Is this a different product than the mainline Opera browser, or are they going to be basing future versions on Chromium, and just decided to stop using the clear and understandable "beta?" It's not all that clear to me, but if the latter, at least it's one fewer browser I have to keep installed for testing.
Basically what happened is that everyone else decided that "Next" was a cool new way of saying "the version that's currently in development". So we have HTML.next and so on.
Opera decided that the only way forward was to copy everyone else and do the same thing.
Just wait until you actually get sick. Then it will seem far less of a great deal.
These plans are a scam, they are attempting to move the cost of healthcare onto the worker while still claiming to provide coverage. I would rather get no coverage and a raise so I can buy my own. Mind you that raise would need to be $1000+/month.
Reading the above, I am *so* glad I live in a country with free healthcare for all.
Sure, it's paid for by my taxes, and sure maybe that means my taxes are a bit higher than yours, but:
1. If I lose my job and have no income, I'll still be covered. 2. If I get sick and need expensive medical assistance, I won't be hit with higher premiums or be uninsurable for any conditions. 3. If I'm in an accident and can't help myself my family won't need to dig through my files to find my insurance papers or pay up-front for anything. 4. If I feel unwell, I can make a judgement about seeing a doctor based on how I feel, not on whether I can afford it.
I honestly can't see how anyone who can make a sane argument against that.
Yep, there are issues -- some people do abuse the system -- but I'd rather have that than the alternatives any day of the week.
Nobody walks onto the sales floor at verizon and asks for a blackberry. BB is the phone you are issued at work.
That was always the case with blackberry. Their core market always was business users, and they did pretty well out of it.
I'm sure they're very keen to eat some of Apple's consumer market share too, but don't confuse a lack of consumer sales with a lack of sales in general. In fact, when it comes to making a profit out of users, business users are a much better prospect than consumers, so if blackberries are still the phone you get issued at work, as you suggest, then BB should be laughing.
While on holiday recently (translation: that's "vacation" for all you Americans), my brother-in-law lent me his copy of T3 magazine.
T3 is a consumer-level technology magazine. A gadget mag for people who think they're a bit techie but are really just tech consumers.
I've not read T3 in years, and I wouldn't have actually bought a copy even then. But I actually found myself reading a lot of it. Not because it was talking about anything I didn't know about, but because it was presenting a significantly different perspective on things to the kind of web sites I normally visit. I was quite interesting to get a different perspective and see how the consumer market thinks about some of the devices on offer at the moment.
The reasons all this is relevant to this discussion are:
1. Asking about paper magazines to the Slashdot crowd is going to get a predictable response. But you'd be a fool if you think for a second that the Slashdot crowd is in any way representative of the wider public. Slashdot users do not read magazines any more, but other people do.
2. If my brother-in-law had been reading a T3 website instead of the magazine, it's virtually certain that I wouldn't have borrowed his copy; I'd have stuck with my own preferred sites. The internet is great at making all things available to all men... but most of us cocoon ourselves in our own little parts of the internet and very rarely venture out. We don't get that alternative perspective, and it leads to narrow mindedness and blinkered thinking.
Why is the computer industry hell bent on constantly reinventing the wheel?
Because the computer industry (and certainly the louder and more vocal parts of it) has a heavy bias of young excitable developers who are talented enough to create these things from scratch, and not experienced enough to think that others might have done similar things in the past.
Normal work hours in the UK are 9am to 5.30pm, with an hour for lunch (this is typical of every job I have worked, non-retail). This was posted at about 5.15pm - just before the end of the normal working day for most people.
....So I guess you weren't highly productive in that last half hour, then?
Great idea, then all the terrorist have to do to bring this country to a halt economically is knock apart a few rail tracks. Same for an invading army, but lets face it, that's less likely. Trucks can be rerouted to any number of roads, rail cannot.
During WWII, the British rail network took a very heavy pounding from the German bombers. And yet, somehow it managed to continue providing the service of transporting goods around the country.
The reason was that it had excellent built-in redundancy. Multiple available routes between all the major destinations made it remarkably robust. Sure, some routes are quicker than others, but the ability to keep things moving even if two or three main lines were knocked out was critical.
So history shows your argument to be incorrect. Rail can be just as robust as roads when it comes to network reliability.
