If a God made us then we should probably do as He says, which in the case of the Mormon God is that only a man and a woman who are legally wed to each other can have sex with each other. The examples of monogamy/polygamy/polyamory in the animal kingdom would not apply and you could call God a Bigot.
If a God made us and told us what to do or He'll send us to Hell...wouldn't that perhaps make Him like a mob boss? Wouldn't tithing or other donations to His church be protection money?
If you believe there is no God, or that God has left the scene, and all practitioners of religion are practicing priestcraft (selling salvation/absolution for a small donation)...then why not have sex with anyone or anything you like? Or what, beyond the law of the land, is to stop you from stealing or murdering or snowdenning?
Enough is enough! How dare they suggest we cage those happy go lucky free range cute little buggers and raise them for our FOOD! What's wrong with them? I am hereby announcing the formation of PETI, People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects. We need to treat the insects humanely and not cage them. It's bad enough that we poison them, zap them, or otherwise murder these helpless little creatures when all they are doing is trying to survive in this cruel world. We need to show our support for our little friends by letting the termites eat our houses, the cockroaches raid our pantries, and treat those mosquitoes, leeches, and ticks to a fine blood meal. This is how we can show them thanks for all they do for us.
Many companies won't even look at you if you don't have a degree from an ABET accredited school. ECPI and ITT are a couple schools that do NOT show up on the ABET.org website as accredited schools.
A good technical college or university will be ABET accredited (abet.org)
you can search for the school name here: http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx.
HINT: search on full school names, not abbreviations.
I know hiring managers that will not even look at a resume if it lists a non-accredited school, like ITT, or ECPI.
As forward thinking as the EU is with limiting the energy consumption of discrete components; I am surprised they haven't addressed a much larger issue, the cruelty of computer on software violence. Everyday, trillions of instructions are summarily executed with no trial and no right of appeal. This cannot continue!
It is both amusing and aggravating to me how many people fall for someone else's predigested spin on any topic you name from their favorite media source.
It is also amusing an aggravating to me how you can't find unbiased reporting on anything. There seems to be so much hysteria in the news lately both about politics and mormons.
It is also amusing an aggravating to me how much the people who preach tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints almost immediately turn around and slam people they don't agree with, often using strong words to demonstrate their disgust and lack of tolerance and acceptance. Don't like Romney and think he's a moron? Whatever. He is richer and accomplished more as governor and as a businessman that most of the people that call him a moron. Want to call Obama a bozo. Whatever. He is rich and president of the united states, which is more than most of the people who call him a moron have accomplished.
Want to call mormons a crazy religion with unbelievable stories and majic underwear and all that? Whatever. They must have something going for them if they have 15 million or so members across the world.
I try to listen some to liberal media and some to conservative media and figure the truth is somewhere between each sides spin.
If I want to know more about what Mormons really believe, I will read their Book of Mormon. If I want to know more about what Muslims really believe, I will read the Koran. I won't listen to the stupid rumors that seem to be prevalent in the media or comments.
next stop, location sensing popup ads in your googles glasses. Imagine driving past a store and then in your augmented reality glasses an ad pops up dead center while your trying to make a turn or change lanes...
I am not convinced that the current 'gloabal warming' trend is solely due to human activity. James Hansen may be NASA, but some of his conclusions seem dubious. And then the climategate scandal. There is so much pro and con and hysteria about global warming, it's hard to know who is a reliable source of information. To me, there seems to be natural warming and cooling cycles, wetter and dryer cycles.
The drought this summer made me think we are in for another 'dustbowl' period like in the thirties. Sure we have better agricultural practices now, so we won't have huge dust storms, but we could be in for the same type of severe drought. I remember reading a story that in the 1920s, ships were able to sail over the ice-free north pole in the summer. My though here is this points to a cycle covering decades.
There is another cycle covering centuries. There was a medieval warm period from around 800 or 900 CE to about 1300 CE where the climate warmed enough they were growing grapes in Britain. In this time the Vikings colonized Greenland and Iceland and reportedly landed in Nova Scotia. Some archeological evidence for Vikings has been found in NS. But the one thing that has puzzled archeologists is the mention of the Vikings finding wild grapes in NS-which doesn't make sense unless the climate was warmer at that time than now. In the early 1300s the climate changed to what is termed 'the little ice age'. It got cold enough that the Thames would freeze hard enough and the British has Frost Fairs on it. It was cold enough that the picture of George Washington's crossing with all the ice chunks in it was correct. Around the 1850s, the earth started warming up again.
