That's all well and nice for local sites for the locals, but what about foreign visitors or accessing any international site? Any banks or anything else with a https login I'd like to visit won't work as they won't care one shit about what Pakistan wants. That's pretty much a tourism killer. And commerce killer. Ah well, it's their self-implosion.
Oh, I can predict where this is going since I work for a consulting company and we have to work on client computers where we don't always have VPN. The answer is HTTPS, unless they want to block all HTTPS traffic as well. Oh yeah, and I assume you can't SSH to or from any Pakistan boxes anymore? That'll work so great for servers, I'd start making my migration plan now...
Seriously, since the actual owners authorized the monitoring company to have that form of access to the computer, anybody who steals it and uses it afterwards (knowingly or not) really has no legal dispute with the rightful owner and any company the owner authorized to snap screencaps and whatnot.
I think your argument sounds a bit too much like the legal owner can do anything. That alone would be like that school that had spycam software installed on pupil's laptops, even if they're the legal owner of the laptop they or their authorized company don't have legal permission to covertly bring it into people's homes and take pictures of whatever they want. If it had been her boyfriend's pictures or co-inhabitants in the background, they might have a case. But in this case she's operating a stolen computer, it's like complaining of being photographed driving a stolen car. Secondly, securing evidence for the police is a legitimate cause, if they found this in some camera tech's private stash I might think very differently about the case. You could easily argue that nude photos could include tattoos, birthmarks or other identifying markers that may help identification. I think she's got a really bad case.
If you saw anything like 2%, it probably includes Android which has somewhat over 1% of the browser market, most of which use the built in browser. At least "What's the best browser for an Android phone?" is a completely different test...
Because after long enough time, there's always someone who's irked about the performance of the wheel and wants to replace it with conveyor belts or robot legs. Sometimes even square wheels. And because we've done round wheels for so long, old lessons have faded or been deemed outdated and so we try it. Then it turns out it's not that great except for very limited use cases, but we're too deep invested and stubborn so we'll try fixing it. After a lot of fighting against windmills, we slowly reinvent and rediscover the reasons why we used a wheel in the first place. Then the cycle starts over. Same with most NIH projects, they start out as being radically different and then end up looking much the same after tackling the same challenges.
And much like 1999, the Linux web browsing desktop has less than 1% market share. There's absolutely no imaginary numbers of hidden users you could pull up that would make them more significant in a browser test. There was a time when I wanted to see a trend, but it's not there so you can't really call them up and coming either. Of course it hurts here on slashdot but the truth is pretty plain to see.
Yes, in fact it was one of their great failings in the PC market, they were too heavy on selling support contracts, implementation services and the corporate desktop, completely ignoring what happened with the consumer market. That and over-engineered and over-tested solutions built to last 20 years from top-rated components with huge stockpiles of spare parts. They were still in the Big Iron mindset, where people want an exact replacement for whatever setup they've tested and certified. So the support contracts were ripoffs and if you didn't have a contract the spare part prices were ripoffs to make you sign up. And rather than trying to be that lean and mean deliverer of barebone hardware they tried putting the cat back in the bag with MCA, the rest of the industry went with EISA and IBM disappeared out of any real PC significance. But if we're talking failures they screwed themselves far more on software than on hardware...
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe. Be it a germ, comet, meteor, pole shift, solar flare, gamma burst, supervolcano or the unwise use of technology itself.
Most of the things you mention simply can not get so bad as to cause total extinction. The point is not that "we" would survive, like you and I. 90%, 99%, 99.9999% of humanity could die and there'd still be thousands to rebuild the human race, same as we could realistically send out into space. There will be no general evacuation, it'd just be a fail-safe to continue the human race. For space to be the best option, it has to be a disaster so great you can't even survive in deep underground bunkers.
The other thing is that there's millions of years between even minor extinction events. We're now in some absurd hurry to do everything within 100 years when even 1000 years would mean it's 65.001 million years since the dinosaurs died out. Honestly, we could as easily have been another million years on the monkey stage, it's not important if something happens in 10 or 30 or 50 years. Really it isn't.
Oh yeah, just one more point. If we're first doing space, the space base has to survive the same disaster. For example a gamma ray burst would most likely affect the whole solar system. An asteroid impact bad enough to destroy earth could lead to massive amounts of debris in all directions to hit Mars as well. So even in the case of an extinction event it might be better to just dig deeper in at home anyway.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
If you're on a social network and have zero emotional attachment to the people you're networking with, you got some even bigger issues. By your logic I should also not get upset if I get locked out of my email account, since that too is a freebie offered by a company making money on advertising.