And in fact, your counter point that trucks can be routed onto any number of roads is also incorrect, as heavy vehicles can only go on roads that are suitably robust. You may look at the map and see a whole network of roads, but filter it down to the routes that could be used by significant number of trucks, and you'll see that in fact it wouldn't take nearly as many road blockages as you might think to severely affect the country's ability to transport goods.
Sadly the British rail cuts in the 1960s removed a lot of the "unnecessary" lines, which left the UK today with a much more efficient network, but one which would not survive a similar bombardment now.
And this points to the final part of the discussion: maintenance costs. Both rail and road networks require significant maintenance. Many will point to the roads as being cheaper in this respect, but in fact heavy trucks cause a lot of road damage. The main reason roads appear cheaper is because the cost is not direct, but the two are comparable. Subsidies and taxes also mask the real costs.
The real solution to the problem is to make the experimental features more obviously experimental.
It should be mandatory that a pre-standardised feature be disabled by default in the browser, and enabled via a preference setting for developers to try them out.
Most non-developer users would not bother to fiddle with these prefs, and thus the features would remain truly experimental until they were standardised.
Yes, this would mean that developers would get frustrated by stuff they want to do which is tantalisingly out of reach in terms of being able to use it for mainstream development. But on the flip side, I believe it would also act as an encouragement to all parties involved to get the features through the standardisation process at a decent speed (this has been a large part of the underlying cause of the problem, not the prefix policy itself).
It isn't just programming languages that have changed in the years since you changed career 10 years ago (or 30 if we start from when you first cut your programming teeth).
Back then, the concept of unit testing your code was unheard of outside of financial institutions (though I bet they didn't call it that back then), and the phrase "design patterns" would have made you think more of knitting than programming. (The actual practices described by the common design patterns have been around for ages, but the names given to them are relatively new and have quickly become part of developer jargon. You need to know them).
In short, whatever language you learn, try to also get a handle on some of the most current programming practices and the terminology around them.
The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteroid was 20% gold
Developing the infrastructure and technology to achieve the goal would provide you with a huge collateral resource. Don't under-estimate the money to be made from selling technology developed on the back of a bigger project. Even if the bigger project itself never actually comes to fruition, they could still make money from this.
I only know Jerry Seinfeld because the sitcom he had in the 90s was named after him
Similarly, you might know who Louis CK is because he has a current sitcom named after him. Actually a brilliant television show that probably shouldn't be called a "sitcom" because it's too brilliant.
Wow.
Now you've told me how brilliant it is, I feel compelled to go out immediately and watch every episode.
I never would have imagined there might be a brilliant comedian I'd never heard of in a foreign country. If only you'd told me sooner.
Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.
If it was really that good, someone would have forked it.
Even KDE (which is a *much* bigger project than Firefox) got forked successfully when sufficient numbers of users disliked the move from KDE3 to KDE4. KDE4 is now pretty good, but the Trinity project forked from KDE3 is still holding its own.
So if Firefox 3.6 is such an fantastic browser, and so much better than the subsequent versions, then why has no-one forked it?
Answer: because there's no need to -- the current version of Firefox is so much better than FF3.6 that there really isn't any argument to be had.
Storage may be cheap, but that's hardly an excuse for being cluttered.
Ask yourself: When are you ever going to read all those email again? When is *anybody* ever going to read them again. And the more you have, the less likely it is that they ever will be read, because the more you have, the more time it will take to go through them.
And don't tell me that doesn't matter because it's easy to run a search -- the same still applies, and you'd only bother running a search if you had something specific you wanted to search for. Is there anything in your 2003 email archives that you are likely to want to search for? The answer to this question may well be 'yes'; you know your archives better than I do; but I'll tell you this: if you haven't found the need to search an archive over the last five years, then the odds are diminishingly small that you'll need to in the future.
My advice is to keep your archives, but take the time to filter out the stuff you really don't need or want any more.
First, sort the list of emails by size. This will give you all the ones with attachments. The odds are most of the big stuff can be deleted. Most of the stuff you want to keep you'll already have extracted from your email and saved somewhere else. So feel free to delete them. There will also be obsolete software, video and flash attachments that were funny five years ago, and other junk. Deleting all this stuff will free up a substantial portion of your disk usage.
Next sort the list by name of sender. This might sound odd, but it's a very quick way to see who you were talking to all those years ago. There might be a few surprises in there. People you'd lost touch with an virtually forgotten about. Maybe this is your chance to remind yourself to get back in touch? If so, then the exercise has been worthwhile even if you don't delete anything. Or maybe you know you don't want to talk to them. In that case, you do really want to keep those old emails from them? Get rid of them. It's cathartic.
