The links contain comments by myself where I have gone to the effort of comparing Apple laptops to others and I don't see the point of doing it any more.
Every single laptop. I've been through this tiresomeprocessso many times I'm not going to bother again. As I said there may be a small window when there is nothing to make a reasonable comparison against but when there is, they are consistently undercut by the competition and for most of the lifetime of the product before the cycle repeats. They are more expensive and quite obviously so.
Alibaba is filled with cheap tablets and they're actually not that bad, many boasting 1.2GHZ ARM processors, 512-1024MB RAM, 4+GB storage. They don't run Windows but they run Android 4.0 or Ubuntu at 800x400. Buy a $10 leather case and keyboard and you essentially have a laptop with a 4 hour battery life.
They can say they are overpriced because they are overpriced. There may be a small window at launch time when there is nothing from Dell / whomever to make a comparison with (e.g. if Apple has switched to a new CPU), but as soon as there is, the disparity in pricing becomes very obvious and becomes more pronounced the further up the ladder in specs / storage / memory etc. that you go.
I expect the school or the local council contracts the catering service and it's up to them to cook and serve food to the budget and nutritional standards required by their contract. It probably does mean they serve up crap and the crap is prepared by low skilled, low paid workers who are less interested in the quality of the food, as much as they are about their jobs. I'm pretty certain they could buy fresh ingredients and serve a far higher standard of food with the same budget but it's a question of the effort required to do it and the skills of the staff to actually bother and do it properly.
Jamie Oliver has had a campaign running for some time in the UK to boost the standard of school meals a while back and it has raised awareness of the issue. Maybe the blog and the fallout is one consequence of that awareness. From a long term perspective it doesn't do any nation good to serve crap food to children. They'll be mentally and physically underdeveloped as a result, underachieve academically and probably have a higher risk of developing conditions like obesity, diabetes etc later in life.
The aside about the Pi was because prior to the launch I mentioned in one forum how crap desktop performance would be and a guy with access to a preview board claimed it was good. Then lo and behold it turns out desktop performance is pretty crap which is entirely predictable considering the lack of RAM, the IO constraints, low clock speed, single core etc.. You *could* use it as a desktop, depending on your patience but it would be a borderline experience even with the lightest of window managers and apps.
I've programmed set top boxes using SoCs not dissimilar to the one in the Pi and I know how weedy they are in general. The built in hardware is meant to do the heavy lifting. Whenever the CPU takes over performance becomes very mediocre. These things are designed to service an embedded linux with a process or two sitting on top controlling the experience, providing a gui and acting as the conductor to set off the decoders and so on. I intend to buy a Pi as soon as my place in the queue comes up but I expect it will end up running something like XBMC which more closely fits the sort of thing it was designed to run.
The flood of AllWinner A10 chips is interesting though. Performance will still stink but they seem to be ship with more RAM and a higher clock speed which is nice. I wonder what their other hardware performance is like and if it's accessible from open source.
I don't know since I haven't used Ubuntu on it. As a general rule, anyone who claims you're going to get decent desktop performance out of an embeddable SoC is lying. Same goes for the Raspberry Pi.
They wholesale on Alibaba for $50. I assume you could probably obtain them for even less shopping around that site. In some respects these are more attractive than Raspberry PI since they have 512MB or 1GB ram and 4 GB storage and come with case and cables. On the flip side I doubt they're ever going to be as well supported by the community or manufacturer and it may be the hardware codecs remain locked up.
I have a 7" NATPC using an AllWinner A10 chip running ICS. Cost of device $90 or less on places like EBay. Mostly it runs pretty well but it definitely suffers from not being dual core since there are times related to background activity when performance takes a dump. It's still capable of running most Android games pretty smoothly though.
You credit criminals with too much sense. Maybe some of them would file down the pin but I guarantee many wouldn't.
I don't see anything retarded with the law at all. It doesn't inconvenience legitimate gun owners in any way and it will in many cases offer additional forensic information which could help break the case.
I have a NATPC based off an Allwinner A10 and for the money it's not that bad. The device itself feels pretty sturdy though the capacitive screen requires quite heavy touches. Maybe there is a way to calibrate sensitivity but none in the GUI. Technical support is a bit poor but it does exist including a 4.0 update for a device that was originally 2.2. Allwinner has also GPL'd their changes though it took some messing around to persuade them to do it.
