About number 2: GP was asking about people who want to use Safari. As one sample out of your second group, let me tell you we don't want or like to use Safari nor MSIE 5.5. They're the really ugly stuff that need to be worked with some times, but that's everything but pleasurable.
Tested both, no crash for me here. Actually, this alpha version has been running extraordinarily (for a browser in general) stable here, hadn't relly noticed until now.
I disagree about the inelasticity. I'm one of the techs at a small local stage (some 150 seats max -- small), we tend to get local artists as well as foreign from a neighboring country. Locals will usually charge about $30 (appears to be the agreed-upon national standard) while foreigners tend to sell their CDs for an equivalent of some $16, locally. Rounding that to $20, foreigners often sell a lot more, sometimes double or triple of what locals would.
Prices roughly converted to USD. This is not the US, stuff is generally more expensive here.
Bloat is absolutely and completely subjective. I like programs to be as powerful as necessary to perform, and if they manage to keep those extra features hidden, they're not bloat to me. Do you consider Ubuntu bloated for including an executable named libpng12-config (example of questionable quality. Replace with a largely unused command) which 99% of all users may never run? I don't. It's 2.3k and it probably won't get in my way.
In my book, the same goes for Office 12/2007. Most users probably won't require half of it's functionality. You don't usually need to work with references when writing a letter and you may not need all that mailing functions to write a book. Those functions don't get in your way, though. In terms of screen real estate we're talking about some 20-25 pixels height to switch between 8 function sets - space you could hardly save by removing a few features. The new interface may not be what most people are used to, but it does a hugely better job hiding unneeded extra features than Office's old layout.
In my experience, the Tribe and Alpha (talk about bad namimg) versions were very unstable and left the whole system in an unenjoyable fashion even after upgrading to the release version. May not apply to every release or every system, but I'd advise against using them.
I hope you're not too serious, but I'll try to explain.
Ubuntu uses Debian's apt package management system. It's a great thing, fast as hell (especially when one's coming from Gentoo or source-y relatives), easy through Synaptic and so on. It does, however, have one major difference to Gentoo's way of handling new releases: Only security fixes are applied to packages after a release.
That's a great advantage to admin staff. Never touch a running system's config unless upgrading to a new release. It's also a (rather large) disadvantage to people favouring the bleeding edge. A seperate "backports" repository will contain some new releases but it's not as extensive or current as gentoo's. The actual updating process itself, though, is typically orders of magnitude faster because packages are distributed binary (source optional) instead of as source and compiled locally.
Updating Ubuntu's embraced and extended* edition of Firefox to it's newest version is as easy as "apt-get upgrade" (emerge -u world) or "apt-get install ubufox" (emerge firefox) after an "apt-get update" (emerge --sync). Updating to vanilla Firefox from mozilla.org is, as GP stated, another beast.
* I'm seriously hoping for that third "e" there -- all those annoying Fx banners and buttons and other nuisances are enough to ruin an already mediocre product completely. Freedom in software should mean letting people use whatever browser they like. Be it Opera, Safari, ELinks, Lynx or even a properly secured instance of MSIE.
So? If any studio decides to release a game whose minimum settings aren't playable on the majority of their target audience's machines, they'll sell only a few copies. If they sell only a few copies, they don't make any profits. If they don't make any profits, they don't get money to buy food which they need so they won't.
There's always going to games with ridiculously high hardware demands but unless they're Diablo III, WoW 2 or Halo 3 (UT3 and Doom 3 weren't that hyped anymore, right?) they need to provide playability for a large enough part of their target group. Also, those titles keep the genre moving. Remember how beautiful Far Cry looked, compared to everything else back then? Most major releases today look like that or better now. Keep pushing forward or pretty soon EA Annoying Sports franchise #1425 2009, 2010, 2011 will be the industry standard.
I am intrigued. Please tell me your address, a phone number of a local company with trucks and drivers for hire and the phone number of whomever I need to call to sell your equipment back to you:)
Two webcams in opposite corners, "seeing" the whole cubicle space including the entry door as well as each other. Works great that way for banks and they store a lot more expensive stuff than you do.