Next, check if you've been subscribed to any mailing lists over the years. Possibly you'll want to keep some of those archives, but equally there can be a lot of pretty mundane chatter on these things, and the bits that are relevant are often only relevant for the moment. It depends a lot on the individual lists, but my experience is that content five years old or more is unlikely to still be of much value. And in any case, most good mailing lists have their own archives online. So your own copies in your archives may be pretty pointless. Be ruthless and delete them.
My guess is that if you followed that advice, your email archives are now about a quarter of their original size. And nothing of value was lost.
In fact, doing an exercise like this every now and then can actually be helpful. Not because it saves disk space, but because it means that you do actually go back every now and then and look at what you were doing a few years ago. It's remarkable the things you forget over time. Sometimes its good to be reminded. Other times you may not want to be reminded, but that's what the delete key is for; delete it, and you won't need to be reminded of it again when you do this same process next time.
There are good reasons for the two layouts. They're lost in the mist of time, but they are good reasons.
Calculators derive their layout from a strictly mathematical perspective, and is probably the most sensible layout to work with if you want to practice your muscle memory.
The phone layout is that way due to the mapping of letters to the digits, which was defined back in the days of rotary dial phones. Putting the 'ABC' key at the top of the keypad made it easier to read. In addition, the in old pulse-dial system, the zero digit actually represented ten, not zero, and on rotary dials it was placed at the end after nine. That also helped to make the chosen key layout for phones seem more logical at the time, both for the phone manufacturers and for users who were used to rotary dials.
One thing you certainly aren't going to achieve is to get calculator or phone manufacturers to change their layouts. Both layouts are highly ingrained in the collective consciousness of their users, and no-one is going to buy a product which deviates from the norm. You may as well try to persuade everyone to go and buy a Dvorak keyboard.
So the short answer to your plea is: no. It ain't gonna happen.
But I can see hope for you: Smart phones.
While you aren't going to get calculators to change, smart phones have touch screen interfaces. I don't see any reason at all why there couldn't be an app that displays the phone keypad in calculator-like style. It may be the opposite of what you're asking for, but it would achieve the consistency that you're looking for between the two.
The only problem then is if you ever have to use someone else's phone to make a call....
The suggestion as it's been put in the main article is pointless.
The fact is we already have UTC (or GMT for those of us who still insist the British invented it so we ought to get to keep it), and it's perfectly easy for anyone in any country to use it. If you want to communicate with someone in another time zone, you are perfectly free to use UTC as a common reference point when deciding what time to meet.
But while it does indeed work very well as a common reference point, it doesn't solve any of the practical issues of communicating between time zones. If I want to talk to someone in another country, we have to arrange it at a time when we're both going to be at the office -- or at the very least, when we're both going to be awake.
The simple fact is that physics dictates that different parts of the world have different daylight hours, and biology dictates that people prefer to be awake during the daylight hours. There is nothing you can do that will change this; no amount of meddling with the time system will make it any easier to talk to someone on the other side of the world.
Regarding the suggested adjustment for DST simply meaning that everyone adjusts their schedule by an hour while the clocks stay the same.... I can't even begin to describe how wonderfully naive this is. If it were really that simple, we wouldn't have invented DST in the first place.
Are corporations websites *that* badly coded that a minor change in browser *version* would cause it to not work? I can understand from IE6 to IE7 to IE8, due to all the usual IE BS
Right. So you can understand that a business would be cautious of going IE7 -> IE8, but you don't get it when they take the same approach with FF4 - > FF5.
The whole point of major version numbers is that they're... uh... major versions. Big things have changed. By bumping the version number, Mozilla is telling the world "hey, this is a big thing we've done here, with lots of changes!"
And somehow you expect businesses to just shrug their shoulders and run the upgrade? Riiiight.
Firefox (and Chrome for that matter) are either being disingenuous with their version numbering, or else they are being arrogant with dropping support for older versions too soon.
Personally, I say they're being both. I'm getting fed up with this now. A few short months ago, I was dead excited about the future of the web, where we might finally have some good standards compliant browsers and sufficient people using them that we could write good standards compliant sites. But now I'm starting to get pretty jaded about the whole thing: it's the browser wars all over again: this is how it started the first time, and I for one really don't want to go through that again.
