What is a concern is that those guys are now dead (Alan Turing), retired (Don Knuth) or in very old age (lots of 60s people who worked on C-like languages), or not presentable. For those alive, their contributions were made at young age, so we are missing something because our twenty-somethings are not earning the same respect, or somehow achievements magically stopped mattering.
In comparably important to human development as science, we have the political and business world. There, there are influential and WELL-known figures on TV and media articles providing quotes, as well as market-moving long-term predictions (like certain American financial advisers.)
Besides Bill Gates, there is no other known figure that mainstream people recognize (Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are names that carry no recognition in the third world countries, for instance.) Our equivalently bright, twenty-something uber-gods are busy running their successful Facebooks, Googles or whatever. These people aren't interested to know about what Linus thinks. Matter of fact, I cannot name a single world-famous doctor alive today. Maybe medicine and IT jobs where we're regarded as "plumbers" and fixer-uppers, rather than geniuses, have a downside when it comes to mainstream fame.
I suspect that individual recognition affordable in other human endeavors where respect and breakthroughs are encouraged, became forbidden in favor of abstracting your achievement to uncopiable patents attached to a big name like IBM.
You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.
In Windows XP, Start > Control Panel > Internet Options puts the non-IE-specific settings in the Connections pane along with five panes of web-specific stuff. Was this changed in Windows Vista or Windows 7?
To do us all a public service, I went to check. I've been using Vista fulltime for 3 years, but don't recall any way to reach the proxy page without IE's "Internet Properties" which is tin the same place where "Internet Options" is (in control.exe's classic view.)
I did a search for proxy settings and found a link or two that state these are for Internet Explorer. The first link shows the Windows registry key to apply a restrictions via group policy is mysteriouslySoftware\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.
For more proof, though, and pretending the above isn't enough, we can reason that if these "system-wide" control panels were true to the phrase, then why would we need a cookie control GUI in every single alternative browser? It appears that every tab in there is ignored equally: auto-complete, parental controls, popup blocking, running activeX, managing addons, protocol handlers and the default browser --which mysteriously has an IE icon in it and no option to set ANOTHER browser in this particular dialog.
The MacOS 8 of 1997 has an Internet Connection panel to centrally handle many settings, and was followed by browsers. My personal "homepage" should be stored once and for all by default, but we all have to deal with apple choosing their site, MS choosing their own, and firefox pointing to google or mozilla even when I've already told the supposedly central panel where I want to go. No, offering to scan my alternative browser settings is still inferior to forcing everyone to just just look in a registry key. Windows programmers never had hard guidelines to strictly set or to follow. That's why the OS is the twisty little... mess we have today.
By the way, in Vista you cannot reach the above IE settings / proxy control panel from the "Network and Sharing Center," though a proxy is considered a most important part of a network. See?
I once spent an hour trying to figure out why the DVI output from my Time Warner Cable box would appear on my computer monitor for two seconds, then disappear. I finally realized it didn't "trust" my monitor and HDCP was the culprit.
Once in a while, I swap inputs sources from HDMI to coaxial on my TWC box. This very elusive DVI output dialog says that the correct cable isn't connected / compatible / whatever AND prevents you from watching the cable signal (the box being momentarily confused).
Another stupid thing about the DVI dialog is that the cable box outputs it over their coaxial output to my TV set while the HDMI source works fine. Powering off the television tends to inform the box that I've made a change and the dialog disappears when I turn the TV back on. It's creepy having the box do its bidirectional communication with my TV over coaxial... I thought it only did that with the cable CO and that only HDMI cable was meant to be sneaky.
The decipherment of Ugaritic took years and relied on some happy coincidences — such as the discovery of an axe that had the word “axe” written on it in Ugaritic.
Maybe I should go around and write "computer" in English on all my computers, as a service to future language researchers.
Extinct language researchers examining english would fail at this same task 3000 years from now. English has no nouns --it has brand names: today's "computers" have big "Dell" logos but not "Computer."
Also, how would researchers realize that [Apple Mac Glyph] isn't an integral part of our "ancient moon runes" if seen from their era?:)
until something sticks. That seems to be their current strategy with cell phones, and unfortunately, despite this individual failure, with their money and resources, I have a feeling something will stick eventually.
When the iPad was announced 4 months ago I expected better alternatives to rise shortly. The US economy is still half dead, so I am still not seeing competing pads (or even contract-less Android phones) at minus $200 their premium prices. In light of MS' lack of respect for a somewhat related product, I realize that wannabe smartphones might shut down App Stores without warning, just because of bad sales. Then I would be stuck with brand-new brick in a 2 year contract for an undesirable carrier.
