No it's not just a language issue, Baidu is rubbish - everyone knows this, or at least that's the opinion held by the finance industry and software developer types in Shanghai I've hung around with. The general opinion is that Baidu promotes sponsored results without marking them as such, and is incredibly easy to game with SEO techniques. The two factors in combination mean the first page and a half of results are useless.
That said, Google is pretty bad at dealing with Chinese-language searches. I sometimes even get better results with DuckDuckGo. There's definitely a market opportunity for a search engine that deals well with Chinese language and doesn't suck.
It's popular with locals as well for certain kinds of searches. Baidu actually doesn't have a very good reputation - it's generally regarded as being very vulnerable to SEO and guilty of promoting the rank of results for people who pay them such that the first page-and-a-half of results are often useless.
You don't. In Chinese you can often tell the pronunciation from one radical in the character. When you come across an unfamiliar character, you have a fairly good chance of guessing the pronunciation correctly. I thought this sounded ridiculous when a Chinese friend told me, but after a month in Shanghai, I was correctly reading street names with characters I didn't recognise. It actually isn't that hard.
Only if you can prove that the source compiles to the image on your phone. Do any of the handset vendors have reproducible builds so you can verify that what you compile produces the same firmware image they signed? If not, and if there's any closed source "secret source", you can't completely trust it.
On the Galaxy S3 none of the pre-installed apps could be removed, but on the Galaxy S8 I found that Google Duo, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard and a number of other pre-installed things actually could be removed. I don't have as many disabled apps as I used to on my S3 - just Chrome, Game Launcher, Gmail, Google Play Store, and YouTube - since my S8 allowed all the other obnoxious things to be uninstalled. I have Telstra Australia firmware, and it's the SM-G950F variant.
I've had an S3 and S8, and neither has re-activated the apps unless I install updates for them via Galaxy Apps. Threre's apparently no way to disable apps unless no updates are installed.
In Australia we manage to eat grass-fed beef. We don't need to subsidise corn and we get along fine. US agricultural subsidies just make the industry horribly inefficient and wasteful.
The professional UNIX workstation market evaporated when Windows became good enough. All that stuff moved to Windows when NT4 became good enough for a far more attractive price. Professional UNIX workstations were still better mind you, but a PC with Windows NT4 was so much cheaper and (perhaps just barely) good enough, so it became the rational choice.
But it's well-established. Look at something basic like a Yamaha A-S301. A class D amp isn't going to get close to that. But that's something recent. What if you go back 20 years? A Yamaha AX-392 from 20 years ago doesn't perform as well as the A-S301, but it's still going to beat a class D amp. Going back further, anything from Pioneer, Yamaha or Sony from the "power wars" in the '80s is going to outperform a class D amp, and a lot of cheaper home theater amps as well (jamming a lot of amps into one box means they're all going to be compromised). We've got over 30 years of knowing how to build a good amp.
Slashdot's aversion to most things other than 7-bit ASCII is well-known. Why visit and post at the site if you aren't prepared to deal with its well-known constraints?
You're full of shit. My neighbours in Melbourne are a mix of different nationalities, and no-one gives a fuck. Well there's this one Rasta guy on this floor who has these loser "friends" who hang around him just because they know he always shares the herb, and they can be a pain, but it's just that he's too damn nice and won't tell them to piss off even though they're clearly leeching off him - nothing to do with race. Step into any finance industry shop and you'll find best and and brightest of all nationalities. No-one makes a big deal about it, because it just isn't a bit deal.
You get enclaves when a new group of immigrants arrive, but once they spread out into the community, the enclaves dissolve. Where are the Greek, Italian and Maltese enclaves now? They don't exist any more. Once they spread out into the community, they help new arrivals find their feet. The Vietnamese enclaves are diluting as well. Relatively speaking, there aren't that many Vietnamese businesses in Footscray any more (and remember that was a Greek enclave before it became a Vietnamese enclave).
