If the computer industry can't adapt to counting the way of the rest of the world does, that's our problem. We should be pointing at whoever originally decided that they should usurp the already established term Kilo to mean 1024 and slapping them upside the head. Anything less is pure arrogance on our part.
I will defend to the death the absolute right of Fox News to talk bull****!
Or I would if I actually lived in America, we don't have TV like that in the UK. That sort of rhetoric gets buried in the columns of disreputable newspapers like the Daily Fail. *cough* Mail.
Would you like to see political groups broken up for saying something that an individual would have been fine saying? It's happened all over the world in the past - the "legally elected government" cracking down on opposition parties simply because they oppose them, I'd say protecting the right of any organisation to express rational opposition to another is absolutely a requirement of civilised society.
While the EU has had a lot of criticism (some of it justified) for it's costs, it's impenetrable bureaucracy, and it's tendency to focus on the minutia rather than bigger problems, I think that it would be impossible to practically enact vital laws and opinions such as this on an international scale without it. Big government may be out of fashion on the other side of the pond, but it certainly has it's merits over here (where our governmental needs are different) and this kind of check against the increasing pressure and influence of fanatical commercial interests on the interpretation and drafting of legislation is exactly what we need right now to restore a little sanity to the situation.
In the past, our legal rights have coincided nicely with what's physically enforceable. We buy discs / cartridges / tapes with games on, we play them, we sell them. With always-on internet connections comes a method by which the user of a product can be verified before it can be used, so now the letter of the law is at odds with what's practically possible - and people with lots of money (and even more at stake) will make sure that the law is changed (or rather "clarified") to reflect this.
Physical media itself is already far more endangered than many realise and the damage to the first sale doctrine has already been done - by iTunes, Steam and Amazon. They have already proved by their own success that the majority of people don't care about their resale rights when it comes to music, films, ebooks and games. I can see this majority acceptance being used by politicians as leverage to achieve the clarification mentioned above, rather than lawyers trying to argue the case in court - they can't win with the current rules so they'll change them again.
While there is no single console that, out of the box, requires always on-authentication tied to specific people/hardware and has no physical media options, we are steadily moving in that direction. I think the biggest step we've seen so far is actually the Ouya - it may effectively be a repackaged Android phone, but it's marketed as a console with no physical media. As much as I'd love to have one purely for it's Plex client and retro-gaming capabilities, I can't help but be concerned about where this is leading.
I can dig that point of view. I saw those covers you can get for tablets with the Bluetooth keyboard built in and immediately liked the idea. If a Chromebook can manage a fast enough start-up time it could compete against tablets in the convenience stakes for a certain type of user with low requirements. However, they'll need to do something pretty special if they're looking to break any significant market share away from the current established players (I'm looking primarily at Windows, good luck luring in Mac users!) so more power to the lot of them if they manage it.
14" isn't too bad actually, around 13-15 inches is a nice sweet spot for the keyboard if you're trying to build for people with big hands. To be honest, the best way to improve laptop usability would be to ditch that shiny coating for matt non-reflective screens instead.
Yeah, I love my Thinkpad and I don't see myself getting over it any time soon;)
Ah, now it starts to make sense. It's a play by Google to wean the office drones of the future off Office. And I guess 6 hours is okay for education when you can charge them up at recess.
I do exactly the same thing - I work on a helpdesk that supports both Windows and Mac. I'm also teaching myself Linux on the side, although where on earth do you start figuring out basic Linux desktop support in an environment so fractured and chaotic?! Loving CLI servers though;)
Windows 8 also doesn't have anywhere else to go but up. It's first quarters numbers will always be inflated by people chasing the latest and greatest at any cost, large enterprises stockpiling licenses early. Also, while it's profit isn't exactly weak, it's certainly not as dominant as it was was 2010 Q1 and previously, especially compared to other tech companies - the eponymous Apple being on of them - that seem to be capitalising nicely on Microsoft's slow erosion. Whether it can be halted is another matter but based on recent sales figures, it's not looking good for Microsoft ever returning to it's former glory days.
MS aren't doing themselves any favours. If Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Surface and the planned changes to Small Business Server are anything to go by, it appears their new hobby is committing economic suicide. That's a pretty big threat to Windows and I know a lot of Windows server administrators who are starting to get nervous.
It seems that Chromebooks are trying to slide into the market slot that Netbooks are currently vacating. I'm not entirely sure I understand what's going on there, netbooks were well refined products that seem to have gone out of favour and everyone is designing Chromebooks from scratch. Considering these are effectively the new dumb terminals, you'd have thought they could've done better than a Celeron and 4.25 hours of battery life - netbooks were rather more capable than Chromebooks appears to be, cost about the same and had far superior battery life.
