It depends. If it's a police entrance exam or an entrance exam for a similarly easily exploited position of trust then, yes, it may very well be preferable to catch people who have a propensity for poor moral decisions like cheating, rather than keep them honest for the exam only so that they can abuse the position later.
My point was that there were past counter-examples to the claims that a new development team would make Microsoft Windows Phone 7 necessarily better than previous versions of Windows Mobile. Those same kinds of claims had been made about Windows NT 4.0.
Generally these kinds of issues are due to organizational/structural factors and corporate culture. While there can be exceptions if things are sufficiently compartmentalized, when a company has a well established track record for doing things a certain way, it's not unreasonable to expect any future endeavours to follow that track record. There hasn't been any indication that the team responsible for Windows Phone 7 was isolated in any way from the corporate culture that produced Bob, Vista, XBox RROD, and Kin. While it appears that president/VP-level heads have rolled as a result of Kin and Windows Phone 7, it's unclear whether the replacements will provide a marked departure from the Microsoft corporate culture of the past, and it's doubtful that will happen as long as Steve Ballmer remains CEO.
Technical organizations with large market shares will naturally tend to prefer to suppress disruptive technologies because it's more likely that unforeseen effects of disruptive improvements will reduce that market position than improve it. That's why producers of photographic film like Kodak were among the last to get on the digital photography bandwagon. The result is that corporate culture in large organizations tend to generate products that are bland and slow to evolve, and rarely revolutionary (unless they are produced by unofficial skunkworks-type teams). The up-and-coming fighters tend to be more hungry, driven, and risky, but a lot of them fall in the competition to take down the title holders.
Many data plans are 500MB/month. So you would use that in ~1000 hours, which is ~40 days. OK so just on idle, the phone uses up 3/4 of your standard monthly bandwidth, leaving you 1/4 for things like browsing the net, viewing videos, running networked apps like RDP, etc. Yeah, it's a pig.
What makes you think that you can't do all of those things on both IOS and Android? It's just that IOS and Android also allow you to play games. How many flights in a day do you book? If you're not a day-trader, how often do you check your stock per day and how long does it take? On the other hand you've got a generation that's grown up with video games and social media who are going to be doing it all day if they can. It should be blindingly obvious why you mainly see them gaming and checking Facebook instead of checking stock quotes and booking flights - it's because it's what they want to spend their time doing, not because they can't do what you're limited to on wm6.5.
1. I'm pretty sure Motorola made the ROKR, not Apple. Apple may have had some input but they had very limited influence over the development. Motorola's design failures with ROKR are probably what spurred Apple to roll their own.
2. There have been enough successful Apple products to provide a reasonable doubt that the Mac Cube was the exception and not the rule (though the Newton and Apple/// are other data points indicating they can misjudge the market or produce flawed products).
3. Microsoft has a pretty strong history of producing products that are shipped too early and trying to bull their way through superior marketing until they can later throw enough resources at it to play catchup and fix the problems (IIS, IE, Windows ME, Vista, Xbox, MSN). Heck this goes all the way back to the first releases of DOS (compared to CPM) where they depended on IBM's channel and stores. It works when they have competition that is just as bad/sloppy as they are, or when they can leverage their existing monopoly power, but sometimes not even then.
In the end it has to do with the corporate culture. The Apple corporate culture is that everything they do is insanely great, which leads to hubris and the occasional reality check. The Microsoft corporate culture is that if you can produce a product that's "good enough" that people won't want to throw it at a wall, you can probably throw enough marketing at it to make it a success long enough to buy time to file down the sharpest corners.
There have been significant functionality issues that have been unfixed across at least two major overlapping versions of Windows, and sometimes more. I remember for instance one major bug in NT3.5 where, if you tried to log in too soon after a cold boot, the machine wouldn't boot up properly and would need to be rebooted again. Was the problem fixed years later when NT 4 came out? Nope. It wasn't fixed until an NT4 service pack many years later. So yeah, when it comes to Microsoft, the statement that bugs may cross multiple releases of software products, despite claims of substantial re-writes and completely different development teams, is actually pretty strongly rooted in experience and reality.