No, thanks. I'll hold my pad/droid plans for another 18 months.
Oh, but of course. See, what the Russian spies REALLY wanted, and almost got, are outlined in secret documents in the Pentagon which I will describe here...
Hey... wait a second! Damn you, mykos, but you are a clever one... almost got me that time.
Rather clever misdirection aimed at the feds! What you really mean is "Expect my Wikileak at 11!";)
So basically it's like what Google did with Buzz and Gmail contacts. You didn't learn from others' mistakes on this one did you Microsoft?
Yahoo has a Buzz competitor too. Windows Live/Hotmail, Google and Yahoo! Pulse's biggest downside is that none of them force people to use their real full names, so you can't expand your network with long-lost acquaintances.
The new players still protect our privacy, but hinder people's being found: obfuscated URLs, hiding your name, sex location and relative age; not being indexed at the very top of Google's searches have killed their shine in light of the big social networks.
For 3 years I slowly noticed Google, MS Live and Yahoo integrating chat, social information, avatars, new blogs, photo albums, status update broadcasts and crap mindful of dating sites. None of that has forced my friends, already deep in FB, to UPDATE their pre-Facebook site profiles using the new tools in their hands.
(*) Funny that Facebook, in spite of all its privacy controversy, is so correct about e-mail address disclosure. I applaud their hiding your valuable e-mail address from the friend request process. Thus, people who are out of touch with you can attempt to contact you --and if things go wrong, you can unfriend them without worrying that in the process of finding you they would learn handles allowing them to bug you over Gmail / Hotmail and Yahoo chat until you personally accept them at a more serious level.
But there's a nice unexamined assumption in your post: Why the fuck aren't the men taking parental leave or caring for the children?
I'll take this one: men don't because
1) it's not really allowed in men's job contracts because of today's social/legal norms 2) men (at least our kind) are in IT precisely because computers run in an easily controllable environment... where specific incremental results are predictable based on our fix toolset and experience.
On the other hand, babies are chaotic and non-programmable, have no tech support, and are also an expensive "piece of hardware" that comes with no manuals, tech support or warranties of any kind. I would venture saying that it's as high maintenance as you could get. Ever. It's already hard enough
Bad for "freedoms"... good for morality, which is the pushing force behind the basic idea of penal systems worldwide. Slashdot, take morality in whatever way you want, but if you're breaking your governments' laws instead of going to a country that allows your torts, you're being immoral.
Slashdot, don't come to me with the "We use BT ONLY for Linux ISO's, which is legal!" excuse. You know full well that on your own block your neighbors aren't, even if you're being perfectly honest. People can't be expected to police themselves, and that's why we have laws. You can choose to obey them all or try to change legislation with your vote.
JPEG's are for sissies. Here is a short cosplay clip with L holding the phone prophetically. The concept is 3 years old --prophetic! We'll ALL be holding it from here on. Google Death Note
Ever since yesterday's late story about renewed effort to bring Android to x86, I got a not so crazy idea of wanting an Android-less App environment on my PC. We already have Linuxless KDE on Windows. We already have a PC emulator for debugging and developing Android apps. The next step is to logically push easy-to-get apps to your PC that you only normally get on your portable phone. I would even allow Google to use that freaky location and AP detection technology in exchange for giving me the Android App Store on my Windows PC.
Now we know they won't stand for particular Apps* on mobile phones, and will by extension implement whatever they need to avoid circumvention of App blocks on netbooks. So, if PC's ever do get the environment, they will just ensure they can control it tightly, and it won't be a "free lunch" for us non-conformists. Remember that TODAY they are killing inappropriate apps. All it takes is an internal memo from the boss, and the policy can change in a Flash without much we could
You can be sure they never built the kill functionality into the system. Uptight as they are in rejecting apps, why would they allow the roots of blemished phones to persist if they can claim perpetual ownership over the device ecosystem?
If I'm wrong and the functionality was put in since day 1 of iPhone 1.0, or worst-case, tacked on via our brand new version 4 update, then you can bet your butt that they'll hint at Google's "prior art" to say that "the rest of the industry" is just as evil as they want to become
If there are fewer delivery days in a month, then you get fewer movies per month if you turn them around every other day. This would help Netflix's bottom line to cut delivery down to 5 days a week.
It's interestingly like using monthly transit passes that come at a flat rate: you can use them for 31 days in a month without paying "extra," but those smaller months of 30 and 29 days come at no return to the buyer.
Shouldn't we feel somewhat cheated on leap years? Anyway, companies always milk the system (both our millenary date-wise system and the law system) to increase margins thanks to reduced work loads for them.