Anyway if Chinese firms can knock out tablets this cheap then I don't see why more recognizable firms can't stick a bit of quality control and support on top for a little bit more. The point would still stand that there is no way for Windows RT tablets to compete with this. I don't see how they can even compete further up the price chart either.
You can buy wholesale, right now, Android 4.0 7" tablets with 1GB ram, 8GB storage, capacitive screens for $55 a piece.
How are Windows tablet suppliers supposed to compete with Android when they're lumbered with a massive licence cost for the software? It's certainly not going to happen at the low end of the scale and it's hard to see how it can happen in the middle either.
I think vi's optimal area is in pattern based operations and doing stuff N number of times. The mixed mode editor was and is a fucking awful idea which was obsolete the moment that terminals were capable of doing stuff like moving cursors around, clearing lines, repainting etc.
emacs has a far more sensible approach to interactive editing but is a big bloated pig of an editor, with it's own arcane terminology, obscure commands and maliciously obtuse configuration.
So given the choice of editor for some quick and dirty change I'd use neither of them. I'd choose an emacs-lite editor such as joe, jed, uemacs etc. And for more in depth editing I wouldn't use a console editor at all since there are lots of excellent standalone / IDE graphical editors.
I'm quite aware of the benefits of Wayland. But compositing in X11 is still better than nothing. It is still less overhead than sending damage events out to all applications incurring numerous context switches as each of them attempts to repaint themselves when a user drags a window around.
I like GNOME 3 but I think it has cut too many settings. People have legitimate reasons for wanting to change their fonts, or perhaps the position of the global bar etc and I think it needs to address those needs. Linus is right to rant about that.
One thing I also noticed when I was running Firefox in GNOME 3 is how much space is wasted when the browser is supposed to be maximized. At the top you have the GNOME bar, then an app title bar doing essentially nothing, then a menu in Firefox. Firefox could probably make use of the menu in the GNOME bar (which normally just says Quit) and hide it's own menu by default like it does in Windows 7. And GNOME a maximized app's window with its own bar instead of showing both. A bit like Unity without that execrable global menu functionality. That arrangement would work so much better on smaller screens.
As in accelerated graphics. As in X11 and desktops have started taking advantage of compositing extensions and hardware acceleration to improve the desktop experience. Even if you don't want eye candy on your desktop, compositing makes the experience a LOT better since X11 won't be sending damage events out for processes to handle every time one window moves over the top of another.
I don't use KDE because it has WAY too many settings, menus, tabs and dialogs all mixed together with the common stuff buried amongst the advanced stuff. It's a kitchen sink of desktops and I'm pretty certain that it would have enjoyed far more success amongst end users and enterprises if it had really dialled back on this stuff. Arguably GNOME 3 goes too far in removing stuff but there is no arguing which desktop a novice would find easier to sit down and use with no experience.
That's a picture frame, not a tablet. One only has to look at comparative shots of the devices, accessories like cables / charges and the packaging to clearly see Samsung was ripping the iPad off.
I fail to see why it would be unethical to work for a pharmaceutical company. Drugs improve the quality of people's lives and save them outright in some instances. Even if there is animal testing involved, the immediate question is does the availability of high quality modelling tools reduce the amount of testing required on live subjects. My guess is that it would. Therefore what's unethical about that? And pharmaceuticals are only one aspect of medicine. I'm sure there is plenty of need for physic s simulation in orthopedic, podiatrics, prosthetics and so on.
I bet that every time news comes out of a password list that many people reach for the nearest online MD5sum / SHA1sum calculator so they can search the list to see if their password is on there. Of course now their password, however strong it was before is now is worthless since they've just given it to some random website which for anyone knows is run by a malicious operator or could be hacked in its own right. Similarly, if you found some rainbow table sight and typed in your hash and it was not discovered, the site might make it a priority to brute force that hash in case it comes across again.
The moral is don't use online password complexity calculators or hashers or rainbow lookups with your real password or hash.