I've been in this country long enough to hear the same arguments about every wave of immigrants. Greeks and Italians were going to be the end of Australia. Vietnamese were going to be the end of Australia. Lebanese were going to be the end of Australia. Africans are going to be the end of Australia. I'm still waiting for it to happen.
Well, Australians aren't replacing themselves. Australian birth rate is well below replacement. Even Australian muslim birth rate is now below replacement. Capitalism is predicated on perpetual growth, so if the population doesn't grow organically, you need to add more people another way. But white Australians aren't being replaced, unless you want to redefine "white" - the biggest immigrant groups each year are still from white countries.
They're already integrating. When the Sudanese arrived, they started opening gender-segregated coffee shops etc. - you'd have these places where just Sudanese men hung out, no women or other nationalities. Now most of them have closed, and when you walk past the ones that haven't, you see women and white Aussies sitting down there as well. There are three Somali restaurants on up the street, and there are Vietnamese people working alongside the Somalis in the kitchens. I bet there are gonna be a hell of a lot of half Asian, half African babies in Melbourne's next generation, because the local schools (St Brendan's, Mount Alexander College, St Aloysius, etc.) are full of African and Asian kids mingling.
The media loves horror stories. They've blown up a few incidents in Melbourne out of all proportion, because it gets them eyeballs. A few years back it was drug gangs and home invasions they were making a big song and dance about, and most of the perpetrators were white or Vietnamese. There's still some of that going on, particularly around St Albans (western suburbs of Melbourne, poor working class), but the media's moved on to the next thing to get people worked up about.
You mention the Aborigines, but I think that makes my point about disenfranchising an entire community. The Aboriginal community as a whole has been disenfranchised, and that's led to this rift that we can't bridge. If we target the entire Sudanese community rather than just the problematic people/behaviours, we'll create another disenfranchised group. But I think in a way it's already too late for that to happen. Walk up the main street of Flemington some time - the Sudanese Australians are already Australians.
I've got an apartment in Flemington (Melbourne) as well as one in Elizabeth Bay (Sydney), so when I'm in Melbourne, I'm in African immigrant central. There's almost no trouble here. In fact, most of the trouble involving Africans is vandalism targeting businesses owned by Africans in the main street. A few years back, they had to sack most of the local cops because they were targeting African kids for no reason. The trouble is, when you have to cops unfairly targeting a group, they'll think, "Well, I get treated like a criminal even when I'm clean - I may as well just be a criminal."
If you haven't noticed that every group of immigrants in Australia is racist to the next group, you've had your eyes shut. The western Europeans/Brits hated the Greek and Italian "wogs", then the "wogs" hated the Chinese/Vietnamese, and the Chinese/Vietnamese feel entitled to hate the Indians and Africans.
Now there have been issues with groups, but you get that with kids that grew up in a war zone - they're going to have trouble adjusting to a "normal" society. Do you remember the 4T gang in western Sydney? They'd shoot people for looking at their girlfriends wrong. They imploded when their charismatic leader was killed. But what would've happened if instead of targeting the problematic behaviour, we'd alienated the entire Vietnamese community? We'd have a permanent underclass at odds with the rest of society. What about the MERCS (middle-eastern raping cunts)? Do you remember the outrage over that? When the other Lebanese people found out who was responsible for this, they started sending death threats to their parents, like, "Your fucking kids are giving the entire Lebanese community a bad name! We're gonna kill you!" But it was the same thing - kids from a war zone not knowing any different.
Wait a decade or so, and Sudanese will be the same - the Sudanese community will be an integral part of Australia's multicultural society, everyone will look back on the initial issues through the lens of hindsight, and they'll join in with everyone else in hating on whoever the latest round of refugees or economic migrants are.
I can anecdote as well. I have a Galaxy S8 on Telstra 4GX LTE, and I was in the basement foodhall of a busy department store last Friday. I only had one bar of signal, and I could check my e-mail, and make a crystal-clear VoLTE call to my wife with no interruptions/dropouts. There were some teething issues with Telstra's LTE network back when they started rolling it out (around 2014 IIRC), but for the last two years or so it's worked better than their 3G/Next-G network ever did. The problem is shitty rollout by your carrier.