Or I could look at this and see how incomplete and far from reality it is: http://www.focus.com/images/view/11905/ Furthermore, scores of 70 in the Acid test shortly before their release deadline tell me to expect mediocrity with HTML5, which they have struggled with for a lot less than their HTML4. By the way, IE8 shows a 20/100 in the score currently.
Demos are incomplete by nature, but devs don't hide their demo miracles for the release date.
Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough?
In hindsight, this particular penalty was only a matter of time. Browsers hit the mythical 100% score and decided speed was the next mythical benchmark.
The speed issue is the newest in a string of issues like + RAM is cheap! We aint optimizing our product. Just max out your RAM to play our game. + Get a better videocard, noob! + Buy a new motherboard! You need it so you can upgrade BUY a new [compatible] CPU so you can get the PCI-e videocard above, because plain PCI is uncool. Eventually we're all told we don't have "enough" of the old hardware resource or performance to be supported or that even if it's reliable and fast.
In a few years as IE/FF/Chrome get closer in stats, we'll have businesses returning to the fragmented 1990's saying "This site is best viewed with..."
It's much less common to have a collection of PCI cards than it was to have a collection of ISA (or EISA / VLB) cards to move to a new machine.
Says YOU!
Graphics cards are about the only thing that you regularly find as expansion cards, and these are typically upgraded at least as frequently as the motherboard anyway.
My main desktop is a Pentium 4 sold by Dell in 2003. Now, I can tell you that for newbs migrating to a new desktop for a 2 or 3 year jump, it's true there aren't many cards. However, I've been hoarding devices that this Dell did not bring or brought underpowered versions of.
So, my nVidia PCI card replaces the 64MB shared intel. My Diamond Extreme PCI provides surround sound and nice drivers that Dell didn't. My 3Com PCI provides a network connection. Another PCI card provides Firewire input because it's the only way to edit video --USB isn't even available. Oh, that card doesn't even fit, because I swapped it out for a USB PCI hub before external ones became common. Remember that old machines didn't have today's motherboard peripheral cancer that today's have. So an older machine came with barebones stuff even if it had sound.
I'll also say that there are PCI modem emergencies (need to send a Fax to a long list of addresses?), but the card is stashed away as well. I have also stashed other cards away. The PC will see itself replaced shortly, as of 2 years ago no cheap motherboard has more than 2 PCI ports. They cheat by using the 1x or 2x PCI express which are little used, and then a single fullsize PCI express. The day we see 4 fullsize PCI express ports there, so that I cannot even decide which of my abominably old peripherals to keep and which other 3 to throw away, then I'll be OK with them getting rid of PCI. So one more reason to think about AMD, for now at least.
You most certainly can block it -- it resides nicely between two tags. The bigger question is, will asshole web developers use canvases in places where straight up text would have worked just fine, and force us to deal with their CPU eating abominations for no good reason at all?
You just reminded me of spam where HTML TABLES allowed a spammer to painstakingly post text cell by cell into something that looked like a paragraph. That way, each letter was parsed separately and the word Viagra could not be filtered. Good thing that hasn't caught on since I saw it 5 years ago.
I am curious what else they will use to circumvent filters, and whether spammers are willing to wait for another decade, which seems to be the length it will take IE10 to cover the standard AND be on every PC on the planet. Remember even 2010's IE8 has no HTML5, and IE9 won't support it well. MS will have to bundle their "perfect enough for HTML5" browser on yet another new version of their OS for HTML5 to take off
Kudos for your relative bravery in posting your comment (posted AC)
The failure of standards is that they are always perverted, and giving Flash-like power to webpages will only improve the destructive power of Ads --without any additional plugins, and empowering ad-makers to bombard us in the relative peaceful environment that are iP*s, Blackberries, and Firefox-NoScript. At least I can turn of Flash and annoying Javascript layer ads in some browsers.
That will change. HTML will do some cool things we can't visualize today, yes, but then my plain vanilla browser sure as heck won't have equivalents of say, "turn off HTML5 blink tag."
I'm posting supporting stats before/. archives the story, to prove how culturally independent from company commitment the US is. I just wish I had stats for Japan, which is supposed to have a high loyalty rate and very personal tie between work life and personal life, where your kissing up to the boss after hour is expected. Anyway, age apparently drives people to be loyal; it's either a generational gap, or the likely fear of older people putting family mouths in danger by moving around or switching careers.
