Despite the Metro UI, I like my Surface Pro a lot more than my iPad, and I use it constantly. It doesn't suffer from the walled garden of iOS, and I have a ton of programs installed. Very few Metro apps from the app store, however - I mostly have desktop and command line stuff from sourceforge (plus the obligatory Office suite.) The Microsoft app store is lacking, so I rarely think of it as an iPad type tablet. Instead, I think of it as a very portable laptop. And with the i5 and the SSD, performance hasn't been a problem.
Even though I lug them both around in my backpack, and the Surface is twice as heavy as the iPad, I use the iPad only about once a week these days, and that's only because of some iOS-only apps I need for work. Otherwise, the Surface is my go-to portable platform.
Plus, ever since iOS 7 came out, both platforms are now essentially equally ugly. iOS 7's UI changes are about the best gift Apple could have given Microsoft.
Keurig once again showing that the inferior machine wins and the only thing that counts is marketing.
And every Keurig shareholder says "yay, we win!" The only thing that counts to the business owner is profit, and all you're doing is confirming that they've made very good choices so far.
Of course, this will hit them in their long term profits, and four years from now as they're chasing their CEO out of town with chipped pods containing Keurig brand tar-and-feathers 2.0, they might finally understand the DRM lessons the rest of us already know. But until they actually learn this lesson, they'll continue to think they're geniuses.
Well, their chip system could certainly solve this problem for you. It could encode "I need 6 oz water at 212 degrees" in the message it sends to the coffee maker. Of course, Tassimo's barcodes already do this on their T-discs.
There's a tremendous amount of competition out there, and while they're currently the most popular, K-cups are far from the only game in town. If you don't want to get screwed by Keurig, buy a Nespresso, or Tassimo, or buy an AeroPress and forget the damn pods altogether.
Coffee companies that have tried technologies to lock-in their users (I'm thinking T-disc barcodes) have not taken over the market. Customers are in love with the broad variety of K-cup compatible coffees out there, not just the Keurig licensed brands. I expect Keurig will stumble hard on this one - New Coke hard.
In our city the pods are collected and recycled in a separate bag. They won't accept pods full of grounds, so they require the aluminum pods be run through a recycling press to crush the grounds out of them. The grounds are to be composted by the users in the same way as they would any other coffee grounds.
Aluminum recycles with pretty good efficiency. While they're still somewhat wasteful compared to a reusable container or a traditional coffee pot, they're hardly an environmental disaster. The packaging is just cardboard and aluminum.
I think they could solve stabilization with modern electronics. Kid's toy quadcopters are already self leveling, and as they weigh much less thank a kilogram, they're far more "twitchy" than 150kg of inertia carried about by the humans and their gear.
As you mentioned, it's the soldier who has to carry the additional 60kg pack that is the real limit.
I think the biggest problem with jetpacks is the logistics of carrying them when you're not actually jetting about with them. They were simultaneously bulky, fragile, and extremely combustible. Plus, the things weighed 60 kg when fueled, and this would almost double the normal amount of weight the average infantryman is required to carry. Even if they had a specific military purpose, getting them to the soldiers who need them at the exact time they need them is problematic.
The problem with this idea is that it still implies that you trust firewalls to keep your stuff safe. But firewalls have really proven only to be hurdles, not barriers - an unpatched browser, an infected web page, a bot client that can surf around behind your firewall, and suddenly your thermostat, washing machine, and refrigerator can be abused to send spam.
Another security problem is many of those home things are service based (for both good and bad reasons). But things that reach out across the network can be abused via their responses.
So to be secure, yes, you have to secure every damn device. Firewalls have demonstrated they help, but clearly aren't enough.
IPv6 means there will be enough addresses that you won't be needing NAT anymore, not that the things aren't already going on-line, or even that the things don't have to be behind firewalls. There is way too much utility to be had in devices that can use the network to save energy (smart grid control of energy hogging devices and learning thermostats), devices that can warn you of potential damage (freezers that let you know the door isn't closed, water leak sensors, etc), and devices that save you time (laundry machines that tell you when to take out the clothes.)