The article is talking about things long in the past, I have a HD5850 in my machine that's almost two years old and built on 40 nm process from TMSC. That process has been fairly stable for a long time now even though it was a bit delayed and early yields weren't as good as hoped. Where they have really struggled is with their 32-34 nm - I don't remember exactly - process that should have gone into the last generation of chips. In short, they ended up simply skipping it since they were due to deliver 28 nm by the time it would be ready. And there's actually three 28 nm processes, LP, HPL and HP which you can call low, mid and high-power. LP is really just for support chips, but it's rumored that HPL will be used for the next generation Cortex and AMDs Southern Islands, while nVidia is waiting on the HP process for their next generation. For the GPU business it just means progress is slower - both AMD and nVidia are stuck waiting for TMSC. For CPUs on the other hand Intel and GlobalFoundries are heavy competitors - GF to take over the business while Intel only produce for themselves - but being a process step behind is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.
Hehe, yeah I remember this one. It was around the same time some people were trying to renounce their citizenship and move to cyberspace, it was the wierdest cult thing. "Internet Time" was kinda the same, now we're all moving to cyberspace so we don't need regular time anymore. That Swatch was pushing it in all seriousness shows how completely on acid the dotcom craze was.
With time zones you can simply look up the time at a given location to know which part of the day it is (...) DST is the beast that needs to die
Except those two are contradictory. I'm pretty close to the arctic circle, so short winter days and long summer days. In the darkest of winter, the sun rises at 10 AM and sets at 2:30 PM. As we progress towards summer both the mornings and evenings get brighter, in March before DST the sun rises at 6 AM and sets at 7 PM, after DST an hour later. It is far, far more useful for me that the sun is up 7-8 PM than 6-7 AM because of working hours, store hours and so on. We want all the rest of the sun time to be 8-9-10 PM in the evening, not 4-5-6 AM in the morning. If it's not useful to you, well then you're not living in a place where it matters. In fact, if we weren't following a European standard we could probably use another hour from mid-April to mid-September. Also, this is the reason Australia would want to do it the other way around, they want to have DST in their summer, our winter. So no, it's not going to get much simpler than it is.
The thing is, it's not one thing you have to know, it's kernel drivers, x drivers, desktop environment, applications and possibly all the ways they are configured.
Hell, 1997-2003 era computer then you might look at 32-64MB of RAM on the low end. Even loading just the latest 2.6 kernel you'll probably lose half that just to that.
At some point you have to ask, is it really going to be worth it? Can't we find them some 128-256MB machines that'll run more "normal" distros and software?
Some things tell me we'd actually get further getting a little better at shipping our outdated machines to someone who needs them. I bet there's plenty 128-512MB RAM machines in landfills all over the place.
She was of the same school as Scully. "We sell a brand, not products." We need to find the business schools where they learn this shit and burn them to the ground.
Because Apple isn't selling a brand? An image? The problem is that some CEOs go over the top and forget that the actual product is part of your reputation as well. If people think your product is buggy low-quality shit and you get a reputation for that, it's a turn-off in every market segment. Then it hardly matters if you're hitting the "right" segments or not.
That, and that Jobs isn't dead he's now chairman of the board. Of course that means he won't be running things day to day like a CEO, but he'll be there to guide Apple. Hopefully the cancer isn't terminal but if it is, I think that's when we'll see the real drop.
Indeed. With Windows 7 being able to recover from a graphics driver crash and GNU/Linux not being able to I wonder what happened to the Unix philosophy...
Sometimes. I have a corrupt video that'll crash Win7 whenever DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) is enabled. It's pretty neat when it works though, because on Linux X crashing is as bad as the kernel crashing for a desktop.
You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly
Ah, the no true Scotsman fallacy. Sorry if I'm being rude, but I don't see anything in your post that couldn't be better solved with a QShaderEffectItem instead of the ridiculous QML UI. I get it, it appeals to all the people who know HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It still sucks to everyone who knows C++/Qt, no matter how much you polish the turd.
For nerds like us, the limitations are redily apparent. But for a technically illiterate person? It'll be great until they decide to learn more and end up running into the limitations.
Then we use the laptop/desktop for that. Ye gods, the iPhone/iPad are nice little tools but I'd never have them alone. I've noticed several times that if I had not had my iPhone in my pocket, I'd need my netbook now. But since I do and it's always in my pocket, it's good enough. My impression is that it's the same with the iPad, they could use their laptop but find the tablet format more convienient.
