After never ever having used an iPhone, I recently needed to do some testing of a VPN config for a customer, so I got a loaner phone... iPhone 4, iOS 6.1... (actually 6.0, but I did an update:) )
On the upside: I got the VPN up and running, and the UI definitely is running smoothly.
On the downside: The UI feels so completely outdated. I've been using Android since I had my first Google G1, so I know the evolution of Android through the different versions and on different devices, albeit with CyanogenMod on most of them (didn't root my Transformer Prime, but all phones). Personally, I must say that iOS 6 feels less functional than even Android 2.3, much less Jelly Bean. I miss many of the basic functions that even Android 1.5 already had. I don't understand how or why technically inclined people can rave about Apple and the iPhone - at least not if they take an open-minded look at any of the current (or even not so current) Android phones. See how well they can be customized, well outside the arbitrary limits Apple decides to set for their customers...
And I don't even start to talk about the tiny screen, compared to my Nexus 4 or even the SGS2...:) (and that didn't get that much better on the iPhone5...)
While I'm not very experienced in US and IP law, I don't understand how a user of a commercially available product can be held liable for using something he just bought. How should one be expected to ensure that every piece of hardware you buy on the open market is legal as far as IP and licensing goes? Sounds to me like it's a complete scare tactics on the side of this lawyer, and should be punishable by law... including damages payments for the company targeted in this way...
But then, when has the legal system been sane and understandable for any person with at least half a brain...
After reading and seeing the intelligence (or absence thereof) in the US presidential race (most notably on the side of the republican candidates, as well as members of congress and house), as well as reading many very intelligent posts (not!) of people on social media, clearly proving total ignorance of anything not directly concerning the US or their local issues, I wonder whether the US school system may need to take care of itself first...
Updates? By the time this device is being sold, the next version of the OS will be ready, making older hardware obsolete, as it requires more CPU, memory and storage space... (remember Windows Phone 7?)
actually, that were bytes available for Basic. For assembler applications, most of those 64k (oops, almost used the wrong denominator;) ) were usable... a C64 had a total of 80k of memory (RAM and ROM) available...
Wow, 45Gigs of OS and Applications? Most likely none of which you can remove? So a backup of that takes up a whooping 5-11 DVDs (depending on whether dual layer or single layer)? Really? Are you out of your f-ing mind?
If somebody could go out and patent patenting anything that exists in the physical world as digital representations, wouldn't these pointless patents go away?
OTOH, I guess the US Patent Office is doing this on purpose... if they'd just turn down these stupid patents, all they'd earn would be the original application fees... By approving the patents, they for one attract patent trolls to put on for even more of these type of patents, and also ensure that other companies spend money for them to check and possibly invalidate the patents... => Profit! Therefore, the patent employees ensure their jobs' safety!
But I reckon as long as they don't get any "punishment" for passing junk like this, they'll keep on doing it, even if the patent is about the most trivial, prior-art, or whatever patent...
Contrary what many companies nowadays believe, I don't think people stop being good programmers just because they age... I reckon it's often just the results of the Peter Principle (look it up if you don't know it)...
I've started programming at 12 on a ZX Spectrum in a store, later advanced to a C64, Amiga and finally Unix... been through Basic, 6502 assembler, 68k assembler, Pascal (yuck - and another of Wirth's languages I can't or won't remember the name anymore), C (most of the code written in it), C++ (just a bit) and recently mostly PHP... I still love it, even though I've not been doing much the last ~10 years... I still more or less blow away anybody in the company (ISP/Network Consulting) when it comes to hacking some tool or solving some problem that require automation... including and especially the folks that "learned" programming in School... granted, we usually don't really need it, and we didn't hire people for programming. But compared to the people 20+ years ago, knowledge of programming nowadays is practically non existent.
For non-programmers programming must be wizardry... trusting an experienced programmer is also hard... in more than one occasion, I was asked to do a detailed plan of what would be needed and how it would have to be implemented... doing that would have taken longer than the actual implementation I did... (I believe there was a comic on Dilbert about that, too). I guess once you have many years of experience, some processes just "work" inside the brain, allowing you to get the work done without spending too many thoughts on it... and that's the part one most likely doesn't lose either... you may need to get back into the syntax, or parameters etc., but the actual "art" of how to program is still there... also makes learning a new language easier...