Except cars work at high speeds in varying and complex environments, and are often driven by stupid, simple, frail, inattentive, incapacitated, and/or incompetent people. A smart system can help keep them in control of their vehicles, perhaps keeping them from spinning out in front of you, or driving through an intersection into you. A smart system can understand how fast you're moving, how much inertia you have, and whether it should deploy the airbags to save you. It can detect wheel slippage, and use the ABS system to keep you moving straight. A smart system can monitor combustion and modify engine performance to reduce emissions, or shift the transmission to improve fuel economy. A smart system can call emergency services in the case of an accident. A smart car can adjust the suspension to adapt to rough or smooth roads.
The Rat Shacks in Minnesota stopped asking for phone numbers over a decade ago. Hate on them all you want, but I recommend using current facts, not memories.
Cydia is the only reason I still use iPhones. By itself, an iPhone is not a special magical phone, it doesn't work better than other smart phones, iOS7 is now jarring and cartoonish, and it has a lot of other drawbacks, such as a sealed battery. And the fact that everything is locked inside it means that piece of shit iTunes is really the only interface for dealing with the music. I'm done buying Apple anything.
I've now spent a lot on Cydia apps that add features that should have been present all along, so I keep the thing around. But I won't upgrade it, not without a decent assurance that a jailbreak will work, and I likely won't ever replace it with an Apple product.
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you have a lot of privacy tools available. Firewall iP is a great app that lets you block individual connections. PMP (Protect My Privacy) lets you set any combination of 18 unique privacy settings on a per app basis. UsingLocation lets you know when apps are using location services or geofences. Locationholic lets you spoof your location. FMFLive tells you when your friends are locating you.
I use the P-touch to print labels for plant tags in the greenhouse, and they've lasted several years with no failures in a 90%+ humidity environment. (To be fair, they don't get flexed on the rigid plastic sticks.) They're as legible today as the day I printed them. And with my handwriting, they're much more legible than my pencil scratches ever were. They're probably less than $0.05 each.
Publish or perish is a quantity driver, not a quality driver. As long as you can deliver the numbers to your department, it doesn't seem to matter if you work your butt off, get a program to generate them for you, or if you have a grad student puff up the quadratic equation into 20 pages of fluffery.
Actually, "learning the language" is the one time that an IDE is not the best choice. That's the time you should be trotting out Notepad and developing the skills and familiarity with the language itself.
Once you've mastered the language, the IDE serves as your reference tool, your refactoring tool, your formatting tool, your reading tool, your analysis tool, and even your testing tool. It makes simple things simpler, which is too simple for someone who doesn't understand the original simplicity.
A good IDE is a speed enhancer for good programmers. An IDE does not make a bad programmer become a good programmer.
Look at it this way: would you give a toddler a pair of crutches in order to teach him to walk?
To whoever marked this comment overrated, I'll have you know I'm typing it on a Surface. The flat keyboard is in no way a joy to type on. The chiclet keyboard is somewhat better, but the track pad and mouse buttons are still awful. The Sinclair keyboards were awful, but this is 30 years newer, so there's no excuse.
Branding works great on wooden handles of shovels, rakes, etc. This is the kind of device my uncle's heating and plumbing shop used: http://brandingirons.com/propa... But it's not so useful on computer gear or metal or plastic cases.
Sharpies are the worst. They fade to illegible after only a few years.
I use a Brother P-Touch label maker. You can buy flexible tape that works great for tagging cables. I also use it to label wall-warts or external power supplies with the device they power. I used to use paper labels with clear packing tape wrapped over the tags, but the P-touch is nicer and easier.
An honest finder will use the tag to try to return it to you. But if a thief finds your stuff and doesn't want your tag to remain visible, he's going to slap his own sticker over whatever markings you placed on it. To a first glance, it will seem to legitimately be his. It's much harder to defend yourself against them. I also inventory my gear with a phone app, taking pictures of my stuff and its serial numbers. It's much more useful to the police and to the insurance company if the stuff is stolen. Plus, the inventory app is great for keeping maintenance notes, replacement part numbers, etc. I use MyStuff2 for the iPhone, but I'm sure similar apps exist on other platforms.