To be fair to Apple, Samsung called a lot of this shit onto itself by so blatantly lifting design elements from the iPad. Other tablet manufacturers sensibly avoided giving Apple the ammunition to shoot them with by making their devices distinct.
I think they're just trying to (lamely) skin their developer studio with a Metro like theme to put Devs in the mindset of developing to that . Problem is that DevStudio is a classic windows app and until such time as it runs on Metro itself it should look and feel like other classic windows apps.
Of course it may be that they put an idiot in charge of the look and feel for their developer tools. Given how they've already been one through one firestorm of criticism for using monochromatic icons that could well be the case too.
Even the most rigorously tested code that has been used in production for decades has bugs in it. It's virtually impossible to write bug free code let alone prove that it's bug free. Even stable software like TeX has bugs and it would certainly have many more if it was in active development.
The device made grandiose claims it couldn't possibly deliver on. Remember all that BS about it being able to recognize faces and even emotions? The thing can't even reliably tell when someone has their arms in front of them.
The average kinect game involves making some exaggerated flailing motions that map onto some canned animations. Even then it often screws up or gets confused. There's only so far you can go with that system. Sports / fitness / dance games are the main focus but there isn't much beyond that. There have been a few genuinely innovative attempts to use kinect in a novel way that have almost succeeded such as Once Upon a Monster but most games have been dire and people have gotten bored of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The links contain comments by myself where I have gone to the effort of comparing Apple laptops to others and I don't see the point of doing it any more.
Every single laptop. I've been through this tiresome process so many times I'm not going to bother again. As I said there may be a small window when there is nothing to make a reasonable comparison against but when there is, they are consistently undercut by the competition and for most of the lifetime of the product before the cycle repeats. They are more expensive and quite obviously so.
Alibaba is filled with cheap tablets and they're actually not that bad, many boasting 1.2GHZ ARM processors, 512-1024MB RAM, 4+GB storage. They don't run Windows but they run Android 4.0 or Ubuntu at 800x400. Buy a $10 leather case and keyboard and you essentially have a laptop with a 4 hour battery life.
They can say they are overpriced because they are overpriced. There may be a small window at launch time when there is nothing from Dell / whomever to make a comparison with (e.g. if Apple has switched to a new CPU), but as soon as there is, the disparity in pricing becomes very obvious and becomes more pronounced the further up the ladder in specs / storage / memory etc. that you go.
Jamie Oliver has had a campaign running for some time in the UK to boost the standard of school meals a while back and it has raised awareness of the issue. Maybe the blog and the fallout is one consequence of that awareness. From a long term perspective it doesn't do any nation good to serve crap food to children. They'll be mentally and physically underdeveloped as a result, underachieve academically and probably have a higher risk of developing conditions like obesity, diabetes etc later in life.
I've programmed set top boxes using SoCs not dissimilar to the one in the Pi and I know how weedy they are in general. The built in hardware is meant to do the heavy lifting. Whenever the CPU takes over performance becomes very mediocre. These things are designed to service an embedded linux with a process or two sitting on top controlling the experience, providing a gui and acting as the conductor to set off the decoders and so on. I intend to buy a Pi as soon as my place in the queue comes up but I expect it will end up running something like XBMC which more closely fits the sort of thing it was designed to run.
The flood of AllWinner A10 chips is interesting though. Performance will still stink but they seem to be ship with more RAM and a higher clock speed which is nice. I wonder what their other hardware performance is like and if it's accessible from open source.
I don't know since I haven't used Ubuntu on it. As a general rule, anyone who claims you're going to get decent desktop performance out of an embeddable SoC is lying. Same goes for the Raspberry Pi.
They wholesale on Alibaba for $50. I assume you could probably obtain them for even less shopping around that site. In some respects these are more attractive than Raspberry PI since they have 512MB or 1GB ram and 4 GB storage and come with case and cables. On the flip side I doubt they're ever going to be as well supported by the community or manufacturer and it may be the hardware codecs remain locked up.
I have a 7" NATPC using an AllWinner A10 chip running ICS. Cost of device $90 or less on places like EBay. Mostly it runs pretty well but it definitely suffers from not being dual core since there are times related to background activity when performance takes a dump. It's still capable of running most Android games pretty smoothly though.
