In fareness to the manufacturers: that contract you are stuck with is not with them nor was it arranged by them. Though you are right, lack of updates for rather expensive devices after small amount of time is something that puts me off Android based devices at the moment.
If they had limited carrying capacity then it'll have come down to known/unknown factors. They'd have some knowledge of how to identify iDevoce versions (as they are likely to be retail units) and know the back-o-lorry market value for the iPads with some degree of accuracy so they'd know what they were walking away with. The surface units they'd know less about in those regards: it is possible that they are pre-production units or otherwise easily identifed as from there rather than the retail channel, which would make them harder to shift even if there were a good price for them generally on the nicked market right now.
So now you have to go back "some time" in the future to clean up the mess you left the first time? Who's going to pay for the cleanup?
By "some time" I'm meaning days or weeks, not many months or more.
Slap everything commented that doesn't need to persist with a "CLEANUP" tag and scan for them pre-release or at then end of a run of sprints (and/or as you approach a release, where-ever it fits in your flow) as part of your other housekeeping tasks. Give the job to a junior so he/she might learn from the changes (have a more experienced dev to hand in case of questions, and to try make sure the wrong things are not learnt from less "clean" work).
Try and submit a patch with a bunch of commented out code to a major open source project and see if it gets accepted.
Each open source project will their own preferences and rules which are fine by me, but equally are not my problem currently (if I were to have something to contribute I'd would of course try to fit into the project's preferred coding standards (or just release my changes as-is and if anyone else wants to clean them up and claim the credit they can go right ahead, if not then fair enough too)).
Commenting just code is fine for temporary testing/debugging/rewriting.
Leaving code in a commented state is a comment ("this is how something used to be done here"), but not a terribly helpful one. If you find yourself doing this, as well as commenting the code add a true comment stating why and what code replaces its function (the bit above, the bit below, something elsewhere, nothing (it is truly deprecated)?) and why.
Once some time has passed, unless the change is significant and there is a chance someone will come along and "unchange" it not knowing the history, such comments along with the commented code should be removed as it is all in source control anyway - but keeping it in your face (and the faces of other people working on the code) in the short term can sometimes be quite helpful especially in the case of code several people are actively looking at as one of them may quickly spot a flaw (which may otherwise go unnoticed for a while longer) that makes your new more clean/fast/bugless code far less perfect than you first thought.
With Vista, the mystery was how they'd managed to get so little done in 6-odd years of development
The amount of jiggery pokery they'd done to the internals was quite obvious and caused one of Vista's greatest problems. A lot of the internals had changed including several alterations that meant needing new drivers for existing devices which a lot of manufacturers didn't bother producing (why would Epson, to give an example I presonally experienced, spend time writing drivers for their old devices, time they'd see no money back from, when they might instead get some sales of a new devices when peopel discovered Vista didn't like the old ones?), and often the Vista drivers (both for new devices and where they were created to support old ones) were much less tested than the existing XP ones so early adoptors exsperienced a lot of bugs.
Probably at some point, once the relevant evidence is collected and researched. There have been a couple of cases against high profile individuals in recent years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_Belgium#Pedophile_priests_scandal) but collating the right evidence to make a solid case against a large organisation is rather more difficult.
Altering a video convincingly is much harder than an indivdual frame, though still possible.
In this instance a there will be other evidence to back up the video: the sequencing of the lights will follow certain patterns for instance, so changing the colour of lights in the video is likely to create a sequence that simply isn't possible. In most cases where video or photographic evidence is accpeted, it is used in conjunction with other evidence rather than trusted on its face value alone because of how many ways such things can be tampered with.
Also in instances like this it is unlikely to come to court. The insurance company certainly won't fight like that, and the driver will hopefully have either the good sense to not waste the time and money or not have the time/money to throw at such a case anyway. It it really was the insurer calling then it would have been simply to check that they were safe to reject a claim, if not then it will be someone acting on behalf of the driver testing the water to see if there is enough evidence to make a claim (or further appeal) pointless.