Swipe in from the right edge in to get the charms, mouse to upper right corner to get charms, etc, those are all gestures. Gestures are generally bad because they are always hidden, and the user has to somehow discover them.
Changing the user interface is absolutely no different than changing the interface to a class, and the same design principles apply for similar reasons. The Open Closed Principle (OCP) states that a class should be open to extension, but closed to modifications. User interfaces are no different. They should be able to extend it to add new features, but they should never change the existing interface to provide for backward compatibility. The reasons are identical, as well: if you don't change it, nobody else has to change in order to keep using it.
The only valid reason you should change the interface is that you should remove the old interface if it was no longer needed because the tasks it did are no longer used. Clearly, that's not the case here - people still need to search, organize, locate and execute programs. Changing the UI was a completely counterproductive action, and never had any way to actually add benefit. Offering an additional UI for people who wanted a new UI would be a perfectly appropriate approach, yet they failed to implement that way.
Instead, they poorly copied Microsoft's actions with Windows 8 and Metro, which was itself a poorly done copy of iOS's interface, with the added insult of requiring gestures even on a mouse-based machine! Apple themselves then made a shit-poor decision to change the UI for iOS 7. Unity fell somewhere in the middle of this mess, believing that "change is good because Apple and Microsoft were doing it." So they violated the OCP, and pissed off as many users as they could. That's even a bigger mistake for them, because Unity users are far less locked into the choice of Canonical than a Microsoft or Apple user.
All in all, Ubuntu has made bad decision after bad decision once they started down the path with Unity. And they don't seem to understand this is a failure at every level; instead, they blame the users for being whiny luddites incapable of dealing with change. They're wrong about that, because I can indeed change, and it looks like Mint or Kali will be my next distro instead of the next version of 'stammering shuttleworth' or whatever childish name they're assigning to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the Metro UI, I like my Surface Pro a lot more than my iPad, and I use it constantly. It doesn't suffer from the walled garden of iOS, and I have a ton of programs installed. Very few Metro apps from the app store, however - I mostly have desktop and command line stuff from sourceforge (plus the obligatory Office suite.) The Microsoft app store is lacking, so I rarely think of it as an iPad type tablet. Instead, I think of it as a very portable laptop. And with the i5 and the SSD, performance hasn't been a problem.
Even though I lug them both around in my backpack, and the Surface is twice as heavy as the iPad, I use the iPad only about once a week these days, and that's only because of some iOS-only apps I need for work. Otherwise, the Surface is my go-to portable platform.
Plus, ever since iOS 7 came out, both platforms are now essentially equally ugly. iOS 7's UI changes are about the best gift Apple could have given Microsoft.
Keurig once again showing that the inferior machine wins and the only thing that counts is marketing.
And every Keurig shareholder says "yay, we win!" The only thing that counts to the business owner is profit, and all you're doing is confirming that they've made very good choices so far.
Of course, this will hit them in their long term profits, and four years from now as they're chasing their CEO out of town with chipped pods containing Keurig brand tar-and-feathers 2.0, they might finally understand the DRM lessons the rest of us already know. But until they actually learn this lesson, they'll continue to think they're geniuses.
Well, their chip system could certainly solve this problem for you. It could encode "I need 6 oz water at 212 degrees" in the message it sends to the coffee maker. Of course, Tassimo's barcodes already do this on their T-discs.
There's a tremendous amount of competition out there, and while they're currently the most popular, K-cups are far from the only game in town. If you don't want to get screwed by Keurig, buy a Nespresso, or Tassimo, or buy an AeroPress and forget the damn pods altogether.
Coffee companies that have tried technologies to lock-in their users (I'm thinking T-disc barcodes) have not taken over the market. Customers are in love with the broad variety of K-cup compatible coffees out there, not just the Keurig licensed brands. I expect Keurig will stumble hard on this one - New Coke hard.
In our city the pods are collected and recycled in a separate bag. They won't accept pods full of grounds, so they require the aluminum pods be run through a recycling press to crush the grounds out of them. The grounds are to be composted by the users in the same way as they would any other coffee grounds.
