I know it's a bit crap, but I must confess to quite liking MS Paint for it's simplicity. When all you need is to crop a screendump and save it as a JPG, nothing beats it!
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
I hope this isn't a silly question, but is COM still being used under the hood in Vista? I remember reading somewhere that WIN32 was essentially being replaced by.Net (or something similar) under Vista...
Yeah I'd generally agree with that, especially your second paragraph. Although as a contractor working for a UK Government department I should really say that not all outsourcing efforts are a waste of time/money! As you say, the Government can't really afford to retain people at the market rates (they'd be sat doing nothing at a high cost when there was no relevant project to work on), or just doesn't have an interest in doing so. Things tend to get done about 3 times more quickly by contractors than internal Government staff, but of course the contractors day rates are usually quite high.
The real problem as I see it is the lack of people with enough IT knowledge to properly define/agree the requirements of the IT projects that are undertaken by outside contractors and the lack of suitable clauses to claw back money in the result of overruns/overspends, quite often leading to the wasted money you speak of. If more projects were done for a fixed price with tightly defined contracts and requirements, there would probably be less waste.
Actually the UK Government aren't that bad as far as IT projects are concerned. The UK Government are running literally thousands of projects at any one time; sure there are a few high profile failures and overruns, but a great deal of the projects finish on time and on budget, and deliver large benefits to the tax payer.
Yes, projects such as those running to bring the NHS (National Health Service for those not in the UK) IT Systems up to scratch are going very badly, but the NHS is the second largest organisation in the world (after Walmart I believe) and the project to computerise everyone's records, connect up all the GPs etc. is one of the largest IT projects ever conceived (which is probably the biggest failure of the project - they've tried to do it all at once). Is it any surprise that such an ambitious project with so many independent contractors is failing? I guess one of the problems with a project of that size is that there isn't a company in existence at the moment large enough to take it on by itself.
Exactly, an extra $200 on 1 million iPhones is $200,000,000 profit in just a few months! I imagine that's gone a long way towards paying for the development of the iPhone + iPod Touch. I imagine that since Apple are now buying even more 8GB flash drives than they were prior to the manufacturing of the iPod Touch, they're getting a better discount too.
The cynic in me thinks that maybe the high price of the iPhone initially was to keep City Analysts happy given the relatively low predicted sales for the iPhone when it was released. Now they've reached their initial 1m sales target (with good feedback on what was quite a risky product for a company with no experience in making phones) and made a huge profit Apple can afford to change tact and aim for more sales at a lower price point.
Touchscreen seems nice at first, but after a bit of thought, it adds flashiness, but takes away from usability. I like the physical controls that allow me to use my ipod without having to look at it. The edges of the scroll-circle-thing guide my fingers where they need to be without ever having to take it out of my pocket. Having this on a screen, while nice looking, would really screw with my aim.
I have a 3G iPod (pre click wheel; the only button on it that has any kind of tactile feedback is the hold switch. Do I care? No, because it came with a nice inline remote that has the volume, pause/play and next/previous track buttons on it, which is all I need. I assume a full-touchscreen iPod will come with at least the same accessories as previous iPods without any tactile buttons.
Completely with you on this. I have a 3G iPod and I'm looking to replace it. It was damn expensive when I bought it (around £300 I think), but I've used it at least every other day for the past 3 years and 9 months so the cost per use-day is pretty low (like 40p or something). Even if the new video iPod is $600 I'll probably get one as I know I'm likely to get a decent return on my investment.
Plus, I'm heading over to NYC later in the month so hopefully I'll be able to buy one without having to pay the inflated UK prices. Usually it's possible to save up to £40 by buying in the states, even with the appropriate taxes taken into account.
That's surprising, as I've had 7 different handsets on Vodafone, ranging from a Nokia 3210 to a Samsung Z720 and none of them have been locked to the network. I used to work with embedded GPRS devices using SIMs from various networks (both UK and International) and never had any trouble testing the SIMs in my Vodafone handset. I actually had an Orange SIM in my phone only last week and everything worked fine.