Do you really think Apple's UK employees really give a damn?
Do you really think Apple gives a damn about whether Apple's UK employees give a damn? And no matter what other judgments might come out of that, do you really believe the employee's jobs are in danger? As long as "believers" will still pay premium for being allowed to walk around with an Apple product, they will still be sold...
At a place I worked for we had a similar experience... the company had a product (their central/main product) named "Telekon" (composite of "Telefonverkauf" - Sales by phone - and "Kontraktverwaltung" - Contract management) for which they even had a trademark. When the national, state-owned mail & phone company Deutsche Bundespost decided to split up in 1995 into separate companies, one of which was the phone part, they named themselves "Deutsche Telekom". Shortly after, they tried to bully the small company attempting to make them drop the product name "Telekon", as it might be misleading... even though the company already had the trademark for many years... of course (luckily), Telekom's attempt was turned down by the German Patent Office, as the name was already registered. Though they stated that had Telekom already existed, the brand Telekon would not have been registered... Goes to show that big players believe they can get through with any claims...
Wondering, was the offer directly from Cisco? Did the person who designed/selected the gear know what they were doing? Just by selecting the wrong gear, prices between different Cisco gear can already differ by a factor of 2-3... e.g., we just had a project in which a company campus with something like 20 Gigabit switches (24/48 ports, access layer) and a core with 10G ability to feed to those as well as cover the DC with redundant 1G ports... going with the usual suspect (6500) as core switch with line cards to supply up to 16 10G ports and 96 1G copper ports would have been more than twice the price than the alternative we chose, Nexus 5548 w/ two 2248 FEX chassis. Also, instead of using overpriced (to say the least) Cisco SFP/SFP+ modules would have run the total bill up even more... (total of 44 SFP+, 42 SFP, with original Cisco SFPs that would add up to around 50k€ - would have been a third of the whole project budget. Using OEM/compatible modules was around 5k€). Assuming a large quantity of fiber ports in such a project, the optics alone may quickly add up to the factor mentioned above...
Here's two solutions I managed to get out of Sudoku Sensai by filling in a couple fields randomly (that is, for fields where only two possible locations for a single digit in 3x3 field were available, I picked one, let the program solve deterministically until no more steps were available, then repeated)
mainly because it's not deterministic, it's under-defined (or whatever it's called). If you can solve it with (at least) two different solutions, this PhD ought to give back his degree and go back to school for making such a claim without actually checking into the facts... otherwise, here's my "hardest sudoku": "1" at E5. Send back the correct solution I have here.
Btw, any Sudoku solver that goes by deterministic rules without using guesswork/brute force should stop after eliminating some numbers from empty fields... ny solver that comes up with a solution obviously does brute force...
Best way to drive down the price for Nokia and take them over... after all, they went all in on the WinPhone crap... buyers that already picked up the phone from them will be p@ssed, and people interested won't buy them...
- how much power does the PC use when running - how much does each drive use - how likely is it that one of the older drives fail - how much work is it to replace the drive, including the "cost" of the downtime
I would assume that over - say - three years the power usage of a regular PC (especially on that has enough room and power for 10 drives) will easily outweigh the cost for some low-power NAS and something like 3-4 large hard drives, which will most likely run without a glitch for something like 3-5 years... at least that's the results I came out at, before picking up a 4-bay QNAP NAS that I put 4 1.5TB drives in... mind you, I do like to tinker with hard and software, but at some points, it's just not worth it...
... as long as it's not the broken, mis-designed (assuming it has been designed and not just the result of a failed Rohrschach test) and for a desktop utterly unusable "Metro" look...
One thing ISP experts are pretty skeptical about current plans of securing BGP (apart from the fact that it has to be used wide-spread to actually make it work) is that they use some central key for signing the routes - which means that governmental agencies could easily shut down whole parts of the internet by revoking a signed key, effectively removing a prefix/route from the global routing table... therefore, any technically sound protocol (and safe from "the powers that be") would need some public repository that can not be controlled...
