Ugh. No doubt Abbot's poetry is awful, but the sort of smug snarkiness shown by the article author seems in very poor taste. It's the sort of thing one expects from random blogs, of course, but this guy is a "poetry professional," writing in a major newspaper (ok, it's the Grauniad, but still).
Er, from what I've read, they intended to try and capture him if possible. But if he was determined to go out shooting, their choices on the ground were probably very limited, especially operating in what's essentially hostile territory.
The article author is very clearly a raging Apple fanboy.
It's downright painful to read his fapping, as he attempts to avoid the most obvious explanation: The ipad is essentially a fashion accessory (much more so than the iphone), and there's really little reason to buy one (especially at a high price) if you aren't buying into Apple's heavy techno beat and synchronized strobe lights.
I enjoy grocery shopping as well, but that's in "normal" grocery stores, that I can conveniently drop into on my normal walking route.
Walmart (and other U.S. style suburban mega box stores) are different: they're truly unpleasant places, and typically require a dedicated trip to the edge of town or something. I can imagine many people would pony up some cash to get the low prices of Walmart while avoiding the depressing experience and inconvenience.
It's a sad comment on the state the U.S., with the disintegration of any sense of community, but in most places that damage is already done; this is just a reaction to it. I think it's the wrong reaction, and will just make a horrible situation even worse, but it's understandable that someone would choose it.
Do you know of any other organization with a large automated regression testing system for linux kernels? That's not just me being snarky, its a serious question - who else beside phoronix is doing this sort of wide-scale testing on a constant basis?
I can't answer your question, but Phoronix's testing and benchmarking is notoriously bad, and anything you see there needs to be taken with a gigantic nugget of salt. At best, it's a hint to look around and see if you can find any similar result from a more reputable source.
This is a common difference between countries that have equatorial regions and none. The US can launch its spacecraft from Florida (or in the alternative Edwards AFB). This allows them to reach the right inclination with LESS energy (delta-V, fuel, money, take your pic). ... SpaceX launching from the US or central America will ALWAYS have to expend significantly less fuel than launches from China.
Inclination. It's a big word, but it means $$$.
Wait, what?
According to Google maps, China's southern-most point (around 18deg N, in Hainan) is well south of the U.S.'s southern-most point (around 25deg N in Florida, or 21deg N in Hawaii)....
SpaceX has also launched from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, which is apparently leased by the U.S. military; presumably China could lease some islands too if that's useful...
The controller that they include with the PS3 is really, really bad. It's made for little kids and they've refused to offer a controller designed for adults. I get that there's a cultural thing about face in Japan, but ruining products with this sort of lack of attention to detail is ridiculous.
No idea what you mean by "made for little kids," but I think you're quite off the mark about "Japan": in most cases Japanese companies are insanely customer-focused, and very detail oriented, and go to great lengths to please the customer, even if it means swallowing their pride; they pay a lot of attention to customer reaction.
However, Sony -- or maybe more properly, SCE -- does indeed seem to have a bit of a stubborn streak. Some of that is probably rooted in the tendency of Japanese firms to tinker endlessly with details over a very long time trying to perfect them, but I think a lot of it stems from the somewhat atypical arrogance of SCE, which is due to both its astonishing but somewhat unexpected success in the mid-90s, and the personalities of its founders. I think some of this attitude in the greater Sony organization results from the lopsided influence of SCE.
[I work in Japan for a Japanese consumer electronics firm.]
OK, they're almost certainly better than the ngage, but "glorious"?!
In general, Sony has an absolutely awful record with controllers... The (in)famous Sony "dpad of pain"... the awkward analogue stick placement on the dualshock and descendents.... the crappy PSP nub... the cramped and awkward PSPgo controls... ugh. Sony has many strengths, but designing gaming controls isn't one of them.
A quick look at the article isn't very reassuring: The "Xperia Play" has (1) the dpad-of-pain, and (2) some awkwardly-placed "touch sensitive disks" with no tactile feedback...