I'm not surprised that carriers don't care about the unlocking generally though, as once you've signed up for their contract (12 months, 18 months, whatever) they know they're going to get back the subsidy through your monthly contract payments whether you make calls using their SIM or not (or at least, enough people will make calls/send texts using their network so that overall they don't lose out). PAYG is different as the handsets don't tend to be subsidised and are typically more basic models anyway.
That's interesting to know, thanks for the correction. I wonder whether Blackberrys are a special case as there may be network specific configuration in order for the e-mail functionality to work as expected?
I know in the UK that it has been fairly common practice to lock down phones. Until recently, all subsidised phones on an Orange contract were locked to Orange (they might still be for all I know, I've never been on Orange).
As far as I know, Vodafone has never locked it's phones to only allow Vodafone SIMs (I've regularly used other network's SIMs in my Vodafone phone), but they do tend to put custom Vodafone firmware on the devices which can cause a loss in functionality if you put another SIM (say from Orange, T-Mobile etc) into the phone.
I don't think locking phones is illegal in the UK, but I'm fairly sure unlocking them isn't either, as you can wander down any high street and see people advertising unlocking services in store windows.
You obviously never owned a Sony Ericsson T610. That had one of the slowest UIs I've ever come across (the delay when typing SMS messages was horrible). I went straight back to Nokia after that phone. Sure, it may not have been as pretty, but at least it didn't frustrate the hell out of me.
Recently I've been using a Samsung phone, and although it looks nice and the UI/functionality is OK, the build quality of the phone isn't up to the standard of similarly spec'd Nokias.
If Nokia could build something like the N95 with a slightly improved interface (doesn't have to be multi-touch, but whatever works I guess) and better battery life, I'd be pretty much sold. I think the N-Series OS is a step backwards from the old Nokia OSes, but they needed something to better support 3rd party apps and I'm sure it will improve with time. Apple using OSX is interesting, but as other people have pointed out OSX doesn't have the support that Series 60 enjoys. I'm sure OSX will get more attention in the coming months, or at least it would do if Apple provide a developer API for the iPhone.
Strictly speaking, if you did the following:
1. Bought a MacBook in the US
2. Claimed back the US sales tax (which you're entitled to do if you're not a US citizen)
3. Imported the MacBook and paid the UK duty (17.5% VAT at the time of writing, no other duty payable)
then you would actually save very little on the UK price. In fact, only about £55 on the entry level MacBook ($1099 or ~£550 + 17.5% vs. £699). I think that £55 is worth paying for a British keyboard layout personally. If the £ vs $ falls much below 2:1 then these figures change a bit, but not much.
Basically, don't forget that Apple web prices on the US store don't include sales tax, or you're not comparing like for like. Of course, if you plan on trying to get away without paying the UK duty on your import (I don't condone this), then there's a significant saving to be made...
I imagine Bioshock will easily sell more copies than Gears as the game was designed for X-Box and PC from the start.
I've been playing the PC version and it's easily the best single player game since Half-Life 2. As mentioned elsewhere, the production values are sky-high and I haven't noticed any bugs to speak of (apart from my initial pre-load from Steam being broken, easily resolved by forcing an integrity check of the local files).
One other thing to note is that I can run the game at an acceptable frame rate at 1280x1024 with max details on an 18 month old PC (on Vista too). Shame the can't be said for the weak X-Box 360 ports that have been coming out on the PC recently (Lost Planet, I'm looking at you).
The first CD-ROM drive we had at our school (in about 1993) actually required that you put the CD into a cartridge before placing it into the drive. All the CDs that were kept in our library (Encarta and other similar rubbish) were stored on the shelves in these cartridges, probably to prevent them from getting scratched.
At lot of people actually got a choice of five free blu-ray discs with their PS3, not just Talladega Nights. If they haven't worked out what to do with the discs yet then I really do despair at the youth of today!;-)
I believe Parallels does this too. It let's you run MS Word 2007 on a Mac as if it were native, for example.