Also, security through obscurity: You don't go around telling your coworkers, the cleaning stuff and that well-dressed guy who doesn't work there yet comes now and then and leaves with a few more laptop bags you do have cameras. Most importantly, you don't tell them where your cameras are. If you're going for the deterrent factor; great; point out one (fake) camera, watch that one, it's surrounding space and the whole cube really, really closely.
Also, if you want to make sure thieves not only get caught but your stuff will remain in the office, link some kind of cam (works great with the ones embedded in notebooks' display bezels) to a screen and either use your notebook's motion sensor (ThinkPads, some Apple devices, I believe newer Toshiba devices, probably others) or monitor the webcam for changes. In the event of something happening send the mugshot of whomever to the screen. Add a message if deemed necessary.
Adding the box will dramatically worsen the value/(weight * volume) ratio a casual thief would probably be looking for. Leaving an $2m mainframe stand around in plain sight won't run you into a big risk of it getting stolen; $500k of jewellery right next to it probably won't stay there for long.
It's an over-the-top analogy, but a thief looking to maximize profits from what he can take in a short amount of time using his bag may go for the 2.5 kg $2k notebook, not for the 5 kg locker with a notebook of unknown value.
Probably not. On standard hardware you need to keep the processor (even clocked down via SpeedStep), main board, memory and display (probably four to eight times the area of the Shift's display) fed with power. HTC can use a specialized, pda-like processor and system board for the WinMobile portion of their device, you and me can't.
My ThinkPad X61t is a tablet, too. Also it's a bit heavier than the others you mentioned, has an SXGA+ display, a high-capacity battery and 3G WWAN. Apart from the WinMobile as well as Vista, nothing much new here.
Get a ThinkPad. Each of the current series (that's R, T, X) offers at least one standard aspect model. Z series are no longer produced (merged with T widescreen), the X300 is the only current model without a direct 4:3 variant, but X60[ts] take good care of that.
The Swiss/Austrian way over apprenticeship and Berufsmatur is great, but - to my knowledge - pretty much only available around there. [Quick info for outsiders about the western european education system: Nine year mandatory school (this is roughly equivalent to everything up to an U.S. high school). Then either Matura/Abitur (three years; leads up to university for another some three years to a bachelor's degree) or an apprenticeship. In the latter, you'll spend three to four years working for a company and earning some money. Also, you'll be going to school for one or two days a week (the CS path is four years with two days of school). During this time, the second day of school can be replaced (or added, if it'd only be one otherwise) by the Berufsmaturitaetsschule, leading up to the Berufsmatura. The apprenticeship will get you qualification papers for a real-world job, the voluntary Berufsmatura gets you into college after the apprenticeship.]
Working through your evenings is an option, but making $30k p.a. while studying full-time seems near impossible. At four hours each and every day including weekends that'd be an $20/hr job, a lot more than what a typical U.S. student job pays.
Back to you, OP: It's a tough decision. I'd recommend to try and contact the institutions you want to go to first. Then, look further for some grant money. Local/federal scholarships, that kind of stuff. If that won't lead to a result, ask some companies you know you might like. Propose a realistic, drawn out plan of what you intend to do, how it applies to them and how long you'd work for them after completing your studies.
If that won't help out, you could go with a student loan. Keep in mind though that $120k (30k/yr, 4 years for a bachelor's) is a metric fucking shitload of debt. I, for one, wouldn't want to be there after finishing college. I also wouldn't want to be tied to some company for x years, but that's up to you.
If all else fails, make an extensive list of all colleges you can find, ordered by how much you'd like to go there. Contact at leastthe top 20, ask for financing possibilities and so on. Keep in mind switching between different colleges is possible. Save some money in the three years leading up to graduation and study real hard, then switch to MIT and graduate there. You may lose some credits and time and you'll probably have to study really fucking hard to make the switch work, but it could very well be worth it.