This article deals with what happens when GPS is disrupted due to a localised jammer. Sounds like some serious chaos.
So... what happens when we have a major solar flare that disables a few GPS satellites entirely? Can we expect entire nations to suddenly lose their ATM networks, shipping navigation and air traffic control?
Oh goody. I can't wait for the solar cycle to get going again. And there was me thinking the only thing we had to look forward to were better aurora.:-/
You say: "very few people should be allowed to view credit card numbers".
In fact, for them to be PCI compliant (which I would assume a company the size of Vodaphone must be), no-one should be able to access customer credit card numbers. Its shockingly bad practice if they're even on their database, let alone widely accessible.
I think taking the software down is a very boding/bodeable/bodeful/whatever thing to do.
I completely agree. The guy who posted the original story was just wrong to say it "doesn't bode well".
By saying that, he was basically condemning Microsoft's actions before they'd even done then. I dislike MS as much as the next guy here, but - please! - what have they done in this case to warrant not boding well? As soon as they found out there was a potential problem, they pulled the software so they could investigate. Absolutely the right action.
What would you have preferred them to do? The only two other options were (a) ignore the problem, and (b) release the code. Ignoring the problem was clearly never going to happen -- even MS isn't that arrogant. And while I'm sure we'd have loved them to have just released the code, they would certainly need to check it first, because there's a very high probability that it also contains code which is licensed in a way that can't be released (especially since this is a DVD tool). So pulling it while they investigate is the right thing to do.
The most likely scenario I would suggest is that MS will re-launch the tool in a few months with the GPL parts replaced so they don't have to release any code. Not what the masses of slashdot would want, but likely to be the most sensible and pragmatic way for MS to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a different product than the mainline Opera browser, or are they going to be basing future versions on Chromium, and just decided to stop using the clear and understandable "beta?" It's not all that clear to me, but if the latter, at least it's one fewer browser I have to keep installed for testing.
Basically what happened is that everyone else decided that "Next" was a cool new way of saying "the version that's currently in development". So we have HTML.next and so on.
Opera decided that the only way forward was to copy everyone else and do the same thing.
Kinda like this whole "webkit, uh, blink" thing.
Just wait until you actually get sick. Then it will seem far less of a great deal.
These plans are a scam, they are attempting to move the cost of healthcare onto the worker while still claiming to provide coverage. I would rather get no coverage and a raise so I can buy my own. Mind you that raise would need to be $1000+/month.
Reading the above, I am *so* glad I live in a country with free healthcare for all.
Sure, it's paid for by my taxes, and sure maybe that means my taxes are a bit higher than yours, but:
1. If I lose my job and have no income, I'll still be covered.
2. If I get sick and need expensive medical assistance, I won't be hit with higher premiums or be uninsurable for any conditions.
3. If I'm in an accident and can't help myself my family won't need to dig through my files to find my insurance papers or pay up-front for anything.
4. If I feel unwell, I can make a judgement about seeing a doctor based on how I feel, not on whether I can afford it.
I honestly can't see how anyone who can make a sane argument against that.
Yep, there are issues -- some people do abuse the system -- but I'd rather have that than the alternatives any day of the week.
Nobody walks onto the sales floor at verizon and asks for a blackberry. BB is the phone you are issued at work.
That was always the case with blackberry. Their core market always was business users, and they did pretty well out of it.
I'm sure they're very keen to eat some of Apple's consumer market share too, but don't confuse a lack of consumer sales with a lack of sales in general. In fact, when it comes to making a profit out of users, business users are a much better prospect than consumers, so if blackberries are still the phone you get issued at work, as you suggest, then BB should be laughing.
While on holiday recently (translation: that's "vacation" for all you Americans), my brother-in-law lent me his copy of T3 magazine.
T3 is a consumer-level technology magazine. A gadget mag for people who think they're a bit techie but are really just tech consumers.
I've not read T3 in years, and I wouldn't have actually bought a copy even then. But I actually found myself reading a lot of it. Not because it was talking about anything I didn't know about, but because it was presenting a significantly different perspective on things to the kind of web sites I normally visit. I was quite interesting to get a different perspective and see how the consumer market thinks about some of the devices on offer at the moment.
The reasons all this is relevant to this discussion are:
1. Asking about paper magazines to the Slashdot crowd is going to get a predictable response. But you'd be a fool if you think for a second that the Slashdot crowd is in any way representative of the wider public. Slashdot users do not read magazines any more, but other people do.
