All joking apart, how would you manage to give perks to those who do well but _without_ anyone being able to notice that others are not getting said perks and thus by simple logic must be 'dumb' (your words) ?
You'd also be rewarding the wrong kids... there are kids like me out there... when I was in high school, I never did homework, I never studied, I played hookie more often than not in my final year, and I even got kicked out of one high school for telling the headmaster exactly what I thought of him (that he was a pompous self-absorbed officious bureaucrat with no concept of how people actually worked... I was right, but for some reason he didn't appreciate my candor). I also have eidetic memory, and was still able to pull off an A average.
The school system in general is not designed to teach people how to actually think and function. With the amount of effort I put in at high school, I shouldn't have been able to get the grades that I did. It took a few years in the real world, including a stint in the Canadian military, before I was ready to start at University, and for the amount of effort that was actually required in my field of study... the way the department at my alma mater actually worked, you needed to say something actually original in order to get an A.
But the thing is... the school system leading up to University was rewarding my laziness. If they were actually focused on ability rather than test scores, there's no earthly reason I should have been able to get the grades I did... my brother worked his ass off for a B- average, and I think that prepared him a lot better for the real world than it did his kid sister. Couple things like that with test anxiety, people with bad memory, or people who simply have a habit of studying the wrong material, and you end up with people like me who don't work at all and pull off straight A's they don't deserve, and people who have a really good understanding of the material being taught who get D's they don't deserve.
No, it means you've conveniently ignored economies of scale, which don't exist in the green energy industry yet (well, in some parts of the world), because of continued reliance on other sources of energy. It's a relatively new industry when compared against nuclear, coal, or oil power, and it's naive to think that while the infrastructure and industry is being built up it's going to compete at equal pricing.
That does not, however, mean that green energy should be ignored. It also doesn't mean that we should focus our efforts on a single technology as a panacea... in areas where renewable energy sources is a very mature industry, like, for example, hydroelectric power in Quebec, Canada, it's actually a lot cheaper than the alternatives... there's a reason that "hydro" is synonymous with "electricity" in some parts of the world, you know. Wind, Solar, and Geothermal all have the potential to reach the same level of efficiency with economies of scale, but the scale needs to actually be there for it to happen, and that's going to require some teething pains.
The GGP suggested dd, which doesn't really care whether it's ntfs or not. dd piped with gzip to compress the image, and you should be able to easily create images of just about any filesystem out there. If you don't care about storage space (or it's a small OS partition with user files on a separate partition), you can also forgo piping in gzip.
Of course. It's cheaper to make somebody on salary do an 80 hour work week with no overtime than it is to hire a second person so they both work 40 hours. It's all about the profit margins at corporations.
Incidentally, that's also why I studied arts when I went back to University, and why I avoid IT jobs like the plague these days. That kind of mistreatment doesn't seem to happen nearly as much when you're working in a non-IT capacity.
The overage charges aren't supposed to make them lots of money, it's supposed to keep heavy bandwidth users in control so that the rest of the network doesn't suffer. Also, it doesn't matter how much it actually costs to the ISPs at that point. Nowhere they say it costs them $2.50/GB, but that's the price they're billing from you if you use over something like 250GB a month, which most people won't. They're free to do so. You're also free to choose your provider. However, don't bitch if there are no providers that sell you at the price you want.
depends on the ISP... Bell Canada, for example, includes 2GB/month usage with their cheapest plan, and charges $2.50/GB for overage. That is obscene, and considering that they're charging you $30/mo for a 2mbit connection, there's no way you're going to convince me it actually costs them that much when I can get a 5mbit w/ 300GB/mo and $0.25/GB overage charge for $32/mo, and if I were willing to pay $37/mo, I could get 5mbit w/ no bandwidth cap at all, both from a different provider that uses the same network, meaning I'd be connected to the same port, with the same copper.
It's not only infrastructure. Not even starting at wages for workers and other recurring costs, ISP's have to pay each other to buy bandwidth from them. Only the tier 1 ISP's can get away with peering without extra costs.
If your ISP's business plan is to make up those costs on overage charges, I suggest you find a new ISP, as they will go bankrupt as soon as their customer base starts watching what they're doing.