Re:How are these numbers calculated?
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 1
Thank you, that's much more informative than the original article:-)
Re:How are these numbers calculated?
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah I just read that. If 20 million e-mails (according to Joe Stewart in the article) have been found and he estimates that 250k to 1m machines are infected, that implies that somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 80 of the machines he's looked at are infected. I'm assuming somewhere in the middle is what he actually discovered before applying a margin of error - so 1 in 50. I wonder how many machines he actually checked? 50? 500? Were these machines known to have received the e-mail or just random machines?
All I'm saying is that I doubt the methods used to estimate these numbers would stand up to close scrutiny. That's not to say this isn't interesting (the number could be higher than the estimate after all), but I'd rather the article just said "we don't know how many machines are infected, but it's likely to be a lot".
How are these numbers calculated?
on
Storm Worm Rising
·
· Score: 5, Funny
They estimate between a quarter and a million infected systems usable for spam or DDOS attacks. 0.25 to 1,000,000 is a pretty large range.
Seriously though, how does one go about estimating these numbers? Is it something as simple as an estimate of what proportion of infected e-mails are expected to result in an infected desktop? I doubt that would give a very accurate figure.
Steven Pinker's book, The Language Instinct is a good read for anyone interested in the theory of Universal Grammar. It's written in a fairly accessible style, but there are some tough ideas to get your head around if you're new to the subject. Those who have a Computer Science background and learnt about grammars etc. in their compiler design courses might appreciate reading about the subject from a different angle, I know I did.
I believe it's menu and play/pause if you have a third gen or earlier model.
Incidentally, if Mr. Jobs hates buttons so much why did he go from the nearly-all-touch-sensitive 3rd Gen iPod to the annoying mechanical click-wheel on the 4th Gen and later iPods? Maybe he was out of the office the day that decision was made.
Like most things in CS, I think it's important to understand the theory of writing multi-threaded applications before letting software do it for you.
That said, I'm sure most CS courses teach at least the basics of memory management, but people are still happy to rely on the Java garbage collector;-)
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I know it's a bit crap, but I must confess to quite liking MS Paint for it's simplicity. When all you need is to crop a screendump and save it as a JPG, nothing beats it!
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
I hope this isn't a silly question, but is COM still being used under the hood in Vista? I remember reading somewhere that WIN32 was essentially being replaced by .Net (or something similar) under Vista...
Yeah I'd generally agree with that, especially your second paragraph. Although as a contractor working for a UK Government department I should really say that not all outsourcing efforts are a waste of time/money! As you say, the Government can't really afford to retain people at the market rates (they'd be sat doing nothing at a high cost when there was no relevant project to work on), or just doesn't have an interest in doing so. Things tend to get done about 3 times more quickly by contractors than internal Government staff, but of course the contractors day rates are usually quite high.
The real problem as I see it is the lack of people with enough IT knowledge to properly define/agree the requirements of the IT projects that are undertaken by outside contractors and the lack of suitable clauses to claw back money in the result of overruns/overspends, quite often leading to the wasted money you speak of. If more projects were done for a fixed price with tightly defined contracts and requirements, there would probably be less waste.
Actually the UK Government aren't that bad as far as IT projects are concerned. The UK Government are running literally thousands of projects at any one time; sure there are a few high profile failures and overruns, but a great deal of the projects finish on time and on budget, and deliver large benefits to the tax payer.
Yes, projects such as those running to bring the NHS (National Health Service for those not in the UK) IT Systems up to scratch are going very badly, but the NHS is the second largest organisation in the world (after Walmart I believe) and the project to computerise everyone's records, connect up all the GPs etc. is one of the largest IT projects ever conceived (which is probably the biggest failure of the project - they've tried to do it all at once). Is it any surprise that such an ambitious project with so many independent contractors is failing? I guess one of the problems with a project of that size is that there isn't a company in existence at the moment large enough to take it on by itself.
