I replaced 50W halogens with 2W LEDs and there is no drop in light output. If anything the LEDs are slightly brighter. I agree there are some really crappy LED bulbs out there but the ones I bought from EcoPal.ie are great.
I just built a new house which has something like 32 GU10 spotlights built into the ceilings to provide lighting. An LED bulb uses ~1/25th the power of a traditional halogen so I could be turn on every single light in the house for little more than the cost of a single halogen. The initial outlay will pay for itself in a year or two. And I don't have to be climbing up ladders or risking my neck changing they so often because they last much longer.
The main issues to look for with LEDs is some of the cheaper ones give out a horrible ghostly white light. The box should say what colour temperature they output, and the best ones output 3200K warm white light similar to traditional incandescents. You wouldn't even know its an LED unless you stared at it. The other issue is only some bulbs work with dimmer switches, but there are models which do that too.
The case for LEDs in other kinds of fixtures is probably less clear cut. LEDs are fairly directional so they probably require some refractive covering to be useful in hang down bulbs. But in the meantime there are plenty of CFL solutions which again save a lot more than traditional incandescents. I really don't see why anyone would bother with incandescent bulbs unless they are ignorant of how much money they're losing or they have have highly specific needs that other kinds of bulbs do not provide.
it's the same feigned argument as when they refused to port DX10 to XP to boost Vista sales - uh - I mean it was because it's technically impossible... it's just that hackers ported it to XP later....
It isn't a feigned argument. Having development resources, development environments, build engineers, QA testers, release engineers + assorted managers to fix vanilla XP when it's already fixed by a service pack is a monumental waste of time. Just keeping a shoestring operation running would probably cost MS tens of millions of dollars in resources.
Of course they're not going to want to do it. I'm sure if you paid them enough money they might of course, but who could blame them?
Of course money has to do with it. If it didn't then everyone would stick with MS Office. After all, it's a decent enough suite, even if it's locked into MS Windows and other Microsoft products. I would not be surprised if IBM has realised its spending hundreds of millions on software licences, money that it doesn't need to and that is incentive enough to transition away.
As for other customers, I'm sure IBM's rationale is that if you need to exchange documents then either a) save/load them in.doc format, b) print them in PDF, c) make customers use ODF possibly through contractual agreement, d) allow employees to get special dispensation to install MS Word on a case by case basis.
What do we care?
They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.
You should care. It demonstrates that even a massive company like IBM is able to use a largely open source application suite in place of MS Office. If IBM can use it then there really shouldn't be much excuse or impediment for many others. Once MS Office is removed from the picture, what is the reason for using Windows again? The office suite is practically the key stone of the Microsoft-centric office. Remove that and there is very little reason for most workplace desktops to be using Windows at all.
I agree that the underlying file format is a very important change BTW, but it wouldn't be much good if there weren't a suite of software running over the top capable of meeting enterprise requirements.
To stretch the analogy... the body of a Linux operating system is composed of many, many different parts. It's like some demented taxidermist has stitched together lots of animal bits to make something either beautiful or horrific depending on your point of view.
GNU software may comprise a lot of it, but there is plenty of other code which has nothing to do with GNU and arguably makes the OS something people find useful for something. The whole "call it GNU/Linux" movement is just silly and frankly smacks of some kind of deep seated resentment that Linux succeeded where Hurd didn't.
Silverlight the runtime might work on Firefox but that is no guarantee that the Silverlight app will, or the HTML surrounding it for that matter. It is all too easy for devs to make assumptions about the DOM, or JavaScript that would break an app if its not running in the "right" browser.
The irony is that the zealots who make condescending remarks like RTFM, luser, Micro$oft etc. have probably done more to scare people away from Linux than Microsoft. Fortunately Linux is becoming more mainstream and that has a lot to do with non-intimidating and friendly distributions like Ubuntu. I think some zealots are probably angry about that too, that people can finally use Linux without needing to RTFM.
Team building exercises are a blight on co-operation. Getting a bunch of people who may have legitimate reason to not get along and forcing them together. The best part of them is complaining about them afterwards.
