I think that any organization still using XP has failed an IT test. This does not mean that the IT people suck but that some aspect of IT sucks. It could be that the IT people can't proactively spend money to avoid expenses such as this and can only spend money when they have to. This is broken. I wouldn't be surprised if some dolts in these organizations are now saying that the budget to upgrade from XP has been eaten by these licensing costs.
What I have seen before is that some minor OS upgrade comes along and the various parties say, "Hey we need a minor upgrade to our software to keep up." this is then refused so after the next OS update they say, "He we pretty desperately need a medium sized upgrade to catch up." this is refused. This goes on and on until basically they are screaming, "We MUST upgrade now and the upgrade is a major overhaul of how everything works." then the worst thing in the world happens, they agree. The problem being that some sleazy mega-sized consulting company comes in and starts throwing around "best-practices" and $50 million later a completely useless system that is actually far worse than the 12 year old pile of crap they have is born. Then another $50 million is spent getting it to barely work.
The probable cost to have had a continuous stream of upgrades in the first place? Maybe $500,000 per year.
I don't know about that. I dropped Godaddy years ago because of what they were doing. And now I have dropped Dropbox for hiring a potential war criminal. It might not be a Watts riot but I know at least 3 people who have dropped Dropbox; this might not seem like many but that is a good chunk of people who I know personally who use it. Plus I will never recommend it again, which was how most of these people discovered it.
Plus depending on your use of Dropbox there are far better services. If you are simply storing and sharing files with a select few then Google drive gives you 15 GB which is a huge amount of storage in comparison.
Plus with someone like Rice onboard, how long before Dropbox ends up in an incestuous relationship with the NSA? So if I were any company that hadn't already dumped all US data providers it is now time to look into things like opencloud anyway.
If you have ever met the local SAR types I am willing to bet that they were instrumental in shutting him down. The last thing in the world they would want is their "Seniority" to be challenged by some upstart with easy to use technology. If you want to see the living defintion of a blowhard then go meet your local SAR.
I am not talking about professionals such as the coast guard but these local types who periodically call for hikers to be licensed and whatnot.
Think about how easy SAR could be with semi-intelligent drones. They could blanket an area, looking for heat signatures(or other sensory clues) from a very low altitude, and then when one was found could potentially fly right down to the source for a look. Also they could fly in dangerously poor weather, at night, and at little cost. Also the mathematical patterns they could be doing would be pushing up against 100% efficiency so there would be little human input required.
In what was there fluctuations? This might seem like a glib question but, I actually am interested in the answer. Their theory seems to cover the idea of where all the stuff (including space) came from. But where did the "thing" that was fluctuating come from? And no I am not implying religion.
I would say in the above case that the above cop was instantly demoted to helpful citizen. If the police are arresting someone and the guy is getting the better of them and you jump in and grab a leg, I am fairly sure that in most jurisdictions you would be fine. The key would be that he would have to fully recognize that he was no longer a cop. So no stop or I'll shoot. No telling people to get down. No putting handcuffs on people. Just assisting at most.
The key is that a copy without a recorder is like you are walking down the street and say, "Hey buddy stop right there while I search you for drugs." then you have just mugged someone.
Again the above provides the incentive for the cops to get recorders that aren't easily messed with.
Another thing that should be is that a cop can only be a cop while in uniform and their badge number in large letters. A detective not in uniform should be an investigator but being not in uniform should have zero powers of arrest. This might seem odd but it prevents cops from wandering around threatening people with their arrest powers and guns.
Actually I would be black and white on this. Then abusing power would simply be way too hard. I would be perfectly happy that a cop could say stop and if you saw that he didn't have a camera that you could flip him the bird and walk away. If he tried stopping you then you could take him down like any nut job who tried to stop you from leaving. Then when he would say you resisted arrest you would say, I want him charged with assault and unlawful confinement. The judge would say, no camera, not a policeman.
This would be great for these power hungry cops who pull out their badges when the bouncer tries to throw the bum out of a bar and other similar mini napoleon behavior.