That kind of cost, and everything else you mention in your post, is supposed to be budgeted for in your monthly tithe err... monthly subscription fees. Overage fees are just that... fees for going over the allotted amount of monthly usage. Those fees are completely unreasonable. At that point, it does not cost them $2.50/GB to deliver that data to you, because your monthly subscription fee has already covered the lion's share of those costs. It really does only cost $0.01/GB at that point, or at least, it should only cost that little if they're doing it right.
Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to run a fibre 1,000 miles through rough terrain with no road access, and where you can't bury it thanks to the permafrost layer, to serve a community of 200, which would be considered a large community in some parts of northern Canada?
I don't think anybody in the states outside of people working in the mining industry and people living in Alaska have any clue how remote Canada's high arctic actually is, nor how desolate things get once you're above the tree line.
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers.
I think you're not giving Woz enough credit.
I think neither of you is giving Gates enough credit... most of the first wave of personal computers, including the Apple II, ran MicroSoft BASIC, one of the few pieces of software that Gates actually wrote himself.
Not that I harbour much love for Mr. Gates, nor do I want to hijack a memorial thread for Mr. Jobs, but you really can't overlook the difference that MS BASIC made in the first wave of computers, and in making it accessible to the world. An awful lot of programmers who are today giving you the computers and ui's and tablets etc. that you use on a daily basis cut their teeth on that system in one of its forms.
You are right, however, that Woz did design the hardware. The Apple ][ was the first computer I ever got to muck with at school (though my parents had an 8086 at home), and it was one of the first I ever programmed for. It's the end of an era.:(
GP was talking about blocking port 53 outbound from the ISP's network, forcing everybody to use the ISP's internal DNS servers unless they used a different port.
That's a bit kludgy... why not just silently redirect it to the ISP's own DNS server? Then most people wouldn't have a clue it was even happening, even if they'd already gone to the trouble of setting themselves up with an open DNS server.
That would depend on jurisdiction. I would love to see what would happen when DHS decides to try to take down a.CA domain name....CA is under the purvey of CIRA, which is a Canadian non-profit. For such a takedown order to have *any* teeth at all, they'd have to convince a judge that Canadian law has been broken, and that there was a case to de-register the domain name. Good luck with that, for now, because Canadian copyright law is different from American copyright law, and because even if Canadian law were violated, there's procedures that they'd have to go through (dictated by the CIRA constitution) before they could actually de-register the domain name.
Most TLD's are hosted outside of the USA, and as such, the DHS/ICE would have similar problems going after almost any domain that doesn't end in.com,.org,.net, or.us. They could order foreign domains blocked by ISPs themselves in a DNS blackhole, but good luck enforcing that one, or they could order the Tier 1 links to adjust their routing to send the IP addresses into la-la land, but it's doubtful that either of those would happen except in particularly extreme cases.
Which sort of begs the question... why the hell has TPB not switched over to a.se domain name?
BTW, driving range also applies to internal combustion engine vehicles as well, although most automotive manufacturers usually don't make that a key selling point.
Depends on the manufacturer and the market they're advertising to... the new VW Golf Diesel, for example, is being advertised quite heavily around here for having a 1100km range. I also remember an episode of Top Gear (the real one) where Jeremy drove over 800 miles on a single tank of gas in a Jaguar diesel. (London to Edinburgh and back. don't kid yourself into thinking the "challenges" they do on Top Gear are anything other than advertising for that particular car)
Some cars are designed to go really fast. Some are designed to handle corners. Some are designed to have lots of torque. Some are designed to go really far on a tank of gas. Some are designed to be the seat of luxury. And some are designed to make the owner look like an idiot (like the guy up the street who has a 2011 Silverado with 24" rims... what better way to say that you're an idiot than to fit a utility truck like a Silverado -- the one with the 6.2L 400hp V8 engine -- with wheels that would preclude your doing anything utilitarian with it, like towing or carrying a load... I have to confess I don't have any inkling how or why the male mind works, but that isn't sexy, it's retarded).
Usually, a manufacturer will advertise what the car is designed for... you're unlikely to see a 0-60 stat on an advert for a Chev Aveo (astonishingly quick worst-in-class 19 seconds), just as you're unlikely to see a mileage stat on an advert for a Bugatti Veyron (at top speed, you have 11 minutes of fuel with a full tank). For what it's worth, 320 miles is about what I get on my 2011 Subaru Impreza... I could probably get more out of it if I drove less vigorously, but that isn't a car that's designed for mileage, it's a car that's designed to handle corners and go reasonably fast. They're both about the same level of luxury; the main difference between the two is that the Tesla needs to return to a charging station and be plugged in overnight to fill up. The Impreza, I can pull into any gas station, and fill up in a few minutes. That, and the Impreza cost 1/10th as much.