I have never once experienced a decent "team building exercise" except for voluntary bbq, drinks & meal functions where people can choose to attend or not as they see fit, and leave as they see fit. When people are forced to attend team building, especially excruciating management offsites, the only thing that happens is the company wastes a lot of time and money for everyone who attended.
Chrome has had security flaws too. Not that I sympathize with Microsoft since IE security has been swiss cheese for a long time and they wouldn't be such a target if they hadn't forced their browser onto so many desktops. But if ever Chrome, Safari, Opera or even Firefox got as big a market share as IE, they'd be the number 1 target for hackers too.
I don't believe any PC vendor would change the default unless they were being paid, or just angling for a better deal from Microsoft. I suppose the latter is possible too, but given their choice of browser I think its more likely it was a monetary deal.
Yup, that's probably it. Dell et al preload their machines with all sorts of unwanted, never asked for crap including Norton, MS Works etc. I just bought a new Dell and spent quite some cleaning all the unwanted junk & default links off the thing.
The Norton app was especially offensive because it pops up a box (with the close button helpfully disabled) forcing you to activate your 30 days whether you want to or not. Then it pops up again later to ask for registration info. I'm sure if I continued with the trial it would have popped up again and again pushing me to buy their product. It wasn't ransomware but it felt almost as sleazy.
While Chrome isn't a bad browser and certainly isn't anywhere as offensive as Norton, I really don't see any reason that a vendor would make it the default unless they were being paid to.
4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.
That really hasn't been my experience when I was using Windows: I wanted faster boxes such that I could play better games. How many people have upgraded computers to run newer versions of Windows/Office? In any case, why doesn't the FSF say in big, nasty, red letters: "Microsoft is making you spend money (excessively)!"? [add an OMGBBQROFL and exclamation marks if you think it makes the message more convincing].
It's not my experience either. Of course Microsoft releases new updates to its software. It's a way for the company to make money. I don't see the situation being ANY different from any Unix / Linux vendor that has to pay the bills. Either they charge for new versions, or they charge for support, or they charge for updates or they do a combination of all three.
Operating system releases are that close together either. They're usually 3 years apart and sometimes more. Microsoft are remarkably generous with their support too. XP appeared in 2001 and it's *still* got limited support from Microsoft and many brand new apps still support it. Compare and contrast to any other OS. I doubt many Linux distributions get support 8 years on, and if they do it certainly doesn't amount to more than a few security patches. It's easier to take aim at other OS vendors like Apple for pushing software and hardware updates on people than it is Microsoft.
Anyway Stallman does have a unique way of overcoming rounds and rounds of upgrades - implement a development cycle best described as glacial and more accurately moribund. Look at Emacs and Hurd for two examples of projects that are going nowhere fast.
I think you'd be pissed as hell if the next person who used your computer, or looked over your shoulder discovered what sites you were on. I'm not saying the tab restoration behaviour shouldn't exist but the current implementation is completely at odds with privacy settings the user may well have set. There should either be a check box or the value should be inferred from looking at the other privacy settings. For example if the user has set they don't want their browser history recorded, or has chosen to clear settings at shutdown, then they should not be shown what they were last looking at when the browser restarts.
The problem is it "crashes" just by shutting down Windows. Firefox frequently assumes for some reason it didn't shut down cleanly and sticks that message up when you reboot. Other times you simply might not be bothered to start the browser, or forget about this useful "feature".
The behaviour could easily be changed so it is controlled from a checkbox or intelligently inferred by looking at the privacy settings such as the remember browser history settings. The current behaviour is completely at odds with privacy.
Firefox has "helpful" feature where if it crashes it sticks up a "Well that was embarrassing" error which lists all the sites you were on when it went down and do you want to open them again. That's great except it completely pisses all over the privacy settings.
I'm sure that if you fire up about:config you might be able to tweak this behaviour but really by default it should be disabled, or at least disabled if history is set to 0. It's a monumental oversight to leave it the way it is and I hope it is fixed.
Aside from (some) deterrent effect, there is no doubt that CCTV allows police to spot trouble and mobilize for it, and come in and bust it up if its ongoing, or direct emergency services to an accident or fire, or use CCTV to secure a conviction for some offence caught on camera. There might be nothing to "solve" in any of these cases but that doesn't mean that camera's don't have a practical use.