Yes if Aliens landed later today and told me that I could go out and join a highly advanced galactic civilization full of opportunity, health benefits, education, and wonder; I am pretty sure that my family and I would be gone in a heartbeat.
But at the same time I would hope that the Aliens would vaccinate me against that fungus that melts your brain,
Here is a simple rule. If a cop doesn't have an active recording device then he isn't a cop; he is just some guy waving a gun and threatening people. Also invalidate any evidence that a "cop" gathers while not on video and audio. So if a cop searches someone and "finds" drugs and there is no video then it didn't happen; that combined with the stop and frisk being considered a mugging these cops would be polishing the lenses and making sure the equipment was in perfect working order.
I am going to go out on a limb; but maybe the solution is to figure out which diseases are typically killing all these people, then put together a tasty treat that is filled with weakened strains of this and that, and air drop them into areas where these people might be living.
Then stage two might be to hunt them sci-fi style with drones and fire vaccine darts into their asses.
Now I am going to go even further out on a limb; To do anything less would be a condemnation on our lack of civilization. If the people of the world have to spend a few billion saving these people then I think that then we might be able to call ourselves at least marginally civilized.
Look at the effort being spent on finding a missing plane. We are not doing it to find the plane so much as to find out what happened so that we don't have it happen to us. Maybe we can even find a selfish reason to save these people; so let's assume that one of their medicine men knows something pretty cool.
The whole XP debate actually exposes a deeper Microsoft problem; which is that if Windows XP were to have been kept up to date and it was easier to transfer the old data and OS to a newer machine that most people wouldn't have updated. In reality all the versions since XP offer as their primary feature software that no longer works with XP.
But at the same time if Microsoft hadn't tried to gouge people for every upgrade and simply autoupgraded the entire OS as part of the regular update process then the whole XP debate would not exist. There would be like 20,000 people still running XP.
In Canada the rules are pretty much iron clad. You can't accept a piece of gum for so much as saying the word, "Airplane". This might be an exaggeration but not by much. If I have a private plane and am flying it around the rules are about what you would expect or maybe even less. But once you cross that magical threshold of taking money for flying all kinds of insurance, regulations, plane requirements, and changes in maintenance requirements.
While I am speaking about Canada, I suspect that the rules for most western countries aren't going to be that different. Basically you will have trouble finding a more regulated industry than the aviation industry, and where these regulations might have gaps the insurance companies will be standing right there.
These guys might be on a sounder footing if they were to start selling a DIY brain surgery kits.
As a developer I don't think that I could get below 200GB usage. My mother on the other hand could probably get below 10gb. So if someone sold a really fast 30GB cheap SSD I would probably go around and swap most of my family's drives.
The key problem is that a reasonably fast SSD isn't priced that different than a new low end laptop. So if my family asked, should I tuck an SSD into my old machine I might just suggest they go to staples and buy some low end laptop instead.
If I had to guess, we will all find out that there was some price fixing hanky-panky like there was with, monitors, memory, and hard drives. The lawsuit will be out and the prices will go into freefall.
For any professional I would say that below 500GB and there will be trouble. The key is that there is a nice list of software(beyond the obvious) that really benefits from an SSD and one of the worst hogs would be Virtual Machines. These piggies really benefit from an SSD as well as lots of RAM; plus VMs will eat up gobs of HD space as well with those gobs growing in 10+GB spurts.
I keep my desktop as clean as is possible and presently am using around 200GB. I could easily use another 100GB over the next month or so. Then I have an external drive with all the goodies such as downloaded lectures and whatnot for later viewing. So a 256GB SSD would be a disaster whereas a 500GB would leave me with some breathing room.
But with Costco having a 4GB drive available for $120 I can't see external storage as being much of an issue for most people.
First is that it must focus on doing things that watches can do well. So the time, the date, alarms, etc.
Second is that it should not try to do anything that a watch is terrible at. Such as no making notes, text messaging, complicated mapping, etc.
But the last and more important thing is that it do something very phone friendly that way too cool. This would be something like having a navigation system where you enter your destination on some other device or by voice and then the phone shows very simple navigation cues such as vibrate when you should turn and simple arrows and other numbers. A map would just be stupid. The same with almost every other app. They must be extra simple. Focus on the quick check of the wrist vs any input.