The thing is, if he was poor he wouldn't have been able to post bail, wouldn't have been allowed to return to China, and would have been bullied into a plea bargain. The US legal system (calling it a "justice system" feels like a bad joke) is stacked in favour of people with money.
W-CDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ all require linear power amplifiers on the handset. This runs down battery rapidly and causes the handset to heat up. LTE intentionally uses SC-FDMA on the uplink so the handset doesn't need linear amplification, and can run cooler with far better battery life. The GMSK scheme used by GSM before EDGE had similar benefits, which is why GSM handsets got such good battery life.
HSPA+ was deployed on lower-frequency bands in places other than the US (e.g. 850MHz and 900MHz in Australia), and it still suffered from the same problems, because they're inherent. Better RF propagation doesn't magically change the requirements of the modulation scheme.
LTE has better spectral efficiency than W-CDMA/HSPA(+) and doesn't suffer as badly from the "buried node" problem where a handset close to the base station swamps the signal from a distant handset that can still receive the signal from the base station. This problem is inherent to CDMA systems - there's no getting around it. This means that in a sparsely-populated area, you're more likely to be able to make use of marginal signal when other users are close to the base.
Dynamically dividing CDMA code space to manage multiple handsets' bandwidth demands is computationally expensive and difficult to optimise. You'll always be wasting more code space than you need for some handset, wasting bandwidth on the channel. This is inherent to CDMA and gets worse as channels get wider and code spaces get bigger (i.e. it's a lot worse on 5MHz W-CDMA channels than 1.25MHz cdmaOne channels). It's a lot easier to optimally assign bandwidth with LTE's OFDMA on the downlink. This combines with the previous point to allow LTE to make much better use of the same amount of spectrum.
"Soft handover" where a handset associates with multiple base stations is not PPP multi-link. It doesn't split the data between them - it consumes the same amount of code space on all of them but doesn't multiply the available bandwidth. It provides benefits in situations where you can get marginal signal from multiple base stations, but it's very wasteful. The networks try to stop handsets from staying in soft handover any longer than absolutely necessary to minimise wasted spectrum.
IP address changes aren't an issue with the network technology itself - software-defined networking techniques allow a handset to maintain its IP address as it's handed over from cell to cell. If the US carriers can't get this right, they need to learn to do networking properly.
Circuit-switched modes are inefficient compared to packet-switched modes. Cellular radio technology has improved to the point where packet-switched mode is good enough for voice and video calls. It's been deployed for years on 3G networks (typically branded "Next-G" - e.g. Telstra in Australia and 1010 in Hong Kong), and LTE always does packet-switched voice calls. It makes things simpler on the carrier's network as well if they don't need to support circuit-switched modes for voice/video in addition to packet-switched modes for mobile data. This has been on the roadmap for years - it was always part of the plan for cdma2000 to switch to packet-switched voice as well, but it died before that happened.
You sound like a Qualcomm shill trying to badmouth the superior technology that won out in the end.
Have you even been to Australia? TPG and Telstra both implement this using a simple DNS block. I have live Telstra and TPG connections at the moment, and they don't black-hole the IP addresses or anything. Changing DNS allows access to all blocked sites.
Your argument is somewhat true for the majority of RISC processors, although you may be able to use full 64-bit registers if you know you're running on a 64-bit RISC CPU in 32-bit mode (it depends on whether the OS will save the full 64-bit register contents for a 32-bit process on context switch). This is useful if you're doing stuff like fixed-point maths where being able to work on twice as many bits at once is a big win, especially for multiplication and division. But for the most part, 64-bit versions of RISC CPUs largely work like their 32-bit predecessors, just with bigger registers (yes, AArch64 is an exception, being very much not ARM).