2. If my brother-in-law had been reading a T3 website instead of the magazine, it's virtually certain that I wouldn't have borrowed his copy; I'd have stuck with my own preferred sites. The internet is great at making all things available to all men... but most of us cocoon ourselves in our own little parts of the internet and very rarely venture out. We don't get that alternative perspective, and it leads to narrow mindedness and blinkered thinking.
Why is the computer industry hell bent on constantly reinventing the wheel?
Because the computer industry (and certainly the louder and more vocal parts of it) has a heavy bias of young excitable developers who are talented enough to create these things from scratch, and not experienced enough to think that others might have done similar things in the past.
The depressing thing is that our anachronistic, out-of-touch, hereditary monarch is probably the sanest and best informed member of our government...
Not to mention the most popular.
And the least corrupt.
Normal work hours in the UK are 9am to 5.30pm, with an hour for lunch (this is typical of every job I have worked, non-retail). This was posted at about 5.15pm - just before the end of the normal working day for most people.
....So I guess you weren't highly productive in that last half hour, then?
Great idea, then all the terrorist have to do to bring this country to a halt economically is knock apart a few rail tracks. Same for an invading army, but lets face it, that's less likely. Trucks can be rerouted to any number of roads, rail cannot.
During WWII, the British rail network took a very heavy pounding from the German bombers. And yet, somehow it managed to continue providing the service of transporting goods around the country.
The reason was that it had excellent built-in redundancy. Multiple available routes between all the major destinations made it remarkably robust. Sure, some routes are quicker than others, but the ability to keep things moving even if two or three main lines were knocked out was critical.
So history shows your argument to be incorrect. Rail can be just as robust as roads when it comes to network reliability.
And in fact, your counter point that trucks can be routed onto any number of roads is also incorrect, as heavy vehicles can only go on roads that are suitably robust. You may look at the map and see a whole network of roads, but filter it down to the routes that could be used by significant number of trucks, and you'll see that in fact it wouldn't take nearly as many road blockages as you might think to severely affect the country's ability to transport goods.
Sadly the British rail cuts in the 1960s removed a lot of the "unnecessary" lines, which left the UK today with a much more efficient network, but one which would not survive a similar bombardment now.
And this points to the final part of the discussion: maintenance costs. Both rail and road networks require significant maintenance. Many will point to the roads as being cheaper in this respect, but in fact heavy trucks cause a lot of road damage. The main reason roads appear cheaper is because the cost is not direct, but the two are comparable. Subsidies and taxes also mask the real costs.
The real solution to the problem is to make the experimental features more obviously experimental.
It should be mandatory that a pre-standardised feature be disabled by default in the browser, and enabled via a preference setting for developers to try them out.
Most non-developer users would not bother to fiddle with these prefs, and thus the features would remain truly experimental until they were standardised.
Yes, this would mean that developers would get frustrated by stuff they want to do which is tantalisingly out of reach in terms of being able to use it for mainstream development. But on the flip side, I believe it would also act as an encouragement to all parties involved to get the features through the standardisation process at a decent speed (this has been a large part of the underlying cause of the problem, not the prefix policy itself).
It isn't just programming languages that have changed in the years since you changed career 10 years ago (or 30 if we start from when you first cut your programming teeth).
Back then, the concept of unit testing your code was unheard of outside of financial institutions (though I bet they didn't call it that back then), and the phrase "design patterns" would have made you think more of knitting than programming. (The actual practices described by the common design patterns have been around for ages, but the names given to them are relatively new and have quickly become part of developer jargon. You need to know them).
In short, whatever language you learn, try to also get a handle on some of the most current programming practices and the terminology around them.
The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteroid was 20% gold
Developing the infrastructure and technology to achieve the goal would provide you with a huge collateral resource. Don't under-estimate the money to be made from selling technology developed on the back of a bigger project. Even if the bigger project itself never actually comes to fruition, they could still make money from this.
I only know Jerry Seinfeld because the sitcom he had in the 90s was named after him
Similarly, you might know who Louis CK is because he has a current sitcom named after him. Actually a brilliant television show that probably shouldn't be called a "sitcom" because it's too brilliant.
Wow.
Now you've told me how brilliant it is, I feel compelled to go out immediately and watch every episode.
I never would have imagined there might be a brilliant comedian I'd never heard of in a foreign country. If only you'd told me sooner.