The quote is "open-source information" - the lack of capitalisation is significant here: no link to the OSI is intended to be implied.
Open-source information is a fairly common term in some circles, it refers to information that can be obtained or derived from sources that are open to (legitimate) public access. In other words accessing that information does not in itself constitute a break of any law or other rule.
Of course the way he used the information once he had obtained it is another matter.
The OSI foundation doesn't seem to be doing a good job of enforcing the trademark of the term Open Source.
They can't in this instance. "open-source information" is a phrase that has been used by people intelligence services, academia, and other organisations since long before the OSI existed in any form. Even if they could afford the team of lawyers Microsoft use to defend their sole use of the word "windows" in certain contexts, I doubt this would be one of the contexts where they would win.
Could be encryption export restrictions (yes, I knwo the devices were made in China in the first place and are available everywhere else anyway so the restriction has no real effect, but that are still legal restrictions).
There may be other trade limiting legislation that is relevant.
She could be bypassing import/export taxes and other such.
Getting less iPhone specific: she may have been intending to use the phones to pay for other illegal products/services, high priced items are sometimes used as part of attempts to launder money associated with drug and people transportation.
Nothing that really warrants a tasering, though if she was getting overly argumentative they could claim (however disengenuously) that they reacted in fear that she might become violent and put other members of the public in danger.
There are two thigs that make it costing more than Windows unsurprising.
Firstly the cost of Windows to manufacturers like Dell is much much much lower per unit than the likes of you or I would pay personally, and they get a kick-back for every bit of crapware they install on it for you which could easily make the Windows+crap solution zero cost. The crapware is not available for Linux, so they lose that couple of $/unit.
Secondly, if they have done as much work as "the result of a skunkworks project to optimise the open-source OS to run on Dell projects, to create better laptops for developers" might imlpy, then that sort of work to any decent quality level costs a fair amount in experienced man-time. Most chipset/device manufacturers produce their own Windows drivers that are (eventually, usually after a few revisions) fast and stable, but produce very little or nothing at all for other OSs such as Linux. This means that anything not yet fully supported and optimsed by the mainstream kernel woudl need work from Dell's team - and it may not be easy work as often public documentation for such things is sparce or otherwise lacking (or simply not available: they may have had to pay for access to some information).
This isn't about creaming money of us silly Linux people - it is about not doing work for nothing (which is fine for individuals and small groups who are making use of what would otherwise be spare time, but very difficult to get passed your shareholders when you are a publicly listed company).
As Windows gradually loses market share due to the number of devices (I'm including everything here, not just desktops and laptops where Windows is still very much king) running other options (Android, iOS, Linux,...) the device support situation will hopefully change to the point where (at very least) good documentation is publicly available for most things.
Excellent, my evil island cloaking device is functioning perfectly. They'll never know my nefarious plans until they are too late to do anything about them!
they only need to make this available to their own customers
But they also can't stop their customers making the GPL covered code available elsewhere once they have access to it, so releasing to their customers is effectively releasing to the world.
Unfortunately most of the general public think that because nothing really went wrong there was not a problem in the first place, and that it was all hyped up by the media. Some of this is the simple truth that it was over-hyped by the media who over-hype everything so people are growing desensitised, some of it is people not bothering to research their opinions or properly engage their critical thinking abilities.
Interesting fact: it isn't just the light that makes them scurry away adn hide. They can smell us, and find us quite disgusting (presumably an evolved survival reaction: avoid mammals as they'll either eat you or just stomp on you).
Why? If Samsung can make money from iPhone sales, why would they want to stop the sales completely?
The supply deal between Samsung and Apple is already due to end (in 2014) IIRC, so Samsung are in a position to lose at most that. Chip manufacture is an expensive business, there are a fair few players in the mobile device market right now and Samsung don't have infinite production capacity - presumably they think they can make the same money (or more) using that finite resource to service other clients (including other parts of themselves), and do so without helping a competitor, they may even already have new contracts lined up ready.
