As a developer, you need to do what the bosses ask of you. You may argue a bit about it at the beginning, especially if you can back your argument up (vulnerabilities, extra costs, missing features...), but once the choice is made you've got to suck it up.
My brother works for one of those infamous IE6-bound large corps. It hurts them quite badly (to the point where most users have installed firefox on the side and try and use it whenever it works), but they've got so much specific stuff (activeX controls,.NET, just plian web stuff) invested in IE6 that switching would be a multimillion-dollar proposition. They're reluctant to even start phasing it out for new developments, since that would mean supporting 2 browsers instead of just the one.
Now, if you're your own boss and got a choice, you need to think carefully about who your users are, how willing they'll be to change browsers just for you...
1- PayPal is a poster case of why governments are needed: freezing, canceling, hijacking accounts with no rhyme, reason, nor customer service. Just imagine if banks where free to keep your cash 'coz they no longer like you. I'll use PayPal once it is regulated, meself.
2- In some countries, the government is not only about regional control and protection. Education, Health, Retirement, Social Security... To my unprofessional eyes, governments do not seem to do much worse than the private sector in those domains, on average. I'd rather study, be sick, retire or be on the dole in France than in the US.
3- Countries exist because it is easier to feel close to people with the same language and culture.
Have you traveled at all ? Not as a tourist, but staying for moth than a month in a different country, working with locals ?
I did RTFS, and even went to their site - $200 is a lot, there's netbooks for $250 - the datasheet lists an external SD slot, the summary says there aren't any ? - available with up to 1 gig RAM - optional "real" batteries instead of 8xAA - Vista certainly not supported, otherwise they would say so.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough. All governments and organizations believing, or pretending to believe, that OOXML is a standard now know they're fools, and/or not fooling anyone.
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
Not sure. One could normalize - connectors (i don't know if cables are workable, or if it must needs be fixed plugs) - locking mechanism - management/supervision protocol - form factor - accessibility
One such example would be PCI-Express: one slot, 3 form factors (normal, low-profile, mini), plenty of different cards, various options (number of lanes, supplemental power), some leeway outside the norm (dual slot cards)...
1- for daily commutes, you start each day with a full battery, which is more convenient than having to do regular trips to the service station.
2- for longer trips, batteries could be swappable, making longer trips possible with not much more pain than currently. that means 2a- coming up with an easy and standard way to do it (government regulation may be helpful, if it can prevent market fragmentation), and 2b- re-thinking ownership, because people will be leery of swapping their brand new battery for someone else's clunker. A yearly battery lease may be the way to go. It would alleviate the battery price problem, too.
No. Locked phone = no SIM swapping, neither at home nor abroad. One exception: MVNO that use your original provider's network, but that's not very interesting.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but the law in France forces the operator to unlock your phone for free after 6 months (or for a fee up to € 65 before). So the locked phone issue only exists for the first 6 months of a contract (you've got to request the unlock, though). I always keep a previous phone, just in case.
what we've been doing for years is: enforcing a fixed price for books. The price depends on the number of pages, and soft vs hard cover.Specialty books (art, school...) are exempt I think. As are second-hand books.
They idea is to keep French authors and editors thriving, and to keep quality up. I think it's kinda working:
- though books are rather expensive, there's a lot of public libraries for when you can't afford them. - publishers and above all resellers don't care which book they sell, just how many, which gives them an incentive to be neutral and actually try and give good advice. Contrast that to what happens when you set foot in a computer shop, and have the sales-contest-of-the-week crap pushed at you. - even obscure authors have a chance at making reasonable money off their sales (either for them or their publishers, but that another question).
I'm not a fan of regulation, but I do think books make a reasonable exception.
Running the PSN network must cost big money. It kinda makes sense to have subscriptions to cover those recurring costs, instead of counting on games revenues, which are one-off, to offset them.
I'm not saying it's nice or a good think for customers, just that it is logical. Maybe game prices can go down now that games don't have to pay for the network costs, and people can choose cheaper standalone play or pay for network play if the wish.
Films and books are very different. I find my perception is always very tainted by the order in which I see/read them: if the book comes first, I'll have a hard time appreciating the film because I'll be looking in it for my preconceptions and much more content than a film can convey; if I see the film first, my understanding, visualization, and expectations of the books will be very conditioned.
All in all, I think book first, film afterwards is better. It lets me create my own vision, even though I then have to try and suspend it while trying to get into the film.
That said, I think Dune was a good not great film. Nice visuals, but felt a bit empty. I'm guessing the new film will feel the same: there's just no time to convey the overall social situation, the politics, the technology, the metaphysical aspects, the sense of wonder... in 2-3 hrs.
There's 2 films I find at least as good as their books: 1984 and Blade Runner. I'm interested in suggestions for more. LOTR fails because the books were so great, but the films are OK.
- what is front end data ? data that does not get wiped like my backend's, only shaken ? - what algorithm or at least principle do they use to decide what gets on the SSD ? it almost sounds as if they cache the first x sectors, which feels dumb. - do I have any control over that ?
My guess is, it won't. It must be a dumb cache that just monitors which sectors/clusters are most often read, and caches those.