With every such system I know of, payment-via-phone is an option, and you can just use a stored-charge contactless smartcard instead.
I actually have a phone I can use to pay for the train, but I just use a card instead because it's anonymous (the cards can be recharged easily at a ticket machine, or a new one obtained from a machine for a ¥500 deposit) and it's easier to grab the card from my pocket than fish out my phone...
Note that that the comprised system was "MIFARE Classic", which is an extremely flawed implementation. Other systems are not necessarily such an easy target (and FeliCa is almost certainly better than MIFARE Classic).
Of course, while there are certainly better and more secure ways to implement stored-payment cards, I guess the real lesson is that the entities who choose which system/standard to use are often not very well qualified to do so...
In C, the non-short-circuiting and/or operators are bit-wise whereas the short-circuiting operators are boolean, which may sometime cause confusion (but note that some programming languages simply lack the non-short-circuiting operators altogether, e.g., python).
Er, well of course if you buy a cheezy low-end MB, it's not surprising that it will be flaky in a lot of ways, and poor support for upgrades is a prime candidate -- but since it will very likely also be flaky even in normal operation, I'm not sure such MBs are really such a great deal. You can buy a $100 MB instead and have great support, solid performance, and double the lifetime of your computer through better upgradibility...
I build my own PCs simply because I've had such miserable experiences with pre-built computers (much it through work), which usually sound good on paper, but are complete dogs in practice -- e.g., they have a fast CPU, but some sort of bottleneck elsewhere that makes them consistently pokey.
I don't spend lots of money, and I just pick simple "obvious" things, typically middle-of-the-road CPUs/components, avoiding the fastest, but the resulting computers seem to always feel vastly better than the prebuilt ones at work -- for less money.
It's a little bit of pain to do so, but it's really only a day of my time at worst (much of that just wading through PC sites trying to figure out what to buy), and the result is a palpably better experience for several years of daily use...
Nobody asked for the "awesome bar" or whatever the hell that is. If it improves productivity then fine, tabs make sense, but the majority of this shit is just gimmicks
The "awesome bar" has a stupid name, but I've found it to actually be a huge productivity improvement for me. It basically replaces bookmarks in everyday usage, and is far faster and more easier to use than they are. I'll note that while chrome kinda tried to copy the AB, the chrome version is considerably less nice.
FF4 in general seems a pretty good release -- it's faster and less resource hungry than its predecessor, and has some nice features (e.g. the option of removing the menubar, which was always an annoying waste of space) -- and I'd say that the Moz devs are doing a pretty good job. There's a lot of competition among browsers at the moment, and while FF isn't the best in every way, it's quite competitive (better in some ways, worse in others) with other modern browsers like chrome, IE9, and safari. I frequently switch back and forth between FF and chrome depending on the circumstance (per-tab processes are great, especially for resource-constrained machines), but in the end FF still basically holds the lead; props to chrome, though, for many good ideas and keeping the competition hot.
You've got to admit it's a great headline though -- reading that was the first time I actually laughed out loud this april 1st...
Sure, it's all pretty lame, especially compared to the sublime "OMG ponies!1!" -- but except for that (what on earth happened that year?!), slashdot's april fools have always been lame.... it's a slashdition!
Luckily Nintendo did things right, and provide a very convenient way to adjust the amount of 3D effect, or turn it off completely.
[That's what sucks about the current 3D-movie craze: often the only version of a movie playing in a given location will be the 3D version, meaning those who don't enjoy the 3D effect must suffer an inferior viewing experience (dimmer image, awkward and uncomfortable glasses), and end up paying extra for the privilege!]
I wasn't aware that Japan had nuclear reactors, it was a really dumb idea for them to do. In the US the few nuclear reactors we have are designed so that if power is lost to the core the control rods fall into the core and the fuel rods fall out and the reaction stops. The problem is that if a reactor like that suffers and earthquake you can end up in a position where the rods get jammed and the assurance of an automatic shutdown disappears.