From the lion's mouth (US Bureau of labor statistics) is an interesting document on tenure for employees Only 27% of US workers 16 or older were at their employer for more than 10 years. For people over 55, more than 50% have 10 year of tenure. "The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008." You can imagine the curve joining these two endpoints, or just read the first couple pages of the report above, which is all I've done.
Decisions in this most influential country on earth are made without much expectation of being there to account for them. For anyone with a little time, poke around the historic values for 2006 and 2004.
PS: Some later searching shows that recent stats are paywalled by academic sites. There is the short pdf (tables around [scanned] page 726) with data from 1979, showing japan had a mean of 8 years (4 for the US) and 25% tenure for 10+ years, compared to 15% in the US. Google books shows that Japanese workers were the highest tenured in 1990, followed closely by Germany, France and Spain. The US was last in a list of around 10. I also found a forum comment citing that the Phillipines have the 2nd highest turnover rate in Asia-Pacific, which is bone-chilling seeing how we think Indian callcenters suck, and how Americans are switching away from India to cheap pinoy labor. I could not confirm if India has the highest rate or not, but it still gives me a chill.
All that is true. The problem is the bad decisions made 10 years prior to the present carry little repercussion. Yes, small and mid-size companies upgrade CPU's every 5+ years, so the foolishness checkpoints are few and far between.
Can that even affect the guilty accountant? No. These recession days 10 year employees are the minority in the United States. They're usually tenured enough or far enough from their original position that they fail to receive the ensuing flack, if anyone in the inner circle making the decision even figures out their "mistake."
Try your statement again on a Bean counter test (TM):
Hell, lots of people didn't even get 64-bit Vista because of perception that if you don't use more than 4G of RAM you don't need it.
Bean counter:Alright! Since we skipped Vista, none of our corporate PC's ever needed even 3GB. Money saved!
Actually, all modern machines should be running 64-bit OS only
Bean counter:Tell me more and I'll put in an order so we can stay competitive in this "modern" market. I'm curious.
simplified address space management
Bean counter:Huh?
and increased register count
Bean counter:Useless. More technobabble that only programmers need. I'll recommend keeping XP on our single core Pentium 4. I'll also get a raise for saving the PHB a ton on this year's budget.
makes it a no-brainer.
Bean counter:I fully agree. I'll even grin all the way to the bank!
Understimating people would make sense if there were less spyware and scams, out there.
Clarifying my sentence: "Your saying I'm underestimating people here would make sense if we saw no spyware and phone/web-related scams affecting our uneducated masses."
Scams are still a major issue regardless of computers, and spyware works because nobody thinks it's odd that their PC's web-less popups are out of ordinary, or dare do much about it without a helping hand --they only balk when the PC becomes unusable or upon several consecutive infections if they were careful to know what we did to clean them up. Matter of fact, none of the family PC's where I install antivirus/antispyware software had updates and scans manually run after I left, even if I gave specific instructions to the owner to avoid causing a relapse ending in my return to use the product for them.
Computers are an elective field, and not something everybody understands like us. Because our field is stupid, we don't realize that in any other type of product there are usage warnings mandated by government bodies, like "do not drink this liquid soap." People who have been trained scoff at the training label, but in our case, trainees are far fewer than the general populace.
Understimating people would make sense if there were less spyware and scams, out there. The only reason PC's are clean these days is that companies underestimating people have taken to protecting their brandnames by adding shovelware Antivirus systems that actually protects their machines beyond last decade's levels of Windows 98 and pre-firewall XP.
The tech business of spyware removal still thrives, and it's because of clueless who click on things. Getting back on-topic, these same users are the same ones who can't be expected to know their usage levels any given months. Even/. users mostly estimate usage through flashed routers or single-OS "guesstimate" utilities.
The general public knows that they're paying X for broadband, but don't know the difference between 3MB and 6MB, or fiber. They only know "faster because the advertisement said so" or "too slow on my own machine, so I have to upgrade." The data from AT&T only says that either they're lying, or they should ONLY meter that %2 after properly notifying them. AT&T is the same company that is failing badly at handling iPhone usage for 100% of people, so I doubt they're aiming at just targetting a measly 2% when they can pork barrel the rest of us.
They are "overestimating" users on purpose because we know full well who will benefit if you open up the 98% that are beneath the 2GB number to "accidentally" racking up high bandwidth every few months. The problem is when average lusers hear about new "alternative" sites from OUR already-alternative group, and have no idea how to protect themselves in ways that we take for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
What is a concern is that those guys are now dead (Alan Turing), retired (Don Knuth) or in very old age (lots of 60s people who worked on C-like languages), or not presentable. For those alive, their contributions were made at young age, so we are missing something because our twenty-somethings are not earning the same respect, or somehow achievements magically stopped mattering.