Aluminum recycles with pretty good efficiency. While they're still somewhat wasteful compared to a reusable container or a traditional coffee pot, they're hardly an environmental disaster. The packaging is just cardboard and aluminum.
I think they could solve stabilization with modern electronics. Kid's toy quadcopters are already self leveling, and as they weigh much less thank a kilogram, they're far more "twitchy" than 150kg of inertia carried about by the humans and their gear.
As you mentioned, it's the soldier who has to carry the additional 60kg pack that is the real limit.
I think the biggest problem with jetpacks is the logistics of carrying them when you're not actually jetting about with them. They were simultaneously bulky, fragile, and extremely combustible. Plus, the things weighed 60 kg when fueled, and this would almost double the normal amount of weight the average infantryman is required to carry. Even if they had a specific military purpose, getting them to the soldiers who need them at the exact time they need them is problematic.
The problem with this idea is that it still implies that you trust firewalls to keep your stuff safe. But firewalls have really proven only to be hurdles, not barriers - an unpatched browser, an infected web page, a bot client that can surf around behind your firewall, and suddenly your thermostat, washing machine, and refrigerator can be abused to send spam.
Another security problem is many of those home things are service based (for both good and bad reasons). But things that reach out across the network can be abused via their responses.
So to be secure, yes, you have to secure every damn device. Firewalls have demonstrated they help, but clearly aren't enough.
IPv6 means there will be enough addresses that you won't be needing NAT anymore, not that the things aren't already going on-line, or even that the things don't have to be behind firewalls. There is way too much utility to be had in devices that can use the network to save energy (smart grid control of energy hogging devices and learning thermostats), devices that can warn you of potential damage (freezers that let you know the door isn't closed, water leak sensors, etc), and devices that save you time (laundry machines that tell you when to take out the clothes.)
Cars should be stupid simple.
Except cars work at high speeds in varying and complex environments, and are often driven by stupid, simple, frail, inattentive, incapacitated, and/or incompetent people. A smart system can help keep them in control of their vehicles, perhaps keeping them from spinning out in front of you, or driving through an intersection into you. A smart system can understand how fast you're moving, how much inertia you have, and whether it should deploy the airbags to save you. It can detect wheel slippage, and use the ABS system to keep you moving straight. A smart system can monitor combustion and modify engine performance to reduce emissions, or shift the transmission to improve fuel economy. A smart system can call emergency services in the case of an accident. A smart car can adjust the suspension to adapt to rough or smooth roads.
They better hurry then, March is a few days away. Time be marching away from them otherwise.
And Slashdot editors much to the beat of a different drummer.
The Rat Shacks in Minnesota stopped asking for phone numbers over a decade ago. Hate on them all you want, but I recommend using current facts, not memories.
Cydia is the only reason I still use iPhones. By itself, an iPhone is not a special magical phone, it doesn't work better than other smart phones, iOS7 is now jarring and cartoonish, and it has a lot of other drawbacks, such as a sealed battery. And the fact that everything is locked inside it means that piece of shit iTunes is really the only interface for dealing with the music. I'm done buying Apple anything.
I've now spent a lot on Cydia apps that add features that should have been present all along, so I keep the thing around. But I won't upgrade it, not without a decent assurance that a jailbreak will work, and I likely won't ever replace it with an Apple product.
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you have a lot of privacy tools available. Firewall iP is a great app that lets you block individual connections. PMP (Protect My Privacy) lets you set any combination of 18 unique privacy settings on a per app basis. UsingLocation lets you know when apps are using location services or geofences. Locationholic lets you spoof your location. FMFLive tells you when your friends are locating you.
I use the P-touch to print labels for plant tags in the greenhouse, and they've lasted several years with no failures in a 90%+ humidity environment. (To be fair, they don't get flexed on the rigid plastic sticks.) They're as legible today as the day I printed them. And with my handwriting, they're much more legible than my pencil scratches ever were. They're probably less than $0.05 each.
Publish or perish is a quantity driver, not a quality driver. As long as you can deliver the numbers to your department, it doesn't seem to matter if you work your butt off, get a program to generate them for you, or if you have a grad student puff up the quadratic equation into 20 pages of fluffery.