From what I've gathered it's a bit of a moot point as these reactors were apparently built upside down such that they have to have constant power to keep the reactor offline.
Note that the Japanese reactors at Fukushima which are currently melting down are a U.S. (General Electric) design, and the oldest (1 and 2) were actually built by GE... This design is apparently quite common in the U.S. as well.
A $2199 thing is not a status symbol unless you're in Libya or Egypt.. I think. A private jet is a status symbol.
I have no beef with Apple's laptops — I think they make great hardware — but it's pretty clear that many people buy Macbooks because they're the cool thing to have. It's not the price, of course, it's the look, and the name.
E-books have many advantages, but -- ignoring the idiotic licensing shenigans -- they have a huge disadvantage too: they're less pleasant to read. Yes, e-ink displays are better than LCDs, but frankly they're still awful compared to simple old paper.
Maybe some future tech will fix that, but I'm not holding my breath... even when it becomes technically possible, the current market focus seems to be more on making books into little TVs than supporting reading well.
[I'm thinking mainly of books that one reads at length. For something like a reference manual, of course, which is typically read in short bursts, and where small size, searchability, and random access are huge advantages, an e-book of just about any sort is the bee's knees.]
But we have no shortage of forests in North America, or well really even Europe. There's been a net gain in the last 100 years by a staggering amount.
Of course, one of the big reasons for that is that in the slightly-more-distant past, people had gone completely bonzo insane with their forest-razing. More recently, the forest-razing hasn't been quite as bonzo...
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. No doubt Abbot's poetry is awful, but the sort of smug snarkiness shown by the article author seems in very poor taste. It's the sort of thing one expects from random blogs, of course, but this guy is a "poetry professional," writing in a major newspaper (ok, it's the Grauniad, but still).
Bad form, sir.
Canada has a government?!
Er, from what I've read, they intended to try and capture him if possible. But if he was determined to go out shooting, their choices on the ground were probably very limited, especially operating in what's essentially hostile territory.
The article author is very clearly a raging Apple fanboy.
It's downright painful to read his fapping, as he attempts to avoid the most obvious explanation: The ipad is essentially a fashion accessory (much more so than the iphone), and there's really little reason to buy one (especially at a high price) if you aren't buying into Apple's heavy techno beat and synchronized strobe lights.
If it depended on mono I'll bet they would have added it...
:[
I enjoy grocery shopping as well, but that's in "normal" grocery stores, that I can conveniently drop into on my normal walking route.
Walmart (and other U.S. style suburban mega box stores) are different: they're truly unpleasant places, and typically require a dedicated trip to the edge of town or something. I can imagine many people would pony up some cash to get the low prices of Walmart while avoiding the depressing experience and inconvenience.
It's a sad comment on the state the U.S., with the disintegration of any sense of community, but in most places that damage is already done; this is just a reaction to it. I think it's the wrong reaction, and will just make a horrible situation even worse, but it's understandable that someone would choose it.
Do you know of any other organization with a large automated regression testing system for linux kernels? That's not just me being snarky, its a serious question - who else beside phoronix is doing this sort of wide-scale testing on a constant basis?
I can't answer your question, but Phoronix's testing and benchmarking is notoriously bad, and anything you see there needs to be taken with a gigantic nugget of salt. At best, it's a hint to look around and see if you can find any similar result from a more reputable source.
Because they were good enough for Jesus!
This is a common difference between countries that have equatorial regions and none. The US can launch its spacecraft from Florida (or in the alternative Edwards AFB). This allows them to reach the right inclination with LESS energy (delta-V, fuel, money, take your pic).
...
SpaceX launching from the US or central America will ALWAYS have to expend significantly less fuel than launches from China.
Inclination. It's a big word, but it means $$$.
Wait, what?
According to Google maps, China's southern-most point (around 18deg N, in Hainan) is well south of the U.S.'s southern-most point (around 25deg N in Florida, or 21deg N in Hawaii)....