As a last suggestion, to get this buried as -1 Troll: Sell software. Build that app you're talking about, build a few more and sell them. Sell support for your apps, support for apps you understand. Sell your time to build what other people need. Work on Wine, earn pledges. Short and sweet: make money (to pay for your tuition yourself).
I don't see the point in having a pretty wallpaper or a funny cursor set on a work machine. I'm there to be productive, to build quality software, not to spend hours picking whatever picture would look best on the desktop I never look at because it's hidden under some IDE.
Wow, that does sound like a place I really wouldn't want to be working for. I'm not that guy who spends hours with theming his desktop or changing cursor images, but auto-sorted desktop icons? That sounds awfully sadistic to me. Also, recently used docs and the like can be something quite useful and don't have much of a downside.
The potential usability troubles for other users can be easily offset with the simple use of profiles. That'd make everybody as productive on their "home station" in the company as well as any other -- and would allow them to have ordered icons, a background picture and a double-height auto-hiding start bar on the top of the screen (just examples).
I wouldn't consider myself mathematically literate, but applying the findings of Trakhtman to navigation instructions in the real world would, if I understand the theorem correctly, make finding any point anywhere as easy as "at intersections, follow the pattern red-blue-blue".
What I don't quite get, is the efficiency of this. The WP example looks like, transferred to the real world, a trip from Ohio to Cleveland may very well go through Indiana and Pittsburgh. Not what I'd consider efficient/fast routing.
Fair retort: That's very likely a problem for USAnian networks and good phones (and, of course, vice-versa). Striking North Americas special (politically correct for "retarded") GSM frequencies out of the equation, GSM + EDGE + 3G is pretty much globally open.
Also, EDGE is only a GSM supplement. Every EDGE phone will work on a non-EDGE GSM network and vice-versa. Strangely enough, the Trinity's a quad band device (should work on all continents flawlessy); your bad experiences with it may be AT&T's fault. Or HTC's. Or MSFT's. Let's go with that one;)
Of course not. I haven't read the full thing, but as far as I know, it's going to be run GSM style. If you want to use the network, you'll have to get it's equivalent of GSM's SIM card (and the contract that comes with it), usable in any device that supports this network.
Nothing new here, the rest of the world has been doing this for over a decade and a half.
Hardware v. Development costs differ greatly in different parts of the world.
As a nice little example, consider the following:
A mid-grade colo web server* costs about the same amount of money annualy as an average developer** does in two business days.
*: A dual 3-GHz, 6-8 Gig of RAM, 2x750 GB Hard drive box including a terabyte of traffic. Comes with a clean linux install and full ssh access, software mgmt is left to you. We're talking about commodity hardware and a ~99.5% SLA here, though three to four nines are common. Add a dead-app-server-detecting load balancer in front of a few of these and your Rails app scales effortlessy to your database server's capabilities at negligible cost.
**: The last figure I could recall off the top of my head was the hourly cost per developer in a government office I used to work for. This includes office rent, heating, and office IT infrastructure as well as the dev's actual salary. This figure is probably some 5-15% higher than the national average. Change the example to two years of server per work week to be on the safe side.
I didn't state this clearly enough in my original post, but I fully agree with you. Basic medical care should be something federally mandated and "forced upon" each and every person living within whatever jurisdiction we're talking about. Everybody pays for it (no opt-out) via taxes, social security or whatever may apply, everybody gets treatment for bad stuff or stuff with serious potential to turn into bad stuff.
In my opinion, basic would also mean it should be limited to diseases and conditions that are known to be curable in a realistic timeframe. However cruel this may sound, I don't think basic care should contain a half-year-long hospital stay with 30% chance for survival if this new HIV drug does work or that year of intensive care because several of this 80 year old person's internal organs are failing.
Apart from seeming cruel to some, that kind of hard limits could keep the costs of such an insurance down and make sure private insurance companies aren't put out of work just now. Single hospital rooms, plastic surgery, experimental treatments could still warrant policies to those who require 'em while everybody else saves money and is safe.