Assuming he hasn't already...
He obviously hasn't. His algorithms are too good to produce all the dupes we see here.
I find I am much more focused and sane now
I would beg to differ with you on this point. :-)
Actually, "learning the language" is the one time that an IDE is not the best choice. That's the time you should be trotting out Notepad and developing the skills and familiarity with the language itself.
Once you've mastered the language, the IDE serves as your reference tool, your refactoring tool, your formatting tool, your reading tool, your analysis tool, and even your testing tool. It makes simple things simpler, which is too simple for someone who doesn't understand the original simplicity.
A good IDE is a speed enhancer for good programmers. An IDE does not make a bad programmer become a good programmer.
Look at it this way: would you give a toddler a pair of crutches in order to teach him to walk?
To whoever marked this comment overrated, I'll have you know I'm typing it on a Surface. The flat keyboard is in no way a joy to type on. The chiclet keyboard is somewhat better, but the track pad and mouse buttons are still awful. The Sinclair keyboards were awful, but this is 30 years newer, so there's no excuse.
Branding works great on wooden handles of shovels, rakes, etc. This is the kind of device my uncle's heating and plumbing shop used: http://brandingirons.com/propa... But it's not so useful on computer gear or metal or plastic cases.
Not recommended for use on co-workers.
I was always sober at CES
Good advice, but totally impractical. :-)
Sharpies are the worst. They fade to illegible after only a few years.
I use a Brother P-Touch label maker. You can buy flexible tape that works great for tagging cables. I also use it to label wall-warts or external power supplies with the device they power. I used to use paper labels with clear packing tape wrapped over the tags, but the P-touch is nicer and easier.
An honest finder will use the tag to try to return it to you. But if a thief finds your stuff and doesn't want your tag to remain visible, he's going to slap his own sticker over whatever markings you placed on it. To a first glance, it will seem to legitimately be his. It's much harder to defend yourself against them. I also inventory my gear with a phone app, taking pictures of my stuff and its serial numbers. It's much more useful to the police and to the insurance company if the stuff is stolen. Plus, the inventory app is great for keeping maintenance notes, replacement part numbers, etc. I use MyStuff2 for the iPhone, but I'm sure similar apps exist on other platforms.
Could it be worse than the Surface keyboard?
Swipe in from the right edge in to get the charms, mouse to upper right corner to get charms, etc, those are all gestures. Gestures are generally bad because they are always hidden, and the user has to somehow discover them.
Changing the user interface is absolutely no different than changing the interface to a class, and the same design principles apply for similar reasons. The Open Closed Principle (OCP) states that a class should be open to extension, but closed to modifications. User interfaces are no different. They should be able to extend it to add new features, but they should never change the existing interface to provide for backward compatibility. The reasons are identical, as well: if you don't change it, nobody else has to change in order to keep using it.
The only valid reason you should change the interface is that you should remove the old interface if it was no longer needed because the tasks it did are no longer used. Clearly, that's not the case here - people still need to search, organize, locate and execute programs. Changing the UI was a completely counterproductive action, and never had any way to actually add benefit. Offering an additional UI for people who wanted a new UI would be a perfectly appropriate approach, yet they failed to implement that way.
Instead, they poorly copied Microsoft's actions with Windows 8 and Metro, which was itself a poorly done copy of iOS's interface, with the added insult of requiring gestures even on a mouse-based machine! Apple themselves then made a shit-poor decision to change the UI for iOS 7. Unity fell somewhere in the middle of this mess, believing that "change is good because Apple and Microsoft were doing it." So they violated the OCP, and pissed off as many users as they could. That's even a bigger mistake for them, because Unity users are far less locked into the choice of Canonical than a Microsoft or Apple user.
All in all, Ubuntu has made bad decision after bad decision once they started down the path with Unity. And they don't seem to understand this is a failure at every level; instead, they blame the users for being whiny luddites incapable of dealing with change. They're wrong about that, because I can indeed change, and it looks like Mint or Kali will be my next distro instead of the next version of 'stammering shuttleworth' or whatever childish name they're assigning to it.