SpaceX has also launched from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, which is apparently leased by the U.S. military; presumably China could lease some islands too if that's useful...
The controller that they include with the PS3 is really, really bad. It's made for little kids and they've refused to offer a controller designed for adults. I get that there's a cultural thing about face in Japan, but ruining products with this sort of lack of attention to detail is ridiculous.
No idea what you mean by "made for little kids," but I think you're quite off the mark about "Japan": in most cases Japanese companies are insanely customer-focused, and very detail oriented, and go to great lengths to please the customer, even if it means swallowing their pride; they pay a lot of attention to customer reaction.
However, Sony -- or maybe more properly, SCE -- does indeed seem to have a bit of a stubborn streak. Some of that is probably rooted in the tendency of Japanese firms to tinker endlessly with details over a very long time trying to perfect them, but I think a lot of it stems from the somewhat atypical arrogance of SCE, which is due to both its astonishing but somewhat unexpected success in the mid-90s, and the personalities of its founders. I think some of this attitude in the greater Sony organization results from the lopsided influence of SCE.
[I work in Japan for a Japanese consumer electronics firm.]
"glorious PlayStation-style controls"
OK, they're almost certainly better than the ngage, but "glorious"?!
In general, Sony has an absolutely awful record with controllers... The (in)famous Sony "dpad of pain"... the awkward analogue stick placement on the dualshock and descendents.... the crappy PSP nub... the cramped and awkward PSPgo controls... ugh. Sony has many strengths, but designing gaming controls isn't one of them.
A quick look at the article isn't very reassuring: The "Xperia Play" has (1) the dpad-of-pain, and (2) some awkwardly-placed "touch sensitive disks" with no tactile feedback...
PSPgo2 anybody?
Thanks for the correction; I don't actually use Python, I was just going by the wikipedia table and bit of random googling...
With every such system I know of, payment-via-phone is an option, and you can just use a stored-charge contactless smartcard instead.
I actually have a phone I can use to pay for the train, but I just use a card instead because it's anonymous (the cards can be recharged easily at a ticket machine, or a new one obtained from a machine for a ¥500 deposit) and it's easier to grab the card from my pocket than fish out my phone...
Reverse Engineering a real-world RFID payment system: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4036.en.html Video of the presentation (in English)
Note that that the comprised system was "MIFARE Classic", which is an extremely flawed implementation. Other systems are not necessarily such an easy target (and FeliCa is almost certainly better than MIFARE Classic).
Of course, while there are certainly better and more secure ways to implement stored-payment cards, I guess the real lesson is that the entities who choose which system/standard to use are often not very well qualified to do so...
It's a C language compound-or statement. The first term that evaluates false terminates the evaluation with false.
I don't do much programming in C, but please tell me that their approach to boolean logic isn't that fucked up.
C has both short-circuiting and non-short-circuiting and/or operators; the same is true of most major programming languages.
In C, the non-short-circuiting and/or operators are bit-wise whereas the short-circuiting operators are boolean, which may sometime cause confusion (but note that some programming languages simply lack the non-short-circuiting operators altogether, e.g., python).
Er, well of course if you buy a cheezy low-end MB, it's not surprising that it will be flaky in a lot of ways, and poor support for upgrades is a prime candidate -- but since it will very likely also be flaky even in normal operation, I'm not sure such MBs are really such a great deal. You can buy a $100 MB instead and have great support, solid performance, and double the lifetime of your computer through better upgradibility...
I build my own PCs simply because I've had such miserable experiences with pre-built computers (much it through work), which usually sound good on paper, but are complete dogs in practice -- e.g., they have a fast CPU, but some sort of bottleneck elsewhere that makes them consistently pokey.
I don't spend lots of money, and I just pick simple "obvious" things, typically middle-of-the-road CPUs/components, avoiding the fastest, but the resulting computers seem to always feel vastly better than the prebuilt ones at work -- for less money.