I don't know the details of the system, but it wouldn't be hard at all to make a ticket machine readable, e.g. by putting a barcode or some other unique machine readable code on it. Then give a scanner / reader to people who check for tickets and that's that. If you're worried that lazy meter readers won't bother scanning tickets, ensure the scanner also logs each ticket and it's GPS location as it is scanned.
There are plenty of transport options of which you missed buses, local train services, crossrail, private coach operators, mopeds, motorcycles, electric/hybrid vehicles, taxis. Yes the tube is fairly expensive but public transport in London is still pretty good considering the load it works under.
As for cars, screw cars. The congestion charge was introduced in because cars ground London to a standstill. For 95% of commuters there is no reason at all to drive in anyway since central London (where charging occurs) is very well supplied with tube and bus routes. If you absolutely must drive and don't want to pay the charge, you have plenty of other choices, including driving hybrids and electric vehicles which incur no charge.
Does that mean London's transport system is perfect? Far from it but it works and works quite well aside from when the unions decide to go on strike.
Scalable computing is the answer. In theory, if you write a cloud app, it can serve from 1 to a million users without you having to lift a finger to make it happen. If more users hit your app, the "cloud" dedicates more instances to serving them. Amazon, Google, MS or whomever take care of it all. Of course in practice it probably doesn't scale that seamlessly and you have to pay the host based on CPU / disk / database/whatever consumption but you get the idea.
As for why you might choose cloud over your own solution, the answer probably depends on what you're trying to do. Paying for bandwidth, administration, storage etc. isn't cheap and if demand bounces all over the place then you're either going to end up paying too much or not enough.
AOL had in Nullsoft the ability to build iTunes years before iTunes existed. Virtually everyone used WinAmp at the time and it would have been a natural progression to throw in ripping and a store front. In Time Warner they had a ready supply of music and video content to sell content. There was potential there but AOL was just completely clueless as history has proven.
Who says it won't return in some form? But if it means that much to you, go buy a PS3 second hand containing it. Or just keep your PS2.
* Better video support, especially MKV files. (Yes, you can convert MKV files to be playable. No, I don't think that's good enough.)
The PS3 already plays MPEG2, ASP, AVC and VC-1 media from a variety of containers, from local storage and remote. It probably has the best multimedia support of any console. Yes MKV would be nice, but I suspect it will only happen if Sony wants DIVX 7 certification. I'd also note that MKV support by itself is completely meaningless since it's what's in the container that matters. MKV is just a container not a magic wand to make random content play.
* Ability to play media files over a Windows/Samba share, rather than having to use media server software.
Would be nice, but it's hardly a big deal. There are plenty of DLNA servers and you can also get media by plugging in an external drive, or just downloading it through a browser.
* Ability to backup the PS3 over a LAN automatically.
Again it would be nice, but I'd prefer first to be able to selectively back up content. My HDD is full of movies which are duplicates so I see no reason backing up again.
* Less klunky web browsing
It would be nice if they dumped Netfront for WebKit or Gecko. Realistically the crappy Netfront browser would still have to kick around for legacy in-game browsing.
* 1080i support for more games. (Since some TVs are 1080/480 only, and downgrade 720 down to 480.)
1080i support is never going to be mandatory. 1080i/480p sets are out of the dark ages. Virtually every HD set in the last 4 years supports 1080i, 720p and even 1080p. Sony are not going piss off game devs by mandating something which a small and ever diminishing number of users even care about.
The AOL/TW merger could and should have been a massive success. AOL was at the time THE premium content delivery network, and Time Warner has scads of content in print, music, video, TV - just the sort of thing people might pay to see. AOL was just starting broadband and Time Warner had the infrastructure. It really could have lead to a service where you got content and broadband all for some fairly reasonable price.
But back to reality... AOL were supremely arrogant and didn't know innovation if it bit them on the ass (witness how they handled Netscape & Nullsoft). And Time Warner were an old school media conglomerate terrified of the internet. Neither side had a clue how to work "synergies" and the whole lot just collapsed in a heap. I'm sure Steve Case made a mint, but the whole deal was a disaster from the get go.