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About number 2: GP was asking about people who want to use Safari. As one sample out of your second group, let me tell you we don't want or like to use Safari nor MSIE 5.5. They're the really ugly stuff that need to be worked with some times, but that's everything but pleasurable.
Tested both, no crash for me here. Actually, this alpha version has been running extraordinarily (for a browser in general) stable here, hadn't relly noticed until now.
Get it here, presumably next week. Current 9.5 weeklies aren't that bad either, though.
I disagree about the inelasticity. I'm one of the techs at a small local stage (some 150 seats max -- small), we tend to get local artists as well as foreign from a neighboring country. Locals will usually charge about $30 (appears to be the agreed-upon national standard) while foreigners tend to sell their CDs for an equivalent of some $16, locally. Rounding that to $20, foreigners often sell a lot more, sometimes double or triple of what locals would.
Prices roughly converted to USD. This is not the US, stuff is generally more expensive here.
Bloat is absolutely and completely subjective. I like programs to be as powerful as necessary to perform, and if they manage to keep those extra features hidden, they're not bloat to me. Do you consider Ubuntu bloated for including an executable named libpng12-config (example of questionable quality. Replace with a largely unused command) which 99% of all users may never run? I don't. It's 2.3k and it probably won't get in my way.
In my book, the same goes for Office 12/2007. Most users probably won't require half of it's functionality. You don't usually need to work with references when writing a letter and you may not need all that mailing functions to write a book. Those functions don't get in your way, though. In terms of screen real estate we're talking about some 20-25 pixels height to switch between 8 function sets - space you could hardly save by removing a few features. The new interface may not be what most people are used to, but it does a hugely better job hiding unneeded extra features than Office's old layout.
In my experience, the Tribe and Alpha (talk about bad namimg) versions were very unstable and left the whole system in an unenjoyable fashion even after upgrading to the release version. May not apply to every release or every system, but I'd advise against using them.
I hope you're not too serious, but I'll try to explain.
Ubuntu uses Debian's apt package management system. It's a great thing, fast as hell (especially when one's coming from Gentoo or source-y relatives), easy through Synaptic and so on. It does, however, have one major difference to Gentoo's way of handling new releases: Only security fixes are applied to packages after a release.
That's a great advantage to admin staff. Never touch a running system's config unless upgrading to a new release. It's also a (rather large) disadvantage to people favouring the bleeding edge. A seperate "backports" repository will contain some new releases but it's not as extensive or current as gentoo's. The actual updating process itself, though, is typically orders of magnitude faster because packages are distributed binary (source optional) instead of as source and compiled locally.
Updating Ubuntu's embraced and extended* edition of Firefox to it's newest version is as easy as "apt-get upgrade" (emerge -u world) or "apt-get install ubufox" (emerge firefox) after an "apt-get update" (emerge --sync). Updating to vanilla Firefox from mozilla.org is, as GP stated, another beast.
* I'm seriously hoping for that third "e" there -- all those annoying Fx banners and buttons and other nuisances are enough to ruin an already mediocre product completely. Freedom in software should mean letting people use whatever browser they like. Be it Opera, Safari, ELinks, Lynx or even a properly secured instance of MSIE.
). There you go.
Yeh. Also, a console does everything a PC does and the games aren't more expensive at all. Thanks for that insight, film at 11.
So? If any studio decides to release a game whose minimum settings aren't playable on the majority of their target audience's machines, they'll sell only a few copies. If they sell only a few copies, they don't make any profits. If they don't make any profits, they don't get money to buy food which they need so they won't.
There's always going to games with ridiculously high hardware demands but unless they're Diablo III, WoW 2 or Halo 3 (UT3 and Doom 3 weren't that hyped anymore, right?) they need to provide playability for a large enough part of their target group. Also, those titles keep the genre moving. Remember how beautiful Far Cry looked, compared to everything else back then? Most major releases today look like that or better now. Keep pushing forward or pretty soon EA Annoying Sports franchise #1425 2009, 2010, 2011 will be the industry standard.