It's a little bit of pain to do so, but it's really only a day of my time at worst (much of that just wading through PC sites trying to figure out what to buy), and the result is a palpably better experience for several years of daily use...
Nobody asked for the "awesome bar" or whatever the hell that is. If it improves productivity then fine, tabs make sense, but the majority of this shit is just gimmicks
The "awesome bar" has a stupid name, but I've found it to actually be a huge productivity improvement for me. It basically replaces bookmarks in everyday usage, and is far faster and more easier to use than they are. I'll note that while chrome kinda tried to copy the AB, the chrome version is considerably less nice.
FF4 in general seems a pretty good release -- it's faster and less resource hungry than its predecessor, and has some nice features (e.g. the option of removing the menubar, which was always an annoying waste of space) -- and I'd say that the Moz devs are doing a pretty good job. There's a lot of competition among browsers at the moment, and while FF isn't the best in every way, it's quite competitive (better in some ways, worse in others) with other modern browsers like chrome, IE9, and safari. I frequently switch back and forth between FF and chrome depending on the circumstance (per-tab processes are great, especially for resource-constrained machines), but in the end FF still basically holds the lead; props to chrome, though, for many good ideas and keeping the competition hot.
You've got to admit it's a great headline though -- reading that was the first time I actually laughed out loud this april 1st...
Sure, it's all pretty lame, especially compared to the sublime "OMG ponies!1!" -- but except for that (what on earth happened that year?!), slashdot's april fools have always been lame.... it's a slashdition!
Not fair. Google's been a lot better at protecting info than Zuckerberg's famous pig.
Google's a lot better than most companies -- but their success has made them some powerful enemies, who do a lot of lobbying...
I won't even attempt the Nintendo 3DS.
Luckily Nintendo did things right, and provide a very convenient way to adjust the amount of 3D effect, or turn it off completely.
[That's what sucks about the current 3D-movie craze: often the only version of a movie playing in a given location will be the 3D version, meaning those who don't enjoy the 3D effect must suffer an inferior viewing experience (dimmer image, awkward and uncomfortable glasses), and end up paying extra for the privilege!]
I wasn't aware that Japan had nuclear reactors, it was a really dumb idea for them to do. In the US the few nuclear reactors we have are designed so that if power is lost to the core the control rods fall into the core and the fuel rods fall out and the reaction stops. The problem is that if a reactor like that suffers and earthquake you can end up in a position where the rods get jammed and the assurance of an automatic shutdown disappears.
From what I've gathered it's a bit of a moot point as these reactors were apparently built upside down such that they have to have constant power to keep the reactor offline.
Note that the Japanese reactors at Fukushima which are currently melting down are a U.S. (General Electric) design, and the oldest (1 and 2) were actually built by GE... This design is apparently quite common in the U.S. as well.
A $2199 thing is not a status symbol unless you're in Libya or Egypt.. I think. A private jet is a status symbol.
I have no beef with Apple's laptops — I think they make great hardware — but it's pretty clear that many people buy Macbooks because they're the cool thing to have. It's not the price, of course, it's the look, and the name.
E-books have many advantages, but -- ignoring the idiotic licensing shenigans -- they have a huge disadvantage too: they're less pleasant to read. Yes, e-ink displays are better than LCDs, but frankly they're still awful compared to simple old paper.
Maybe some future tech will fix that, but I'm not holding my breath... even when it becomes technically possible, the current market focus seems to be more on making books into little TVs than supporting reading well.
[I'm thinking mainly of books that one reads at length. For something like a reference manual, of course, which is typically read in short bursts, and where small size, searchability, and random access are huge advantages, an e-book of just about any sort is the bee's knees.]
But we have no shortage of forests in North America, or well really even Europe. There's been a net gain in the last 100 years by a staggering amount.
Of course, one of the big reasons for that is that in the slightly-more-distant past, people had gone completely bonzo insane with their forest-razing. More recently, the forest-razing hasn't been quite as bonzo...