+1 I started out on a Spektrum, going to the department store almost every day, programming on the one they had on display for advertisement (they also had the ZX81, but with it being monochrome, awful keyboard and only 1K of RAM, who wanted that?). My friend would even bring his cassette player so we could save programs we wrote... (cassette player as in "bulky, heavy, need a bag to carry it around"). After a while, my parents got fed up with my hanging around in the store constantly, so they decided to buy me one - while we were waiting for the clerk to get one from storage, we talked to some boy who convinced us to get a C64, as it had more RAM, more power, better keyboard,... so we got that instead... Of course I was disappointed with the missing gfx commands on the 64, but quickly got around that (in part because of "Simon's Basic" IIRC), and ended up with the good ol' 6502/6510 Assembler programming... heck, once you get around with 3 not-so-all-purpose registers and the limited ASM commands, you ought to be able to program in just about any language with a couple pages of syntax/command reference... seeing how "well" kids nowadays are tought in business school as far as programming goes, I always wonder if we should put an emulator (or maybe even the "real thing"?) on their desk and let them learn coding in assembler for a while... sure programming is easy with all the fancy tools and libraries, but if you never really learned the basics, how should they know that requiring a bigger, faster computer isn't the way you fix limitations and performance problems?
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After never ever having used an iPhone, I recently needed to do some testing of a VPN config for a customer, so I got a loaner phone ... iPhone 4, iOS 6.1 ... (actually 6.0, but I did an update :) )
On the upside: I got the VPN up and running, and the UI definitely is running smoothly.
On the downside: The UI feels so completely outdated. I've been using Android since I had my first Google G1, so I know the evolution of Android through the different versions and on different devices, albeit with CyanogenMod on most of them (didn't root my Transformer Prime, but all phones). Personally, I must say that iOS 6 feels less functional than even Android 2.3, much less Jelly Bean. I miss many of the basic functions that even Android 1.5 already had. I don't understand how or why technically inclined people can rave about Apple and the iPhone - at least not if they take an open-minded look at any of the current (or even not so current) Android phones. See how well they can be customized, well outside the arbitrary limits Apple decides to set for their customers...
And I don't even start to talk about the tiny screen, compared to my Nexus 4 or even the SGS2 ... :) (and that didn't get that much better on the iPhone5 ...)
While I'm not very experienced in US and IP law, I don't understand how a user of a commercially available product can be held liable for using something he just bought. How should one be expected to ensure that every piece of hardware you buy on the open market is legal as far as IP and licensing goes? ... including damages payments for the company targeted in this way ...
Sounds to me like it's a complete scare tactics on the side of this lawyer, and should be punishable by law
But then, when has the legal system been sane and understandable for any person with at least half a brain ...
After reading and seeing the intelligence (or absence thereof) in the US presidential race (most notably on the side of the republican candidates, as well as members of congress and house), as well as reading many very intelligent posts (not!) of people on social media, clearly proving total ignorance of anything not directly concerning the US or their local issues, I wonder whether the US school system may need to take care of itself first ...
Updates? By the time this device is being sold, the next version of the OS will be ready, making older hardware obsolete, as it requires more CPU, memory and storage space ... (remember Windows Phone 7?)
actually, that were bytes available for Basic. For assembler applications, most of those 64k (oops, almost used the wrong denominator ;) ) were usable ... a C64 had a total of 80k of memory (RAM and ROM) available ...
Wow, 45Gigs of OS and Applications? Most likely none of which you can remove? So a backup of that takes up a whooping 5-11 DVDs (depending on whether dual layer or single layer)? Really? Are you out of your f-ing mind?
He's just making sure he has a job tomorrow ... and for years to come ...
... all we have to do is get everyone to use PGP/GPG ... then they can read anything that is sent ... or try to ;)
If somebody could go out and patent patenting anything that exists in the physical world as digital representations, wouldn't these pointless patents go away?
OTOH, I guess the US Patent Office is doing this on purpose ... if they'd just turn down these stupid patents, all they'd earn would be the original application fees ... ... => Profit! Therefore, the patent employees ensure their jobs' safety!
