Agreed, but more importantly (IMO), they aren't bundling Android with their "monopoly" produce of search.
Microsoft didn't just give IE away for free... they took their dominant position of OS distribution, and bundled in a free-as-in-beer IE, AND (initially) did not provide any way to remove it. They also provided major "incentives" (read; deterrents) to hardware distributors to encourage them to only ship Windows
I don't really care if Google is doing exactly the same thing as Microsoft did back in the day. I don't care whether corporations are doing what they do out of a desire to be evil or not. If somebody becomes so dominant in some market segment that they have a 80-90% market share that company has become too big a player. Why did you put the word monopoly in scare quotes when referring to Google and the internet search business? The last time I looked Google had something like a 85% share of the internet search market. That sounds like a monopoly to me and monopoly is always bad. Microsoft has a similar dominance on the desktop computer OS market, which is also bad. I'm sure the all knowing, self-correcting and ever perfect free market will eventually sort this out. Unfortunately the all knowing, self-correcting and ever perfect free market seems to have a habit of taking it's own sweet time when it comes to taking down monopolies so I'll applaud any help the free market gets from competition/antitrust watchdogs or anybody else willing to light a fire under the monopolist's posteriors. I have made my own tiny contribution by making increasing use of Bing and other alternative search engines instead of Google. I generally don't like Microsoft but I like Google's search monopoly even less. I became a OS X/Linux user for the exact same reason vis-Ã-vis Microsoft's OS monopoly.
... aw crap!... there is no Mac App Store access for my country. Should I do what the local Apple dealer is telling me which is go to a gift card scalper? The one they recommend charges $62.50 for a $50 giftcard. The bastards were happy enough to sell me a Mac but now I'm stuck dealing with scalpers to get OS updates. It was bad enough having to shell out giftcard money for XCode which used to be freely downloadable. I didn't really care that much either that my country has not been 'blessed' with an iOS App Store by saint Steve, I don't buy that much iPhone software anyway but the whole Mac App Store concept simply sucks ass.
The estate is claiming that this infringes on Tolkien's publicity rights, but if that's the case, would it make almost all 'historical fiction' illegal?
More evidence that the copyright term is much too long.
The Right of Publicity can be defined simply as the right of an individual to control the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness or other unequivocal aspects of one's identity.
Maybe I'm missing something really obvious but I was always under the impression that publicity and privacy rights are separate from copyright. This lawsuit is bloody ridiculous and I hope the Tolkien estate loses but as far as I can tell it has very little to do with copyright law.
Samsung Galaxy Tab. This was actually pretty good. Fast, responsive and sensitive screen. But you could tell the apps were designed for a smaller screen and just stretched onto this larger one.
Not only that, every time you want to change your grip or rotate the Galaxy Tab those capacitive buttons on the extreme edge of the thing keep getting accidentally activated. The iPad has only one mechanical button like the iPhone and a buffer zone around the display so your fingers don't accidentally activate something on the screen. Also full international keyboard support on the Galaxy Tab is only available on that lame Swype keyboard, not the regular one.
I hope not. I wish people had the good sense to keep a lid on this sort of thing. If you publish this kind of data the bottom-feeders descend on them and they are usually looted out much faster than they can be ever be excavated. I know the looters have access to Google's services too but there is no reason to make it any easier for them than it has to be.
Don't forget that you're only having that revenue because of them in the first place.
The same can be said about Apple and Microsoft. Anybody who develops software for their OS'es has revenue because of MS and Apple. That does not give them the right to mandate a 30% ' industry-standard' tax on anybody who develops for their platform. Apple has done that with the iPhone and is trying it with OS X and I for one will not be paying that tax if I can in any way avoid it. I can make up my own mind about who does my marketing, payment processing, distribution, in-game-sales, etc.. and what currency I choose to do business in. These things are still going to cut into my profits but at least I'll be free to choose service providers and switch providers if somebody doesn't perform. Mind you with the Apple app store tax at least you are getting free distribution and access to marketing resources, and a few other things. That at least is something worth thinking about even if I am skeptical as to the value of those services since IMHO the AppStore is suboptimal in terms of being a way to sell your product... that plus I deeply dislike lock-in of any kind. As far as I can tell, with this Facebook tax, you get nothing back other than the privilege of integrating your app on Facebook's web page. Do you at least get the App hosted on Facebook's server farms in return for that 30% cut? Do you get free advertising? Does their support center handle your customer's service requests? If the answer to any of that is yes I might reconsider but I still don't care for lock-in. I am pleased that in Google Android, Apple and it's iPhone/iPod franchise finally has a competitor capable of dishing out some punishment and I sure as hell hope Facebook get's some of that same medicine.