I don't see anything retarded with the law at all. It doesn't inconvenience legitimate gun owners in any way and it will in many cases offer additional forensic information which could help break the case.
Anyway if Chinese firms can knock out tablets this cheap then I don't see why more recognizable firms can't stick a bit of quality control and support on top for a little bit more. The point would still stand that there is no way for Windows RT tablets to compete with this. I don't see how they can even compete further up the price chart either.
How are Windows tablet suppliers supposed to compete with Android when they're lumbered with a massive licence cost for the software? It's certainly not going to happen at the low end of the scale and it's hard to see how it can happen in the middle either.
emacs has a far more sensible approach to interactive editing but is a big bloated pig of an editor, with it's own arcane terminology, obscure commands and maliciously obtuse configuration.
So given the choice of editor for some quick and dirty change I'd use neither of them. I'd choose an emacs-lite editor such as joe, jed, uemacs etc. And for more in depth editing I wouldn't use a console editor at all since there are lots of excellent standalone / IDE graphical editors.
I'm quite aware of the benefits of Wayland. But compositing in X11 is still better than nothing. It is still less overhead than sending damage events out to all applications incurring numerous context switches as each of them attempts to repaint themselves when a user drags a window around.
One thing I also noticed when I was running Firefox in GNOME 3 is how much space is wasted when the browser is supposed to be maximized. At the top you have the GNOME bar, then an app title bar doing essentially nothing, then a menu in Firefox. Firefox could probably make use of the menu in the GNOME bar (which normally just says Quit) and hide it's own menu by default like it does in Windows 7. And GNOME a maximized app's window with its own bar instead of showing both. A bit like Unity without that execrable global menu functionality. That arrangement would work so much better on smaller screens.
As in accelerated graphics. As in X11 and desktops have started taking advantage of compositing extensions and hardware acceleration to improve the desktop experience. Even if you don't want eye candy on your desktop, compositing makes the experience a LOT better since X11 won't be sending damage events out for processes to handle every time one window moves over the top of another.
I don't use KDE because it has WAY too many settings, menus, tabs and dialogs all mixed together with the common stuff buried amongst the advanced stuff. It's a kitchen sink of desktops and I'm pretty certain that it would have enjoyed far more success amongst end users and enterprises if it had really dialled back on this stuff. Arguably GNOME 3 goes too far in removing stuff but there is no arguing which desktop a novice would find easier to sit down and use with no experience.
That's a picture frame, not a tablet. One only has to look at comparative shots of the devices, accessories like cables / charges and the packaging to clearly see Samsung was ripping the iPad off.
I fail to see why it would be unethical to work for a pharmaceutical company. Drugs improve the quality of people's lives and save them outright in some instances. Even if there is animal testing involved, the immediate question is does the availability of high quality modelling tools reduce the amount of testing required on live subjects. My guess is that it would. Therefore what's unethical about that? And pharmaceuticals are only one aspect of medicine. I'm sure there is plenty of need for physic s simulation in orthopedic, podiatrics, prosthetics and so on.
The moral is don't use online password complexity calculators or hashers or rainbow lookups with your real password or hash.
To be fair to Apple, Samsung called a lot of this shit onto itself by so blatantly lifting design elements from the iPad. Other tablet manufacturers sensibly avoided giving Apple the ammunition to shoot them with by making their devices distinct.
Of course it may be that they put an idiot in charge of the look and feel for their developer tools. Given how they've already been one through one firestorm of criticism for using monochromatic icons that could well be the case too.
Even the most rigorously tested code that has been used in production for decades has bugs in it. It's virtually impossible to write bug free code let alone prove that it's bug free. Even stable software like TeX has bugs and it would certainly have many more if it was in active development.
If there is no economic or contractual incentive to fix software then don't fix it.
The average kinect game involves making some exaggerated flailing motions that map onto some canned animations. Even then it often screws up or gets confused. There's only so far you can go with that system. Sports / fitness / dance games are the main focus but there isn't much beyond that. There have been a few genuinely innovative attempts to use kinect in a novel way that have almost succeeded such as Once Upon a Monster but most games have been dire and people have gotten bored of it.