In comparably important to human development as science, we have the political and business world. There, there are influential and WELL-known figures on TV and media articles providing quotes, as well as market-moving long-term predictions (like certain American financial advisers.)
Besides Bill Gates, there is no other known figure that mainstream people recognize (Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are names that carry no recognition in the third world countries, for instance.) Our equivalently bright, twenty-something uber-gods are busy running their successful Facebooks, Googles or whatever. These people aren't interested to know about what Linus thinks. Matter of fact, I cannot name a single world-famous doctor alive today. Maybe medicine and IT jobs where we're regarded as "plumbers" and fixer-uppers, rather than geniuses, have a downside when it comes to mainstream fame.
I suspect that individual recognition affordable in other human endeavors where respect and breakthroughs are encouraged, became forbidden in favor of abstracting your achievement to uncopiable patents attached to a big name like IBM.
Think hard to see what form is weirdest:
"In soviet Russia, does the public understand scientists?"
It's hard to decide.
You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.
In Windows XP, Start > Control Panel > Internet Options puts the non-IE-specific settings in the Connections pane along with five panes of web-specific stuff. Was this changed in Windows Vista or Windows 7?
To do us all a public service, I went to check. I've been using Vista fulltime for 3 years, but don't recall any way to reach the proxy page without IE's "Internet Properties" which is tin the same place where "Internet Options" is (in control.exe's classic view.)
I did a search for proxy settings and found a link or two that state these are for Internet Explorer. The first link shows the Windows registry key to apply a restrictions via group policy is mysteriously Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.
For more proof, though, and pretending the above isn't enough, we can reason that if these "system-wide" control panels were true to the phrase, then why would we need a cookie control GUI in every single alternative browser? It appears that every tab in there is ignored equally: auto-complete, parental controls, popup blocking, running activeX, managing addons, protocol handlers and the default browser --which mysteriously has an IE icon in it and no option to set ANOTHER browser in this particular dialog.
The MacOS 8 of 1997 has an Internet Connection panel to centrally handle many settings, and was followed by browsers. My personal "homepage" should be stored once and for all by default, but we all have to deal with apple choosing their site, MS choosing their own, and firefox pointing to google or mozilla even when I've already told the supposedly central panel where I want to go. No, offering to scan my alternative browser settings is still inferior to forcing everyone to just just look in a registry key. Windows programmers never had hard guidelines to strictly set or to follow. That's why the OS is the twisty little... mess we have today.
By the way, in Vista you cannot reach the above IE settings / proxy control panel from the "Network and Sharing Center," though a proxy is considered a most important part of a network. See?
I once spent an hour trying to figure out why the DVI output from my Time Warner Cable box would appear on my computer monitor for two seconds, then disappear. I finally realized it didn't "trust" my monitor and HDCP was the culprit.
Once in a while, I swap inputs sources from HDMI to coaxial on my TWC box. This very elusive DVI output dialog says that the correct cable isn't connected / compatible / whatever AND prevents you from watching the cable signal (the box being momentarily confused).
Another stupid thing about the DVI dialog is that the cable box outputs it over their coaxial output to my TV set while the HDMI source works fine. Powering off the television tends to inform the box that I've made a change and the dialog disappears when I turn the TV back on. It's creepy having the box do its bidirectional communication with my TV over coaxial... I thought it only did that with the cable CO and that only HDMI cable was meant to be sneaky.
The decipherment of Ugaritic took years and relied on some happy coincidences — such as the discovery of an axe that had the word “axe” written on it in Ugaritic.
Maybe I should go around and write "computer" in English on all my computers, as a service to future language researchers.
Extinct language researchers examining english would fail at this same task 3000 years from now. English has no nouns --it has brand names: today's "computers" have big "Dell" logos but not "Computer."
Also, how would researchers realize that [Apple Mac Glyph] isn't an integral part of our "ancient moon runes" if seen from their era? :)
until something sticks. That seems to be their current strategy with cell phones, and unfortunately, despite this individual failure, with their money and resources, I have a feeling something will stick eventually.
When the iPad was announced 4 months ago I expected better alternatives to rise shortly. The US economy is still half dead, so I am still not seeing competing pads (or even contract-less Android phones) at minus $200 their premium prices. In light of MS' lack of respect for a somewhat related product, I realize that wannabe smartphones might shut down App Stores without warning, just because of bad sales. Then I would be stuck with brand-new brick in a 2 year contract for an undesirable carrier.
No, thanks. I'll hold my pad/droid plans for another 18 months.