By approving the patents, they for one attract patent trolls to put on for even more of these type of patents, and also ensure that other companies spend money for them to check and possibly invalidate the patents
But I reckon as long as they don't get any "punishment" for passing junk like this, they'll keep on doing it, even if the patent is about the most trivial, prior-art, or whatever patent ...
Contrary what many companies nowadays believe, I don't think people stop being good programmers just because they age ... I reckon it's often just the results of the Peter Principle (look it up if you don't know it) ...
I've started programming at 12 on a ZX Spectrum in a store, later advanced to a C64, Amiga and finally Unix ... been through Basic, 6502 assembler, 68k assembler, Pascal (yuck - and another of Wirth's languages I can't or won't remember the name anymore), C (most of the code written in it), C++ (just a bit) and recently mostly PHP ... I still love it, even though I've not been doing much the last ~10 years ... I still more or less blow away anybody in the company (ISP/Network Consulting) when it comes to hacking some tool or solving some problem that require automation ... including and especially the folks that "learned" programming in School ... granted, we usually don't really need it, and we didn't hire people for programming. But compared to the people 20+ years ago, knowledge of programming nowadays is practically non existent.
For non-programmers programming must be wizardry ... trusting an experienced programmer is also hard ... in more than one occasion, I was asked to do a detailed plan of what would be needed and how it would have to be implemented ... doing that would have taken longer than the actual implementation I did ... (I believe there was a comic on Dilbert about that, too). I guess once you have many years of experience, some processes just "work" inside the brain, allowing you to get the work done without spending too many thoughts on it ... and that's the part one most likely doesn't lose either ... you may need to get back into the syntax, or parameters etc., but the actual "art" of how to program is still there ... also makes learning a new language easier ...
Do you really think Apple's UK employees really give a damn?
Do you really think Apple gives a damn about whether Apple's UK employees give a damn? And no matter what other judgments might come out of that, do you really believe the employee's jobs are in danger? As long as "believers" will still pay premium for being allowed to walk around with an Apple product, they will still be sold ...
At a place I worked for we had a similar experience ... the company had a product (their central/main product) named "Telekon" (composite of "Telefonverkauf" - Sales by phone - and "Kontraktverwaltung" - Contract management) for which they even had a trademark. When the national, state-owned mail & phone company Deutsche Bundespost decided to split up in 1995 into separate companies, one of which was the phone part, they named themselves "Deutsche Telekom". Shortly after, they tried to bully the small company attempting to make them drop the product name "Telekon", as it might be misleading ... even though the company already had the trademark for many years ... of course (luckily), Telekom's attempt was turned down by the German Patent Office, as the name was already registered. Though they stated that had Telekom already existed, the brand Telekon would not have been registered ... ...
Goes to show that big players believe they can get through with any claims
May I assume he thought the same of the Zune? or Windows Mobile/CE?
Wondering, was the offer directly from Cisco? Did the person who designed/selected the gear know what they were doing? ... e.g., we just had a project in which a company campus with something like 20 Gigabit switches (24/48 ports, access layer) and a core with 10G ability to feed to those as well as cover the DC with redundant 1G ports ... going with the usual suspect (6500) as core switch with line cards to supply up to 16 10G ports and 96 1G copper ports would have been more than twice the price than the alternative we chose, Nexus 5548 w/ two 2248 FEX chassis. ... (total of 44 SFP+, 42 SFP, with original Cisco SFPs that would add up to around 50k€ - would have been a third of the whole project budget. Using OEM/compatible modules was around 5k€). Assuming a large quantity of fiber ports in such a project, the optics alone may quickly add up to the factor mentioned above ...
Just by selecting the wrong gear, prices between different Cisco gear can already differ by a factor of 2-3
Also, instead of using overpriced (to say the least) Cisco SFP/SFP+ modules would have run the total bill up even more
... so what could go wrong?