You're saying like as if writing Qt5 app in C++ will no longer be possible.
Possible yes, but you can tell they're now pushing QML as "the next big thing" and the traditional QWidgets aren't getting nearly as much love as before. The rest of Qt will of course be there but without all the UI building blocks I'd say Qt is gutted. So you can of course be an old fart and use the widgets anyway, but I fear it'll become more of a legacy option. While I don't think Nokia is going to depreciate them, the priority of bugs and enhancements vs QML is a concern.
QML is pretty much like HTML/CSS+Javascript, except that you can do more Javascript magic to manipulate the UI. In theory the whole application can be written in Javascript, but I'd say normally just for the UI or things closely related to the UI. Personally I consider it a step backwards, to me it's more like trying to use web app tech to build a "real" app. I always thought that the only reason you'd want to use a declarative UI is because you need to send it as one big HTTP page, rather than set one and one property as you can do locally. To me at least the whole system seems way less intuitive. With an imperative system I always call setWidth() to set the width, in a declarative UI it's set in the declaration one way and I have to change that property some other way. Maybe I'm wrong but IMO it's throwing away the best part Qt has.
Like it or not, tablets are merely a fad. They have no staying power.
And I assume you're basing all this wonderful market research on yourself or a small group of like-minded friends? They sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter - for comparison they sold 3.95 million Macs. It's as much a fad as the iPhone, maybe you haven't found a use for it but the market has. The problem with Gnome and KDE chasing after the tablet market is that they think they'll be a "player" along with iOS and Android. If anything I think they have less chances of succeeding there on the desktop, they're ignoring the 1% desktop market share they have and chasing 1% of the mobile market. They haven't got the resources to run in two directions with two different teams, so they'll go halfway up both roads.
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That's all well and nice for local sites for the locals, but what about foreign visitors or accessing any international site? Any banks or anything else with a https login I'd like to visit won't work as they won't care one shit about what Pakistan wants. That's pretty much a tourism killer. And commerce killer. Ah well, it's their self-implosion.
Oh, I can predict where this is going since I work for a consulting company and we have to work on client computers where we don't always have VPN. The answer is HTTPS, unless they want to block all HTTPS traffic as well. Oh yeah, and I assume you can't SSH to or from any Pakistan boxes anymore? That'll work so great for servers, I'd start making my migration plan now...
Seriously, since the actual owners authorized the monitoring company to have that form of access to the computer, anybody who steals it and uses it afterwards (knowingly or not) really has no legal dispute with the rightful owner and any company the owner authorized to snap screencaps and whatnot.
I think your argument sounds a bit too much like the legal owner can do anything. That alone would be like that school that had spycam software installed on pupil's laptops, even if they're the legal owner of the laptop they or their authorized company don't have legal permission to covertly bring it into people's homes and take pictures of whatever they want. If it had been her boyfriend's pictures or co-inhabitants in the background, they might have a case. But in this case she's operating a stolen computer, it's like complaining of being photographed driving a stolen car. Secondly, securing evidence for the police is a legitimate cause, if they found this in some camera tech's private stash I might think very differently about the case. You could easily argue that nude photos could include tattoos, birthmarks or other identifying markers that may help identification. I think she's got a really bad case.
The latest numbers I saw at Gartner had Linux at about a 2% market share. Compare that with OSX's 4%.
Source please.
Hitslink: 0,91% vs 5,61%
Statcounter: 0.77% vs 6.27%
If you saw anything like 2%, it probably includes Android which has somewhat over 1% of the browser market, most of which use the built in browser. At least "What's the best browser for an Android phone?" is a completely different test...
why reinvent the wheel?
Because after long enough time, there's always someone who's irked about the performance of the wheel and wants to replace it with conveyor belts or robot legs. Sometimes even square wheels. And because we've done round wheels for so long, old lessons have faded or been deemed outdated and so we try it. Then it turns out it's not that great except for very limited use cases, but we're too deep invested and stubborn so we'll try fixing it. After a lot of fighting against windmills, we slowly reinvent and rediscover the reasons why we used a wheel in the first place. Then the cycle starts over. Same with most NIH projects, they start out as being radically different and then end up looking much the same after tackling the same challenges.