Oh, but of course. See, what the Russian spies REALLY wanted, and almost got, are outlined in secret documents in the Pentagon which I will describe here...
Hey... wait a second! Damn you, mykos, but you are a clever one... almost got me that time.
Rather clever misdirection aimed at the feds! What you really mean is "Expect my Wikileak at 11!" ;)
So basically it's like what Google did with Buzz and Gmail contacts. You didn't learn from others' mistakes on this one did you Microsoft?
Yahoo has a Buzz competitor too. Windows Live/Hotmail, Google and Yahoo! Pulse's biggest downside is that none of them force people to use their real full names, so you can't expand your network with long-lost acquaintances.
The new players still protect our privacy, but hinder people's being found: obfuscated URLs, hiding your name, sex location and relative age; not being indexed at the very top of Google's searches have killed their shine in light of the big social networks.
For 3 years I slowly noticed Google, MS Live and Yahoo integrating chat, social information, avatars, new blogs, photo albums, status update broadcasts and crap mindful of dating sites. None of that has forced my friends, already deep in FB, to UPDATE their pre-Facebook site profiles using the new tools in their hands.
(*) Funny that Facebook, in spite of all its privacy controversy, is so correct about e-mail address disclosure. I applaud their hiding your valuable e-mail address from the friend request process. Thus, people who are out of touch with you can attempt to contact you --and if things go wrong, you can unfriend them without worrying that in the process of finding you they would learn handles allowing them to bug you over Gmail / Hotmail and Yahoo chat until you personally accept them at a more serious level.
>
But there's a nice unexamined assumption in your post: Why the fuck aren't the men taking parental leave or caring for the children?
I'll take this one: men don't because
1) it's not really allowed in men's job contracts because of today's social/legal norms
2) men (at least our kind) are in IT precisely because computers run in an easily controllable environment... where specific incremental results are predictable based on our fix toolset and experience.
On the other hand, babies are chaotic and non-programmable, have no tech support, and are also an expensive "piece of hardware" that comes with no manuals, tech support or warranties of any kind. I would venture saying that it's as high maintenance as you could get. Ever. It's already hard enough
Bad for "freedoms"... good for morality, which is the pushing force behind the basic idea of penal systems worldwide. Slashdot, take morality in whatever way you want, but if you're breaking your governments' laws instead of going to a country that allows your torts, you're being immoral.
Slashdot, don't come to me with the "We use BT ONLY for Linux ISO's, which is legal!" excuse. You know full well that on your own block your neighbors aren't, even if you're being perfectly honest. People can't be expected to police themselves, and that's why we have laws. You can choose to obey them all or try to change legislation with your vote.
JPEG's are for sissies. Here is a short cosplay clip with L holding the phone prophetically. The concept is 3 years old --prophetic! We'll ALL be holding it from here on. Google Death Note
Ever since yesterday's late story about renewed effort to bring Android to x86, I got a not so crazy idea of wanting an Android-less App environment on my PC. We already have Linuxless KDE on Windows. We already have a PC emulator for debugging and developing Android apps. The next step is to logically push easy-to-get apps to your PC that you only normally get on your portable phone. I would even allow Google to use that freaky location and AP detection technology in exchange for giving me the Android App Store on my Windows PC.
Now we know they won't stand for particular Apps* on mobile phones, and will by extension implement whatever they need to avoid circumvention of App blocks on netbooks. So, if PC's ever do get the environment, they will just ensure they can control it tightly, and it won't be a "free lunch" for us non-conformists. Remember that TODAY they are killing inappropriate apps. All it takes is an internal memo from the boss, and the policy can change in a Flash without much we could
You can be sure they never built the kill functionality into the system. Uptight as they are in rejecting apps, why would they allow the roots of blemished phones to persist if they can claim perpetual ownership over the device ecosystem?
If I'm wrong and the functionality was put in since day 1 of iPhone 1.0, or worst-case, tacked on via our brand new version 4 update, then you can bet your butt that they'll hint at Google's "prior art" to say that "the rest of the industry" is just as evil as they want to become
If there are fewer delivery days in a month, then you get fewer movies per month if you turn them around every other day. This would help Netflix's bottom line to cut delivery down to 5 days a week.
It's interestingly like using monthly transit passes that come at a flat rate: you can use them for 31 days in a month without paying "extra," but those smaller months of 30 and 29 days come at no return to the buyer.
Shouldn't we feel somewhat cheated on leap years? Anyway, companies always milk the system (both our millenary date-wise system and the law system) to increase margins thanks to reduced work loads for them.