I mean... he is pretty famous. If the story were about Jerry Seinfeld, would you still expect an explanation of who he was?
You say that, and yet..... I've never heard of him.
And I enjoy a good comedy show as much as anyone.
My guess is that he's pretty famous.... in the US, but completely obscure anywhere else.
(and yes, I know of Jerry Seinfeld, but I don't think I can remember the last time I actually saw him on TV)
Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?
Not if you also want an internet that maintains any kind of privacy.
Why would a real bomber warn anyone?
Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.
If it was really that good, someone would have forked it.
Even KDE (which is a *much* bigger project than Firefox) got forked successfully when sufficient numbers of users disliked the move from KDE3 to KDE4. KDE4 is now pretty good, but the Trinity project forked from KDE3 is still holding its own.
So if Firefox 3.6 is such an fantastic browser, and so much better than the subsequent versions, then why has no-one forked it?
Answer: because there's no need to -- the current version of Firefox is so much better than FF3.6 that there really isn't any argument to be had.
Storage may be cheap, but that's hardly an excuse for being cluttered.
Ask yourself: When are you ever going to read all those email again? When is *anybody* ever going to read them again. And the more you have, the less likely it is that they ever will be read, because the more you have, the more time it will take to go through them.
And don't tell me that doesn't matter because it's easy to run a search -- the same still applies, and you'd only bother running a search if you had something specific you wanted to search for. Is there anything in your 2003 email archives that you are likely to want to search for? The answer to this question may well be 'yes'; you know your archives better than I do; but I'll tell you this: if you haven't found the need to search an archive over the last five years, then the odds are diminishingly small that you'll need to in the future.
My advice is to keep your archives, but take the time to filter out the stuff you really don't need or want any more.
First, sort the list of emails by size.
This will give you all the ones with attachments. The odds are most of the big stuff can be deleted. Most of the stuff you want to keep you'll already have extracted from your email and saved somewhere else. So feel free to delete them. There will also be obsolete software, video and flash attachments that were funny five years ago, and other junk. Deleting all this stuff will free up a substantial portion of your disk usage.
Next sort the list by name of sender.
This might sound odd, but it's a very quick way to see who you were talking to all those years ago. There might be a few surprises in there. People you'd lost touch with an virtually forgotten about. Maybe this is your chance to remind yourself to get back in touch? If so, then the exercise has been worthwhile even if you don't delete anything. Or maybe you know you don't want to talk to them. In that case, you do really want to keep those old emails from them? Get rid of them. It's cathartic.
Next, check if you've been subscribed to any mailing lists over the years.
Possibly you'll want to keep some of those archives, but equally there can be a lot of pretty mundane chatter on these things, and the bits that are relevant are often only relevant for the moment. It depends a lot on the individual lists, but my experience is that content five years old or more is unlikely to still be of much value. And in any case, most good mailing lists have their own archives online. So your own copies in your archives may be pretty pointless. Be ruthless and delete them.
My guess is that if you followed that advice, your email archives are now about a quarter of their original size. And nothing of value was lost.
In fact, doing an exercise like this every now and then can actually be helpful. Not because it saves disk space, but because it means that you do actually go back every now and then and look at what you were doing a few years ago. It's remarkable the things you forget over time. Sometimes its good to be reminded. Other times you may not want to be reminded, but that's what the delete key is for; delete it, and you won't need to be reminded of it again when you do this same process next time.
So you could write a browser that supports JavaScript in Java, and then run the browser in itself?
And if you run it in a modern browser, it would still run faster than javascript in IE8.
There are good reasons for the two layouts. They're lost in the mist of time, but they are good reasons.
Calculators derive their layout from a strictly mathematical perspective, and is probably the most sensible layout to work with if you want to practice your muscle memory.
The phone layout is that way due to the mapping of letters to the digits, which was defined back in the days of rotary dial phones. Putting the 'ABC' key at the top of the keypad made it easier to read. In addition, the in old pulse-dial system, the zero digit actually represented ten, not zero, and on rotary dials it was placed at the end after nine. That also helped to make the chosen key layout for phones seem more logical at the time, both for the phone manufacturers and for users who were used to rotary dials.
One thing you certainly aren't going to achieve is to get calculator or phone manufacturers to change their layouts. Both layouts are highly ingrained in the collective consciousness of their users, and no-one is going to buy a product which deviates from the norm. You may as well try to persuade everyone to go and buy a Dvorak keyboard.