And there is a cycle of tens or hundreds of thousands of years where the earth is warm or the earth has a big ice age--yet the planet is still habitable.
There are also news stories where some scientists have found evidence that the earth was warmer in the human past than now, or that not all the ice is going away.
Here is a sample of some:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/02/1930s_greenland_glacier_retreat/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/
I have been considering myself incorporating or LLCing until I remembered and dug up these following slashdot posts:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/1353223/our-low-tech-tax-codehttp://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/02/25/1949223/independent-programmers-no-win-scenario
I also read the linked articles inside these articles. The upshot I get is that independent contracting/consulting is no win scenario in taxes even if you incorporate or LLC yourself. But it seems that writing and selling your own code to an app store is workable.
Don't think this tax targeting tech professionals starting and being sole employees of a business has been repealed has it?
What am I missing? From your comments, most of you seem to have sole proprietership businesses and be doing fine.
IMHO full-time pair programming is a waste of a good developer or a shield for a bad developer. The only time I have seen it really work is for debugging or code review.
I three classes when I was studying for my BSCS that are an excellent example to me of how well or bad lecture versus online can be.
In my linear algebra class, the professor would just come in and lecture the whiteboard as he worked the book examples. Beyond the third row in the classroom, he sounded a lot like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons. There was no value add from listening to the lecture and the only way I passed the class was by reading the book
In my calculus 3 class, the professor was so good at explaining the concepts that I almost never had to crack open a textbook. And I was able to do well on the math department produced exams.
In my statistics class, we only met for the course introduction and to take tests. The rest of the material was either textbooks or online. The online lectures and textbooks were well written enough that I was able to get a good grade in the class.
In my opinion, the linear algebra material and the statistics material were of equal difficulty. I got a C in linear algebra and an A in statistics. This shows to me that an online class can be done very well and a lecture class can absolutely suck.
IMHO online learning is here to stay and is only going to grow. The teachers and professors need to accept that fact and adapt.
I have done pair programming and team programming, and in almost every case, half the pair or half the team was not fully productive.
IMHO the only time the team or the pair is useful is for design, debug, or code review.
Let's see...save money by having one computer for every two devs. That saves a thousand or two dollars. about 2% of an average developers salary. and somehow the productivity of each developer goes up more than 2%, so it's win-win...
How long before some court declares your data is in the public domain once it has left hardware that you own??
Then it will be datamined to death by advertisers, spammers, government agencies.....
If you use cloud services even today, make sure you encrypt your own data and keep the keys, certificates, passphrases, or whatever you use to yourself. While I don't have anything to hide, I still don't want anyone digging through my stuff. Especially nameless, faceless ones at a remote location.
Should I tell you how to live your non-religion so I don't think you're a hypocrite? I always laugh when people not of my religion try to tell me how to practice my religion.
The nature of acceptable evidence is debatable:
The world is what the world is regardless of scientific or religious spin.
Facts are facts regardless of scientific or religious spin.
The Truth is the Truth regardless of scientific or religious spin.
Accepting only one kind of fact and not another based on a consensus of acceptable evidence rather than the nature of the fact seems less than useful...e.g.from a bag of multicolored marbles. many scientists would accept only marbles of one color as evidence of that marbles exist while many religious folk would accept only a different color marble as evidence that marbles exist. And both groups would throw the rest of the marbles away.
The equivalency I was driving at was that people tend to become similarly dogmatic about their chosen belief system, whether that be the bible, science, a flying spaghetti monster, or what have you.
Your other points are well made.
Natural selection is something observed and tested every. Evolution is natural selection extrapolated.
wrt lumping...okay lets lump all scientists together. pons and fleischmann. henrik schon. josef megele. all those scientists around the world, including in the USA, and not just the nazis, practicing eugenics and forced sterilization of undesirables in the early twentieth century for the improvement of the species. all those people who have been bamboozled by scientists into believing humans are the sole cause of global warming. It must be true because so many scientists and people believe it to be true. Just like many scientists at one believed we could never travel safely above 60 mph, then later above the speed of sound. Just like many scientists didn't believe in plate tectonics at first. "Ignorance is ignorance -- it doesn't matter if a larger number of people share it." applies to scientists also.