Maybe, but your limited QA budget should include testing of the core functionality. For something that is promoted as a phone, the testing the GP outlined for signal reception is pretty well key to the core functions of the device. They should be the first and last things tested; The first because everything else depends on it, and the last because, before you mark it for Gold for manufacturing, you want to test it again to make sure you haven't done something while fixing other bugs that caused a regression and broke reception.
QA's biggest budget problem usually isn't one of money so much as one of time. As other development steps (design/coding/system test) slip their timeline, QA is usually the one that gets short-changed in the rush to get something out the door.
Because a fan-less computer is such an unreasonable goal...
Of course it's not. However heat dissipation depends in large part on the power consumption of the parts used, how part density restricts convection airflow, and whether design allows for cooling features (fins?). So you can have a fanless computer, but if your marketing designer decides on a look that precludes necessary cooling features, and your other marketer insists on a performance envelope that require processing parts with a fairly high power consumption, you're going to wind up with a heat problem.
As for what the FFS said, the blackout is a short interval in the flight, and it's ballistic. You're not going to maneuver in that beyond attitude control, The ability to do so would require shielding more of the vehicle from heat and dynamic overpressure. Any retargeting can be done before you hit atmosphere or once the plasma subsides.
Really? What if there is something on an intercept course that's taking advantage that the re-entering hypersonic body is plasma blind and on a defined trajectory? Seems like having some spy eyes telling it that it's going to be dead if it doesn't deke might be worth taking some risk with some momentary overpressure. Especially if you've built-in just a little extra ablative shielding and structural strength to take it for a short period.
The world design concepts (sets, costumes, etc) were done by Moebius (Jean Giraud), the author of The Incal, The Airtight Garage, and many other groundbreaking graphic novel series. Over a decade later, his classmate from the Institut des Arts Appliqués, J.C. Mezieres (artist for Valerian & Laureline) did similar concept artwork for The 5th Element. You can definitely see design element reuse by each artist between the movies and the comic books (for instance costume sleeves in TRON vs. Incal & Airtight, or the taxicabs and vehicular traffic in 5th Element vs Cercles du Pouvoir).
The Evil AI had been done before with Demon Seed (1977), and while HAL was redeemed in 2010 when his programming conflict was explained, at first glance he acted pretty rogue in 2001. But I totally agree on the other points. Vinge had only published True Names one year earlier in 1981, and Gibson wouldn't publish Neuromancer until 1984. Tron was ground-breaking in so many ways that it was mindblowing in 1982. The dialogue could be pretty weak though and the acting feels a little over the top at times (Jeff Bridges' character sometimes feels to me like a cubist caricature because he's like The Dude, but charismatic, manic, or suffering from Asperger's depending on the part of the movie).
I think Uncle Sam would have been a little more creative in choosing the backdoor password since it would have, in large part been USA companies rendered vulnerable. This indicates, I think, either a disgruntled worker who didn't care about picking a hard to find backdoor, or an agent for the foreign government of a country that does a lot of outsourcing who wanted anybody discovering the backdoor to think it was a disgruntled worker. Sometimes it's all about plausible deniability.
Does the EPA really control wild boards running through spinach fields? Or indeed have ANYTHING to do with that situation?
Well that's the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However I think the point the gentleman was making was that the Republicans (in particular their "libertarian" wing) have this tendency to gut red tape, minimize government enforcement, and count on industry self-monitoring and "voluntary guidelines" with the expectation that the free market will redress all wrongs. That doesn't happen with car emissions, with pollution controls, with pharmaceuticals (remember snake oil salesmen promoted snake oil for curing all sorts of ailments), or Ponzi schemes gussied up as investment funds. It also doesn't work when there are only around 7 major meat packing companies in the country and safety problems in one producer create significant shortages that drive up the price and force vendors to turn back to suppliers that have proved themselves unsafe in the past. Too big to fail doesn't just happen to banks. There are areas where excessive regulation may be caused by overzealous bureaucrats, but food safety is one where I generally prefer to err on the side of safety.