This is very important. Data basically can not be input into this tiny device. It must be for quick data consumption only. The rule should be that if the data needs more than a glance then it shouldn't be coming from the watch.
Personally, at this point, I can't see the watch being much use as a stand alone device. It needs to be tied to a phone. But as batteries and electronics get better then an LTE version might be feasible. One of the most important things is that this thing not be a big bulky hassle.
One last ask of Apple; please don't put that stupid carousel interface in.
I will be curious how one will go about buying things for the watch. It almost certainly will have to be on a separate device. But maybe you could tell iCloud what you want sent to the watch and then it will go. But if it is paired to a device that must accompany it then it will be easy.
You could also have an app that makes everyone beautiful and happy.
I am certain that when you can do a full overlay that people will be able to alter their reality so that instead of walking down Main St that they are walking in a Star Wars/Star Trek/etc fantasy world. The idea is that everything that they see will be based upon the reality in front of them but Storm Troopers instead of the actual policeman, floating cars instead of the actual car. Then when you cross the street, if you avoid the fake floating speeder then you will also avoid the real Ford Fusion.
Plus the reduction of concentrated pollution in a city center. The other apples and oranges problem is that often an electric car is a second car. The electric car is used primarily for commuting while the gas car is the weekend road trip car. To me this is too much of trying to fit the data to match a desired conclusion. One could then make an argument that by having a second "commuting" car that the pollution has actually gone up some more. On the other hand, how do you go about putting a reduction of noise pollution onto their spreadsheet?
My tree is taller than your bush is basically what I am hearing from Masda.
Personally I would love an electric car because I would be giving the finger to Big Oil every time I drove past their dwindling gas stations. That is worth 3 Polar bears, and 2.5 baby seals for me.
If you have your electric car connected to solar panels (becoming increasingly common as they are cheap as dirt) then any attempt to compare the CO2 as generated by a fossil fueled car is bogus.
Maybe if the power in your hood comes from coal and crude oil then maybe yes. But many people are Nuclear, Solar, Wind, and Hydro powered. Plus I suspect that people in areas with plenty of green power are more likely to drive an electric car. People in an oil producing area are more likely to not only drive a normal fossil fueled car but actually a diesel powered pick up truck.
I would mostly agree with this. There are certain products that once you see them you get a feeling that you must have it now!!!
There are even products that you think you must have but then they don't get used.
And once in a blue moon there is a product that does take some getting used to. But these are quite rare.
People for instance complain that the Segway is too expensive. But even free I am not sure that many people would regularly use them. The Roomba seems brilliant but most people who buy them have a long list of disappointments. (I still want one). Even sensible things like radar detectors (where they are legal) make a whole lot of sense yet most people don't buy them and most people speed.
So I see Google Glass being even lower on the list than MS Surface for products that they are marketing hard with little consumer buy in.
I suspect that most people will think that people are walking around with google glass displaying porn. Plus the #1 app is going to be a filter that takes people around you and shows what they will look like naked. Or will do a face recognition and search a database to see if they ever put naked photos on the internet.
So my new myth is that 69% of people will Google glass are mostly being pervs.
As far as I am concerned Python didn't exist until about 8 years ago when I suddenly heard about it more and more.
In a way I see Python prior to 8 years ago as a language before its time. On a computer before that it was just too damn slow. But now with regular desktop computers pushing into the Teraflop range the speed of the computer will usually make up for any speed problems with Python. So development time is the only speed that most should worry about. Then if something does need optimization you can start with your code, try something like Numpy, maybe PyPy, and then start looking into OpenCL or a C++ extension type technology.
Knuth talked about premature optimization being the root of all evil, I have realized that using languages that are potentially faster like C++ is effectively premature optimization.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that any organization still using XP has failed an IT test. This does not mean that the IT people suck but that some aspect of IT sucks. It could be that the IT people can't proactively spend money to avoid expenses such as this and can only spend money when they have to. This is broken. I wouldn't be surprised if some dolts in these organizations are now saying that the budget to upgrade from XP has been eaten by these licensing costs.