And much like 1999, the Linux web browsing desktop has less than 1% market share. There's absolutely no imaginary numbers of hidden users you could pull up that would make them more significant in a browser test. There was a time when I wanted to see a trend, but it's not there so you can't really call them up and coming either. Of course it hurts here on slashdot but the truth is pretty plain to see.
Yes, in fact it was one of their great failings in the PC market, they were too heavy on selling support contracts, implementation services and the corporate desktop, completely ignoring what happened with the consumer market. That and over-engineered and over-tested solutions built to last 20 years from top-rated components with huge stockpiles of spare parts. They were still in the Big Iron mindset, where people want an exact replacement for whatever setup they've tested and certified. So the support contracts were ripoffs and if you didn't have a contract the spare part prices were ripoffs to make you sign up. And rather than trying to be that lean and mean deliverer of barebone hardware they tried putting the cat back in the bag with MCA, the rest of the industry went with EISA and IBM disappeared out of any real PC significance. But if we're talking failures they screwed themselves far more on software than on hardware...
Not to mention Sussex and Essex, which have also been victims of many block lists. The UK sure does know how to pick them...
Like you said, a simple word list would have way too much collateral damage so I wouldn't take its absence as much sign of anything.
Or use fun words - cock is a male rooster, pussy is a cat, bitch is a female dog, ass is a donkey.
Priceless classic
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe. Be it a germ, comet, meteor, pole shift, solar flare, gamma burst, supervolcano or the unwise use of technology itself.
Most of the things you mention simply can not get so bad as to cause total extinction. The point is not that "we" would survive, like you and I. 90%, 99%, 99.9999% of humanity could die and there'd still be thousands to rebuild the human race, same as we could realistically send out into space. There will be no general evacuation, it'd just be a fail-safe to continue the human race. For space to be the best option, it has to be a disaster so great you can't even survive in deep underground bunkers.
The other thing is that there's millions of years between even minor extinction events. We're now in some absurd hurry to do everything within 100 years when even 1000 years would mean it's 65.001 million years since the dinosaurs died out. Honestly, we could as easily have been another million years on the monkey stage, it's not important if something happens in 10 or 30 or 50 years. Really it isn't.
Oh yeah, just one more point. If we're first doing space, the space base has to survive the same disaster. For example a gamma ray burst would most likely affect the whole solar system. An asteroid impact bad enough to destroy earth could lead to massive amounts of debris in all directions to hit Mars as well. So even in the case of an extinction event it might be better to just dig deeper in at home anyway.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
If you're on a social network and have zero emotional attachment to the people you're networking with, you got some even bigger issues. By your logic I should also not get upset if I get locked out of my email account, since that too is a freebie offered by a company making money on advertising.
The article is talking about things long in the past, I have a HD5850 in my machine that's almost two years old and built on 40 nm process from TMSC. That process has been fairly stable for a long time now even though it was a bit delayed and early yields weren't as good as hoped. Where they have really struggled is with their 32-34 nm - I don't remember exactly - process that should have gone into the last generation of chips. In short, they ended up simply skipping it since they were due to deliver 28 nm by the time it would be ready. And there's actually three 28 nm processes, LP, HPL and HP which you can call low, mid and high-power. LP is really just for support chips, but it's rumored that HPL will be used for the next generation Cortex and AMDs Southern Islands, while nVidia is waiting on the HP process for their next generation. For the GPU business it just means progress is slower - both AMD and nVidia are stuck waiting for TMSC. For CPUs on the other hand Intel and GlobalFoundries are heavy competitors - GF to take over the business while Intel only produce for themselves - but being a process step behind is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.
Hehe, yeah I remember this one. It was around the same time some people were trying to renounce their citizenship and move to cyberspace, it was the wierdest cult thing. "Internet Time" was kinda the same, now we're all moving to cyberspace so we don't need regular time anymore. That Swatch was pushing it in all seriousness shows how completely on acid the dotcom craze was.
With time zones you can simply look up the time at a given location to know which part of the day it is (...) DST is the beast that needs to die
Except those two are contradictory. I'm pretty close to the arctic circle, so short winter days and long summer days. In the darkest of winter, the sun rises at 10 AM and sets at 2:30 PM. As we progress towards summer both the mornings and evenings get brighter, in March before DST the sun rises at 6 AM and sets at 7 PM, after DST an hour later. It is far, far more useful for me that the sun is up 7-8 PM than 6-7 AM because of working hours, store hours and so on. We want all the rest of the sun time to be 8-9-10 PM in the evening, not 4-5-6 AM in the morning. If it's not useful to you, well then you're not living in a place where it matters. In fact, if we weren't following a European standard we could probably use another hour from mid-April to mid-September. Also, this is the reason Australia would want to do it the other way around, they want to have DST in their summer, our winter. So no, it's not going to get much simpler than it is.