I am intrigued. Please tell me your address, a phone number of a local company with trucks and drivers for hire and the phone number of whomever I need to call to sell your equipment back to you :)
Two webcams in opposite corners, "seeing" the whole cubicle space including the entry door as well as each other. Works great that way for banks and they store a lot more expensive stuff than you do.
Also, security through obscurity: You don't go around telling your coworkers, the cleaning stuff and that well-dressed guy who doesn't work there yet comes now and then and leaves with a few more laptop bags you do have cameras. Most importantly, you don't tell them where your cameras are. If you're going for the deterrent factor; great; point out one (fake) camera, watch that one, it's surrounding space and the whole cube really, really closely.
Also, if you want to make sure thieves not only get caught but your stuff will remain in the office, link some kind of cam (works great with the ones embedded in notebooks' display bezels) to a screen and either use your notebook's motion sensor (ThinkPads, some Apple devices, I believe newer Toshiba devices, probably others) or monitor the webcam for changes. In the event of something happening send the mugshot of whomever to the screen. Add a message if deemed necessary.
Adding the box will dramatically worsen the value/(weight * volume) ratio a casual thief would probably be looking for. Leaving an $2m mainframe stand around in plain sight won't run you into a big risk of it getting stolen; $500k of jewellery right next to it probably won't stay there for long.
It's an over-the-top analogy, but a thief looking to maximize profits from what he can take in a short amount of time using his bag may go for the 2.5 kg $2k notebook, not for the 5 kg locker with a notebook of unknown value.
Probably not. On standard hardware you need to keep the processor (even clocked down via SpeedStep), main board, memory and display (probably four to eight times the area of the Shift's display) fed with power. HTC can use a specialized, pda-like processor and system board for the WinMobile portion of their device, you and me can't.
My ThinkPad X61t is a tablet, too. Also it's a bit heavier than the others you mentioned, has an SXGA+ display, a high-capacity battery and 3G WWAN. Apart from the WinMobile as well as Vista, nothing much new here.
Get a ThinkPad. Each of the current series (that's R, T, X) offers at least one standard aspect model. Z series are no longer produced (merged with T widescreen), the X300 is the only current model without a direct 4:3 variant, but X60[ts] take good care of that.
The Swiss/Austrian way over apprenticeship and Berufsmatur is great, but - to my knowledge - pretty much only available around there.
[Quick info for outsiders about the western european education system: Nine year mandatory school (this is roughly equivalent to everything up to an U.S. high school). Then either Matura/Abitur (three years; leads up to university for another some three years to a bachelor's degree) or an apprenticeship. In the latter, you'll spend three to four years working for a company and earning some money. Also, you'll be going to school for one or two days a week (the CS path is four years with two days of school). During this time, the second day of school can be replaced (or added, if it'd only be one otherwise) by the Berufsmaturitaetsschule, leading up to the Berufsmatura. The apprenticeship will get you qualification papers for a real-world job, the voluntary Berufsmatura gets you into college after the apprenticeship.]
Working through your evenings is an option, but making $30k p.a. while studying full-time seems near impossible. At four hours each and every day including weekends that'd be an $20/hr job, a lot more than what a typical U.S. student job pays.
Back to you, OP: It's a tough decision. I'd recommend to try and contact the institutions you want to go to first. Then, look further for some grant money. Local/federal scholarships, that kind of stuff. If that won't lead to a result, ask some companies you know you might like. Propose a realistic, drawn out plan of what you intend to do, how it applies to them and how long you'd work for them after completing your studies.
If that won't help out, you could go with a student loan. Keep in mind though that $120k (30k/yr, 4 years for a bachelor's) is a metric fucking shitload of debt. I, for one, wouldn't want to be there after finishing college. I also wouldn't want to be tied to some company for x years, but that's up to you.
If all else fails, make an extensive list of all colleges you can find, ordered by how much you'd like to go there. Contact at leastthe top 20, ask for financing possibilities and so on. Keep in mind switching between different colleges is possible. Save some money in the three years leading up to graduation and study real hard, then switch to MIT and graduate there. You may lose some credits and time and you'll probably have to study really fucking hard to make the switch work, but it could very well be worth it.