"Its trivial to trace back the morphing and origin of key theological cornerstones through history, via primary sources.". This is one explanation, but sounds like a piltdown man explanation of various historical sources. Occam's razor is only good if you have sufficient information to make a reasonable conclusion. There are many other books that these historical, mythological, and scriptural sources pull from, that are mentioned, that we do not have in our hands. Assuming the bible is a correct book, then there should be a book of adam, a book of noah, a book of melchizedek somewhere that would predate many of the assumed original books such as the epic of gilgamesh that many point to as the source of the flood story that moses wrote.
Here is my problem with religious leaders and their groupies. They have a certain interpretation of what they consider to be their holy writ and they try to beat down everybody else with that interpretation. So I think the original story that nessie is real and disproves evolution is absolutely laughable.
I have read the bible, and I believe in a God that created this world. It doesn't describe the mechanics of that creation or how long it took. (BTW, I really like that old classic movie,"Inherit the wind". I do not disagree with the evidence that the further back in the planets history we go, the simpler the lifeforms were. The current theory of evolution is certainly one possible explanation of how this happened. That the scientists can explain it does not mean there was not or is not a God. And just deciding there is no God because we don't see the need for one or because the existence of God cannot be proven under a microscope is just silly. There are plenty of things that happen in this world that can't be repeatably tested or put under a microscope that do actually happen. And I don't mean anything ooga booga like swamp gas, lights in the sky, or little green men. I mean things like feelings. If you try to scientifically test your significant other's love for you in a repeatable fashion, he or she will likely be non-linear in his or her responses to you. Likely some resentment at being manipulated will occur.
Here is my problem with scientists and their groupies. They have a certain interpretation of what they believe to be scientifically proven facts and they try to beat down everybody else with that interpretation. While the utopian ideal is any scientifically advanced theory is proven and the results peer reviewed and openly and objectively discussed, the actual reality is far less glamorous. There is infighting and politics and sometimes fudging and outright fabrication of results. I point specifically to the East Anglia emails, reports even in slashdot of how the climate model data was manipulated, and documentary " the dark secret of henrik schon", and cold fusion as examples where scientists' behavior was not above reproach. The ideal of a passionless, objective scientist is a myth. Anyone like that the psychologists usually classify as sociopaths or psychopaths.
In my opinion, there is little difference between a religious zealot and a sc
don't lump all christians in with this lot. the way I see it, scientists cannot disprove the existence of God and christians cannot disprove evolution, or even natural selection.
my first smartphone was a WinMo phone before there was an iPhone or Android and I thought WinMo sucked back then and I still do. Having been burned by WinMo and with MS's history of crapware I have no interest in even looking at the new phone 7 os. My Droid 4 works just fine for what I need it to do. For me to consider developing for a windows phone, it would have to be a major contender in the market place, have good dev tools, and a competitive licensing process. Considering how many iPhones and Androids there are out there, windows phones have a very long way to go.
This digital data storage could get both technological and biological viruses!
I wonder what the crossover will be like...
You thought bird flu jumping to pigs then humans was bad....
I have been reading up on dihydrogen monoxide (water) and it's dangers (dhmo.org) and, after reading this article, I say DHMO is not worth the trouble and we should just ban it.
I have tried sony and hp also. The HP I had totally blew. My first personal laptop was a sony vaio 17 inch with 1920x1200 resolution and it was great. My next was an HP and it blew. It went lighter and cheaper and got one that was 1240x800 and had worsening hardware issues throughout its life (about 2 1/2 years before enough things broke and it became unusable). Never going to buy another HP. The next one I got was another sony and it was 1366x 768. It was a bit underpowered (cheap again-core 2 duo 2.2 ghz). But not a bad machine. 2 1/2 years later and it is still working fine.
Sick of low power and low res laptops I went with a sony vaio z-series. customizable so I could get what I wanted instead of putting up with someone else's preselection. It's light (3 lbs w/o battery sheet and dock), has a 1920x1080 resolution (13.1 inch display), a core i7 2.8 ghz processor (turbo to 3.5). The battery sheet + internal battery gives me a total of 6-8 hours of battery life. SSD-HD, hdmi/vga out, 3 usb ports (one is usb 3), and 802.11n. The dock it came with had a graphics accelerator and an optical drive (I opted for the bluray burner). I expect this thing to last me at least 4 years and still be considered powerful enough that whole time (and working). A little pricey but worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
If a God made us then we should probably do as He says, which in the case of the Mormon God is that only a man and a woman who are legally wed to each other can have sex with each other. The examples of monogamy/polygamy/polyamory in the animal kingdom would not apply and you could call God a Bigot.