RTFA you Fucking Moron. Seriously, get your head out of your ass and fucking READ IT. The Palestinians are the ones doing all the giving here, Israel is still WAY outside it's fucking borders, but stupid fucking racist retarded cunts like you are the reason it can get away with it.
One day in the future we'll all be saddened that Israel was the child of ethnic cleansing and racism, and chose instead of becoming a beacon to inflict misery upon a new set of innocents.
Isn't it just amazing how the elegance, persuasiveness and logical soundness of an argument grows exponentially every time the author works another vulgar expletive into it?
So I get to waste time putting money on that special card so that the app can act as the card at the register.
Anyone else think this is incredibly dumb? I can whip out my debit/credit card faster than you can load your starbucks app.
The professor teaching me reactive systems theory insists that a computer scientist is a reactive system that outputs coins to obtain coffee so that he/she can output/publish papers. Given that analysis I'd say that any alternative ways of obtaining coffee other than just using coins, bills or credit cards, will make computer scientists (and most other professionals for that matter) more productive. Imagine if you forgot your wallet at home, no cofee..... productivity..... grinding.... to.... a.... halt........ With this app you'd still be able to get your fix and earn your paycheck. This app contributes to the economic growth that is essential to pull us out of this recession and propel us into the next bubble. So no, this is not such a dumb idea after all.
You're just a meta-wanker now, because I have to ask, "How does Google discourage publications from using the term 'googling' in reference to web-searches?"
Whine, piss and moan... The next time you decide to ooze your venom over somebody at least RTFA they link to first it's not that hard.
Avoiding genericide
Trademark owners will naturally seek to maximize the popularity of their marks. However, generic use of a trademark presents an inherent risk to the effective enforcement of trademark rights and may ultimately lead to genericide.... Google has gone to lengths to prevent this process, discouraging publications from using the term 'googling' in reference to web-searches. In 2006, both the Oxford English Dictionary[7] and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary[11] struck a balance between acknowledging widespread use of the verb coinage and preserving the particular search engine's association with the coinage, defining google (all lower case, with -le ending) as a verb meaning "use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.
My mother was given a Samsung Galaxy Tab a few weeks ago. It's a pretty nice tablet but it's not quite as good as the iPad and neither is a replacement for my MacBook or any reasonably compact laptop for that matter. The Galaxy Tab has all sorts of capacitive buttons on the rim of the display that get activated accidentally if you are careless with your fingers while manupulating it. I can't fault the performance, not that I have done insane benchmark tests, but it seems to be every bit as snappy as the iPad. The Biggest problem with the Galaxy Tab is the Android software, it was originally a mobile phone OS and it shows a bit. If the iPad gets a ranking of 10 i'd allocate the Galay Tab an 8. There is nothing you can do about the irritating capacitive buttons but i'd still give the Galaxy Tab a 9 if they'd fix some irritating things about Samsung's Android OS flavor such as gigantic drop down boxes and dialogs, long paths to some menu items, the slightly erratic gesture response and the fact that international support for some European alphabets only exists in the SWYPE keyboard (which doesn't work all that well IMHO) but not in the regular keyboard. One other thing that annoys me about the Galaxy Tab is that I can't seem to be able to find the kindle App for it on Android market but that's hardly Samsung's fault. I'd say the iPad fairly narrowly wins out due to slightly better software and the fact that it has no capacitive buttons which eliminates accidental input.