Google does not scrape the entirety of a site and put it up on their scraped search... they take a small blurb for you to read, and link to the original site. They do cache sites, but you have to look for the cache link, and most people aren't even aware that they exist. Very different animal.
I suspect that Google isn't in any danger here, because rather than taking business away from the sites they index, they are actually driving more business *to* those sites.
And in today's lesson, we learn that publishing something and putting it on display for everybody does not give away your copyright or distribution rights. It doesn't matter if I'm handing out pamphlets for free... if you take my pamphlet, scrub my contact information, and then try to resell it as your own work, then you're violating my copyright. If I'm trying to convert you to veganism, that's not really a problem (though it would be annoying), but if that work is in a business context, and is part of my advertising for my services, then it poses a very serious problem. In a real-estate context, where I'm paid commission from both the buyer and the seller, that directly impacts my bottom line, and is a major no-no.
It has wifi, just like the £349 version... it does not have 3G like the £399 version, but it was available as an upgrade option at configuration time (it's a Dell), and with 3G built-in, it would still have cost less than £399.
Aside from the fact that 3G data is way too expensive in this country (Canada), the main reason I didn't go with built-in 3G data is that it would have required that I buy Windows with the laptop. For some reason known only to Dell, the Linux versions of their laptops aren't very customizable. That said, the built-in 3G that Dell sells with some of their systems would have limited my choice in carriers, as not all carriers in this country use the same frequencies for data. I prefer not to get locked in to specific vendors, nor to sign any long-term contracts with cellular providers.
If you write standards-compliant code, you're generally safe. Doing UI/widget codes does suck, particularly if you're using flash, but as long as you write something that plays friendly with Trident, Webkit, and Gecko, you're pretty safe. If you want to be nice, have a "mobile" version of your site which puts all the navigation stuff as normal links at the top/bottom of the page, rather than along a sidebar, and if you want to be *really* nice, have server-side php looking at the browser ID sent by the rendering engine to automatically adjust how the site is rendered.
I happen to have a Kobo Touch as well, btw, and it uses Webkit as its rendering engine for the browser. As long as the website you're viewing is standards-compliant, and doesn't have 200-pixel wide flash based menus to navigate, you're pretty much safe. You can also try most of your usual websites with "m" as a prefix (instead of "www"). That seems to be a fairly standard option these days for the "mobile" version of the site, and all of the news websites that I frequent (except/., and that isn't really "news") follow that standard and render just fine on my Kobo.
btw... if you're really a web developper, I have a hard time believing you didn't already know that there's really only 3 rendering engines you need to worry about... Chrome and Safari both use Webkit (as do Konqueror, Midori, Chromium, and most mobile browsers). Firefox and Seamonkey use Gecko (as do a few other browsers). IE and its derivatives (like Slimbrowser and Maxthon) use Trident. Opera is able to switch between the three, in addition to its own internal rendering engine. And all 3 of those rendering engines can pass Acid2, and *mostly* pass Acid3. If the code you're writing doesn't do anything weird/unusual with the CSS formatting and HTML code, and you're not using idiosyncratic JavaScript code, then you really don't even need to test in the different rendering engines, as you have a reasonable guarantee that they'll all work. If, however, you want to be safe, just install Firefox, IE, and Chrome on your test machine, and you've covered all of the bases. If it works in all 3 of those, you have a reasonable guarantee that it will work in every browser, and supporting a "mobile" platform just means changing your page layout to something that'll display nicely and usably on a small screen.
What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
For £349, you could very decent laptop... This being Slashdot, I kinda skimmed TFA rather than actually reading it, but are they seriously selling the Chromebook for that much money? That's ridiculous. I was able to buy a 3lb 13" ultraportable for about £250 ($400 CAD), and if I'd had another $150 in the budget for it, I could have upgraded it quite nicely. And that's not even considering other form factors that are a lot cheaper, like a 14" or a 15" laptop where you're not as concerned about weight.
Haven't owned a VCR in over a decade, and the last one I owned, I just had to tune in to the TV Guide channel and press a button on the remote for it to set the clock on its own.:)
Yemen is not a battleground, nor was there any immediate and present danger posed by the person who was assassinated. Yes, the US is in time of war, but this is an assassination, and that clause is talking about battlefield death, not a sanctioned killing by the CIA.