My assumption is that Samsung could do better now. The contract must have room for price variance nor room for Samsung to walk away, but clauses that would allow Apple to walk away. If I'm right then what Samsung have done is simply demand Apply pay the going rate, which is higher right now than when their deal was first negotiated. They couldn't lose: either Apple agree and give Samsung what they want, or Apple walk away and Samsung get the same from others (or via equivalent saving by being able to make use of the manufacturing resource directly themselves).
If Samsung caused the cessation of iPhone sales altogether, iPhone customers might move to a brand that doesn't use Samsung parts at all.
I think that inconveniencing a competitor in another market probably didn't even come into it, other than inspiring a few humorous/ironic/what-ever notes on internal memos. This seems to be to be basic cost/benefit and "what the market will bare" stuff. If anything inconveniencing Apple would have made them think twice rather than make them more eager to cause disruption: being seen to deliberately inconvenience a partner, no matter what the provocation, can look bad and make other potential partners think twice about dealing with you.
I've gone a quick check of my memory, and it looks like QuickBasic and its descendants had those directives, which will be where I'll remember it from.
*Ok ok, GP actually said that string variable names always ended in $. But if that isn't the same as saying it was required, then I don't know what is.
GPP was imprecise but almost correct. Unless I'm misremembering and assigning properties of other BASIC variants (I used a few variants way back then) to MS's that it didn't have, or course.
IIRC all unqualified variable names defaulted to integer type, adding the $ told the interpreter that a string type is required instead. But there existed directives to alter this behaviour, so for instance strings were the default. Something like "DEFSTR S-R" would make variables starting with S, T or R default to string (unless specifically set to something else by a trailing type indicator) from that point on.
Here in the UK msn messenger (or whatever MS is calling it this month) seems to be the dominant IM network
I'm only one data-point, but a lot of people I know directly or indirectly seem to have switched away from MS's IM. It usually starts with using Facebook's IM for contacts that are on there then slowly logging into MSN/Live/what-ever less and less often until they don't bother at all (and reverting to mobile phone text messages for communicating with people who are not on facebook).
Don't most people these days, throw their phones on the charger every night when they go to bed?
My phone will last two days between charges if it has to and I don't use it much other than it being on and idle. I can easily run the battery down in a few hours or talking or worse using to tether my netbook to the Internet - being able to put it on charge when I go to bed is not really useful when it is nearly drained due to long voice calls at two in the afternoon when I'm not near a convenient USB port. That doesn't happen often, but it does happen often enough and no doubt there are a great many people out there with more exciting lives than mine who find many more occasions when they are not near a convenient charging point.
I have a couple or portable battery chargers that help a lot for this though, so it isn't a completely unsolved problem even without spare batteries. Not very efficient of course, charging a battery via USB then using that battery to charge another battery later...
Of course a lot of people are more concerned about what will happen when the battery ages to the point of not holding enough charge at all any more. Personally I'm not so worried about that these days as improvements in battery technology make it far more likely that I'll have a replaced the phone before that becomes a major issue.
There are a couple of people/groups out there who are trying to take the highest quality versions and mix out all the changes. "Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition" is said to be the best by far at the moment - available on most moderately disreputable trackers.
Unless it varies by territory of course - I'm in the UK, perhaps the states will get it on the 3rd while we will need to wait 10 more days for the honour of paying through the nose[1] for one.
[1] The equivalent of $383 at current rates for the 8Gb model through a mix of our tax regime and the manufacturer's desire to fleece us like everyone else does. Only 60% of the cost of a sim-free 8Gb iPhone 4 though, when my current smartphone fails (as it is threatening to do) or annoys me enough to warrant a short sharp visit to concrete-land I'll have to search out some comparative reviews.
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In fareness to the manufacturers: that contract you are stuck with is not with them nor was it arranged by them. Though you are right, lack of updates for rather expensive devices after small amount of time is something that puts me off Android based devices at the moment.
Actually, most of the hate is the other way around: people berating MS for forcing mobile optimised elements on the desktop.