Or I could look at this and see how incomplete and far from reality it is:
http://www.focus.com/images/view/11905/
Furthermore, scores of 70 in the Acid test shortly before their release deadline tell me to expect mediocrity with HTML5, which they have struggled with for a lot less than their HTML4. By the way, IE8 shows a 20/100 in the score currently.
Demos are incomplete by nature, but devs don't hide their demo miracles for the release date.
Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough?
In hindsight, this particular penalty was only a matter of time. Browsers hit the mythical 100% score and decided speed was the next mythical benchmark.
The speed issue is the newest in a string of issues like
+ RAM is cheap! We aint optimizing our product. Just max out your RAM to play our game.
+ Get a better videocard, noob!
+ Buy a new motherboard! You need it so you can upgrade BUY a new [compatible] CPU so you can get the PCI-e videocard above, because plain PCI is uncool. Eventually we're all told we don't have "enough" of the old hardware resource or performance to be supported or that even if it's reliable and fast.
In a few years as IE/FF/Chrome get closer in stats, we'll have businesses returning to the fragmented 1990's saying "This site is best viewed with..."
It's much less common to have a collection of PCI cards than it was to have a collection of ISA (or EISA / VLB) cards to move to a new machine.
Says YOU!
Graphics cards are about the only thing that you regularly find as expansion cards, and these are typically upgraded at least as frequently as the motherboard anyway.
My main desktop is a Pentium 4 sold by Dell in 2003. Now, I can tell you that for newbs migrating to a new desktop for a 2 or 3 year jump, it's true there aren't many cards. However, I've been hoarding devices that this Dell did not bring or brought underpowered versions of.
So, my nVidia PCI card replaces the 64MB shared intel. My Diamond Extreme PCI provides surround sound and nice drivers that Dell didn't. My 3Com PCI provides a network connection. Another PCI card provides Firewire input because it's the only way to edit video --USB isn't even available. Oh, that card doesn't even fit, because I swapped it out for a USB PCI hub before external ones became common. Remember that old machines didn't have today's motherboard peripheral cancer that today's have. So an older machine came with barebones stuff even if it had sound.
I'll also say that there are PCI modem emergencies (need to send a Fax to a long list of addresses?), but the card is stashed away as well. I have also stashed other cards away. The PC will see itself replaced shortly, as of 2 years ago no cheap motherboard has more than 2 PCI ports. They cheat by using the 1x or 2x PCI express which are little used, and then a single fullsize PCI express. The day we see 4 fullsize PCI express ports there, so that I cannot even decide which of my abominably old peripherals to keep and which other 3 to throw away, then I'll be OK with them getting rid of PCI. So one more reason to think about AMD, for now at least.
You most certainly can block it -- it resides nicely between two tags. The bigger question is, will asshole web developers use canvases in places where straight up text would have worked just fine, and force us to deal with their CPU eating abominations for no good reason at all?
You just reminded me of spam where HTML TABLES allowed a spammer to painstakingly post text cell by cell into something that looked like a paragraph. That way, each letter was parsed separately and the word Viagra could not be filtered. Good thing that hasn't caught on since I saw it 5 years ago.
I am curious what else they will use to circumvent filters, and whether spammers are willing to wait for another decade, which seems to be the length it will take IE10 to cover the standard AND be on every PC on the planet. Remember even 2010's IE8 has no HTML5, and IE9 won't support it well. MS will have to bundle their "perfect enough for HTML5" browser on yet another new version of their OS for HTML5 to take off
Kudos for your relative bravery in posting your comment (posted AC)
The failure of standards is that they are always perverted, and giving Flash-like power to webpages will only improve the destructive power of Ads --without any additional plugins, and empowering ad-makers to bombard us in the relative peaceful environment that are iP*s, Blackberries, and Firefox-NoScript. At least I can turn of Flash and annoying Javascript layer ads in some browsers.
That will change. HTML will do some cool things we can't visualize today, yes, but then my plain vanilla browser sure as heck won't have equivalents of say, "turn off HTML5 blink tag."
I'm posting supporting stats before /. archives the story, to prove how culturally independent from company commitment the US is. I just wish I had stats for Japan, which is supposed to have a high loyalty rate and very personal tie between work life and personal life, where your kissing up to the boss after hour is expected. Anyway, age apparently drives people to be loyal; it's either a generational gap, or the likely fear of older people putting family mouths in danger by moving around or switching careers.
From the lion's mouth (US Bureau of labor statistics) is an interesting document on tenure for employees
Only 27% of US workers 16 or older were at their employer for more than 10 years. For people over 55, more than 50% have 10 year of tenure. "The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008." You can imagine the curve joining these two endpoints, or just read the first couple pages of the report above, which is all I've done.