If a God made us and told us what to do or He'll send us to Hell...wouldn't that perhaps make Him like a mob boss? Wouldn't tithing or other donations to His church be protection money?
If you believe there is no God, or that God has left the scene, and all practitioners of religion are practicing priestcraft (selling salvation/absolution for a small donation)...then why not have sex with anyone or anything you like? Or what, beyond the law of the land, is to stop you from stealing or murdering or snowdenning?
Enough is enough! How dare they suggest we cage those happy go lucky free range cute little buggers and raise them for our FOOD! What's wrong with them? I am hereby announcing the formation of PETI, People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects. We need to treat the insects humanely and not cage them. It's bad enough that we poison them, zap them, or otherwise murder these helpless little creatures when all they are doing is trying to survive in this cruel world. We need to show our support for our little friends by letting the termites eat our houses, the cockroaches raid our pantries, and treat those mosquitoes, leeches, and ticks to a fine blood meal. This is how we can show them thanks for all they do for us.
Many companies won't even look at you if you don't have a degree from an ABET accredited school. ECPI and ITT are a couple schools that do NOT show up on the ABET.org website as accredited schools.
A good technical college or university will be ABET accredited (abet.org) you can search for the school name here: http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx. HINT: search on full school names, not abbreviations. I know hiring managers that will not even look at a resume if it lists a non-accredited school, like ITT, or ECPI.
As forward thinking as the EU is with limiting the energy consumption of discrete components; I am surprised they haven't addressed a much larger issue, the cruelty of computer on software violence. Everyday, trillions of instructions are summarily executed with no trial and no right of appeal. This cannot continue!
It is both amusing and aggravating to me how many people fall for someone else's predigested spin on any topic you name from their favorite media source. It is also amusing an aggravating to me how you can't find unbiased reporting on anything. There seems to be so much hysteria in the news lately both about politics and mormons. It is also amusing an aggravating to me how much the people who preach tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints almost immediately turn around and slam people they don't agree with, often using strong words to demonstrate their disgust and lack of tolerance and acceptance. Don't like Romney and think he's a moron? Whatever. He is richer and accomplished more as governor and as a businessman that most of the people that call him a moron. Want to call Obama a bozo. Whatever. He is rich and president of the united states, which is more than most of the people who call him a moron have accomplished. Want to call mormons a crazy religion with unbelievable stories and majic underwear and all that? Whatever. They must have something going for them if they have 15 million or so members across the world. I try to listen some to liberal media and some to conservative media and figure the truth is somewhere between each sides spin. If I want to know more about what Mormons really believe, I will read their Book of Mormon. If I want to know more about what Muslims really believe, I will read the Koran. I won't listen to the stupid rumors that seem to be prevalent in the media or comments.
next stop, location sensing popup ads in your googles glasses. Imagine driving past a store and then in your augmented reality glasses an ad pops up dead center while your trying to make a turn or change lanes...
I am not convinced that the current 'gloabal warming' trend is solely due to human activity. James Hansen may be NASA, but some of his conclusions seem dubious. And then the climategate scandal. There is so much pro and con and hysteria about global warming, it's hard to know who is a reliable source of information. To me, there seems to be natural warming and cooling cycles, wetter and dryer cycles. The drought this summer made me think we are in for another 'dustbowl' period like in the thirties. Sure we have better agricultural practices now, so we won't have huge dust storms, but we could be in for the same type of severe drought. I remember reading a story that in the 1920s, ships were able to sail over the ice-free north pole in the summer. My though here is this points to a cycle covering decades. There is another cycle covering centuries. There was a medieval warm period from around 800 or 900 CE to about 1300 CE where the climate warmed enough they were growing grapes in Britain. In this time the Vikings colonized Greenland and Iceland and reportedly landed in Nova Scotia. Some archeological evidence for Vikings has been found in NS. But the one thing that has puzzled archeologists is the mention of the Vikings finding wild grapes in NS-which doesn't make sense unless the climate was warmer at that time than now. In the early 1300s the climate changed to what is termed 'the little ice age'. It got cold enough that the Thames would freeze hard enough and the British has Frost Fairs on it. It was cold enough that the picture of George Washington's crossing with all the ice chunks in it was correct. Around the 1850s, the earth started warming up again. And there is a cycle of tens or hundreds of thousands of years where the earth is warm or the earth has a big ice age--yet the planet is still habitable. There are also news stories where some scientists have found evidence that the earth was warmer in the human past than now, or that not all the ice is going away. Here is a sample of some: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/02/1930s_greenland_glacier_retreat/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/
I have been considering myself incorporating or LLCing until I remembered and dug up these following slashdot posts: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/1353223/our-low-tech-tax-code http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/02/25/1949223/independent-programmers-no-win-scenario I also read the linked articles inside these articles. The upshot I get is that independent contracting/consulting is no win scenario in taxes even if you incorporate or LLC yourself. But it seems that writing and selling your own code to an app store is workable. Don't think this tax targeting tech professionals starting and being sole employees of a business has been repealed has it? What am I missing? From your comments, most of you seem to have sole proprietership businesses and be doing fine.