Or has everyone (finally) just realised that 10" is really not that comfortable a form factor?
The iPhone is capable of accomplishing in a perceived instant what entire rooms full of people would've spent years/decades pre-calculating into data tables a century ago, but as we don't collectively remember those times, the fact that mathematics was rendered a largely brain-free process in the proverbial historic blink-of-an-eye a few decades ago escapes our understanding. While "everyone knows" how powerful modern computers are and how quickly things develop, almost no-one appreciates the true scale of the advances we've enjoyed and how we've employed them in consumer devices.
I once let a user watch while I recompiled a monitoring system I'd written. I was using a command line compiler and the whole thing built in about 5 seconds. Then I ran it under windows and it took about 10 seconds to start running. As you can probably imagine, the user was perplexed by this and my attempts to explain to him the difference in these two operations were thwarted by his preconceptions that effectively put computers on par with magic and made out that anyone who understood them was some kind of Gandalf-like mage, unknowingly powerful and equally unfathomable.
The principle difference that he couldn't/wouldn't get his head around was the labyrinthine complexity of today's graphical, multi-input human-computer interfaces as opposed to the brutal simplicity of the command line. Each has it's target users and the difference in the resources required is an integral part of the suitability equation. Given that the vast majority of everyday computer users still don't understand the simple relationship between their computer, their user account and their password, despite the age of these concepts, I don't think there is any possibility that we will ever establish an appreciation for the true power of modern processors.
tl;dr - The embedded perception of smartphones is that of being a personal magic butler and it's too late to change that.
"Merlin" is an engine brand of Rolls-Royce, a V12 piston engine from the 30's onwards used in a wide variety of aircraft. I can imagine raised eyebrows in their offices, but would they actually sue? I hope not, that would show these lawsuit-happy Yanks what British class really is.
A study in 2005 confirmed the previously discovered link between increased rates of psychosis-related mental disorders and cannabis use in the general population, but went on to show through statistical analysis of data from The Netherlands that this link was greatly increased by a genetic pre-disposition to suffering from those same mental disorders, and that the actual increase in mental disorders that could be attributed to cannabis use was much lower than previously feared, 1.5-2.5% overall IIRC*.
It was briefly talked about in the UK on Radio 4 (gotta love the BBC) but it was greatly under-reported compared to the previous news there was a link between psychosis and cannabis use. There was also some criticism of the study from both sides of the argument - in my experience that's pretty cast-iron proof that it was a truely neutral study, a pretty rare and precious thing given how devisive this issue is.
(*There was an article comparing the 2005 study with the previous study that came up with the cannabis-psychosis link on the BBC website, it went into quite a lot of depth on the numbers and used the conclusions from the 2005 study to analyse the UK's mental illness numbers to debunk the idea that there was about to be a big jump in the psychosis numbers because of very strong "super-skunk" strains hitting the streets. Instead it showed that the rise in figures had already happened and that rates had flattened off a year previously, the same as The Netherlands. Unfortunately, I can't find that ****ing page now!)
In that case, I'd like to cite the film "Superhigh Me". (Don't laugh... yet)
During this film, a guy spends a month not smoking pot does a bunch of tests, then spends a month smoking pot 24/7 and retakes them. In a basic SATS test, his score and psychic ability (I wish I was kidding about that soooo much) go up after spending a month high and his ability to do mental arithmetic goes down, along with taking away his ability to drive.
It won't be coming any time soon - business secretary Vince Cable specifically refused to refused any levies like that when the EU asked us to implement them.
They want a workforce, but they have to assume it'll be unskilled. They can't put these people to work on virtually anything done by local councils as the unions will go ape and strike. A whole load of demeaning labour is already being done by people on community service sentences and there would be riots if they started treating unemployed people like criminals. That leaves them with one option - making deals with companies in the private sector for cheap workers, effectively being a US-style Welfare to Work scheme. Why does that notion fill me with dread?
Slashdot Mirror
If the computer industry can't adapt to counting the way of the rest of the world does, that's our problem. We should be pointing at whoever originally decided that they should usurp the already established term Kilo to mean 1024 and slapping them upside the head. Anything less is pure arrogance on our part.
I will defend to the death the absolute right of Fox News to talk bull****!
Or I would if I actually lived in America, we don't have TV like that in the UK. That sort of rhetoric gets buried in the columns of disreputable newspapers like the Daily Fail. *cough* Mail.