This isn't really any different from any number of other sanctioned assassinations that've been carried out by the CIA, really. The main difference here is the method use to kill him, and the fact that there was collateral damage. Usually it doesn't make the news, because usually they don't resort to Israeli tactics... that is, they don't usually use air strikes for this kind of assassination.
Actually, for casual browsing, try a Dell Vostro v130. I have the linux version of that laptop, and yes, it weighs about 100g more than the 13" Mac Air, it's still very light, very portable, and very usable for about everything (non-gaming) that I've thrown at it. It also handles the few games I have bothered to play (nothing taxing, just stuff like TuxKart and Frozen Bubble) with ease.
Though I suppose it wouldn't really fit the question posed, as it wasn't $100 less than a Macbook Air, it was $800 less than a 13" Macbook Air.
They're out there. The laptop I'm typing this reply on has a magnesium case, that's both light, and inexpensive. And it's in a laptop that cost me $400 at regular price... you can get inexpensive laptops with metal cases, you just need to know where to get them from.
Incidentally, an Aluminum case would not be too expensive... with the price of petroleum these days, it's probably cheaper than a plastic case, actually. Al is one of the most abundant minerals found on this planet (behind only Oxygen and Silicon for its abundance), and is dirt cheap. Literally... some kinds of potting soil are more expensive than aluminum.
Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
I think the GP was intending to talk about forced obsolescence, but somehow doesn't know how Apple actually goes about forced obsolescence... They don't put in bloat code to slow things down on older hardware, they declare that older hardware is no longer supported and simply refuse to install the new version on it, regardless of whether it would actually run properly or not. There is no technical reason that you can't run Snow Leopard on a first generation Intel iMac, yet it won't install because the hardware is "obsolete". This is in spite of the fact that Leopard ran perfectly well on it, and as you so rightly pointed out, Snow Leopard is noticeably faster than Leopard because its main focus was on streamlining things and reducing the system's footprint on the hardware... in other words, Snow Leopard *should* run better on older hardware than Leopard.
Apple is sneaky that way. Microsoft... not so much... Win7 actually runs better on older hardware than Win Vista (and arguably Windows XP once certain minimums are met)... Microsoft doesn't hide the fact that they're designing for newer system configurations, and they don't place arbitrary limits on whether the software will actually install in the first place.... they do limit installation on older hardware (go ahead, try installing Win7 on a '486), but they do it for sanity reasons, not to try to convince you to buy a new computer, and they make it much easier to circumvent those limits (if you check youtube, you can find a video of somebody who's shoehorned Win7 into a '486).
Actually, it's marketing, not usability. The Sandisk Sansa from the same era was much more usable than the iPod, and had features that the Apple didn't, like FM radio and MicroSD expansion ports, in addition to being mountable as USB mass storage. While it's personal opinion, I also found that the menu options on the Sandisk were more easily navigated and made more sense to me... in the end, it wasn't usability/features that caused the iPod to catch on, it was marketing. There were *much* better options available on the market, at a fraction of the cost.
That's just the claim of lazy developers. Consumers don't want apps that are created like that. They are show and don't use any of the native features of your device. What will happen is that developers that take the time to do it right and taylor their apps will be successful. Those that take short cuts will fail.
You forgot a step... people will ask why Angry Birds 12 has feature X on their iPhone 7 but they can't do that on their Android 5 tablet.
If you don't need a native feature of the device for the functionality of your program, then you're naive to think that it's better to code natively rather than using a write once-run everywhere tool chain like html5... assuming that tool chain actually does what you need it to do, why on earth would you develop using a chain that restricts where it can be used?
There is one reason, and one reason alone that I stick to Firefox: Chrome doesn't give you control over the cache settings. I have seen it take up over 50GB of disk space for a cache, which is simply ridiculous. While there are ways to clear the cache, there's no way to tell Chrome not to use a disk cache at all.
Sure, there's a launch-time option for the amount of disk cache to use and where to store it, but there's nowhere you can go in the options to set it permanently. For that reason alone, I keep going back to Firefox. It does what I need it to do, and yes, it's a pig when it comes to memory use, but my system can handle it, and at least that memory gets freed up when I close the program.