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
I actually had to write a paper on this subject for an SQA class I took. The result among other things was (as if we didn't know that already) that PHBs respond to numbers and little else (except maybe Blackberrys) and a scary percentage of them think software testing isn't worth doing beyond weeding out the worst of the bugs because it offers a low return of investment. To convince your PHB you have to gather metrics. How much does an error cost if that error makes it undetected into a marketed product? How much would do save if we caught it early by testing? How much of a reduction in the frequency of, say... buffer overflow or SQL injection bugs, etc... have you achieved by implementing software testing in some other project? If you don't have any SQA enabled projects to fall back on you can try to cite case studies or CS papers. Case studies are probably better since they are less theoretical and not loaded with a huge amount of statistics. Keep in mind that the level of SQA that is justifiable for projects varies according to their nature. If this is an internal product never used by external parties you can get away with much less SQA than if it is used by external customers. Metrics gathering is also a key component in pretty much everything else SQA related, root cause analysis, test coverage analysis, determining code coverage, deciding on where to focus tests... the list goes on and on.
Yes, let's ban a useful tool because some people are too meek to ask others to stop doing distracting things with their laptops. [rolls eyes] When did people become so afraid? Is it really that hard to respectfully ask someone to change their behavior so as not to disturb others? Are we to ban a useful technology in the classroom because of a handful of bozos?
I use my laptop for taking notes both in and out of lectures. I use Texshop for note taking and I have gotten pretty good at it. I also use my laptop for looking stuff up during lectures. This last semester I was in a software-theory class where the lecturer used more acronyms than a one of those acronym laden US military training manuals and the laptop came in pretty handy for looking them up. If people really want to pay horrendous school fees and then spend lectures playing Farmville or pruning their Facebook page that really is their own business, they are paying a lot of money for the privilege of failing the course, but that's their business. If you ban laptops on account of these procrastinators, thus punishing the people who use laptops to do useful stuff during lectures, the procrastinators will simply fall back on some more time tested way of procrastinating and not paying attention to the lecture. As for the idea voiced by some people here that laptops should be banned because the people sitting behind me feel disturbed by the brief flashing on my screen every time I re-typeset my notes they can IMHO stop whining and focus their attention on the lecturer and his slides and not my laptop screen.
We're crying in the rain we can't push the jews into the sea, or burn them. More than likely. After all it's the defacto policy of hizbullah and hamas to kill them, with no peace ever.
Ah a well informed person. Do you know the death-rates between the parties in the last 20 years?
Every year it is something like: Palestina: 700+ more than 200+ children, more than 200+ woman. Israel: 0-15. Always soldiers.
But good to know you are informed!
It's true that the Israelis kill an awful lot of Palestinian civilians and that the situation in Gaza and the occupied territories is something Israel should be ashamed of. But claiming that Hamas, the al-Aqsa brigades et al. only kill soldiers is a blatant falsehood. Every time one of those bozos blows him self up on a bus it's not soldiers that get killed. On the other hand, every time the Israelis decide to 'defend them selves', drop a lavish amount of ordinance on the Gaza strip or Lebanon, send in the tanks and kill a whole bunch of civilians and a few guerillas, a thousand new recruits join Hamas and Hezbollah. The longer I watch the Israelis and the Palestinians go at it the more it becomes clear that neither party actually wants peace. They have become so used to living in state of perpetual war it's hard for them to imagine a world without it. The Palestinians are dominated to a large extend by militant religious fundamentalists and the Israelis have developed a political system that is so dominated by hard nosed ex-military types it's hard to tell where the armed forces stop and the nominally civilian government starts.
That is exactly what these documents allegedly contain. US diplomatic reports of corruption and other shenanigans in practically every country where the USA has an embassy. This is only damaging to the US because it can't keep a lid on other people dirty laundry it's the people who own the dirty laundry that will be most affected.
These bailouts are nothing more but the partial enslavement of Irish taxpayers in order to rescue foreign banks and governments.