Decisions in this most influential country on earth are made without much expectation of being there to account for them. For anyone with a little time, poke around the historic values for 2006 and 2004.
PS: Some later searching shows that recent stats are paywalled by academic sites. There is the short pdf (tables around [scanned] page 726) with data from 1979, showing japan had a mean of 8 years (4 for the US) and 25% tenure for 10+ years, compared to 15% in the US. Google books shows that Japanese workers were the highest tenured in 1990, followed closely by Germany, France and Spain. The US was last in a list of around 10. I also found a forum comment citing that the Phillipines have the 2nd highest turnover rate in Asia-Pacific, which is bone-chilling seeing how we think Indian callcenters suck, and how Americans are switching away from India to cheap pinoy labor. I could not confirm if India has the highest rate or not, but it still gives me a chill.
As a bonus, since I'll refer to this in the future, here's a short general article on employee retention and company culture.
All that is true. The problem is the bad decisions made 10 years prior to the present carry little repercussion. Yes, small and mid-size companies upgrade CPU's every 5+ years, so the foolishness checkpoints are few and far between.
Can that even affect the guilty accountant? No. These recession days 10 year employees are the minority in the United States. They're usually tenured enough or far enough from their original position that they fail to receive the ensuing flack, if anyone in the inner circle making the decision even figures out their "mistake."
Try your statement again on a Bean counter test (TM):
Hell, lots of people didn't even get 64-bit Vista because of perception that if you don't use more than 4G of RAM you don't need it.
Bean counter:Alright! Since we skipped Vista, none of our corporate PC's ever needed even 3GB. Money saved!
Actually, all modern machines should be running 64-bit OS only
Bean counter:Tell me more and I'll put in an order so we can stay competitive in this "modern" market. I'm curious.
simplified address space management
Bean counter:Huh?
and increased register count
Bean counter:Useless. More technobabble that only programmers need. I'll recommend keeping XP on our single core Pentium 4. I'll also get a raise for saving the PHB a ton on this year's budget.
makes it a no-brainer.
Bean counter:I fully agree. I'll even grin all the way to the bank!
Understimating people would make sense if there were less spyware and scams, out there.
Clarifying my sentence: "Your saying I'm underestimating people here would make sense if we saw no spyware and phone/web-related scams affecting our uneducated masses."
Scams are still a major issue regardless of computers, and spyware works because nobody thinks it's odd that their PC's web-less popups are out of ordinary, or dare do much about it without a helping hand --they only balk when the PC becomes unusable or upon several consecutive infections if they were careful to know what we did to clean them up. Matter of fact, none of the family PC's where I install antivirus/antispyware software had updates and scans manually run after I left, even if I gave specific instructions to the owner to avoid causing a relapse ending in my return to use the product for them.
Computers are an elective field, and not something everybody understands like us. Because our field is stupid, we don't realize that in any other type of product there are usage warnings mandated by government bodies, like "do not drink this liquid soap." People who have been trained scoff at the training label, but in our case, trainees are far fewer than the general populace.
I want my technology to look like it was sent from an alient future, or dug up from an alien past... with mystic runes and shit.
Awesome! you could put that in your sig. I don't care if it isn't even on /. It's just that insightful.
Understimating people would make sense if there were less spyware and scams, out there. The only reason PC's are clean these days is that companies underestimating people have taken to protecting their brandnames by adding shovelware Antivirus systems that actually protects their machines beyond last decade's levels of Windows 98 and pre-firewall XP.
The tech business of spyware removal still thrives, and it's because of clueless who click on things. Getting back on-topic, these same users are the same ones who can't be expected to know their usage levels any given months. Even /. users mostly estimate usage through flashed routers or single-OS "guesstimate" utilities.
The general public knows that they're paying X for broadband, but don't know the difference between 3MB and 6MB, or fiber. They only know "faster because the advertisement said so" or "too slow on my own machine, so I have to upgrade." The data from AT&T only says that either they're lying, or they should ONLY meter that %2 after properly notifying them. AT&T is the same company that is failing badly at handling iPhone usage for 100% of people, so I doubt they're aiming at just targetting a measly 2% when they can pork barrel the rest of us.
They are "overestimating" users on purpose because we know full well who will benefit if you open up the 98% that are beneath the 2GB number to "accidentally" racking up high bandwidth every few months. The problem is when average lusers hear about new "alternative" sites from OUR already-alternative group, and have no idea how to protect themselves in ways that we take for granted.