Wow, these posts suggest Boeing has completely forgotten all the lessons it promoted for the 777 jet. There was a TV series and a book called 21st Century Jet which detailed the construction of the 777 and it was, as far as projects go, a triumph. It is a fascinating read. From memory one of the reason it was such a success was because they fostered an atmosphere of complete openess, not getting into blame wars and generally just knuckling down and solving issues. Sounds like all that has been forgotten in their rush to get their "dreamliner" out in time to compete with the Airbus 380.
EVE has a free market economy with buyers in sellers and price goes up and down as a result of rarity and supply vs demand. Prices could even be sky high in one place of the galaxy and much more affordable somewhere else. It's hard to say if inflation has come to EVE, but expansion packs certainly have. Most of the original hardware has been superceded by tech level II stuff which is a lot more money. If you wish to stay level with your peers you'll have to fork a lot more to do it.
If you want to know what marriage will be like, just go live with the girl for a year or two. If you get on, if you don't argue, if don't annoy each other, if you can see a future together then go get married. If you can't do this then split up. I really don't understand why any further hyper-analysis is required. Books will dish up all sorts of blanket aphorisms and pat advice but at the end of the day it's up to you and her to make it work, not some stupid book.
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I replaced 50W halogens with 2W LEDs and there is no drop in light output. If anything the LEDs are slightly brighter. I agree there are some really crappy LED bulbs out there but the ones I bought from EcoPal.ie are great.
The main issues to look for with LEDs is some of the cheaper ones give out a horrible ghostly white light. The box should say what colour temperature they output, and the best ones output 3200K warm white light similar to traditional incandescents. You wouldn't even know its an LED unless you stared at it. The other issue is only some bulbs work with dimmer switches, but there are models which do that too.
The case for LEDs in other kinds of fixtures is probably less clear cut. LEDs are fairly directional so they probably require some refractive covering to be useful in hang down bulbs. But in the meantime there are plenty of CFL solutions which again save a lot more than traditional incandescents. I really don't see why anyone would bother with incandescent bulbs unless they are ignorant of how much money they're losing or they have have highly specific needs that other kinds of bulbs do not provide.
It isn't a feigned argument. Having development resources, development environments, build engineers, QA testers, release engineers + assorted managers to fix vanilla XP when it's already fixed by a service pack is a monumental waste of time. Just keeping a shoestring operation running would probably cost MS tens of millions of dollars in resources.
Of course they're not going to want to do it. I'm sure if you paid them enough money they might of course, but who could blame them?
As for other customers, I'm sure IBM's rationale is that if you need to exchange documents then either a) save/load them in .doc format, b) print them in PDF, c) make customers use ODF possibly through contractual agreement, d) allow employees to get special dispensation to install MS Word on a case by case basis.
You should care. It demonstrates that even a massive company like IBM is able to use a largely open source application suite in place of MS Office. If IBM can use it then there really shouldn't be much excuse or impediment for many others. Once MS Office is removed from the picture, what is the reason for using Windows again? The office suite is practically the key stone of the Microsoft-centric office. Remove that and there is very little reason for most workplace desktops to be using Windows at all.
I agree that the underlying file format is a very important change BTW, but it wouldn't be much good if there weren't a suite of software running over the top capable of meeting enterprise requirements.
To stretch the analogy... the body of a Linux operating system is composed of many, many different parts. It's like some demented taxidermist has stitched together lots of animal bits to make something either beautiful or horrific depending on your point of view. GNU software may comprise a lot of it, but there is plenty of other code which has nothing to do with GNU and arguably makes the OS something people find useful for something. The whole "call it GNU/Linux" movement is just silly and frankly smacks of some kind of deep seated resentment that Linux succeeded where Hurd didn't.
Silverlight the runtime might work on Firefox but that is no guarantee that the Silverlight app will, or the HTML surrounding it for that matter. It is all too easy for devs to make assumptions about the DOM, or JavaScript that would break an app if its not running in the "right" browser.
The irony is that the zealots who make condescending remarks like RTFM, luser, Micro$oft etc. have probably done more to scare people away from Linux than Microsoft. Fortunately Linux is becoming more mainstream and that has a lot to do with non-intimidating and friendly distributions like Ubuntu. I think some zealots are probably angry about that too, that people can finally use Linux without needing to RTFM.