There are factors peculiar to x86 that make x32 a much bigger win than you might think. The 32-bit x86 instruction set has very few architectural registers, doesn't support PC-relative addressing, and is not orthogonal. Firstly, this means that for any computationally-heavy code you spend a lot of instructions spilling and reloading registers. Even with rename registers, this consumes decode/issue/retire bandwidth and increases the image size, which consumes memory bandwidth. Lack of PC-relative addressing makes position-independent code a lot less efficient than it would be otherwise (think shared libraries and ASLR). This means that computationally expensive code typically gains 20% to 30% performance just by targeting x86-64 rather than i686, even if it would never need a large addressable space.
They're not talking about fixed broadband "modems" (DOCSIS modems, ADSL/VDSL modems, fibre NTUs, etc.), they're talking about cellular modems. It's the DSP and analog circuitry that goes between the RF amplifiers/antenna and the rest of the phone. There's no way Apple's going into the fixed broadband modem/router business, especially after killing off the AirPort line which is the closest they'd got to that space.
How the hell is a cellular radio front-end supposed to work without analog signal processing? You have to somehow get the analog signals at the antenna/amplifiers to/from the DSPs somehow. The SCFDMA modulation used for LTE uplink is designed to not required linear power amplifiers - that doesn't mean it doesn't involve analog signals (same is true for GSM's GMSK).
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No it's not just a language issue, Baidu is rubbish - everyone knows this, or at least that's the opinion held by the finance industry and software developer types in Shanghai I've hung around with. The general opinion is that Baidu promotes sponsored results without marking them as such, and is incredibly easy to game with SEO techniques. The two factors in combination mean the first page and a half of results are useless.
That said, Google is pretty bad at dealing with Chinese-language searches. I sometimes even get better results with DuckDuckGo. There's definitely a market opportunity for a search engine that deals well with Chinese language and doesn't suck.
It's popular with locals as well for certain kinds of searches. Baidu actually doesn't have a very good reputation - it's generally regarded as being very vulnerable to SEO and guilty of promoting the rank of results for people who pay them such that the first page-and-a-half of results are often useless.
You don't. In Chinese you can often tell the pronunciation from one radical in the character. When you come across an unfamiliar character, you have a fairly good chance of guessing the pronunciation correctly. I thought this sounded ridiculous when a Chinese friend told me, but after a month in Shanghai, I was correctly reading street names with characters I didn't recognise. It actually isn't that hard.
Only if you can prove that the source compiles to the image on your phone. Do any of the handset vendors have reproducible builds so you can verify that what you compile produces the same firmware image they signed? If not, and if there's any closed source "secret source", you can't completely trust it.
On the Galaxy S3 none of the pre-installed apps could be removed, but on the Galaxy S8 I found that Google Duo, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard and a number of other pre-installed things actually could be removed. I don't have as many disabled apps as I used to on my S3 - just Chrome, Game Launcher, Gmail, Google Play Store, and YouTube - since my S8 allowed all the other obnoxious things to be uninstalled. I have Telstra Australia firmware, and it's the SM-G950F variant.
I've had an S3 and S8, and neither has re-activated the apps unless I install updates for them via Galaxy Apps. Threre's apparently no way to disable apps unless no updates are installed.
In Australia we manage to eat grass-fed beef. We don't need to subsidise corn and we get along fine. US agricultural subsidies just make the industry horribly inefficient and wasteful.
The professional UNIX workstation market evaporated when Windows became good enough. All that stuff moved to Windows when NT4 became good enough for a far more attractive price. Professional UNIX workstations were still better mind you, but a PC with Windows NT4 was so much cheaper and (perhaps just barely) good enough, so it became the rational choice.
But it's well-established. Look at something basic like a Yamaha A-S301. A class D amp isn't going to get close to that. But that's something recent. What if you go back 20 years? A Yamaha AX-392 from 20 years ago doesn't perform as well as the A-S301, but it's still going to beat a class D amp. Going back further, anything from Pioneer, Yamaha or Sony from the "power wars" in the '80s is going to outperform a class D amp, and a lot of cheaper home theater amps as well (jamming a lot of amps into one box means they're all going to be compromised). We've got over 30 years of knowing how to build a good amp.