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All joking apart, how would you manage to give perks to those who do well but _without_ anyone being able to notice that others are not getting said perks and thus by simple logic must be 'dumb' (your words) ?
You'd also be rewarding the wrong kids... there are kids like me out there... when I was in high school, I never did homework, I never studied, I played hookie more often than not in my final year, and I even got kicked out of one high school for telling the headmaster exactly what I thought of him (that he was a pompous self-absorbed officious bureaucrat with no concept of how people actually worked... I was right, but for some reason he didn't appreciate my candor). I also have eidetic memory, and was still able to pull off an A average.
The school system in general is not designed to teach people how to actually think and function. With the amount of effort I put in at high school, I shouldn't have been able to get the grades that I did. It took a few years in the real world, including a stint in the Canadian military, before I was ready to start at University, and for the amount of effort that was actually required in my field of study... the way the department at my alma mater actually worked, you needed to say something actually original in order to get an A.
But the thing is... the school system leading up to University was rewarding my laziness. If they were actually focused on ability rather than test scores, there's no earthly reason I should have been able to get the grades I did... my brother worked his ass off for a B- average, and I think that prepared him a lot better for the real world than it did his kid sister. Couple things like that with test anxiety, people with bad memory, or people who simply have a habit of studying the wrong material, and you end up with people like me who don't work at all and pull off straight A's they don't deserve, and people who have a really good understanding of the material being taught who get D's they don't deserve.
No, it means you've conveniently ignored economies of scale, which don't exist in the green energy industry yet (well, in some parts of the world), because of continued reliance on other sources of energy. It's a relatively new industry when compared against nuclear, coal, or oil power, and it's naive to think that while the infrastructure and industry is being built up it's going to compete at equal pricing.
That does not, however, mean that green energy should be ignored. It also doesn't mean that we should focus our efforts on a single technology as a panacea... in areas where renewable energy sources is a very mature industry, like, for example, hydroelectric power in Quebec, Canada, it's actually a lot cheaper than the alternatives... there's a reason that "hydro" is synonymous with "electricity" in some parts of the world, you know. Wind, Solar, and Geothermal all have the potential to reach the same level of efficiency with economies of scale, but the scale needs to actually be there for it to happen, and that's going to require some teething pains.
The GGP suggested dd, which doesn't really care whether it's ntfs or not. dd piped with gzip to compress the image, and you should be able to easily create images of just about any filesystem out there. If you don't care about storage space (or it's a small OS partition with user files on a separate partition), you can also forgo piping in gzip.
Of course. It's cheaper to make somebody on salary do an 80 hour work week with no overtime than it is to hire a second person so they both work 40 hours. It's all about the profit margins at corporations.
Incidentally, that's also why I studied arts when I went back to University, and why I avoid IT jobs like the plague these days. That kind of mistreatment doesn't seem to happen nearly as much when you're working in a non-IT capacity.
I'm waiting for the first phone that docks to a small docking station with USB and HDMI.
That phone has been on the market for 9 months already.
The overage charges aren't supposed to make them lots of money, it's supposed to keep heavy bandwidth users in control so that the rest of the network doesn't suffer. Also, it doesn't matter how much it actually costs to the ISPs at that point. Nowhere they say it costs them $2.50/GB, but that's the price they're billing from you if you use over something like 250GB a month, which most people won't. They're free to do so. You're also free to choose your provider. However, don't bitch if there are no providers that sell you at the price you want.
depends on the ISP... Bell Canada, for example, includes 2GB/month usage with their cheapest plan, and charges $2.50/GB for overage. That is obscene, and considering that they're charging you $30/mo for a 2mbit connection, there's no way you're going to convince me it actually costs them that much when I can get a 5mbit w/ 300GB/mo and $0.25/GB overage charge for $32/mo, and if I were willing to pay $37/mo, I could get 5mbit w/ no bandwidth cap at all, both from a different provider that uses the same network, meaning I'd be connected to the same port, with the same copper.
It's not only infrastructure. Not even starting at wages for workers and other recurring costs, ISP's have to pay each other to buy bandwidth from them. Only the tier 1 ISP's can get away with peering without extra costs.
If your ISP's business plan is to make up those costs on overage charges, I suggest you find a new ISP, as they will go bankrupt as soon as their customer base starts watching what they're doing.