I have never once experienced a decent "team building exercise" except for voluntary bbq, drinks & meal functions where people can choose to attend or not as they see fit, and leave as they see fit. When people are forced to attend team building, especially excruciating management offsites, the only thing that happens is the company wastes a lot of time and money for everyone who attended.
I don't believe any PC vendor would change the default unless they were being paid, or just angling for a better deal from Microsoft. I suppose the latter is possible too, but given their choice of browser I think its more likely it was a monetary deal.
The Norton app was especially offensive because it pops up a box (with the close button helpfully disabled) forcing you to activate your 30 days whether you want to or not. Then it pops up again later to ask for registration info. I'm sure if I continued with the trial it would have popped up again and again pushing me to buy their product. It wasn't ransomware but it felt almost as sleazy.
While Chrome isn't a bad browser and certainly isn't anywhere as offensive as Norton, I really don't see any reason that a vendor would make it the default unless they were being paid to.
4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.
That really hasn't been my experience when I was using Windows: I wanted faster boxes such that I could play better games. How many people have upgraded computers to run newer versions of Windows/Office? In any case, why doesn't the FSF say in big, nasty, red letters: "Microsoft is making you spend money (excessively)!"? [add an OMGBBQROFL and exclamation marks if you think it makes the message more convincing].
It's not my experience either. Of course Microsoft releases new updates to its software. It's a way for the company to make money. I don't see the situation being ANY different from any Unix / Linux vendor that has to pay the bills. Either they charge for new versions, or they charge for support, or they charge for updates or they do a combination of all three.
Operating system releases are that close together either. They're usually 3 years apart and sometimes more. Microsoft are remarkably generous with their support too. XP appeared in 2001 and it's *still* got limited support from Microsoft and many brand new apps still support it. Compare and contrast to any other OS. I doubt many Linux distributions get support 8 years on, and if they do it certainly doesn't amount to more than a few security patches. It's easier to take aim at other OS vendors like Apple for pushing software and hardware updates on people than it is Microsoft.
Anyway Stallman does have a unique way of overcoming rounds and rounds of upgrades - implement a development cycle best described as glacial and more accurately moribund. Look at Emacs and Hurd for two examples of projects that are going nowhere fast.
I think you'd be pissed as hell if the next person who used your computer, or looked over your shoulder discovered what sites you were on. I'm not saying the tab restoration behaviour shouldn't exist but the current implementation is completely at odds with privacy settings the user may well have set. There should either be a check box or the value should be inferred from looking at the other privacy settings. For example if the user has set they don't want their browser history recorded, or has chosen to clear settings at shutdown, then they should not be shown what they were last looking at when the browser restarts.
The behaviour could easily be changed so it is controlled from a checkbox or intelligently inferred by looking at the privacy settings such as the remember browser history settings. The current behaviour is completely at odds with privacy.
I'm sure that if you fire up about:config you might be able to tweak this behaviour but really by default it should be disabled, or at least disabled if history is set to 0. It's a monumental oversight to leave it the way it is and I hope it is fixed.
Aside from (some) deterrent effect, there is no doubt that CCTV allows police to spot trouble and mobilize for it, and come in and bust it up if its ongoing, or direct emergency services to an accident or fire, or use CCTV to secure a conviction for some offence caught on camera. There might be nothing to "solve" in any of these cases but that doesn't mean that camera's don't have a practical use.
I don't know the details of the system, but it wouldn't be hard at all to make a ticket machine readable, e.g. by putting a barcode or some other unique machine readable code on it. Then give a scanner / reader to people who check for tickets and that's that. If you're worried that lazy meter readers won't bother scanning tickets, ensure the scanner also logs each ticket and it's GPS location as it is scanned.
There are plenty of transport options of which you missed buses, local train services, crossrail, private coach operators, mopeds, motorcycles, electric/hybrid vehicles, taxis. Yes the tube is fairly expensive but public transport in London is still pretty good considering the load it works under.
As for cars, screw cars. The congestion charge was introduced in because cars ground London to a standstill. For 95% of commuters there is no reason at all to drive in anyway since central London (where charging occurs) is very well supplied with tube and bus routes. If you absolutely must drive and don't want to pay the charge, you have plenty of other choices, including driving hybrids and electric vehicles which incur no charge.