Have you tried restoring it to it's default settings?
Not sure what happened there - a total typing fail followed by a re-reading brain fart seems the most likely combination at this time. ;)
Could you explain why you think it's not good?
Would you like to see political groups broken up for saying something that an individual would have been fine saying? It's happened all over the world in the past - the "legally elected government" cracking down on opposition parties simply because they oppose them, I'd say protecting the right of any organisation to express rational opposition to another is absolutely a requirement of civilised society.
While the EU has had a lot of criticism (some of it justified) for it's costs, it's impenetrable bureaucracy, and it's tendency to focus on the minutia rather than bigger problems, I think that it would be impossible to practically enact vital laws and opinions such as this on an international scale without it. Big government may be out of fashion on the other side of the pond, but it certainly has it's merits over here (where our governmental needs are different) and this kind of check against the increasing pressure and influence of fanatical commercial interests on the interpretation and drafting of legislation is exactly what we need right now to restore a little sanity to the situation.
In the past, our legal rights have coincided nicely with what's physically enforceable. We buy discs / cartridges / tapes with games on, we play them, we sell them. With always-on internet connections comes a method by which the user of a product can be verified before it can be used, so now the letter of the law is at odds with what's practically possible - and people with lots of money (and even more at stake) will make sure that the law is changed (or rather "clarified") to reflect this.
Physical media itself is already far more endangered than many realise and the damage to the first sale doctrine has already been done - by iTunes, Steam and Amazon. They have already proved by their own success that the majority of people don't care about their resale rights when it comes to music, films, ebooks and games. I can see this majority acceptance being used by politicians as leverage to achieve the clarification mentioned above, rather than lawyers trying to argue the case in court - they can't win with the current rules so they'll change them again.
While there is no single console that, out of the box, requires always on-authentication tied to specific people/hardware and has no physical media options, we are steadily moving in that direction. I think the biggest step we've seen so far is actually the Ouya - it may effectively be a repackaged Android phone, but it's marketed as a console with no physical media. As much as I'd love to have one purely for it's Plex client and retro-gaming capabilities, I can't help but be concerned about where this is leading.
I can dig that point of view. I saw those covers you can get for tablets with the Bluetooth keyboard built in and immediately liked the idea. If a Chromebook can manage a fast enough start-up time it could compete against tablets in the convenience stakes for a certain type of user with low requirements. However, they'll need to do something pretty special if they're looking to break any significant market share away from the current established players (I'm looking primarily at Windows, good luck luring in Mac users!) so more power to the lot of them if they manage it.
14" isn't too bad actually, around 13-15 inches is a nice sweet spot for the keyboard if you're trying to build for people with big hands. To be honest, the best way to improve laptop usability would be to ditch that shiny coating for matt non-reflective screens instead.
Yeah, I love my Thinkpad and I don't see myself getting over it any time soon ;)
Ah, now it starts to make sense. It's a play by Google to wean the office drones of the future off Office. And I guess 6 hours is okay for education when you can charge them up at recess.
When the redesign ruins those things that actually gave that segment it's appeal in the first place, damn right I'm confused.
I do exactly the same thing - I work on a helpdesk that supports both Windows and Mac. I'm also teaching myself Linux on the side, although where on earth do you start figuring out basic Linux desktop support in an environment so fractured and chaotic?! Loving CLI servers though ;)
I don't usually respond to ACs, but when figures need correcting I make an exception. MS shipped 1.25m Surface tablets Q4 last year but sales figures were only around 700,000. Compared to iPad sales of 22million over the same quarter, that's awful for a major-league product from a tech titan like MS: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-surface-with-windows-rt-tablet-sales-disappoint-in-fourth-quarter-7000010688/
Windows 8 also doesn't have anywhere else to go but up. It's first quarters numbers will always be inflated by people chasing the latest and greatest at any cost, large enterprises stockpiling licenses early. Also, while it's profit isn't exactly weak, it's certainly not as dominant as it was was 2010 Q1 and previously, especially compared to other tech companies - the eponymous Apple being on of them - that seem to be capitalising nicely on Microsoft's slow erosion. Whether it can be halted is another matter but based on recent sales figures, it's not looking good for Microsoft ever returning to it's former glory days.
MS aren't doing themselves any favours. If Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Surface and the planned changes to Small Business Server are anything to go by, it appears their new hobby is committing economic suicide. That's a pretty big threat to Windows and I know a lot of Windows server administrators who are starting to get nervous.