Yes they can - the prime minister can stand for re-election as many times as he wants.
Slashdot's aversion to most things other than 7-bit ASCII is well-known. Why visit and post at the site if you aren't prepared to deal with its well-known constraints?
You're full of shit. My neighbours in Melbourne are a mix of different nationalities, and no-one gives a fuck. Well there's this one Rasta guy on this floor who has these loser "friends" who hang around him just because they know he always shares the herb, and they can be a pain, but it's just that he's too damn nice and won't tell them to piss off even though they're clearly leeching off him - nothing to do with race. Step into any finance industry shop and you'll find best and and brightest of all nationalities. No-one makes a big deal about it, because it just isn't a bit deal.
You get enclaves when a new group of immigrants arrive, but once they spread out into the community, the enclaves dissolve. Where are the Greek, Italian and Maltese enclaves now? They don't exist any more. Once they spread out into the community, they help new arrivals find their feet. The Vietnamese enclaves are diluting as well. Relatively speaking, there aren't that many Vietnamese businesses in Footscray any more (and remember that was a Greek enclave before it became a Vietnamese enclave).
I've been in this country long enough to hear the same arguments about every wave of immigrants. Greeks and Italians were going to be the end of Australia. Vietnamese were going to be the end of Australia. Lebanese were going to be the end of Australia. Africans are going to be the end of Australia. I'm still waiting for it to happen.
Well, Australians aren't replacing themselves. Australian birth rate is well below replacement. Even Australian muslim birth rate is now below replacement. Capitalism is predicated on perpetual growth, so if the population doesn't grow organically, you need to add more people another way. But white Australians aren't being replaced, unless you want to redefine "white" - the biggest immigrant groups each year are still from white countries.
They're already integrating. When the Sudanese arrived, they started opening gender-segregated coffee shops etc. - you'd have these places where just Sudanese men hung out, no women or other nationalities. Now most of them have closed, and when you walk past the ones that haven't, you see women and white Aussies sitting down there as well. There are three Somali restaurants on up the street, and there are Vietnamese people working alongside the Somalis in the kitchens. I bet there are gonna be a hell of a lot of half Asian, half African babies in Melbourne's next generation, because the local schools (St Brendan's, Mount Alexander College, St Aloysius, etc.) are full of African and Asian kids mingling.
The media loves horror stories. They've blown up a few incidents in Melbourne out of all proportion, because it gets them eyeballs. A few years back it was drug gangs and home invasions they were making a big song and dance about, and most of the perpetrators were white or Vietnamese. There's still some of that going on, particularly around St Albans (western suburbs of Melbourne, poor working class), but the media's moved on to the next thing to get people worked up about.
You mention the Aborigines, but I think that makes my point about disenfranchising an entire community. The Aboriginal community as a whole has been disenfranchised, and that's led to this rift that we can't bridge. If we target the entire Sudanese community rather than just the problematic people/behaviours, we'll create another disenfranchised group. But I think in a way it's already too late for that to happen. Walk up the main street of Flemington some time - the Sudanese Australians are already Australians.
I've got an apartment in Flemington (Melbourne) as well as one in Elizabeth Bay (Sydney), so when I'm in Melbourne, I'm in African immigrant central. There's almost no trouble here. In fact, most of the trouble involving Africans is vandalism targeting businesses owned by Africans in the main street. A few years back, they had to sack most of the local cops because they were targeting African kids for no reason. The trouble is, when you have to cops unfairly targeting a group, they'll think, "Well, I get treated like a criminal even when I'm clean - I may as well just be a criminal."
If you haven't noticed that every group of immigrants in Australia is racist to the next group, you've had your eyes shut. The western Europeans/Brits hated the Greek and Italian "wogs", then the "wogs" hated the Chinese/Vietnamese, and the Chinese/Vietnamese feel entitled to hate the Indians and Africans.
