the semantics he asks for. However, the answer to ‘is it implementable’ is I think still Yes.

Quick answer: Yes.

I see there was also a thread about this on StackOverflow, so I’ll echo this Q&A publicly for others’ benefit and hopefully to dispel confusion.

Duncan Forster asked:

I’m quite alarmed the C++ committee chose such a bad interface for std::atomic compare_exchange, i.e.:

    bool compare_exchange_???(T& expected, T desired, …);

I notice you have mentioned (here reader-qa-how-to-write-a-cas-loop-using-stdatomics) that the committee had doubts whether it was a good idea.
Your quote below:

• Usage note: In the code at top we save an explicit reload from ‘a’ in the loop because compare_exchange helpfully (or “helpfully” – this took me a while to discover and remember) stores the actual value in the ‘expected’ value slot on failure. This actually makes loops simpler, though some of us are still have different feelings on different days about whether this subtlety was a good idea… anyway, it’s in the standard.
  

The reason I think it’s not only bad but also dangerous is that we now have a race condition baked into the standard. Race condition you say? All hardware CAS implementations that I know of only return 1 value (the old value). Yet the C++ version has 2 returns (success/failure as a boolean return and the old value by reference). So how can an atomic class which is suppose to implement atomic methods do this? Answer is it can’t, the boolean result is calculated after the atomic exchange has occurred. That leaves us with a method which is only partially atomic and with the bonus of a built-in race condition!

Perhaps I haven’t convinced you, so here’s some code to help. I have simulated the hardware CAS with simple C++ code to help demonstrate the problem. The crux of the problem is this statement: while(!atomic_bool_compare_and_swap(&head, new_node->next, new_node))
By creating a 1-line while loop and passing new_node->next as the expected value, if someone is also consuming data the new_node will temporarily be visible by 2 threads. The other thread may process and delete the node before atomic_bool_compare_and_swap has calculated success/failure. This would result in a spurious failure and the new_node actually being pushed twice onto the queue. As you can image this should lead to double delete and possibly the process aborting.

template<typename _T>
bool atomic_bool_compare_and_swap(_T *value, _T& expected, _T new_value)
{
_T old_value;

// Here be atomic
{
old_value = *value;
if(old_value == expected)
*value = new_value;
}

// Here be race conditions
return (old_value == expected);
}

[… more code that exercises this function …]

I don’t believe there is an implementability bug in the standard. Rather, your code is incorrect.

[Update: …off-point stuff omitted…]

Let’s say you have a CAS that returns only the old value, but doesn’t set “expected,” as you describe below. Then you should just be able to implement the standard one in terms of that – quick sketch (untested code):

    template<typename _T>
    bool atomic_compare_exchange(_T *value, _T& expected, _T new_value)
    {
        _T old_value;
        _T old_expected = expected;

        // If all you have is a CAS that returns the old value, use that:
        old_value = CAS(value, expected, new_value);

        bool result = old_value == old_expected;
        expected = old_value;
        return result;
    }

Now that there’s no use of “expected” after the CAS and so no timing window.

If I’m misunderstanding the question, or have a bug in my thinking, please let me know in the comments. [Update: Thanks to Duncan in particular for pointing out my original answer did have a bug in my thinking.]

Filed under: C++

Há algum tempo tivemos boatos de que Deuses Americanos de Neil Gaiman seria adaptado em uma série de TV pela HBO. O negócio não andou e tudo parecia esquecido, até que a FremantleMedia, que produz a série The Tomorrow People, assinou um contrato para levar a história para as telas. Confira abaixo uma tradução do release disparado pela Fremantle (pelo menos das partes que interessam):

Gaiman, criador da célebre série de quadrinhos Sandman e autor de livros de sucesso como O Livro do Cemitério, Coraline e O Oceano no fim do Caminho, será produtor executivo da série com a FremantleMedia.

A trama apresenta uma guerra tomando forma entre deuses novos e antigos: os deuses tradicionais de origem bíblica e mitológica de todo o mundo perdem fiéis para um novo panteão de deuses que refletem o amor da sociedade moderna por dinheiro, tecnologia, mídia, celebridades e drogas. Seu protagonista, Shadow Moon, é um ex-detento que se torna guarda-costas e parceiro de viagem do Sr. Wednesday, um trapaceiro que é na verdade um dos deuses antigos, que está em missão pelos EUA para reunir for;as para a iminente batalha contra as novas divindades.

Apesar da HBO ser mais “liberal” com suas produções e ter uma torneira de dinheiro aparentemente infinita, é bem possível que a Fremantle faça uma série excelente com a obra de Gaiman.

Agora nos resta esperar para ver.

[theodd1sout]

[lefthandedtoons]

via http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/GilbertU238Lab.htm

Every damn time.

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/2/75618203992

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	HEY OVERBEY

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Yesterday evening you may have dropped by to watch Slooh’s live coverage of asteroid 2000 EM26 as it passed just 8.8 lunar distances of Earth. Surprise – the space rock never showed up! (...)
Read the rest of ‘Moby Dick’ Asteroid 2000 EM26 is Missing – Help Astronomers Find It (391 words)

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© Bob King for Universe Today, 2014. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: Asteroid 2000 EM26, Asteroids, Slooh

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sandandglass:

Jason Jones talks to a Russian woman protesting against Russia’s anti-gay laws.

don’t give up. we’re all so close.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mathematician Edward Frenkel writes in the NYT that one fanciful possibility that explains why mathematics seems to permeate our universe is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used. This may strike you as very unlikely writes Frenkel but physicists have been creating their own computer simulations of the forces of nature for years — on a tiny scale, the size of an atomic nucleus. They use a three-dimensional grid to model a little chunk of the universe; then they run the program to see what happens. 'Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not,' writes Frenkel. 'If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.' The question now becomes is there any way to empirically test this hypothesis and the answer surprisingly is yes. In a recent paper, 'Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,' the physicists Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage outline a possible method for detecting that our world is actually a computer simulation (PDF). Savage and his colleagues assume that any future simulators would use some of the same techniques current scientists use to run simulations, with the same constraints. The future simulators, Savage indicated, would map their universe on a mathematical lattice or grid, consisting of points and lines. But computer simulations generate slight but distinctive anomalies — certain kinds of asymmetries and they suggest that a closer look at cosmic rays may reveal similar asymmetries. If so, this would indicate that we might — just might — ourselves be in someone else's computer simulation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.