That kind of cost, and everything else you mention in your post, is supposed to be budgeted for in your monthly tithe err... monthly subscription fees. Overage fees are just that... fees for going over the allotted amount of monthly usage. Those fees are completely unreasonable. At that point, it does not cost them $2.50/GB to deliver that data to you, because your monthly subscription fee has already covered the lion's share of those costs. It really does only cost $0.01/GB at that point, or at least, it should only cost that little if they're doing it right.
Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to run a fibre 1,000 miles through rough terrain with no road access, and where you can't bury it thanks to the permafrost layer, to serve a community of 200, which would be considered a large community in some parts of northern Canada?
I don't think anybody in the states outside of people working in the mining industry and people living in Alaska have any clue how remote Canada's high arctic actually is, nor how desolate things get once you're above the tree line.
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers.
I think you're not giving Woz enough credit.
I think neither of you is giving Gates enough credit... most of the first wave of personal computers, including the Apple II, ran MicroSoft BASIC, one of the few pieces of software that Gates actually wrote himself.
Not that I harbour much love for Mr. Gates, nor do I want to hijack a memorial thread for Mr. Jobs, but you really can't overlook the difference that MS BASIC made in the first wave of computers, and in making it accessible to the world. An awful lot of programmers who are today giving you the computers and ui's and tablets etc. that you use on a daily basis cut their teeth on that system in one of its forms.
You are right, however, that Woz did design the hardware. The Apple ][ was the first computer I ever got to muck with at school (though my parents had an 8086 at home), and it was one of the first I ever programmed for. It's the end of an era. :(
GP was talking about blocking port 53 outbound from the ISP's network, forcing everybody to use the ISP's internal DNS servers unless they used a different port.
That's a bit kludgy... why not just silently redirect it to the ISP's own DNS server? Then most people wouldn't have a clue it was even happening, even if they'd already gone to the trouble of setting themselves up with an open DNS server.
That would depend on jurisdiction. I would love to see what would happen when DHS decides to try to take down a .CA domain name... .CA is under the purvey of CIRA, which is a Canadian non-profit. For such a takedown order to have *any* teeth at all, they'd have to convince a judge that Canadian law has been broken, and that there was a case to de-register the domain name. Good luck with that, for now, because Canadian copyright law is different from American copyright law, and because even if Canadian law were violated, there's procedures that they'd have to go through (dictated by the CIRA constitution) before they could actually de-register the domain name.
Most TLD's are hosted outside of the USA, and as such, the DHS/ICE would have similar problems going after almost any domain that doesn't end in .com, .org, .net, or .us. They could order foreign domains blocked by ISPs themselves in a DNS blackhole, but good luck enforcing that one, or they could order the Tier 1 links to adjust their routing to send the IP addresses into la-la land, but it's doubtful that either of those would happen except in particularly extreme cases.
Which sort of begs the question... why the hell has TPB not switched over to a .se domain name?
BTW, driving range also applies to internal combustion engine vehicles as well, although most automotive manufacturers usually don't make that a key selling point.
Depends on the manufacturer and the market they're advertising to... the new VW Golf Diesel, for example, is being advertised quite heavily around here for having a 1100km range. I also remember an episode of Top Gear (the real one) where Jeremy drove over 800 miles on a single tank of gas in a Jaguar diesel. (London to Edinburgh and back. don't kid yourself into thinking the "challenges" they do on Top Gear are anything other than advertising for that particular car)
Some cars are designed to go really fast. Some are designed to handle corners. Some are designed to have lots of torque. Some are designed to go really far on a tank of gas. Some are designed to be the seat of luxury. And some are designed to make the owner look like an idiot (like the guy up the street who has a 2011 Silverado with 24" rims... what better way to say that you're an idiot than to fit a utility truck like a Silverado -- the one with the 6.2L 400hp V8 engine -- with wheels that would preclude your doing anything utilitarian with it, like towing or carrying a load... I have to confess I don't have any inkling how or why the male mind works, but that isn't sexy, it's retarded).
Usually, a manufacturer will advertise what the car is designed for... you're unlikely to see a 0-60 stat on an advert for a Chev Aveo (astonishingly quick worst-in-class 19 seconds), just as you're unlikely to see a mileage stat on an advert for a Bugatti Veyron (at top speed, you have 11 minutes of fuel with a full tank). For what it's worth, 320 miles is about what I get on my 2011 Subaru Impreza... I could probably get more out of it if I drove less vigorously, but that isn't a car that's designed for mileage, it's a car that's designed to handle corners and go reasonably fast. They're both about the same level of luxury; the main difference between the two is that the Tesla needs to return to a charging station and be plugged in overnight to fill up. The Impreza, I can pull into any gas station, and fill up in a few minutes. That, and the Impreza cost 1/10th as much.