Does that mean London's transport system is perfect? Far from it but it works and works quite well aside from when the unions decide to go on strike.
As for why you might choose cloud over your own solution, the answer probably depends on what you're trying to do. Paying for bandwidth, administration, storage etc. isn't cheap and if demand bounces all over the place then you're either going to end up paying too much or not enough.
AOL had in Nullsoft the ability to build iTunes years before iTunes existed. Virtually everyone used WinAmp at the time and it would have been a natural progression to throw in ripping and a store front. In Time Warner they had a ready supply of music and video content to sell content. There was potential there but AOL was just completely clueless as history has proven.
Who says it won't return in some form? But if it means that much to you, go buy a PS3 second hand containing it. Or just keep your PS2.
* Better video support, especially MKV files. (Yes, you can convert MKV files to be playable. No, I don't think that's good enough.)
The PS3 already plays MPEG2, ASP, AVC and VC-1 media from a variety of containers, from local storage and remote. It probably has the best multimedia support of any console. Yes MKV would be nice, but I suspect it will only happen if Sony wants DIVX 7 certification. I'd also note that MKV support by itself is completely meaningless since it's what's in the container that matters. MKV is just a container not a magic wand to make random content play.
* Ability to play media files over a Windows/Samba share, rather than having to use media server software.
Would be nice, but it's hardly a big deal. There are plenty of DLNA servers and you can also get media by plugging in an external drive, or just downloading it through a browser.
* Ability to backup the PS3 over a LAN automatically.
Again it would be nice, but I'd prefer first to be able to selectively back up content. My HDD is full of movies which are duplicates so I see no reason backing up again.
* Less klunky web browsing
It would be nice if they dumped Netfront for WebKit or Gecko. Realistically the crappy Netfront browser would still have to kick around for legacy in-game browsing.
* 1080i support for more games. (Since some TVs are 1080/480 only, and downgrade 720 down to 480.)
1080i support is never going to be mandatory. 1080i/480p sets are out of the dark ages. Virtually every HD set in the last 4 years supports 1080i, 720p and even 1080p. Sony are not going piss off game devs by mandating something which a small and ever diminishing number of users even care about.
The AOL/TW merger could and should have been a massive success. AOL was at the time THE premium content delivery network, and Time Warner has scads of content in print, music, video, TV - just the sort of thing people might pay to see. AOL was just starting broadband and Time Warner had the infrastructure. It really could have lead to a service where you got content and broadband all for some fairly reasonable price. But back to reality... AOL were supremely arrogant and didn't know innovation if it bit them on the ass (witness how they handled Netscape & Nullsoft). And Time Warner were an old school media conglomerate terrified of the internet. Neither side had a clue how to work "synergies" and the whole lot just collapsed in a heap. I'm sure Steve Case made a mint, but the whole deal was a disaster from the get go.
Wow, these posts suggest Boeing has completely forgotten all the lessons it promoted for the 777 jet. There was a TV series and a book called 21st Century Jet which detailed the construction of the 777 and it was, as far as projects go, a triumph. It is a fascinating read. From memory one of the reason it was such a success was because they fostered an atmosphere of complete openess, not getting into blame wars and generally just knuckling down and solving issues. Sounds like all that has been forgotten in their rush to get their "dreamliner" out in time to compete with the Airbus 380.
EVE has a free market economy with buyers in sellers and price goes up and down as a result of rarity and supply vs demand. Prices could even be sky high in one place of the galaxy and much more affordable somewhere else. It's hard to say if inflation has come to EVE, but expansion packs certainly have. Most of the original hardware has been superceded by tech level II stuff which is a lot more money. If you wish to stay level with your peers you'll have to fork a lot more to do it.
If you want to know what marriage will be like, just go live with the girl for a year or two. If you get on, if you don't argue, if don't annoy each other, if you can see a future together then go get married. If you can't do this then split up. I really don't understand why any further hyper-analysis is required. Books will dish up all sorts of blanket aphorisms and pat advice but at the end of the day it's up to you and her to make it work, not some stupid book.