IMHO full-time pair programming is a waste of a good developer or a shield for a bad developer. The only time I have seen it really work is for debugging or code review.
I three classes when I was studying for my BSCS that are an excellent example to me of how well or bad lecture versus online can be. In my linear algebra class, the professor would just come in and lecture the whiteboard as he worked the book examples. Beyond the third row in the classroom, he sounded a lot like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons. There was no value add from listening to the lecture and the only way I passed the class was by reading the book In my calculus 3 class, the professor was so good at explaining the concepts that I almost never had to crack open a textbook. And I was able to do well on the math department produced exams. In my statistics class, we only met for the course introduction and to take tests. The rest of the material was either textbooks or online. The online lectures and textbooks were well written enough that I was able to get a good grade in the class. In my opinion, the linear algebra material and the statistics material were of equal difficulty. I got a C in linear algebra and an A in statistics. This shows to me that an online class can be done very well and a lecture class can absolutely suck. IMHO online learning is here to stay and is only going to grow. The teachers and professors need to accept that fact and adapt.
I have done pair programming and team programming, and in almost every case, half the pair or half the team was not fully productive. IMHO the only time the team or the pair is useful is for design, debug, or code review.
Let's see...save money by having one computer for every two devs. That saves a thousand or two dollars. about 2% of an average developers salary. and somehow the productivity of each developer goes up more than 2%, so it's win-win...
one of the better hard sci-fi writers.
I found stephen r donaldsons gap series more depressing than his thomas covenant series
How long before some court declares your data is in the public domain once it has left hardware that you own?? Then it will be datamined to death by advertisers, spammers, government agencies..... If you use cloud services even today, make sure you encrypt your own data and keep the keys, certificates, passphrases, or whatever you use to yourself. While I don't have anything to hide, I still don't want anyone digging through my stuff. Especially nameless, faceless ones at a remote location.
Should I tell you how to live your non-religion so I don't think you're a hypocrite? I always laugh when people not of my religion try to tell me how to practice my religion.
The nature of acceptable evidence is debatable: The world is what the world is regardless of scientific or religious spin. Facts are facts regardless of scientific or religious spin. The Truth is the Truth regardless of scientific or religious spin. Accepting only one kind of fact and not another based on a consensus of acceptable evidence rather than the nature of the fact seems less than useful...e.g.from a bag of multicolored marbles. many scientists would accept only marbles of one color as evidence of that marbles exist while many religious folk would accept only a different color marble as evidence that marbles exist. And both groups would throw the rest of the marbles away.
The equivalency I was driving at was that people tend to become similarly dogmatic about their chosen belief system, whether that be the bible, science, a flying spaghetti monster, or what have you. Your other points are well made.