The one exception I would make regarding food safety, if I could still eat cheese, has to do with the mandated pasteurization of soft cheeses. Put warning labels on the cheese and keep them away from small children and pregnant women, but let me make that choice. It's telling that there have been far fewer deaths in Western Europe from unpasteurised cheeses than there have been in Canada or the US with listeria or E. Coli outbreaks from inspected meat plants. Mainly I find it ridiculous that you can't buy an unpasteurized brie, but cigarettes are sold by the carton at the checkout stand,
Now, the North Korean bomb failed in a way that is expected that implosion bombs could fail. It doesn't need external intervention to explain it, just some tiny error anywhere.
Sure, but the nice thing about having the isotope mix off is that it would produce about the same result. I seem to remember the North Koreans bought centrifuges from Pakistan, as well as getting know how from China. The US was more likely to have agents in Pakistan to seed a virus, and the NK networks are more isolated than the Iranian ones, so it would have been less likely that a targeted virus like Stuxnet would escape.
I guess the real problem is that you would think NK would be doing quality control on the isotope mix output with mass spectrometry, at least during the commissioning phase of the centrifuge cascades. On the other hand, if you could infect the system after commissioning, then the operators might fudge the operating results rather than admit something went wrong on their watch and risk the consequences.
True, but if you vary the rotational speed on a regular basis then you will set up mixing currents that undo the mass-based sorting effect of the centrifuge. It won't take much of a variation to undo the work of hours and limit the isotope purity that you can achieve.
Which makes me wonder about that North Korean atomic bomb test that appeared to fizzle a few years ago. Maybe they got hit by a variant that never made it out. I could see them skipping that part of quality control and never testing the refined product to detect that the isotope purity wasn't anywhere near what it should have been for the amount of time the fissionable material spent in the centrifuges.
Roberto Begnini made fun of Berlusconi's claims that reports of the 74 year old Italian President's relationship with a teenage belly dancer and wild parties with young women were plots by the mafia to discredit him.
Benigni asked if the Mafia were now using pretty young girls instead of guns and bombs, and imagined the premier returning home one night to find three girls in his bed, and shrieking: “The Mafia are after me!”.
Now it appears that Begnini's joke is the truth if you substitute the CIA for the Mafia. It's starting to look like at least one of the girls in Julian Assange's bed had CIA ties, a history of politically motivated lies, and is very likely part of a CIA plot to discredit him. Well, I suppose it's more pleasant than a bullet from a sniper rifle.
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It depends. If it's a police entrance exam or an entrance exam for a similarly easily exploited position of trust then, yes, it may very well be preferable to catch people who have a propensity for poor moral decisions like cheating, rather than keep them honest for the exam only so that they can abuse the position later.
My point was that there were past counter-examples to the claims that a new development team would make Microsoft Windows Phone 7 necessarily better than previous versions of Windows Mobile. Those same kinds of claims had been made about Windows NT 4.0.
Generally these kinds of issues are due to organizational/structural factors and corporate culture. While there can be exceptions if things are sufficiently compartmentalized, when a company has a well established track record for doing things a certain way, it's not unreasonable to expect any future endeavours to follow that track record. There hasn't been any indication that the team responsible for Windows Phone 7 was isolated in any way from the corporate culture that produced Bob, Vista, XBox RROD, and Kin. While it appears that president/VP-level heads have rolled as a result of Kin and Windows Phone 7, it's unclear whether the replacements will provide a marked departure from the Microsoft corporate culture of the past, and it's doubtful that will happen as long as Steve Ballmer remains CEO.
Technical organizations with large market shares will naturally tend to prefer to suppress disruptive technologies because it's more likely that unforeseen effects of disruptive improvements will reduce that market position than improve it. That's why producers of photographic film like Kodak were among the last to get on the digital photography bandwagon. The result is that corporate culture in large organizations tend to generate products that are bland and slow to evolve, and rarely revolutionary (unless they are produced by unofficial skunkworks-type teams). The up-and-coming fighters tend to be more hungry, driven, and risky, but a lot of them fall in the competition to take down the title holders.
Well, they know that it's a fancy rehash of something the Amiga did in the 80s. Of course the third-party hardware cost a lot more back then.
Many data plans are 500MB/month. So you would use that in ~1000 hours, which is ~40 days. OK so just on idle, the phone uses up 3/4 of your standard monthly bandwidth, leaving you 1/4 for things like browsing the net, viewing videos, running networked apps like RDP, etc. Yeah, it's a pig.