What I have seen before is that some minor OS upgrade comes along and the various parties say, "Hey we need a minor upgrade to our software to keep up." this is then refused so after the next OS update they say, "He we pretty desperately need a medium sized upgrade to catch up." this is refused. This goes on and on until basically they are screaming, "We MUST upgrade now and the upgrade is a major overhaul of how everything works." then the worst thing in the world happens, they agree. The problem being that some sleazy mega-sized consulting company comes in and starts throwing around "best-practices" and $50 million later a completely useless system that is actually far worse than the 12 year old pile of crap they have is born. Then another $50 million is spent getting it to barely work.
The probable cost to have had a continuous stream of upgrades in the first place? Maybe $500,000 per year.
I don't know about that. I dropped Godaddy years ago because of what they were doing. And now I have dropped Dropbox for hiring a potential war criminal. It might not be a Watts riot but I know at least 3 people who have dropped Dropbox; this might not seem like many but that is a good chunk of people who I know personally who use it. Plus I will never recommend it again, which was how most of these people discovered it.
Plus depending on your use of Dropbox there are far better services. If you are simply storing and sharing files with a select few then Google drive gives you 15 GB which is a huge amount of storage in comparison.
Plus with someone like Rice onboard, how long before Dropbox ends up in an incestuous relationship with the NSA? So if I were any company that hadn't already dumped all US data providers it is now time to look into things like opencloud anyway.
If you have ever met the local SAR types I am willing to bet that they were instrumental in shutting him down. The last thing in the world they would want is their "Seniority" to be challenged by some upstart with easy to use technology. If you want to see the living defintion of a blowhard then go meet your local SAR.
I am not talking about professionals such as the coast guard but these local types who periodically call for hikers to be licensed and whatnot.
Think about how easy SAR could be with semi-intelligent drones. They could blanket an area, looking for heat signatures(or other sensory clues) from a very low altitude, and then when one was found could potentially fly right down to the source for a look. Also they could fly in dangerously poor weather, at night, and at little cost. Also the mathematical patterns they could be doing would be pushing up against 100% efficiency so there would be little human input required.
In what was there fluctuations? This might seem like a glib question but, I actually am interested in the answer. Their theory seems to cover the idea of where all the stuff (including space) came from. But where did the "thing" that was fluctuating come from? And no I am not implying religion.
I would say in the above case that the above cop was instantly demoted to helpful citizen. If the police are arresting someone and the guy is getting the better of them and you jump in and grab a leg, I am fairly sure that in most jurisdictions you would be fine. The key would be that he would have to fully recognize that he was no longer a cop. So no stop or I'll shoot. No telling people to get down. No putting handcuffs on people. Just assisting at most.
The key is that a copy without a recorder is like you are walking down the street and say, "Hey buddy stop right there while I search you for drugs." then you have just mugged someone.
Again the above provides the incentive for the cops to get recorders that aren't easily messed with.
Another thing that should be is that a cop can only be a cop while in uniform and their badge number in large letters. A detective not in uniform should be an investigator but being not in uniform should have zero powers of arrest. This might seem odd but it prevents cops from wandering around threatening people with their arrest powers and guns.
Actually I would be black and white on this. Then abusing power would simply be way too hard. I would be perfectly happy that a cop could say stop and if you saw that he didn't have a camera that you could flip him the bird and walk away. If he tried stopping you then you could take him down like any nut job who tried to stop you from leaving. Then when he would say you resisted arrest you would say, I want him charged with assault and unlawful confinement. The judge would say, no camera, not a policeman.
This would be great for these power hungry cops who pull out their badges when the bouncer tries to throw the bum out of a bar and other similar mini napoleon behavior.
Yes if Aliens landed later today and told me that I could go out and join a highly advanced galactic civilization full of opportunity, health benefits, education, and wonder; I am pretty sure that my family and I would be gone in a heartbeat.