It may be better than the current use of SSDs though, which is to put a whole OS on them even though there's many parts of the OS that are barely used. If I had an SSD, IE8 would be on it !
it seems SSDs are mainly good at boosting boot times, app load times, and game level loading. Why don't HDs load the OS in their cache during POST ? It must be quite simple to memorize which sectors get read first after power-up ?
1- RAM systems work that way too: L1 cache, L2 cache, slow RAM, to compare to RAM cache (OS or controller), SSD, HD.
2- SSDs right now are very un-optimized: you've got to put, for example, your whole OS on them, even though I'd guess 20-30% of the files are actually read frequently enough to justify being on the SSD... and probably 5-10% of the files are *written* frequently enough to justify NOT being on the SSD. So seeing the SSDs as a cache rather than a hard disk makes a whole lot of sense, and probably doubles or triples their efficiency, by letting them hold only files that best fit the SSD strong points, and hence a lot more of those files.
My concern is that this "cache"- or "ready-boost"-like mechanism requires quite some intelligence, either, at the most basic level, to keep count of which sectors get read a lot and written not so much, or even, at a higher level, to identify usage patterns and cache the appropriate files (boot, app launch, game play). I'm not sure where that intelligence goes on with the product described... if it goes on at all.
I'm really a bit puzzled about what the extra cores are good for, except for very specific, parallelized tasks (video processing, file encoding...). All other tests I see seem to favor fewer cores at higher speeds ? For general use (office/internet, media consumption as opposed to creation, even games), my take is that 2 cores are plenty ?
If the pictures in the linked articles are true (which is not certain), I find the scan a lot less intrusive than a pat down. I'd rather have someone see a vague picture of my junk than grab it and my ass, while breathing in my face. I can't imagine anyone finding these pictures sexy, or even identify me from them.
My concern is more about the effectiveness of these scans. Is it more theater, or do they really detect something that a metal detector wouldn't ? The example pictures are showing a gun, which doesn't seem that good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
that's very '90s. I'm fairly sure Apple's focus has moved on to "media consumers" and the "cool set", away from "knowledge workers".
As a developer, you need to do what the bosses ask of you. You may argue a bit about it at the beginning, especially if you can back your argument up (vulnerabilities, extra costs, missing features...), but once the choice is made you've got to suck it up.
My brother works for one of those infamous IE6-bound large corps. It hurts them quite badly (to the point where most users have installed firefox on the side and try and use it whenever it works), but they've got so much specific stuff (activeX controls, .NET, just plian web stuff) invested in IE6 that switching would be a multimillion-dollar proposition. They're reluctant to even start phasing it out for new developments, since that would mean supporting 2 browsers instead of just the one.
Now, if you're your own boss and got a choice, you need to think carefully about who your users are, how willing they'll be to change browsers just for you...
?
1- PayPal is a poster case of why governments are needed: freezing, canceling, hijacking accounts with no rhyme, reason, nor customer service. Just imagine if banks where free to keep your cash 'coz they no longer like you. I'll use PayPal once it is regulated, meself.
2- In some countries, the government is not only about regional control and protection. Education, Health, Retirement, Social Security... To my unprofessional eyes, governments do not seem to do much worse than the private sector in those domains, on average. I'd rather study, be sick, retire or be on the dole in France than in the US.
3- Countries exist because it is easier to feel close to people with the same language and culture.
Have you traveled at all ? Not as a tourist, but staying for moth than a month in a different country, working with locals ?
I did RTFS, and even went to their site
- $200 is a lot, there's netbooks for $250
- the datasheet lists an external SD slot, the summary says there aren't any ?
- available with up to 1 gig RAM
- optional "real" batteries instead of 8xAA
- Vista certainly not supported, otherwise they would say so.
Yes and no. Which assertion do you think more probable:
1- "These are not the desired results. Check your code".
2- "These are the desired results. Check your code".
No conspiracy, but a conspiracy-like end result.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough. All governments and organizations believing, or pretending to believe, that OOXML is a standard now know they're fools, and/or not fooling anyone.
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
Not sure. One could normalize
- connectors (i don't know if cables are workable, or if it must needs be fixed plugs)
- locking mechanism
- management/supervision protocol
- form factor
- accessibility
One such example would be PCI-Express: one slot, 3 form factors (normal, low-profile, mini), plenty of different cards, various options (number of lanes, supplemental power), some leeway outside the norm (dual slot cards)...
You're overlooking 2 things:
1- for daily commutes, you start each day with a full battery, which is more convenient than having to do regular trips to the service station.
2- for longer trips, batteries could be swappable, making longer trips possible with not much more pain than currently. that means
2a- coming up with an easy and standard way to do it (government regulation may be helpful, if it can prevent market fragmentation), and
2b- re-thinking ownership, because people will be leery of swapping their brand new battery for someone else's clunker. A yearly battery lease may be the way to go. It would alleviate the battery price problem, too.
Mmmm. The same can be said about all e-commerce. Or all e-anything, pretty much. Do you want to ban the internet ?
hey ! I didn't know that trick ! thanks !