Sure the banks and speculators have much to answer for but they are not the only ones to blame. I did not see the Irish or anybody else for that matter standing outside their government buildings and parliament house protesting the insane expansion of the economy while everything was booming and the money flowed. Let's not forget that somebody had to elect into office the pricks that created the environment in which this mess could happen. Maybe we should be more careful about whom we vote into office next time?
Once Landsbanki collapsed the debt did become a public debt, and in a way Iceland did default: in a referendum, its people decided to compensate only Icelandic citizens. The clever part is the way they did it: simply deciding not to honour the guarantees on their bank, they avoided being punished by a poor credit rating. Of course no Iceland bank will ever get a European banking license again, but at this point who cares?
Not quite... What you are referring to is the Icesave dispute. What the icelandic president refused to sign and referred to a plebiscite wasn't whether or not to repay of the Icesave debt. It was a bill passed by parliament concerning a state guarantee of the 20.887 Euro compensation on Icesave accounts mandated by the European Union. The reason was that the corresponding treaty governing the payment of that compensation was widely considered to be grossly unfair in Iceland thanks to a variety of issues ranging from the amount, the interests, the fact that people felt that the EU screwed up as badly as their own leaders and a demagogic flag waiving campaign by the right wing Independence and Progressive parties. This is particularly ironic because those two parties created the completely deregulated environment in which the Icelandic banking system grew way beyond anything sensible and the Independence party was in fact the one who's ineptitude eventually caused the (by then) inevitable 2008 collapse. The whole Icesave mess is still being re-negotiated by the Icelanders, the Dutch and the British while the Icelandic president, an ardent publicity hound, is already threatening to refer any new agreement to another plebiscite. While the Independence and Progressive parties and their grass roots are standing firmly behind him. The really funny bit is that both the Independence and Progressive parties are archconservative. The president Mr. Grimsson, however, was formerly a major player in a quite radically socialist political party and the conservatives who, used to really despise this guy, are now praising him as a guardian of democracy and national independence. This is a plot that the authors of even the sharpest political TV-satire shows you can name would be very proud of had they managed to dream it up.
Going default will be a short-lived remedy. The country will go back to 1990 in terms of market appeal and productivity. And yes, if the big tech companies leave, the hope of reacquiring a high-tech knowledge industry will go away as well.
Paul Krugman's latest column addresses this. The main point is that Iceland let the banks default, while Ireland took the banks debts as public debts and guaranteed it. In the end, Iceland has recovered while Ireland's people have to bear the burden due to austerity measures.
Iceland didn't let it's banks default as part of an act of clever crisis management even if that's what the members of the firmly right wing Icelandic independence party will confidently tell you. What happened was that a series of governments (dominated by the independence party) and stuffed full of free market fundamentalists sat around from the mid-nineties to 2008, deregulating everything, letting the banks grow at a fantastic pace and crippling the various organizations that were supposed to regulate the financial industry. For years they just held their ears shut singing: "lalalalalala... I can't hear you!" whenever somebody criticized the state of the icelandinc banks and the fact that they had become 12 times the size of the national GDP meaning that the state was therefore unable to back them up in a crisis. By the time the crisis finally hit the Icelandic government was completely bowled over. The Independence party had by now formed a coalition with the Social Democrats who proved just as useless as their right wing coalition partner and did little other than watch while the Independence party (who also dominated the central bank) fumbled about and caused things to fall apart. There were no emergency plans in place, nobody had anticipated this. After all, the infallible all-knowing free market should not act like this should it? They finally decided, at the climax of an epic panic attack, to nationalize the most endebted bank, Glitnir, which caused the whole icelandic banking sector to collapse like a row of dominos. Krugman (probably unintentionally) gives you the impression that the Icelandic Government that presided over the 2008 collapse allowed the banks to default by clever design when in reality they simply "pulled a Homer" a phrase which wikipedia defines as: "to succeed despite idiocy". Like Mr. Krugman I pity the Irish for their successful efforts to postpone the pain by a couple of years because it made the problem exponentially worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, but more importantly (IMO), they aren't bundling Android with their "monopoly" produce of search. Microsoft didn't just give IE away for free... they took their dominant position of OS distribution, and bundled in a free-as-in-beer IE, AND (initially) did not provide any way to remove it. They also provided major "incentives" (read; deterrents) to hardware distributors to encourage them to only ship Windows
I don't really care if Google is doing exactly the same thing as Microsoft did back in the day. I don't care whether corporations are doing what they do out of a desire to be evil or not. If somebody becomes so dominant in some market segment that they have a 80-90% market share that company has become too big a player. Why did you put the word monopoly in scare quotes when referring to Google and the internet search business? The last time I looked Google had something like a 85% share of the internet search market. That sounds like a monopoly to me and monopoly is always bad. Microsoft has a similar dominance on the desktop computer OS market, which is also bad. I'm sure the all knowing, self-correcting and ever perfect free market will eventually sort this out. Unfortunately the all knowing, self-correcting and ever perfect free market seems to have a habit of taking it's own sweet time when it comes to taking down monopolies so I'll applaud any help the free market gets from competition/antitrust watchdogs or anybody else willing to light a fire under the monopolist's posteriors. I have made my own tiny contribution by making increasing use of Bing and other alternative search engines instead of Google. I generally don't like Microsoft but I like Google's search monopoly even less. I became a OS X/Linux user for the exact same reason vis-Ã-vis Microsoft's OS monopoly.
... aw crap! ... there is no Mac App Store access for my country. Should I do what the local Apple dealer is telling me which is go to a gift card scalper? The one they recommend charges $62.50 for a $50 giftcard. The bastards were happy enough to sell me a Mac but now I'm stuck dealing with scalpers to get OS updates. It was bad enough having to shell out giftcard money for XCode which used to be freely downloadable. I didn't really care that much either that my country has not been 'blessed' with an iOS App Store by saint Steve, I don't buy that much iPhone software anyway but the whole Mac App Store concept simply sucks ass.
Nuff said...
And Win98's improved USB support certainly helped too.
Ahhh yes..... Window 98's improved USB support, that takes me back a few years.
The estate is claiming that this infringes on Tolkien's publicity rights, but if that's the case, would it make almost all 'historical fiction' illegal?
More evidence that the copyright term is much too long.
The Right of Publicity can be defined simply as the right of an individual to control the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness or other unequivocal aspects of one's identity.
Maybe I'm missing something really obvious but I was always under the impression that publicity and privacy rights are separate from copyright. This lawsuit is bloody ridiculous and I hope the Tolkien estate loses but as far as I can tell it has very little to do with copyright law.
Samsung Galaxy Tab. This was actually pretty good. Fast, responsive and sensitive screen. But you could tell the apps were designed for a smaller screen and just stretched onto this larger one.
Not only that, every time you want to change your grip or rotate the Galaxy Tab those capacitive buttons on the extreme edge of the thing keep getting accidentally activated. The iPad has only one mechanical button like the iPhone and a buffer zone around the display so your fingers don't accidentally activate something on the screen. Also full international keyboard support on the Galaxy Tab is only available on that lame Swype keyboard, not the regular one.
I hope not. I wish people had the good sense to keep a lid on this sort of thing. If you publish this kind of data the bottom-feeders descend on them and they are usually looted out much faster than they can be ever be excavated. I know the looters have access to Google's services too but there is no reason to make it any easier for them than it has to be.
Don't forget that you're only having that revenue because of them in the first place.