But at the same time I would hope that the Aliens would vaccinate me against that fungus that melts your brain,
Here is a simple rule. If a cop doesn't have an active recording device then he isn't a cop; he is just some guy waving a gun and threatening people. Also invalidate any evidence that a "cop" gathers while not on video and audio. So if a cop searches someone and "finds" drugs and there is no video then it didn't happen; that combined with the stop and frisk being considered a mugging these cops would be polishing the lenses and making sure the equipment was in perfect working order.
I am going to go out on a limb; but maybe the solution is to figure out which diseases are typically killing all these people, then put together a tasty treat that is filled with weakened strains of this and that, and air drop them into areas where these people might be living.
Then stage two might be to hunt them sci-fi style with drones and fire vaccine darts into their asses.
Now I am going to go even further out on a limb; To do anything less would be a condemnation on our lack of civilization. If the people of the world have to spend a few billion saving these people then I think that then we might be able to call ourselves at least marginally civilized.
Look at the effort being spent on finding a missing plane. We are not doing it to find the plane so much as to find out what happened so that we don't have it happen to us. Maybe we can even find a selfish reason to save these people; so let's assume that one of their medicine men knows something pretty cool.
The whole XP debate actually exposes a deeper Microsoft problem; which is that if Windows XP were to have been kept up to date and it was easier to transfer the old data and OS to a newer machine that most people wouldn't have updated. In reality all the versions since XP offer as their primary feature software that no longer works with XP.
But at the same time if Microsoft hadn't tried to gouge people for every upgrade and simply autoupgraded the entire OS as part of the regular update process then the whole XP debate would not exist. There would be like 20,000 people still running XP.
In Canada the rules are pretty much iron clad. You can't accept a piece of gum for so much as saying the word, "Airplane". This might be an exaggeration but not by much. If I have a private plane and am flying it around the rules are about what you would expect or maybe even less. But once you cross that magical threshold of taking money for flying all kinds of insurance, regulations, plane requirements, and changes in maintenance requirements.
While I am speaking about Canada, I suspect that the rules for most western countries aren't going to be that different. Basically you will have trouble finding a more regulated industry than the aviation industry, and where these regulations might have gaps the insurance companies will be standing right there.
These guys might be on a sounder footing if they were to start selling a DIY brain surgery kits.
As a developer I don't think that I could get below 200GB usage. My mother on the other hand could probably get below 10gb. So if someone sold a really fast 30GB cheap SSD I would probably go around and swap most of my family's drives.
The key problem is that a reasonably fast SSD isn't priced that different than a new low end laptop. So if my family asked, should I tuck an SSD into my old machine I might just suggest they go to staples and buy some low end laptop instead.
If I had to guess, we will all find out that there was some price fixing hanky-panky like there was with, monitors, memory, and hard drives. The lawsuit will be out and the prices will go into freefall.
For any professional I would say that below 500GB and there will be trouble. The key is that there is a nice list of software(beyond the obvious) that really benefits from an SSD and one of the worst hogs would be Virtual Machines. These piggies really benefit from an SSD as well as lots of RAM; plus VMs will eat up gobs of HD space as well with those gobs growing in 10+GB spurts.
I keep my desktop as clean as is possible and presently am using around 200GB. I could easily use another 100GB over the next month or so. Then I have an external drive with all the goodies such as downloaded lectures and whatnot for later viewing. So a 256GB SSD would be a disaster whereas a 500GB would leave me with some breathing room.
But with Costco having a 4GB drive available for $120 I can't see external storage as being much of an issue for most people.
As an April fools joke they should have announced that all the bloatware on the machine would also be opensource.
I fully agree with your urine pants.
I am impressed with Siri, When "What is the second derrivative of two x to the fifth." gives you a correct answer then coooool.
If you keep your questions within a sensible domain then the range of useful answers is pretty good. The watch could have much more of the same.
Good science fiction generally had watches or something similar. Bad science fiction generally had Google glass.
Generally, not without exceptions, but generally.
There are three keys to a successful smart watch.
First is that it must focus on doing things that watches can do well. So the time, the date, alarms, etc.
Second is that it should not try to do anything that a watch is terrible at. Such as no making notes, text messaging, complicated mapping, etc.