Now there have been issues with groups, but you get that with kids that grew up in a war zone - they're going to have trouble adjusting to a "normal" society. Do you remember the 4T gang in western Sydney? They'd shoot people for looking at their girlfriends wrong. They imploded when their charismatic leader was killed. But what would've happened if instead of targeting the problematic behaviour, we'd alienated the entire Vietnamese community? We'd have a permanent underclass at odds with the rest of society. What about the MERCS (middle-eastern raping cunts)? Do you remember the outrage over that? When the other Lebanese people found out who was responsible for this, they started sending death threats to their parents, like, "Your fucking kids are giving the entire Lebanese community a bad name! We're gonna kill you!" But it was the same thing - kids from a war zone not knowing any different.
Wait a decade or so, and Sudanese will be the same - the Sudanese community will be an integral part of Australia's multicultural society, everyone will look back on the initial issues through the lens of hindsight, and they'll join in with everyone else in hating on whoever the latest round of refugees or economic migrants are.
We have Daiso and the Chinese knock-off Miniso in Australia as well.
I can anecdote as well. I have a Galaxy S8 on Telstra 4GX LTE, and I was in the basement foodhall of a busy department store last Friday. I only had one bar of signal, and I could check my e-mail, and make a crystal-clear VoLTE call to my wife with no interruptions/dropouts. There were some teething issues with Telstra's LTE network back when they started rolling it out (around 2014 IIRC), but for the last two years or so it's worked better than their 3G/Next-G network ever did. The problem is shitty rollout by your carrier.
The thing is, if he was poor he wouldn't have been able to post bail, wouldn't have been allowed to return to China, and would have been bullied into a plea bargain. The US legal system (calling it a "justice system" feels like a bad joke) is stacked in favour of people with money.
Bullshit:
You sound like a Qualcomm shill trying to badmouth the superior technology that won out in the end.
Have you even been to Australia? TPG and Telstra both implement this using a simple DNS block. I have live Telstra and TPG connections at the moment, and they don't black-hole the IP addresses or anything. Changing DNS allows access to all blocked sites.
Actually he wouldn't be - see this and .
Voluntary administration is not the same thing as bankruptcy. This is slashdot - being correct matters.
Your argument is somewhat true for the majority of RISC processors, although you may be able to use full 64-bit registers if you know you're running on a 64-bit RISC CPU in 32-bit mode (it depends on whether the OS will save the full 64-bit register contents for a 32-bit process on context switch). This is useful if you're doing stuff like fixed-point maths where being able to work on twice as many bits at once is a big win, especially for multiplication and division. But for the most part, 64-bit versions of RISC CPUs largely work like their 32-bit predecessors, just with bigger registers (yes, AArch64 is an exception, being very much not ARM).
There are factors peculiar to x86 that make x32 a much bigger win than you might think. The 32-bit x86 instruction set has very few architectural registers, doesn't support PC-relative addressing, and is not orthogonal. Firstly, this means that for any computationally-heavy code you spend a lot of instructions spilling and reloading registers. Even with rename registers, this consumes decode/issue/retire bandwidth and increases the image size, which consumes memory bandwidth. Lack of PC-relative addressing makes position-independent code a lot less efficient than it would be otherwise (think shared libraries and ASLR). This means that computationally expensive code typically gains 20% to 30% performance just by targeting x86-64 rather than i686, even if it would never need a large addressable space.
They're not talking about fixed broadband "modems" (DOCSIS modems, ADSL/VDSL modems, fibre NTUs, etc.), they're talking about cellular modems. It's the DSP and analog circuitry that goes between the RF amplifiers/antenna and the rest of the phone. There's no way Apple's going into the fixed broadband modem/router business, especially after killing off the AirPort line which is the closest they'd got to that space.
How the hell is a cellular radio front-end supposed to work without analog signal processing? You have to somehow get the analog signals at the antenna/amplifiers to/from the DSPs somehow. The SCFDMA modulation used for LTE uplink is designed to not required linear power amplifiers - that doesn't mean it doesn't involve analog signals (same is true for GSM's GMSK).