You mean apart from adding buttons (well, the click wheel) from the iPod 3G to the iPod 4G?
Exactly, an extra $200 on 1 million iPhones is $200,000,000 profit in just a few months! I imagine that's gone a long way towards paying for the development of the iPhone + iPod Touch. I imagine that since Apple are now buying even more 8GB flash drives than they were prior to the manufacturing of the iPod Touch, they're getting a better discount too.
The cynic in me thinks that maybe the high price of the iPhone initially was to keep City Analysts happy given the relatively low predicted sales for the iPhone when it was released. Now they've reached their initial 1m sales target (with good feedback on what was quite a risky product for a company with no experience in making phones) and made a huge profit Apple can afford to change tact and aim for more sales at a lower price point.
I have a 3G iPod (pre click wheel; the only button on it that has any kind of tactile feedback is the hold switch. Do I care? No, because it came with a nice inline remote that has the volume, pause/play and next/previous track buttons on it, which is all I need. I assume a full-touchscreen iPod will come with at least the same accessories as previous iPods without any tactile buttons.
Completely with you on this. I have a 3G iPod and I'm looking to replace it. It was damn expensive when I bought it (around £300 I think), but I've used it at least every other day for the past 3 years and 9 months so the cost per use-day is pretty low (like 40p or something). Even if the new video iPod is $600 I'll probably get one as I know I'm likely to get a decent return on my investment.
Plus, I'm heading over to NYC later in the month so hopefully I'll be able to buy one without having to pay the inflated UK prices. Usually it's possible to save up to £40 by buying in the states, even with the appropriate taxes taken into account.
That's surprising, as I've had 7 different handsets on Vodafone, ranging from a Nokia 3210 to a Samsung Z720 and none of them have been locked to the network. I used to work with embedded GPRS devices using SIMs from various networks (both UK and International) and never had any trouble testing the SIMs in my Vodafone handset. I actually had an Orange SIM in my phone only last week and everything worked fine.
I'm not surprised that carriers don't care about the unlocking generally though, as once you've signed up for their contract (12 months, 18 months, whatever) they know they're going to get back the subsidy through your monthly contract payments whether you make calls using their SIM or not (or at least, enough people will make calls/send texts using their network so that overall they don't lose out). PAYG is different as the handsets don't tend to be subsidised and are typically more basic models anyway.
That's interesting to know, thanks for the correction. I wonder whether Blackberrys are a special case as there may be network specific configuration in order for the e-mail functionality to work as expected?
I know in the UK that it has been fairly common practice to lock down phones. Until recently, all subsidised phones on an Orange contract were locked to Orange (they might still be for all I know, I've never been on Orange).
As far as I know, Vodafone has never locked it's phones to only allow Vodafone SIMs (I've regularly used other network's SIMs in my Vodafone phone), but they do tend to put custom Vodafone firmware on the devices which can cause a loss in functionality if you put another SIM (say from Orange, T-Mobile etc) into the phone.
I don't think locking phones is illegal in the UK, but I'm fairly sure unlocking them isn't either, as you can wander down any high street and see people advertising unlocking services in store windows.
You obviously never owned a Sony Ericsson T610. That had one of the slowest UIs I've ever come across (the delay when typing SMS messages was horrible). I went straight back to Nokia after that phone. Sure, it may not have been as pretty, but at least it didn't frustrate the hell out of me.
Recently I've been using a Samsung phone, and although it looks nice and the UI/functionality is OK, the build quality of the phone isn't up to the standard of similarly spec'd Nokias.
If Nokia could build something like the N95 with a slightly improved interface (doesn't have to be multi-touch, but whatever works I guess) and better battery life, I'd be pretty much sold. I think the N-Series OS is a step backwards from the old Nokia OSes, but they needed something to better support 3rd party apps and I'm sure it will improve with time. Apple using OSX is interesting, but as other people have pointed out OSX doesn't have the support that Series 60 enjoys. I'm sure OSX will get more attention in the coming months, or at least it would do if Apple provide a developer API for the iPhone.