If they had limited carrying capacity then it'll have come down to known/unknown factors. They'd have some knowledge of how to identify iDevoce versions (as they are likely to be retail units) and know the back-o-lorry market value for the iPads with some degree of accuracy so they'd know what they were walking away with. The surface units they'd know less about in those regards: it is possible that they are pre-production units or otherwise easily identifed as from there rather than the retail channel, which would make them harder to shift even if there were a good price for them generally on the nicked market right now.
So now you have to go back "some time" in the future to clean up the mess you left the first time? Who's going to pay for the cleanup?
By "some time" I'm meaning days or weeks, not many months or more.
Slap everything commented that doesn't need to persist with a "CLEANUP" tag and scan for them pre-release or at then end of a run of sprints (and/or as you approach a release, where-ever it fits in your flow) as part of your other housekeeping tasks. Give the job to a junior so he/she might learn from the changes (have a more experienced dev to hand in case of questions, and to try make sure the wrong things are not learnt from less "clean" work).
Try and submit a patch with a bunch of commented out code to a major open source project and see if it gets accepted.
Each open source project will their own preferences and rules which are fine by me, but equally are not my problem currently (if I were to have something to contribute I'd would of course try to fit into the project's preferred coding standards (or just release my changes as-is and if anyone else wants to clean them up and claim the credit they can go right ahead, if not then fair enough too)).
Commenting just code is fine for temporary testing/debugging/rewriting.
Leaving code in a commented state is a comment ("this is how something used to be done here"), but not a terribly helpful one. If you find yourself doing this, as well as commenting the code add a true comment stating why and what code replaces its function (the bit above, the bit below, something elsewhere, nothing (it is truly deprecated)?) and why.
Once some time has passed, unless the change is significant and there is a chance someone will come along and "unchange" it not knowing the history, such comments along with the commented code should be removed as it is all in source control anyway - but keeping it in your face (and the faces of other people working on the code) in the short term can sometimes be quite helpful especially in the case of code several people are actively looking at as one of them may quickly spot a flaw (which may otherwise go unnoticed for a while longer) that makes your new more clean/fast/bugless code far less perfect than you first thought.
With Vista, the mystery was how they'd managed to get so little done in 6-odd years of development
The amount of jiggery pokery they'd done to the internals was quite obvious and caused one of Vista's greatest problems. A lot of the internals had changed including several alterations that meant needing new drivers for existing devices which a lot of manufacturers didn't bother producing (why would Epson, to give an example I presonally experienced, spend time writing drivers for their old devices, time they'd see no money back from, when they might instead get some sales of a new devices when peopel discovered Vista didn't like the old ones?), and often the Vista drivers (both for new devices and where they were created to support old ones) were much less tested than the existing XP ones so early adoptors exsperienced a lot of bugs.
Probably at some point, once the relevant evidence is collected and researched. There have been a couple of cases against high profile individuals in recent years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_Belgium#Pedophile_priests_scandal) but collating the right evidence to make a solid case against a large organisation is rather more difficult.
Altering a video convincingly is much harder than an indivdual frame, though still possible.
In this instance a there will be other evidence to back up the video: the sequencing of the lights will follow certain patterns for instance, so changing the colour of lights in the video is likely to create a sequence that simply isn't possible. In most cases where video or photographic evidence is accpeted, it is used in conjunction with other evidence rather than trusted on its face value alone because of how many ways such things can be tampered with.
Also in instances like this it is unlikely to come to court. The insurance company certainly won't fight like that, and the driver will hopefully have either the good sense to not waste the time and money or not have the time/money to throw at such a case anyway. It it really was the insurer calling then it would have been simply to check that they were safe to reject a claim, if not then it will be someone acting on behalf of the driver testing the water to see if there is enough evidence to make a claim (or further appeal) pointless.
What is Open Source information?
The quote is "open-source information" - the lack of capitalisation is significant here: no link to the OSI is intended to be implied.