But the last and more important thing is that it do something very phone friendly that way too cool. This would be something like having a navigation system where you enter your destination on some other device or by voice and then the phone shows very simple navigation cues such as vibrate when you should turn and simple arrows and other numbers. A map would just be stupid. The same with almost every other app. They must be extra simple. Focus on the quick check of the wrist vs any input.
This is very important. Data basically can not be input into this tiny device. It must be for quick data consumption only. The rule should be that if the data needs more than a glance then it shouldn't be coming from the watch.
Personally, at this point, I can't see the watch being much use as a stand alone device. It needs to be tied to a phone. But as batteries and electronics get better then an LTE version might be feasible. One of the most important things is that this thing not be a big bulky hassle.
One last ask of Apple; please don't put that stupid carousel interface in.
I will be curious how one will go about buying things for the watch. It almost certainly will have to be on a separate device. But maybe you could tell iCloud what you want sent to the watch and then it will go. But if it is paired to a device that must accompany it then it will be easy.
You could also have an app that makes everyone beautiful and happy.
I am certain that when you can do a full overlay that people will be able to alter their reality so that instead of walking down Main St that they are walking in a Star Wars/Star Trek/etc fantasy world. The idea is that everything that they see will be based upon the reality in front of them but Storm Troopers instead of the actual policeman, floating cars instead of the actual car. Then when you cross the street, if you avoid the fake floating speeder then you will also avoid the real Ford Fusion.
Plus the reduction of concentrated pollution in a city center. The other apples and oranges problem is that often an electric car is a second car. The electric car is used primarily for commuting while the gas car is the weekend road trip car. To me this is too much of trying to fit the data to match a desired conclusion. One could then make an argument that by having a second "commuting" car that the pollution has actually gone up some more. On the other hand, how do you go about putting a reduction of noise pollution onto their spreadsheet?
My tree is taller than your bush is basically what I am hearing from Masda.
Personally I would love an electric car because I would be giving the finger to Big Oil every time I drove past their dwindling gas stations. That is worth 3 Polar bears, and 2.5 baby seals for me.
If you have your electric car connected to solar panels (becoming increasingly common as they are cheap as dirt) then any attempt to compare the CO2 as generated by a fossil fueled car is bogus.
Maybe if the power in your hood comes from coal and crude oil then maybe yes. But many people are Nuclear, Solar, Wind, and Hydro powered. Plus I suspect that people in areas with plenty of green power are more likely to drive an electric car. People in an oil producing area are more likely to not only drive a normal fossil fueled car but actually a diesel powered pick up truck.
There could be two settings: 8+ (hotness level) , and chubby chaser.
I would mostly agree with this. There are certain products that once you see them you get a feeling that you must have it now!!!
There are even products that you think you must have but then they don't get used.
And once in a blue moon there is a product that does take some getting used to. But these are quite rare.
People for instance complain that the Segway is too expensive. But even free I am not sure that many people would regularly use them. The Roomba seems brilliant but most people who buy them have a long list of disappointments. (I still want one). Even sensible things like radar detectors (where they are legal) make a whole lot of sense yet most people don't buy them and most people speed.
So I see Google Glass being even lower on the list than MS Surface for products that they are marketing hard with little consumer buy in.
I suspect that most people will think that people are walking around with google glass displaying porn. Plus the #1 app is going to be a filter that takes people around you and shows what they will look like naked. Or will do a face recognition and search a database to see if they ever put naked photos on the internet.
So my new myth is that 69% of people will Google glass are mostly being pervs.
As far as I am concerned Python didn't exist until about 8 years ago when I suddenly heard about it more and more.
In a way I see Python prior to 8 years ago as a language before its time. On a computer before that it was just too damn slow. But now with regular desktop computers pushing into the Teraflop range the speed of the computer will usually make up for any speed problems with Python. So development time is the only speed that most should worry about. Then if something does need optimization you can start with your code, try something like Numpy, maybe PyPy, and then start looking into OpenCL or a C++ extension type technology.
Knuth talked about premature optimization being the root of all evil, I have realized that using languages that are potentially faster like C++ is effectively premature optimization.