What makes you think that you can't do all of those things on both IOS and Android? It's just that IOS and Android also allow you to play games. How many flights in a day do you book? If you're not a day-trader, how often do you check your stock per day and how long does it take? On the other hand you've got a generation that's grown up with video games and social media who are going to be doing it all day if they can. It should be blindingly obvious why you mainly see them gaming and checking Facebook instead of checking stock quotes and booking flights - it's because it's what they want to spend their time doing, not because they can't do what you're limited to on wm6.5.
1. I'm pretty sure Motorola made the ROKR, not Apple. Apple may have had some input but they had very limited influence over the development. Motorola's design failures with ROKR are probably what spurred Apple to roll their own.
2. There have been enough successful Apple products to provide a reasonable doubt that the Mac Cube was the exception and not the rule (though the Newton and Apple /// are other data points indicating they can misjudge the market or produce flawed products).
3. Microsoft has a pretty strong history of producing products that are shipped too early and trying to bull their way through superior marketing until they can later throw enough resources at it to play catchup and fix the problems (IIS, IE, Windows ME, Vista, Xbox, MSN). Heck this goes all the way back to the first releases of DOS (compared to CPM) where they depended on IBM's channel and stores. It works when they have competition that is just as bad/sloppy as they are, or when they can leverage their existing monopoly power, but sometimes not even then.
In the end it has to do with the corporate culture. The Apple corporate culture is that everything they do is insanely great, which leads to hubris and the occasional reality check. The Microsoft corporate culture is that if you can produce a product that's "good enough" that people won't want to throw it at a wall, you can probably throw enough marketing at it to make it a success long enough to buy time to file down the sharpest corners.
There have been significant functionality issues that have been unfixed across at least two major overlapping versions of Windows, and sometimes more. I remember for instance one major bug in NT3.5 where, if you tried to log in too soon after a cold boot, the machine wouldn't boot up properly and would need to be rebooted again. Was the problem fixed years later when NT 4 came out? Nope. It wasn't fixed until an NT4 service pack many years later. So yeah, when it comes to Microsoft, the statement that bugs may cross multiple releases of software products, despite claims of substantial re-writes and completely different development teams, is actually pretty strongly rooted in experience and reality.
Maybe, but your limited QA budget should include testing of the core functionality. For something that is promoted as a phone, the testing the GP outlined for signal reception is pretty well key to the core functions of the device. They should be the first and last things tested; The first because everything else depends on it, and the last because, before you mark it for Gold for manufacturing, you want to test it again to make sure you haven't done something while fixing other bugs that caused a regression and broke reception.
QA's biggest budget problem usually isn't one of money so much as one of time. As other development steps (design/coding/system test) slip their timeline, QA is usually the one that gets short-changed in the rush to get something out the door.
Of course it's not. However heat dissipation depends in large part on the power consumption of the parts used, how part density restricts convection airflow, and whether design allows for cooling features (fins?). So you can have a fanless computer, but if your marketing designer decides on a look that precludes necessary cooling features, and your other marketer insists on a performance envelope that require processing parts with a fairly high power consumption, you're going to wind up with a heat problem.
Really? What if there is something on an intercept course that's taking advantage that the re-entering hypersonic body is plasma blind and on a defined trajectory? Seems like having some spy eyes telling it that it's going to be dead if it doesn't deke might be worth taking some risk with some momentary overpressure. Especially if you've built-in just a little extra ablative shielding and structural strength to take it for a short period.
Turn-based games basically got stomped by Real-time Strategy games ten years ago. Good luck trying to roll back the clock.
Actually I was thinking of skeet shooting. :-)
Pull!
The fractal rendering on the snow in the snowballs is still pretty cutting edge.
I think you mean "Damn you John Lasseter! Damn you and your Pixar!"
The world design concepts (sets, costumes, etc) were done by Moebius (Jean Giraud), the author of The Incal, The Airtight Garage, and many other groundbreaking graphic novel series. Over a decade later, his classmate from the Institut des Arts Appliqués, J.C. Mezieres (artist for Valerian & Laureline) did similar concept artwork for The 5th Element. You can definitely see design element reuse by each artist between the movies and the comic books (for instance costume sleeves in TRON vs. Incal & Airtight, or the taxicabs and vehicular traffic in 5th Element vs Cercles du Pouvoir).