The same can be said about Apple and Microsoft. Anybody who develops software for their OS'es has revenue because of MS and Apple. That does not give them the right to mandate a 30% ' industry-standard' tax on anybody who develops for their platform. Apple has done that with the iPhone and is trying it with OS X and I for one will not be paying that tax if I can in any way avoid it. I can make up my own mind about who does my marketing, payment processing, distribution, in-game-sales, etc.. and what currency I choose to do business in. These things are still going to cut into my profits but at least I'll be free to choose service providers and switch providers if somebody doesn't perform. Mind you with the Apple app store tax at least you are getting free distribution and access to marketing resources, and a few other things. That at least is something worth thinking about even if I am skeptical as to the value of those services since IMHO the AppStore is suboptimal in terms of being a way to sell your product... that plus I deeply dislike lock-in of any kind. As far as I can tell, with this Facebook tax, you get nothing back other than the privilege of integrating your app on Facebook's web page. Do you at least get the App hosted on Facebook's server farms in return for that 30% cut? Do you get free advertising? Does their support center handle your customer's service requests? If the answer to any of that is yes I might reconsider but I still don't care for lock-in. I am pleased that in Google Android, Apple and it's iPhone/iPod franchise finally has a competitor capable of dishing out some punishment and I sure as hell hope Facebook get's some of that same medicine.
RTFA you Fucking Moron. Seriously, get your head out of your ass and fucking READ IT. The Palestinians are the ones doing all the giving here, Israel is still WAY outside it's fucking borders, but stupid fucking racist retarded cunts like you are the reason it can get away with it. One day in the future we'll all be saddened that Israel was the child of ethnic cleansing and racism, and chose instead of becoming a beacon to inflict misery upon a new set of innocents.
Isn't it just amazing how the elegance, persuasiveness and logical soundness of an argument grows exponentially every time the author works another vulgar expletive into it?
So I get to waste time putting money on that special card so that the app can act as the card at the register. Anyone else think this is incredibly dumb? I can whip out my debit/credit card faster than you can load your starbucks app.
The professor teaching me reactive systems theory insists that a computer scientist is a reactive system that outputs coins to obtain coffee so that he/she can output/publish papers. Given that analysis I'd say that any alternative ways of obtaining coffee other than just using coins, bills or credit cards, will make computer scientists (and most other professionals for that matter) more productive. Imagine if you forgot your wallet at home, no cofee..... productivity..... grinding.... to.... a.... halt........ With this app you'd still be able to get your fix and earn your paycheck. This app contributes to the economic growth that is essential to pull us out of this recession and propel us into the next bubble. So no, this is not such a dumb idea after all.
You're just a meta-wanker now, because I have to ask, "How does Google discourage publications from using the term 'googling' in reference to web-searches?"
Whine, piss and moan ... The next time you decide to ooze your venom over somebody at least RTFA they link to first it's not that hard.
Avoiding genericide .... Google has gone to lengths to prevent this process, discouraging publications from using the term 'googling' in reference to web-searches. In 2006, both the Oxford English Dictionary[7] and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary[11] struck a balance between acknowledging widespread use of the verb coinage and preserving the particular search engine's association with the coinage, defining google (all lower case, with -le ending) as a verb meaning "use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".
Trademark owners will naturally seek to maximize the popularity of their marks. However, generic use of a trademark presents an inherent risk to the effective enforcement of trademark rights and may ultimately lead to genericide
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.
My mother was given a Samsung Galaxy Tab a few weeks ago. It's a pretty nice tablet but it's not quite as good as the iPad and neither is a replacement for my MacBook or any reasonably compact laptop for that matter. The Galaxy Tab has all sorts of capacitive buttons on the rim of the display that get activated accidentally if you are careless with your fingers while manupulating it. I can't fault the performance, not that I have done insane benchmark tests, but it seems to be every bit as snappy as the iPad. The Biggest problem with the Galaxy Tab is the Android software, it was originally a mobile phone OS and it shows a bit. If the iPad gets a ranking of 10 i'd allocate the Galay Tab an 8. There is nothing you can do about the irritating capacitive buttons but i'd still give the Galaxy Tab a 9 if they'd fix some irritating things about Samsung's Android OS flavor such as gigantic drop down boxes and dialogs, long paths to some menu items, the slightly erratic gesture response and the fact that international support for some European alphabets only exists in the SWYPE keyboard (which doesn't work all that well IMHO) but not in the regular keyboard. One other thing that annoys me about the Galaxy Tab is that I can't seem to be able to find the kindle App for it on Android market but that's hardly Samsung's fault. I'd say the iPad fairly narrowly wins out due to slightly better software and the fact that it has no capacitive buttons which eliminates accidental input.