Open-source information is a fairly common term in some circles, it refers to information that can be obtained or derived from sources that are open to (legitimate) public access. In other words accessing that information does not in itself constitute a break of any law or other rule.
Of course the way he used the information once he had obtained it is another matter.
The OSI foundation doesn't seem to be doing a good job of enforcing the trademark of the term Open Source.
They can't in this instance. "open-source information" is a phrase that has been used by people intelligence services, academia, and other organisations since long before the OSI existed in any form. Even if they could afford the team of lawyers Microsoft use to defend their sole use of the word "windows" in certain contexts, I doubt this would be one of the contexts where they would win.
Could be encryption export restrictions (yes, I knwo the devices were made in China in the first place and are available everywhere else anyway so the restriction has no real effect, but that are still legal restrictions).
There may be other trade limiting legislation that is relevant.
She could be bypassing import/export taxes and other such.
Getting less iPhone specific: she may have been intending to use the phones to pay for other illegal products/services, high priced items are sometimes used as part of attempts to launder money associated with drug and people transportation.
Nothing that really warrants a tasering, though if she was getting overly argumentative they could claim (however disengenuously) that they reacted in fear that she might become violent and put other members of the public in danger.
There are two thigs that make it costing more than Windows unsurprising.
...) the device support situation will hopefully change to the point where (at very least) good documentation is publicly available for most things.
Firstly the cost of Windows to manufacturers like Dell is much much much lower per unit than the likes of you or I would pay personally, and they get a kick-back for every bit of crapware they install on it for you which could easily make the Windows+crap solution zero cost. The crapware is not available for Linux, so they lose that couple of $/unit.
Secondly, if they have done as much work as "the result of a skunkworks project to optimise the open-source OS to run on Dell projects, to create better laptops for developers" might imlpy, then that sort of work to any decent quality level costs a fair amount in experienced man-time. Most chipset/device manufacturers produce their own Windows drivers that are (eventually, usually after a few revisions) fast and stable, but produce very little or nothing at all for other OSs such as Linux. This means that anything not yet fully supported and optimsed by the mainstream kernel woudl need work from Dell's team - and it may not be easy work as often public documentation for such things is sparce or otherwise lacking (or simply not available: they may have had to pay for access to some information).
This isn't about creaming money of us silly Linux people - it is about not doing work for nothing (which is fine for individuals and small groups who are making use of what would otherwise be spare time, but very difficult to get passed your shareholders when you are a publicly listed company).
As Windows gradually loses market share due to the number of devices (I'm including everything here, not just desktops and laptops where Windows is still very much king) running other options (Android, iOS, Linux,
Excellent, my evil island cloaking device is functioning perfectly. They'll never know my nefarious plans until they are too late to do anything about them!
they only need to make this available to their own customers
But they also can't stop their customers making the GPL covered code available elsewhere once they have access to it, so releasing to their customers is effectively releasing to the world.
Unfortunately most of the general public think that because nothing really went wrong there was not a problem in the first place, and that it was all hyped up by the media. Some of this is the simple truth that it was over-hyped by the media who over-hype everything so people are growing desensitised, some of it is people not bothering to research their opinions or properly engage their critical thinking abilities.
Nope. Not just your browser. Your browser, your OS & some of its support libraries that many other apps may use.
Interesting fact: it isn't just the light that makes them scurry away adn hide. They can smell us, and find us quite disgusting (presumably an evolved survival reaction: avoid mammals as they'll either eat you or just stomp on you).
Why? If Samsung can make money from iPhone sales, why would they want to stop the sales completely?
The supply deal between Samsung and Apple is already due to end (in 2014) IIRC, so Samsung are in a position to lose at most that. Chip manufacture is an expensive business, there are a fair few players in the mobile device market right now and Samsung don't have infinite production capacity - presumably they think they can make the same money (or more) using that finite resource to service other clients (including other parts of themselves), and do so without helping a competitor, they may even already have new contracts lined up ready.