As a last suggestion, to get this buried as -1 Troll: Sell software. Build that app you're talking about, build a few more and sell them. Sell support for your apps, support for apps you understand. Sell your time to build what other people need. Work on Wine, earn pledges. Short and sweet: make money (to pay for your tuition yourself).
I don't see the point in having a pretty wallpaper or a funny cursor set on a work machine. I'm there to be productive, to build quality software, not to spend hours picking whatever picture would look best on the desktop I never look at because it's hidden under some IDE.
Wow, that does sound like a place I really wouldn't want to be working for. I'm not that guy who spends hours with theming his desktop or changing cursor images, but auto-sorted desktop icons? That sounds awfully sadistic to me. Also, recently used docs and the like can be something quite useful and don't have much of a downside.
The potential usability troubles for other users can be easily offset with the simple use of profiles. That'd make everybody as productive on their "home station" in the company as well as any other -- and would allow them to have ordered icons, a background picture and a double-height auto-hiding start bar on the top of the screen (just examples).
I wouldn't consider myself mathematically literate, but applying the findings of Trakhtman to navigation instructions in the real world would, if I understand the theorem correctly, make finding any point anywhere as easy as "at intersections, follow the pattern red-blue-blue".
What I don't quite get, is the efficiency of this. The WP example looks like, transferred to the real world, a trip from Ohio to Cleveland may very well go through Indiana and Pittsburgh. Not what I'd consider efficient/fast routing.
Fair retort: That's very likely a problem for USAnian networks and good phones (and, of course, vice-versa). Striking North Americas special (politically correct for "retarded") GSM frequencies out of the equation, GSM + EDGE + 3G is pretty much globally open.
;)
Also, EDGE is only a GSM supplement. Every EDGE phone will work on a non-EDGE GSM network and vice-versa. Strangely enough, the Trinity's a quad band device (should work on all continents flawlessy); your bad experiences with it may be AT&T's fault. Or HTC's. Or MSFT's. Let's go with that one
Of course not. I haven't read the full thing, but as far as I know, it's going to be run GSM style. If you want to use the network, you'll have to get it's equivalent of GSM's SIM card (and the contract that comes with it), usable in any device that supports this network.
Nothing new here, the rest of the world has been doing this for over a decade and a half.
Hardware v. Development costs differ greatly in different parts of the world.
As a nice little example, consider the following:
A mid-grade colo web server* costs about the same amount of money annualy as an average developer** does in two business days.
*: A dual 3-GHz, 6-8 Gig of RAM, 2x750 GB Hard drive box including a terabyte of traffic. Comes with a clean linux install and full ssh access, software mgmt is left to you. We're talking about commodity hardware and a ~99.5% SLA here, though three to four nines are common. Add a dead-app-server-detecting load balancer in front of a few of these and your Rails app scales effortlessy to your database server's capabilities at negligible cost.
**: The last figure I could recall off the top of my head was the hourly cost per developer in a government office I used to work for. This includes office rent, heating, and office IT infrastructure as well as the dev's actual salary. This figure is probably some 5-15% higher than the national average. Change the example to two years of server per work week to be on the safe side.
I didn't state this clearly enough in my original post, but I fully agree with you. Basic medical care should be something federally mandated and "forced upon" each and every person living within whatever jurisdiction we're talking about. Everybody pays for it (no opt-out) via taxes, social security or whatever may apply, everybody gets treatment for bad stuff or stuff with serious potential to turn into bad stuff.
In my opinion, basic would also mean it should be limited to diseases and conditions that are known to be curable in a realistic timeframe. However cruel this may sound, I don't think basic care should contain a half-year-long hospital stay with 30% chance for survival if this new HIV drug does work or that year of intensive care because several of this 80 year old person's internal organs are failing.
Apart from seeming cruel to some, that kind of hard limits could keep the costs of such an insurance down and make sure private insurance companies aren't put out of work just now. Single hospital rooms, plastic surgery, experimental treatments could still warrant policies to those who require 'em while everybody else saves money and is safe.