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
I actually had to write a paper on this subject for an SQA class I took. The result among other things was (as if we didn't know that already) that PHBs respond to numbers and little else (except maybe Blackberrys) and a scary percentage of them think software testing isn't worth doing beyond weeding out the worst of the bugs because it offers a low return of investment. To convince your PHB you have to gather metrics. How much does an error cost if that error makes it undetected into a marketed product? How much would do save if we caught it early by testing? How much of a reduction in the frequency of, say... buffer overflow or SQL injection bugs, etc... have you achieved by implementing software testing in some other project? If you don't have any SQA enabled projects to fall back on you can try to cite case studies or CS papers. Case studies are probably better since they are less theoretical and not loaded with a huge amount of statistics. Keep in mind that the level of SQA that is justifiable for projects varies according to their nature. If this is an internal product never used by external parties you can get away with much less SQA than if it is used by external customers. Metrics gathering is also a key component in pretty much everything else SQA related, root cause analysis, test coverage analysis, determining code coverage, deciding on where to focus tests... the list goes on and on.
Yes, let's ban a useful tool because some people are too meek to ask others to stop doing distracting things with their laptops. [rolls eyes] When did people become so afraid? Is it really that hard to respectfully ask someone to change their behavior so as not to disturb others? Are we to ban a useful technology in the classroom because of a handful of bozos?
I use my laptop for taking notes both in and out of lectures. I use Texshop for note taking and I have gotten pretty good at it. I also use my laptop for looking stuff up during lectures. This last semester I was in a software-theory class where the lecturer used more acronyms than a one of those acronym laden US military training manuals and the laptop came in pretty handy for looking them up. If people really want to pay horrendous school fees and then spend lectures playing Farmville or pruning their Facebook page that really is their own business, they are paying a lot of money for the privilege of failing the course, but that's their business. If you ban laptops on account of these procrastinators, thus punishing the people who use laptops to do useful stuff during lectures, the procrastinators will simply fall back on some more time tested way of procrastinating and not paying attention to the lecture. As for the idea voiced by some people here that laptops should be banned because the people sitting behind me feel disturbed by the brief flashing on my screen every time I re-typeset my notes they can IMHO stop whining and focus their attention on the lecturer and his slides and not my laptop screen.
We're crying in the rain we can't push the jews into the sea, or burn them. More than likely. After all it's the defacto policy of hizbullah and hamas to kill them, with no peace ever.
Ah a well informed person. Do you know the death-rates between the parties in the last 20 years? Every year it is something like: Palestina: 700+ more than 200+ children, more than 200+ woman. Israel: 0-15. Always soldiers. But good to know you are informed!
It's true that the Israelis kill an awful lot of Palestinian civilians and that the situation in Gaza and the occupied territories is something Israel should be ashamed of. But claiming that Hamas, the al-Aqsa brigades et al. only kill soldiers is a blatant falsehood. Every time one of those bozos blows him self up on a bus it's not soldiers that get killed. On the other hand, every time the Israelis decide to 'defend them selves', drop a lavish amount of ordinance on the Gaza strip or Lebanon, send in the tanks and kill a whole bunch of civilians and a few guerillas, a thousand new recruits join Hamas and Hezbollah. The longer I watch the Israelis and the Palestinians go at it the more it becomes clear that neither party actually wants peace. They have become so used to living in state of perpetual war it's hard for them to imagine a world without it. The Palestinians are dominated to a large extend by militant religious fundamentalists and the Israelis have developed a political system that is so dominated by hard nosed ex-military types it's hard to tell where the armed forces stop and the nominally civilian government starts.
Wikileaks should be exposing corruption...
That is exactly what these documents allegedly contain. US diplomatic reports of corruption and other shenanigans in practically every country where the USA has an embassy. This is only damaging to the US because it can't keep a lid on other people dirty laundry it's the people who own the dirty laundry that will be most affected.
These bailouts are nothing more but the partial enslavement of Irish taxpayers in order to rescue foreign banks and governments.