Here's two solutions I managed to get out of Sudoku Sensai by filling in a couple fields randomly (that is, for fields where only two possible locations for a single digit in 3x3 field were available, I picked one, let the program solve deterministically until no more steps were available, then repeated)
8 1 4 2 5 3 6 7 9
9 2 3 6 7 8 1 5 4
5 7 6 4 9 1 2 8 3
1 3 5 9 6 7 8 4 2
6 8 2 3 4 5 7 9 1
7 4 9 1 8 2 5 3 6
4 5 1 7 2 9 3 6 8
2 6 8 5 3 4 9 1 7
3 9 7 8 1 6 4 2 5
This one I got out of Google Goggles ...
8 1 2 7 5 3 6 4 9
9 4 3 6 8 2 1 7 5
6 7 5 4 9 1 2 8 3
1 5 4 2 3 7 8 9 6
3 6 9 8 4 5 7 2 1
2 8 7 1 6 9 5 3 4
5 2 1 9 7 4 3 6 8
4 3 8 5 2 6 9 1 7
7 9 6 3 1 8 4 5 2
mainly because it's not deterministic, it's under-defined (or whatever it's called). If you can solve it with (at least) two different solutions, this PhD ought to give back his degree and go back to school for making such a claim without actually checking into the facts ... otherwise, here's my "hardest sudoku": "1" at E5. Send back the correct solution I have here.
Btw, any Sudoku solver that goes by deterministic rules without using guesswork/brute force should stop after eliminating some numbers from empty fields ... ny solver that comes up with a solution obviously does brute force ...
Best way to drive down the price for Nokia and take them over ... after all, they went all in on the WinPhone crap ... buyers that already picked up the phone from them will be p@ssed, and people interested won't buy them ...
- how much power does the PC use when running
- how much does each drive use
- how likely is it that one of the older drives fail
- how much work is it to replace the drive, including the "cost" of the downtime
I would assume that over - say - three years the power usage of a regular PC (especially on that has enough room and power for 10 drives) will easily outweigh the cost for some low-power NAS and something like 3-4 large hard drives, which will most likely run without a glitch for something like 3-5 years ... at least that's the results I came out at, before picking up a 4-bay QNAP NAS that I put 4 1.5TB drives in ... mind you, I do like to tinker with hard and software, but at some points, it's just not worth it ...
... as long as it's not the broken, mis-designed (assuming it has been designed and not just the result of a failed Rohrschach test) and for a desktop utterly unusable "Metro" look ...
One thing ISP experts are pretty skeptical about current plans of securing BGP (apart from the fact that it has to be used wide-spread to actually make it work) is that they use some central key for signing the routes - which means that governmental agencies could easily shut down whole parts of the internet by revoking a signed key, effectively removing a prefix/route from the global routing table ... therefore, any technically sound protocol (and safe from "the powers that be") would need some public repository that can not be controlled ...
+1 ... (cassette player as in "bulky, heavy, need a bag to carry it around"). ... so we got that instead ... ... heck, once you get around with 3 not-so-all-purpose registers and the limited ASM commands, you ought to be able to program in just about any language with a couple pages of syntax/command reference ... seeing how "well" kids nowadays are tought in business school as far as programming goes, I always wonder if we should put an emulator (or maybe even the "real thing"?) on their desk and let them learn coding in assembler for a while ... sure programming is easy with all the fancy tools and libraries, but if you never really learned the basics, how should they know that requiring a bigger, faster computer isn't the way you fix limitations and performance problems?
I started out on a Spektrum, going to the department store almost every day, programming on the one they had on display for advertisement (they also had the ZX81, but with it being monochrome, awful keyboard and only 1K of RAM, who wanted that?). My friend would even bring his cassette player so we could save programs we wrote
After a while, my parents got fed up with my hanging around in the store constantly, so they decided to buy me one - while we were waiting for the clerk to get one from storage, we talked to some boy who convinced us to get a C64, as it had more RAM, more power, better keyboard,
Of course I was disappointed with the missing gfx commands on the 64, but quickly got around that (in part because of "Simon's Basic" IIRC), and ended up with the good ol' 6502/6510 Assembler programming
For ads in Germany, Apple already had to remove the 4G stuff ...
... just LightSquared doing 4G tests ... and of course it's all the manufacturers' fault ...
This should make texting & driving a lot more safer ... just add a full-size keyboard to the steering wheel, and all's good!