It seems that Chromebooks are trying to slide into the market slot that Netbooks are currently vacating. I'm not entirely sure I understand what's going on there, netbooks were well refined products that seem to have gone out of favour and everyone is designing Chromebooks from scratch. Considering these are effectively the new dumb terminals, you'd have thought they could've done better than a Celeron and 4.25 hours of battery life - netbooks were rather more capable than Chromebooks appears to be, cost about the same and had far superior battery life.
Or has everyone (finally) just realised that 10" is really not that comfortable a form factor?
The iPhone is capable of accomplishing in a perceived instant what entire rooms full of people would've spent years/decades pre-calculating into data tables a century ago, but as we don't collectively remember those times, the fact that mathematics was rendered a largely brain-free process in the proverbial historic blink-of-an-eye a few decades ago escapes our understanding. While "everyone knows" how powerful modern computers are and how quickly things develop, almost no-one appreciates the true scale of the advances we've enjoyed and how we've employed them in consumer devices.
I once let a user watch while I recompiled a monitoring system I'd written. I was using a command line compiler and the whole thing built in about 5 seconds. Then I ran it under windows and it took about 10 seconds to start running. As you can probably imagine, the user was perplexed by this and my attempts to explain to him the difference in these two operations were thwarted by his preconceptions that effectively put computers on par with magic and made out that anyone who understood them was some kind of Gandalf-like mage, unknowingly powerful and equally unfathomable.
The principle difference that he couldn't/wouldn't get his head around was the labyrinthine complexity of today's graphical, multi-input human-computer interfaces as opposed to the brutal simplicity of the command line. Each has it's target users and the difference in the resources required is an integral part of the suitability equation. Given that the vast majority of everyday computer users still don't understand the simple relationship between their computer, their user account and their password, despite the age of these concepts, I don't think there is any possibility that we will ever establish an appreciation for the true power of modern processors.
tl;dr - The embedded perception of smartphones is that of being a personal magic butler and it's too late to change that.
The third option when there's a disparity like that is that the audience will complain about it / ignore it / turn it off.
That is all.
It probably cost them less in fines that it would have to actually have the network running over that time. Pointless...
"Merlin" is an engine brand of Rolls-Royce, a V12 piston engine from the 30's onwards used in a wide variety of aircraft. I can imagine raised eyebrows in their offices, but would they actually sue? I hope not, that would show these lawsuit-happy Yanks what British class really is.
Think I've got a copy of Hellgate: London somewhere they can have....
Ah-ha, here it is, under my coffee cup!
A study in 2005 confirmed the previously discovered link between increased rates of psychosis-related mental disorders and cannabis use in the general population, but went on to show through statistical analysis of data from The Netherlands that this link was greatly increased by a genetic pre-disposition to suffering from those same mental disorders, and that the actual increase in mental disorders that could be attributed to cannabis use was much lower than previously feared, 1.5-2.5% overall IIRC*.
Link to study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539839/
It was briefly talked about in the UK on Radio 4 (gotta love the BBC) but it was greatly under-reported compared to the previous news there was a link between psychosis and cannabis use. There was also some criticism of the study from both sides of the argument - in my experience that's pretty cast-iron proof that it was a truely neutral study, a pretty rare and precious thing given how devisive this issue is.
(*There was an article comparing the 2005 study with the previous study that came up with the cannabis-psychosis link on the BBC website, it went into quite a lot of depth on the numbers and used the conclusions from the 2005 study to analyse the UK's mental illness numbers to debunk the idea that there was about to be a big jump in the psychosis numbers because of very strong "super-skunk" strains hitting the streets. Instead it showed that the rise in figures had already happened and that rates had flattened off a year previously, the same as The Netherlands. Unfortunately, I can't find that ****ing page now!)
In that case, I'd like to cite the film "Superhigh Me". (Don't laugh... yet)
During this film, a guy spends a month not smoking pot does a bunch of tests, then spends a month smoking pot 24/7 and retakes them. In a basic SATS test, his score and psychic ability (I wish I was kidding about that soooo much) go up after spending a month high and his ability to do mental arithmetic goes down, along with taking away his ability to drive.
Discuss.
It won't be coming any time soon - business secretary Vince Cable specifically refused to refused any levies like that when the EU asked us to implement them.
They want a workforce, but they have to assume it'll be unskilled. They can't put these people to work on virtually anything done by local councils as the unions will go ape and strike. A whole load of demeaning labour is already being done by people on community service sentences and there would be riots if they started treating unemployed people like criminals. That leaves them with one option - making deals with companies in the private sector for cheap workers, effectively being a US-style Welfare to Work scheme. Why does that notion fill me with dread?