Google does not scrape the entirety of a site and put it up on their scraped search... they take a small blurb for you to read, and link to the original site. They do cache sites, but you have to look for the cache link, and most people aren't even aware that they exist. Very different animal.
I suspect that Google isn't in any danger here, because rather than taking business away from the sites they index, they are actually driving more business *to* those sites.
And in today's lesson, we learn that publishing something and putting it on display for everybody does not give away your copyright or distribution rights. It doesn't matter if I'm handing out pamphlets for free... if you take my pamphlet, scrub my contact information, and then try to resell it as your own work, then you're violating my copyright. If I'm trying to convert you to veganism, that's not really a problem (though it would be annoying), but if that work is in a business context, and is part of my advertising for my services, then it poses a very serious problem. In a real-estate context, where I'm paid commission from both the buyer and the seller, that directly impacts my bottom line, and is a major no-no.
It has wifi, just like the £349 version... it does not have 3G like the £399 version, but it was available as an upgrade option at configuration time (it's a Dell), and with 3G built-in, it would still have cost less than £399.
Aside from the fact that 3G data is way too expensive in this country (Canada), the main reason I didn't go with built-in 3G data is that it would have required that I buy Windows with the laptop. For some reason known only to Dell, the Linux versions of their laptops aren't very customizable. That said, the built-in 3G that Dell sells with some of their systems would have limited my choice in carriers, as not all carriers in this country use the same frequencies for data. I prefer not to get locked in to specific vendors, nor to sign any long-term contracts with cellular providers.
If you write standards-compliant code, you're generally safe. Doing UI/widget codes does suck, particularly if you're using flash, but as long as you write something that plays friendly with Trident, Webkit, and Gecko, you're pretty safe. If you want to be nice, have a "mobile" version of your site which puts all the navigation stuff as normal links at the top/bottom of the page, rather than along a sidebar, and if you want to be *really* nice, have server-side php looking at the browser ID sent by the rendering engine to automatically adjust how the site is rendered.
I happen to have a Kobo Touch as well, btw, and it uses Webkit as its rendering engine for the browser. As long as the website you're viewing is standards-compliant, and doesn't have 200-pixel wide flash based menus to navigate, you're pretty much safe. You can also try most of your usual websites with "m" as a prefix (instead of "www"). That seems to be a fairly standard option these days for the "mobile" version of the site, and all of the news websites that I frequent (except /., and that isn't really "news") follow that standard and render just fine on my Kobo.
btw... if you're really a web developper, I have a hard time believing you didn't already know that there's really only 3 rendering engines you need to worry about... Chrome and Safari both use Webkit (as do Konqueror, Midori, Chromium, and most mobile browsers). Firefox and Seamonkey use Gecko (as do a few other browsers). IE and its derivatives (like Slimbrowser and Maxthon) use Trident. Opera is able to switch between the three, in addition to its own internal rendering engine. And all 3 of those rendering engines can pass Acid2, and *mostly* pass Acid3. If the code you're writing doesn't do anything weird/unusual with the CSS formatting and HTML code, and you're not using idiosyncratic JavaScript code, then you really don't even need to test in the different rendering engines, as you have a reasonable guarantee that they'll all work. If, however, you want to be safe, just install Firefox, IE, and Chrome on your test machine, and you've covered all of the bases. If it works in all 3 of those, you have a reasonable guarantee that it will work in every browser, and supporting a "mobile" platform just means changing your page layout to something that'll display nicely and usably on a small screen.
What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
For £349, you could very decent laptop... This being Slashdot, I kinda skimmed TFA rather than actually reading it, but are they seriously selling the Chromebook for that much money? That's ridiculous. I was able to buy a 3lb 13" ultraportable for about £250 ($400 CAD), and if I'd had another $150 in the budget for it, I could have upgraded it quite nicely. And that's not even considering other form factors that are a lot cheaper, like a 14" or a 15" laptop where you're not as concerned about weight.