No. Locked phone = no SIM swapping, neither at home nor abroad. One exception: MVNO that use your original provider's network, but that's not very interesting.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but the law in France forces the operator to unlock your phone for free after 6 months (or for a fee up to € 65 before). So the locked phone issue only exists for the first 6 months of a contract (you've got to request the unlock, though). I always keep a previous phone, just in case.
hey ! we're using the same gateway ! are you hiding in my closet ?
what we've been doing for years is: enforcing a fixed price for books. The price depends on the number of pages, and soft vs hard cover.Specialty books (art, school...) are exempt I think. As are second-hand books.
They idea is to keep French authors and editors thriving, and to keep quality up. I think it's kinda working:
- though books are rather expensive, there's a lot of public libraries for when you can't afford them.
- publishers and above all resellers don't care which book they sell, just how many, which gives them an incentive to be neutral and actually try and give good advice. Contrast that to what happens when you set foot in a computer shop, and have the sales-contest-of-the-week crap pushed at you.
- even obscure authors have a chance at making reasonable money off their sales (either for them or their publishers, but that another question).
I'm not a fan of regulation, but I do think books make a reasonable exception.
would be kinda funny if MS came up with an original idea ?
Running the PSN network must cost big money. It kinda makes sense to have subscriptions to cover those recurring costs, instead of counting on games revenues, which are one-off, to offset them.
I'm not saying it's nice or a good think for customers, just that it is logical. Maybe game prices can go down now that games don't have to pay for the network costs, and people can choose cheaper standalone play or pay for network play if the wish.
Films and books are very different. I find my perception is always very tainted by the order in which I see/read them: if the book comes first, I'll have a hard time appreciating the film because I'll be looking in it for my preconceptions and much more content than a film can convey; if I see the film first, my understanding, visualization, and expectations of the books will be very conditioned.
All in all, I think book first, film afterwards is better. It lets me create my own vision, even though I then have to try and suspend it while trying to get into the film.
That said, I think Dune was a good not great film. Nice visuals, but felt a bit empty. I'm guessing the new film will feel the same: there's just no time to convey the overall social situation, the politics, the technology, the metaphysical aspects, the sense of wonder... in 2-3 hrs.
There's 2 films I find at least as good as their books: 1984 and Blade Runner. I'm interested in suggestions for more. LOTR fails because the books were so great, but the films are OK.
my other questions:
- what is front end data ? data that does not get wiped like my backend's, only shaken ?
- what algorithm or at least principle do they use to decide what gets on the SSD ? it almost sounds as if they cache the first x sectors, which feels dumb.
- do I have any control over that ?
Holy carp indeed... always loved that fish symbolism for the Christians.
My guess is, it won't. It must be a dumb cache that just monitors which sectors/clusters are most often read, and caches those.
It may be better than the current use of SSDs though, which is to put a whole OS on them even though there's many parts of the OS that are barely used. If I had an SSD, IE8 would be on it !
Another question:
it seems SSDs are mainly good at boosting boot times, app load times, and game level loading. Why don't HDs load the OS in their cache during POST ? It must be quite simple to memorize which sectors get read first after power-up ?
1- RAM systems work that way too: L1 cache, L2 cache, slow RAM, to compare to RAM cache (OS or controller), SSD, HD.
2- SSDs right now are very un-optimized: you've got to put, for example, your whole OS on them, even though I'd guess 20-30% of the files are actually read frequently enough to justify being on the SSD... and probably 5-10% of the files are *written* frequently enough to justify NOT being on the SSD. So seeing the SSDs as a cache rather than a hard disk makes a whole lot of sense, and probably doubles or triples their efficiency, by letting them hold only files that best fit the SSD strong points, and hence a lot more of those files.
My concern is that this "cache"- or "ready-boost"-like mechanism requires quite some intelligence, either, at the most basic level, to keep count of which sectors get read a lot and written not so much, or even, at a higher level, to identify usage patterns and cache the appropriate files (boot, app launch, game play). I'm not sure where that intelligence goes on with the product described... if it goes on at all.
It's a caddy that goes into a 3.5" bay, and accepts a 2.5" SSD. Your regular spinning HD goes into its normal 3.5 bay, and connects to the caddy.
Thank you for your attention. Can we now go on and discuss the interesting things about that gizmo ?
I'm really a bit puzzled about what the extra cores are good for, except for very specific, parallelized tasks (video processing, file encoding...). All other tests I see seem to favor fewer cores at higher speeds ? For general use (office/internet, media consumption as opposed to creation, even games), my take is that 2 cores are plenty ?
If the pictures in the linked articles are true (which is not certain), I find the scan a lot less intrusive than a pat down. I'd rather have someone see a vague picture of my junk than grab it and my ass, while breathing in my face. I can't imagine anyone finding these pictures sexy, or even identify me from them.
My concern is more about the effectiveness of these scans. Is it more theater, or do they really detect something that a metal detector wouldn't ? The example pictures are showing a gun, which doesn't seem that good to me.
I wouldn't want to game on the PSP (too small), not carry it around all the time (too big), so I kinda understand what the problem is.
Maybe if they split the thing in 2 parts, one with screen-cpu-radios-ram on one part, and the gaming controls by themselves on the second part ?