So the short answer to your plea is: no. It ain't gonna happen.
But I can see hope for you: Smart phones.
While you aren't going to get calculators to change, smart phones have touch screen interfaces. I don't see any reason at all why there couldn't be an app that displays the phone keypad in calculator-like style. It may be the opposite of what you're asking for, but it would achieve the consistency that you're looking for between the two.
The only problem then is if you ever have to use someone else's phone to make a call....
The suggestion as it's been put in the main article is pointless.
The fact is we already have UTC (or GMT for those of us who still insist the British invented it so we ought to get to keep it), and it's perfectly easy for anyone in any country to use it. If you want to communicate with someone in another time zone, you are perfectly free to use UTC as a common reference point when deciding what time to meet.
But while it does indeed work very well as a common reference point, it doesn't solve any of the practical issues of communicating between time zones. If I want to talk to someone in another country, we have to arrange it at a time when we're both going to be at the office -- or at the very least, when we're both going to be awake.
The simple fact is that physics dictates that different parts of the world have different daylight hours, and biology dictates that people prefer to be awake during the daylight hours. There is nothing you can do that will change this; no amount of meddling with the time system will make it any easier to talk to someone on the other side of the world.
Regarding the suggested adjustment for DST simply meaning that everyone adjusts their schedule by an hour while the clocks stay the same.... I can't even begin to describe how wonderfully naive this is. If it were really that simple, we wouldn't have invented DST in the first place.
So let me get this straight.... the objection to having roundabouts is that being nice to other people is un-American???
Great. That really makes me want to go out and meet more Americans.
Wow. This is coming from the land that makes saying "Have a nice day" into a national slogan.
Are corporations websites *that* badly coded that a minor change in browser *version* would cause it to not work? I can understand from IE6 to IE7 to IE8, due to all the usual IE BS
Right. So you can understand that a business would be cautious of going IE7 -> IE8, but you don't get it when they take the same approach with FF4 - > FF5.
The whole point of major version numbers is that they're ... uh... major versions. Big things have changed. By bumping the version number, Mozilla is telling the world "hey, this is a big thing we've done here, with lots of changes!"
And somehow you expect businesses to just shrug their shoulders and run the upgrade? Riiiight.
Firefox (and Chrome for that matter) are either being disingenuous with their version numbering, or else they are being arrogant with dropping support for older versions too soon.
Personally, I say they're being both. I'm getting fed up with this now. A few short months ago, I was dead excited about the future of the web, where we might finally have some good standards compliant browsers and sufficient people using them that we could write good standards compliant sites. But now I'm starting to get pretty jaded about the whole thing: it's the browser wars all over again: this is how it started the first time, and I for one really don't want to go through that again.
This article deals with what happens when GPS is disrupted due to a localised jammer. Sounds like some serious chaos.
So... what happens when we have a major solar flare that disables a few GPS satellites entirely? Can we expect entire nations to suddenly lose their ATM networks, shipping navigation and air traffic control?
Oh goody. I can't wait for the solar cycle to get going again. And there was me thinking the only thing we had to look forward to were better aurora. :-/
You say: "very few people should be allowed to view credit card numbers".
In fact, for them to be PCI compliant (which I would assume a company the size of Vodaphone must be), no-one should be able to access customer credit card numbers. Its shockingly bad practice if they're even on their database, let alone widely accessible.
I think taking the software down is a very boding/bodeable/bodeful/whatever thing to do.
I completely agree. The guy who posted the original story was just wrong to say it "doesn't bode well".
By saying that, he was basically condemning Microsoft's actions before they'd even done then. I dislike MS as much as the next guy here, but - please! - what have they done in this case to warrant not boding well? As soon as they found out there was a potential problem, they pulled the software so they could investigate. Absolutely the right action.
What would you have preferred them to do? The only two other options were (a) ignore the problem, and (b) release the code. Ignoring the problem was clearly never going to happen -- even MS isn't that arrogant. And while I'm sure we'd have loved them to have just released the code, they would certainly need to check it first, because there's a very high probability that it also contains code which is licensed in a way that can't be released (especially since this is a DVD tool). So pulling it while they investigate is the right thing to do.
The most likely scenario I would suggest is that MS will re-launch the tool in a few months with the GPL parts replaced so they don't have to release any code. Not what the masses of slashdot would want, but likely to be the most sensible and pragmatic way for MS to deal with it.