Sure the banks and speculators have much to answer for but they are not the only ones to blame. I did not see the Irish or anybody else for that matter standing outside their government buildings and parliament house protesting the insane expansion of the economy while everything was booming and the money flowed. Let's not forget that somebody had to elect into office the pricks that created the environment in which this mess could happen. Maybe we should be more careful about whom we vote into office next time?
Once Landsbanki collapsed the debt did become a public debt, and in a way Iceland did default: in a referendum, its people decided to compensate only Icelandic citizens. The clever part is the way they did it: simply deciding not to honour the guarantees on their bank, they avoided being punished by a poor credit rating. Of course no Iceland bank will ever get a European banking license again, but at this point who cares?
Not quite... What you are referring to is the Icesave dispute. What the icelandic president refused to sign and referred to a plebiscite wasn't whether or not to repay of the Icesave debt. It was a bill passed by parliament concerning a state guarantee of the 20.887 Euro compensation on Icesave accounts mandated by the European Union. The reason was that the corresponding treaty governing the payment of that compensation was widely considered to be grossly unfair in Iceland thanks to a variety of issues ranging from the amount, the interests, the fact that people felt that the EU screwed up as badly as their own leaders and a demagogic flag waiving campaign by the right wing Independence and Progressive parties. This is particularly ironic because those two parties created the completely deregulated environment in which the Icelandic banking system grew way beyond anything sensible and the Independence party was in fact the one who's ineptitude eventually caused the (by then) inevitable 2008 collapse. The whole Icesave mess is still being re-negotiated by the Icelanders, the Dutch and the British while the Icelandic president, an ardent publicity hound, is already threatening to refer any new agreement to another plebiscite. While the Independence and Progressive parties and their grass roots are standing firmly behind him. The really funny bit is that both the Independence and Progressive parties are archconservative. The president Mr. Grimsson, however, was formerly a major player in a quite radically socialist political party and the conservatives who, used to really despise this guy, are now praising him as a guardian of democracy and national independence. This is a plot that the authors of even the sharpest political TV-satire shows you can name would be very proud of had they managed to dream it up.
Going default will be a short-lived remedy. The country will go back to 1990 in terms of market appeal and productivity. And yes, if the big tech companies leave, the hope of reacquiring a high-tech knowledge industry will go away as well.
Paul Krugman's latest column addresses this. The main point is that Iceland let the banks default, while Ireland took the banks debts as public debts and guaranteed it. In the end, Iceland has recovered while Ireland's people have to bear the burden due to austerity measures.
Iceland didn't let it's banks default as part of an act of clever crisis management even if that's what the members of the firmly right wing Icelandic independence party will confidently tell you. What happened was that a series of governments (dominated by the independence party) and stuffed full of free market fundamentalists sat around from the mid-nineties to 2008, deregulating everything, letting the banks grow at a fantastic pace and crippling the various organizations that were supposed to regulate the financial industry. For years they just held their ears shut singing: "lalalalalala... I can't hear you!" whenever somebody criticized the state of the icelandinc banks and the fact that they had become 12 times the size of the national GDP meaning that the state was therefore unable to back them up in a crisis. By the time the crisis finally hit the Icelandic government was completely bowled over. The Independence party had by now formed a coalition with the Social Democrats who proved just as useless as their right wing coalition partner and did little other than watch while the Independence party (who also dominated the central bank) fumbled about and caused things to fall apart. There were no emergency plans in place, nobody had anticipated this. After all, the infallible all-knowing free market should not act like this should it? They finally decided, at the climax of an epic panic attack, to nationalize the most endebted bank, Glitnir, which caused the whole icelandic banking sector to collapse like a row of dominos. Krugman (probably unintentionally) gives you the impression that the Icelandic Government that presided over the 2008 collapse allowed the banks to default by clever design when in reality they simply "pulled a Homer" a phrase which wikipedia defines as: "to succeed despite idiocy". Like Mr. Krugman I pity the Irish for their successful efforts to postpone the pain by a couple of years because it made the problem exponentially worse.