My assumption is that Samsung could do better now. The contract must have room for price variance nor room for Samsung to walk away, but clauses that would allow Apple to walk away. If I'm right then what Samsung have done is simply demand Apply pay the going rate, which is higher right now than when their deal was first negotiated. They couldn't lose: either Apple agree and give Samsung what they want, or Apple walk away and Samsung get the same from others (or via equivalent saving by being able to make use of the manufacturing resource directly themselves).
If Samsung caused the cessation of iPhone sales altogether, iPhone customers might move to a brand that doesn't use Samsung parts at all.
I think that inconveniencing a competitor in another market probably didn't even come into it, other than inspiring a few humorous/ironic/what-ever notes on internal memos. This seems to be to be basic cost/benefit and "what the market will bare" stuff. If anything inconveniencing Apple would have made them think twice rather than make them more eager to cause disruption: being seen to deliberately inconvenience a partner, no matter what the provocation, can look bad and make other potential partners think twice about dealing with you.
I've gone a quick check of my memory, and it looks like QuickBasic and its descendants had those directives, which will be where I'll remember it from.
*Ok ok, GP actually said that string variable names always ended in $. But if that isn't the same as saying it was required, then I don't know what is.
GPP was imprecise but almost correct. Unless I'm misremembering and assigning properties of other BASIC variants (I used a few variants way back then) to MS's that it didn't have, or course.
IIRC all unqualified variable names defaulted to integer type, adding the $ told the interpreter that a string type is required instead. But there existed directives to alter this behaviour, so for instance strings were the default. Something like "DEFSTR S-R" would make variables starting with S, T or R default to string (unless specifically set to something else by a trailing type indicator) from that point on.
Here in the UK msn messenger (or whatever MS is calling it this month) seems to be the dominant IM network
I'm only one data-point, but a lot of people I know directly or indirectly seem to have switched away from MS's IM. It usually starts with using Facebook's IM for contacts that are on there then slowly logging into MSN/Live/what-ever less and less often until they don't bother at all (and reverting to mobile phone text messages for communicating with people who are not on facebook).
Don't most people these days, throw their phones on the charger every night when they go to bed?
My phone will last two days between charges if it has to and I don't use it much other than it being on and idle. I can easily run the battery down in a few hours or talking or worse using to tether my netbook to the Internet - being able to put it on charge when I go to bed is not really useful when it is nearly drained due to long voice calls at two in the afternoon when I'm not near a convenient USB port. That doesn't happen often, but it does happen often enough and no doubt there are a great many people out there with more exciting lives than mine who find many more occasions when they are not near a convenient charging point.
I have a couple or portable battery chargers that help a lot for this though, so it isn't a completely unsolved problem even without spare batteries. Not very efficient of course, charging a battery via USB then using that battery to charge another battery later...
Of course a lot of people are more concerned about what will happen when the battery ages to the point of not holding enough charge at all any more. Personally I'm not so worried about that these days as improvements in battery technology make it far more likely that I'll have a replaced the phone before that becomes a major issue.
There are a couple of people/groups out there who are trying to take the highest quality versions and mix out all the changes. "Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition" is said to be the best by far at the moment - available on most moderately disreputable trackers.
Unless it varies by territory of course - I'm in the UK, perhaps the states will get it on the 3rd while we will need to wait 10 more days for the honour of paying through the nose[1] for one. [1] The equivalent of $383 at current rates for the 8Gb model through a mix of our tax regime and the manufacturer's desire to fleece us like everyone else does. Only 60% of the cost of a sim-free 8Gb iPhone 4 though, when my current smartphone fails (as it is threatening to do) or annoys me enough to warrant a short sharp visit to concrete-land I'll have to search out some comparative reviews.
The summary says November 3rd, but the linked article says November 13th. I'll assume the original article is correct.
The horses mouth suggests your assumption is correct: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb
There is a rather useful search engine run by a company you may heard off, that helpfully directed me to the official specs when I made an appropriate enquiry: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb
The dimensions are listed there, to the precision of 0.1mm (no word on the accuracy though).