Strictly speaking, if you did the following:
1. Bought a MacBook in the US
2. Claimed back the US sales tax (which you're entitled to do if you're not a US citizen)
3. Imported the MacBook and paid the UK duty (17.5% VAT at the time of writing, no other duty payable)
then you would actually save very little on the UK price. In fact, only about £55 on the entry level MacBook ($1099 or ~£550 + 17.5% vs. £699). I think that £55 is worth paying for a British keyboard layout personally. If the £ vs $ falls much below 2:1 then these figures change a bit, but not much.
Basically, don't forget that Apple web prices on the US store don't include sales tax, or you're not comparing like for like. Of course, if you plan on trying to get away without paying the UK duty on your import (I don't condone this), then there's a significant saving to be made...
I imagine Bioshock will easily sell more copies than Gears as the game was designed for X-Box and PC from the start.
I've been playing the PC version and it's easily the best single player game since Half-Life 2. As mentioned elsewhere, the production values are sky-high and I haven't noticed any bugs to speak of (apart from my initial pre-load from Steam being broken, easily resolved by forcing an integrity check of the local files).
One other thing to note is that I can run the game at an acceptable frame rate at 1280x1024 with max details on an 18 month old PC (on Vista too). Shame the can't be said for the weak X-Box 360 ports that have been coming out on the PC recently (Lost Planet, I'm looking at you).
The first CD-ROM drive we had at our school (in about 1993) actually required that you put the CD into a cartridge before placing it into the drive. All the CDs that were kept in our library (Encarta and other similar rubbish) were stored on the shelves in these cartridges, probably to prevent them from getting scratched.
At lot of people actually got a choice of five free blu-ray discs with their PS3, not just Talladega Nights. If they haven't worked out what to do with the discs yet then I really do despair at the youth of today! ;-)
I believe Parallels does this too. It let's you run MS Word 2007 on a Mac as if it were native, for example.
Thank you, that's much more informative than the original article :-)
Yeah I just read that. If 20 million e-mails (according to Joe Stewart in the article) have been found and he estimates that 250k to 1m machines are infected, that implies that somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 80 of the machines he's looked at are infected. I'm assuming somewhere in the middle is what he actually discovered before applying a margin of error - so 1 in 50. I wonder how many machines he actually checked? 50? 500? Were these machines known to have received the e-mail or just random machines?
All I'm saying is that I doubt the methods used to estimate these numbers would stand up to close scrutiny. That's not to say this isn't interesting (the number could be higher than the estimate after all), but I'd rather the article just said "we don't know how many machines are infected, but it's likely to be a lot".
Seriously though, how does one go about estimating these numbers? Is it something as simple as an estimate of what proportion of infected e-mails are expected to result in an infected desktop? I doubt that would give a very accurate figure.
Yeah when I saw that I found myself thinking "doesn't Vista do that already?"
It's pretty much a must have feature on any photo gallery app these days though, I'm surprised it took this long to make into a Mac application.
Steven Pinker's book, The Language Instinct is a good read for anyone interested in the theory of Universal Grammar. It's written in a fairly accessible style, but there are some tough ideas to get your head around if you're new to the subject. Those who have a Computer Science background and learnt about grammars etc. in their compiler design courses might appreciate reading about the subject from a different angle, I know I did.
I believe it's menu and play/pause if you have a third gen or earlier model.
Incidentally, if Mr. Jobs hates buttons so much why did he go from the nearly-all-touch-sensitive 3rd Gen iPod to the annoying mechanical click-wheel on the 4th Gen and later iPods? Maybe he was out of the office the day that decision was made.
Like most things in CS, I think it's important to understand the theory of writing multi-threaded applications before letting software do it for you.
;-)
That said, I'm sure most CS courses teach at least the basics of memory management, but people are still happy to rely on the Java garbage collector