The thing is, it's not one thing you have to know, it's kernel drivers, x drivers, desktop environment, applications and possibly all the ways they are configured.
Hell, 1997-2003 era computer then you might look at 32-64MB of RAM on the low end. Even loading just the latest 2.6 kernel you'll probably lose half that just to that.
At some point you have to ask, is it really going to be worth it? Can't we find them some 128-256MB machines that'll run more "normal" distros and software?
Some things tell me we'd actually get further getting a little better at shipping our outdated machines to someone who needs them. I bet there's plenty 128-512MB RAM machines in landfills all over the place.
She was of the same school as Scully. "We sell a brand, not products." We need to find the business schools where they learn this shit and burn them to the ground.
Because Apple isn't selling a brand? An image? The problem is that some CEOs go over the top and forget that the actual product is part of your reputation as well. If people think your product is buggy low-quality shit and you get a reputation for that, it's a turn-off in every market segment. Then it hardly matters if you're hitting the "right" segments or not.
That, and that Jobs isn't dead he's now chairman of the board. Of course that means he won't be running things day to day like a CEO, but he'll be there to guide Apple. Hopefully the cancer isn't terminal but if it is, I think that's when we'll see the real drop.
Indeed. With Windows 7 being able to recover from a graphics driver crash and GNU/Linux not being able to I wonder what happened to the Unix philosophy...
Sometimes. I have a corrupt video that'll crash Win7 whenever DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) is enabled. It's pretty neat when it works though, because on Linux X crashing is as bad as the kernel crashing for a desktop.
You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly
Ah, the no true Scotsman fallacy. Sorry if I'm being rude, but I don't see anything in your post that couldn't be better solved with a QShaderEffectItem instead of the ridiculous QML UI. I get it, it appeals to all the people who know HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It still sucks to everyone who knows C++/Qt, no matter how much you polish the turd.
For nerds like us, the limitations are redily apparent. But for a technically illiterate person? It'll be great until they decide to learn more and end up running into the limitations.
Then we use the laptop/desktop for that. Ye gods, the iPhone/iPad are nice little tools but I'd never have them alone. I've noticed several times that if I had not had my iPhone in my pocket, I'd need my netbook now. But since I do and it's always in my pocket, it's good enough. My impression is that it's the same with the iPad, they could use their laptop but find the tablet format more convienient.
You're saying like as if writing Qt5 app in C++ will no longer be possible.
Possible yes, but you can tell they're now pushing QML as "the next big thing" and the traditional QWidgets aren't getting nearly as much love as before. The rest of Qt will of course be there but without all the UI building blocks I'd say Qt is gutted. So you can of course be an old fart and use the widgets anyway, but I fear it'll become more of a legacy option. While I don't think Nokia is going to depreciate them, the priority of bugs and enhancements vs QML is a concern.
QML is pretty much like HTML/CSS+Javascript, except that you can do more Javascript magic to manipulate the UI. In theory the whole application can be written in Javascript, but I'd say normally just for the UI or things closely related to the UI. Personally I consider it a step backwards, to me it's more like trying to use web app tech to build a "real" app. I always thought that the only reason you'd want to use a declarative UI is because you need to send it as one big HTTP page, rather than set one and one property as you can do locally. To me at least the whole system seems way less intuitive. With an imperative system I always call setWidth() to set the width, in a declarative UI it's set in the declaration one way and I have to change that property some other way. Maybe I'm wrong but IMO it's throwing away the best part Qt has.
Like it or not, tablets are merely a fad. They have no staying power.
And I assume you're basing all this wonderful market research on yourself or a small group of like-minded friends? They sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter - for comparison they sold 3.95 million Macs. It's as much a fad as the iPhone, maybe you haven't found a use for it but the market has. The problem with Gnome and KDE chasing after the tablet market is that they think they'll be a "player" along with iOS and Android. If anything I think they have less chances of succeeding there on the desktop, they're ignoring the 1% desktop market share they have and chasing 1% of the mobile market. They haven't got the resources to run in two directions with two different teams, so they'll go halfway up both roads.
So people will get nostalgic about the "good old days" when CmdrTaco was running slashdot.