Natural selection is something observed and tested every. Evolution is natural selection extrapolated. wrt lumping...okay lets lump all scientists together. pons and fleischmann. henrik schon. josef megele. all those scientists around the world, including in the USA, and not just the nazis, practicing eugenics and forced sterilization of undesirables in the early twentieth century for the improvement of the species. all those people who have been bamboozled by scientists into believing humans are the sole cause of global warming. It must be true because so many scientists and people believe it to be true. Just like many scientists at one believed we could never travel safely above 60 mph, then later above the speed of sound. Just like many scientists didn't believe in plate tectonics at first. "Ignorance is ignorance -- it doesn't matter if a larger number of people share it." applies to scientists also. "Its trivial to trace back the morphing and origin of key theological cornerstones through history, via primary sources.". This is one explanation, but sounds like a piltdown man explanation of various historical sources. Occam's razor is only good if you have sufficient information to make a reasonable conclusion. There are many other books that these historical, mythological, and scriptural sources pull from, that are mentioned, that we do not have in our hands. Assuming the bible is a correct book, then there should be a book of adam, a book of noah, a book of melchizedek somewhere that would predate many of the assumed original books such as the epic of gilgamesh that many point to as the source of the flood story that moses wrote. Here is my problem with religious leaders and their groupies. They have a certain interpretation of what they consider to be their holy writ and they try to beat down everybody else with that interpretation. So I think the original story that nessie is real and disproves evolution is absolutely laughable. I have read the bible, and I believe in a God that created this world. It doesn't describe the mechanics of that creation or how long it took. (BTW, I really like that old classic movie,"Inherit the wind". I do not disagree with the evidence that the further back in the planets history we go, the simpler the lifeforms were. The current theory of evolution is certainly one possible explanation of how this happened. That the scientists can explain it does not mean there was not or is not a God. And just deciding there is no God because we don't see the need for one or because the existence of God cannot be proven under a microscope is just silly. There are plenty of things that happen in this world that can't be repeatably tested or put under a microscope that do actually happen. And I don't mean anything ooga booga like swamp gas, lights in the sky, or little green men. I mean things like feelings. If you try to scientifically test your significant other's love for you in a repeatable fashion, he or she will likely be non-linear in his or her responses to you. Likely some resentment at being manipulated will occur. Here is my problem with scientists and their groupies. They have a certain interpretation of what they believe to be scientifically proven facts and they try to beat down everybody else with that interpretation. While the utopian ideal is any scientifically advanced theory is proven and the results peer reviewed and openly and objectively discussed, the actual reality is far less glamorous. There is infighting and politics and sometimes fudging and outright fabrication of results. I point specifically to the East Anglia emails, reports even in slashdot of how the climate model data was manipulated, and documentary " the dark secret of henrik schon", and cold fusion as examples where scientists' behavior was not above reproach. The ideal of a passionless, objective scientist is a myth. Anyone like that the psychologists usually classify as sociopaths or psychopaths. In my opinion, there is little difference between a religious zealot and a sc
don't lump all christians in with this lot. the way I see it, scientists cannot disprove the existence of God and christians cannot disprove evolution, or even natural selection.
my first smartphone was a WinMo phone before there was an iPhone or Android and I thought WinMo sucked back then and I still do. Having been burned by WinMo and with MS's history of crapware I have no interest in even looking at the new phone 7 os. My Droid 4 works just fine for what I need it to do. For me to consider developing for a windows phone, it would have to be a major contender in the market place, have good dev tools, and a competitive licensing process. Considering how many iPhones and Androids there are out there, windows phones have a very long way to go.
This digital data storage could get both technological and biological viruses! I wonder what the crossover will be like... You thought bird flu jumping to pigs then humans was bad....
I have been reading up on dihydrogen monoxide (water) and it's dangers (dhmo.org) and, after reading this article, I say DHMO is not worth the trouble and we should just ban it.
I have tried sony and hp also. The HP I had totally blew. My first personal laptop was a sony vaio 17 inch with 1920x1200 resolution and it was great. My next was an HP and it blew. It went lighter and cheaper and got one that was 1240x800 and had worsening hardware issues throughout its life (about 2 1/2 years before enough things broke and it became unusable). Never going to buy another HP. The next one I got was another sony and it was 1366x 768. It was a bit underpowered (cheap again-core 2 duo 2.2 ghz). But not a bad machine. 2 1/2 years later and it is still working fine. Sick of low power and low res laptops I went with a sony vaio z-series. customizable so I could get what I wanted instead of putting up with someone else's preselection. It's light (3 lbs w/o battery sheet and dock), has a 1920x1080 resolution (13.1 inch display), a core i7 2.8 ghz processor (turbo to 3.5). The battery sheet + internal battery gives me a total of 6-8 hours of battery life. SSD-HD, hdmi/vga out, 3 usb ports (one is usb 3), and 802.11n. The dock it came with had a graphics accelerator and an optical drive (I opted for the bluray burner). I expect this thing to last me at least 4 years and still be considered powerful enough that whole time (and working). A little pricey but worth it.