Haven't owned a VCR in over a decade, and the last one I owned, I just had to tune in to the TV Guide channel and press a button on the remote for it to set the clock on its own. :)
Yemen is not a battleground, nor was there any immediate and present danger posed by the person who was assassinated. Yes, the US is in time of war, but this is an assassination, and that clause is talking about battlefield death, not a sanctioned killing by the CIA.
This isn't really any different from any number of other sanctioned assassinations that've been carried out by the CIA, really. The main difference here is the method use to kill him, and the fact that there was collateral damage. Usually it doesn't make the news, because usually they don't resort to Israeli tactics... that is, they don't usually use air strikes for this kind of assassination.
Actually, for casual browsing, try a Dell Vostro v130. I have the linux version of that laptop, and yes, it weighs about 100g more than the 13" Mac Air, it's still very light, very portable, and very usable for about everything (non-gaming) that I've thrown at it. It also handles the few games I have bothered to play (nothing taxing, just stuff like TuxKart and Frozen Bubble) with ease.
Though I suppose it wouldn't really fit the question posed, as it wasn't $100 less than a Macbook Air, it was $800 less than a 13" Macbook Air.
They're out there. The laptop I'm typing this reply on has a magnesium case, that's both light, and inexpensive. And it's in a laptop that cost me $400 at regular price... you can get inexpensive laptops with metal cases, you just need to know where to get them from.
Incidentally, an Aluminum case would not be too expensive... with the price of petroleum these days, it's probably cheaper than a plastic case, actually. Al is one of the most abundant minerals found on this planet (behind only Oxygen and Silicon for its abundance), and is dirt cheap. Literally... some kinds of potting soil are more expensive than aluminum.
Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
I think the GP was intending to talk about forced obsolescence, but somehow doesn't know how Apple actually goes about forced obsolescence... They don't put in bloat code to slow things down on older hardware, they declare that older hardware is no longer supported and simply refuse to install the new version on it, regardless of whether it would actually run properly or not. There is no technical reason that you can't run Snow Leopard on a first generation Intel iMac, yet it won't install because the hardware is "obsolete". This is in spite of the fact that Leopard ran perfectly well on it, and as you so rightly pointed out, Snow Leopard is noticeably faster than Leopard because its main focus was on streamlining things and reducing the system's footprint on the hardware... in other words, Snow Leopard *should* run better on older hardware than Leopard.
Apple is sneaky that way. Microsoft... not so much... Win7 actually runs better on older hardware than Win Vista (and arguably Windows XP once certain minimums are met)... Microsoft doesn't hide the fact that they're designing for newer system configurations, and they don't place arbitrary limits on whether the software will actually install in the first place.... they do limit installation on older hardware (go ahead, try installing Win7 on a '486), but they do it for sanity reasons, not to try to convince you to buy a new computer, and they make it much easier to circumvent those limits (if you check youtube, you can find a video of somebody who's shoehorned Win7 into a '486).
Actually, it's marketing, not usability. The Sandisk Sansa from the same era was much more usable than the iPod, and had features that the Apple didn't, like FM radio and MicroSD expansion ports, in addition to being mountable as USB mass storage. While it's personal opinion, I also found that the menu options on the Sandisk were more easily navigated and made more sense to me... in the end, it wasn't usability/features that caused the iPod to catch on, it was marketing. There were *much* better options available on the market, at a fraction of the cost.
That's just the claim of lazy developers. Consumers don't want apps that are created like that. They are show and don't use any of the native features of your device. What will happen is that developers that take the time to do it right and taylor their apps will be successful. Those that take short cuts will fail.
You forgot a step... people will ask why Angry Birds 12 has feature X on their iPhone 7 but they can't do that on their Android 5 tablet.
If you don't need a native feature of the device for the functionality of your program, then you're naive to think that it's better to code natively rather than using a write once-run everywhere tool chain like html5... assuming that tool chain actually does what you need it to do, why on earth would you develop using a chain that restricts where it can be used?
There is one reason, and one reason alone that I stick to Firefox: Chrome doesn't give you control over the cache settings. I have seen it take up over 50GB of disk space for a cache, which is simply ridiculous. While there are ways to clear the cache, there's no way to tell Chrome not to use a disk cache at all.
Sure, there's a launch-time option for the amount of disk cache to use and where to store it, but there's nowhere you can go in the options to set it permanently. For that reason alone, I keep going back to Firefox. It does what I need it to do, and yes, it's a pig when it comes to memory use, but my system can handle it, and at least that memory gets freed up when I close the program.