If you're going to mention Bloom County's awesomeness, you can't forget to include Calvin and Hobbes!
The Evil AI had been done before with Demon Seed (1977), and while HAL was redeemed in 2010 when his programming conflict was explained, at first glance he acted pretty rogue in 2001. But I totally agree on the other points. Vinge had only published True Names one year earlier in 1981, and Gibson wouldn't publish Neuromancer until 1984. Tron was ground-breaking in so many ways that it was mindblowing in 1982. The dialogue could be pretty weak though and the acting feels a little over the top at times (Jeff Bridges' character sometimes feels to me like a cubist caricature because he's like The Dude, but charismatic, manic, or suffering from Asperger's depending on the part of the movie).
I think Uncle Sam would have been a little more creative in choosing the backdoor password since it would have, in large part been USA companies rendered vulnerable. This indicates, I think, either a disgruntled worker who didn't care about picking a hard to find backdoor, or an agent for the foreign government of a country that does a lot of outsourcing who wanted anybody discovering the backdoor to think it was a disgruntled worker. Sometimes it's all about plausible deniability.
Well that's the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However I think the point the gentleman was making was that the Republicans (in particular their "libertarian" wing) have this tendency to gut red tape, minimize government enforcement, and count on industry self-monitoring and "voluntary guidelines" with the expectation that the free market will redress all wrongs. That doesn't happen with car emissions, with pollution controls, with pharmaceuticals (remember snake oil salesmen promoted snake oil for curing all sorts of ailments), or Ponzi schemes gussied up as investment funds. It also doesn't work when there are only around 7 major meat packing companies in the country and safety problems in one producer create significant shortages that drive up the price and force vendors to turn back to suppliers that have proved themselves unsafe in the past. Too big to fail doesn't just happen to banks. There are areas where excessive regulation may be caused by overzealous bureaucrats, but food safety is one where I generally prefer to err on the side of safety.
The one exception I would make regarding food safety, if I could still eat cheese, has to do with the mandated pasteurization of soft cheeses. Put warning labels on the cheese and keep them away from small children and pregnant women, but let me make that choice. It's telling that there have been far fewer deaths in Western Europe from unpasteurised cheeses than there have been in Canada or the US with listeria or E. Coli outbreaks from inspected meat plants. Mainly I find it ridiculous that you can't buy an unpasteurized brie, but cigarettes are sold by the carton at the checkout stand,
Sure, but the nice thing about having the isotope mix off is that it would produce about the same result. I seem to remember the North Koreans bought centrifuges from Pakistan, as well as getting know how from China. The US was more likely to have agents in Pakistan to seed a virus, and the NK networks are more isolated than the Iranian ones, so it would have been less likely that a targeted virus like Stuxnet would escape.
I guess the real problem is that you would think NK would be doing quality control on the isotope mix output with mass spectrometry, at least during the commissioning phase of the centrifuge cascades. On the other hand, if you could infect the system after commissioning, then the operators might fudge the operating results rather than admit something went wrong on their watch and risk the consequences.
True, but if you vary the rotational speed on a regular basis then you will set up mixing currents that undo the mass-based sorting effect of the centrifuge. It won't take much of a variation to undo the work of hours and limit the isotope purity that you can achieve.
Which makes me wonder about that North Korean atomic bomb test that appeared to fizzle a few years ago. Maybe they got hit by a variant that never made it out. I could see them skipping that part of quality control and never testing the refined product to detect that the isotope purity wasn't anywhere near what it should have been for the amount of time the fissionable material spent in the centrifuges.
Now it appears that Begnini's joke is the truth if you substitute the CIA for the Mafia. It's starting to look like at least one of the girls in Julian Assange's bed had CIA ties, a history of politically motivated lies, and is very likely part of a CIA plot to discredit him. Well, I suppose it's more pleasant than a bullet from a sniper rifle.
On the plus side, while the specific impulse of RP-1/LOX is lower than that of LOX/LH, kerosene is nowhere near as corrosive as LH.
Well, I'm not a US citizen either :-)