Excluding CPU and Ram variations, Dell offers what, a dozen desktop platform and a half-dozen notebooks ? Each one of those sells several million units. Don't you think it would be rather trivial to book ONE GUY (of the 65000 or so people they employ) to do Linux testing on each distinct model ? Hell I could probably do it all in a week or two.
Dell's treatment of Linux overall has been a joke. I've never seen any decent SKU offered with Linux, only the most craptacular bargain-barrel ones like these "laptops" with a single-core AMD processor. What if I want the i7 with 8gb of Ram ? The damned hardware is already expensive enough as it is, I don't need to blow an extra $200 on Windows 7 Ultimate just because Dell thinks I'm a sucker. If they must pigeonhole software with hardware, at least put Ubuntu on the shit ones, and Gentoo on the big ones:) Or better yet: give me a blank hard drive. Naked, empty, unviolated. The first thing most geeks do anyway is wipe the disk and install a clean OS without crapware.
There needs to be new blood in the ISP industry. I personally think we should have a nationwide government-run fiber network, just like any other public utility. Failing that, a wealthy thrill-seeking investor could do in a pinch. It's not exactly difficult to undercut the big boys, you just have to swallow the very costly barrier to entry. These monolithic 19th-century telcos simply don't have the flexibility to compete, and they all know it, which is why they never rock the boat...
Why don't cities bill pedestrians and motorists by the number of miles they've traveled so the bedridden and terminally-handicapped don't pay for streets they don't use ? You could also add a door-crossing fee to the bill as well. They could offer weight tiers for the users so the fatter the walker, the more expensive the amount per mile.
The internet has evolved to a point where it is seen as a public utility. It should be offered, managed and subsidized like any other public utility. Governments build roads and waterworks, each of which are orders of magnitude more costly to deploy and maintain than even the most exotic data networks.
If our government can piss $1B on a moronic G20 meeting and related psyops, surely they could spend that money to build a national ISP that makes Rogers look like a science fair runner-up.
“ensure we are giving those with higher demands the option to choose more speed or bandwidth while ensuring those whose needs are not as great to have lower priced tiers,”
And yet, they are lowering the cap on the "Extreme" service by 12%.
For comparison, I push out an average of 4500gb a month on my colocated web server, and it costs less than my residential cable internet. What Rogers is charging for overage is about 200 times my relatively high bulk cost, considering I'm small peas in the colo world.
Dude, they punish and blackmail EVERY TIER. My internet bill is about $120 because I am one of those who consistently uses more than 95gb per month. According to Rogers, people who use that kind of bandwidth can only be evil pirates. According to my own traffic logs, I am a geek who really values offsite backups, remote desktop access and ferrying new content to/from my web server somewhere in Seattle.
Rogers is ass, but they're the lesser of several evils up here. Bell's network conks out on a daily basis, even when it's up the speed is pathetic and latency is worse than my old 9600 baud. All the other "ISPs" are Bell resellers, cheaper but equally fucked - even the legendary TekSavvy is at the mercy of Bell's colonary spasms.
And I have yet to hear any word about residential fiber up here. What Bell calls "Fibe" is just ADSL 2 and the fiber terminates at the DSLAM, like it has for 15 years.
What do I want ? Simple. I want a 100mbit shared line in my building. They call this place "Silicon Valley North", well then where's my fucking pipe ?
If I guess by the number of WiFi networks I've scanned, at least 25 tenants have broadband in my building alone. Now being a sysadmin, I know a thing or two about fiber, and I know that 25 times $50 a month is enough to bring a 100mb line here. With a bit of infrastructure, that could be aggregated up to a gbit line to service a few city blocks. It's certainly more bandwidth than Rogers is providing us.
I think it's kinda funny, I think it's kinda sad, That goalie we just traded was the best we ever had. I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take, Our manager's a retard, It's a very very... mad world.
Fair use or not, I for one am sick of every Youtube video having a goddamned top-40 hip-hop soundtrack.
I don't need 50-Cent to tell me again how often he's been shot in the face, while I'm trying to follow some lame tutorial about a piece of software that was designed by proto-germanic sado-masochists.
Maybe Youtube should have a heuristic that says "You seem to be 12 years old and/or an imbecile. Click OK to remove this vapid audio track, or click Cancel to be blessed by the almighty banhammer."
From the very moment this idiotic service was announced, we geeks simply "did the math" and predicted this outcome rather precisely. Even if they had instantaneous video compression, they still can't exceed the base latency of the network. If it's already difficult to just receive conventional multiplayer packets quickly enough, then streaming a 100-fold larger video sure as shit won't make things any faster.
It's not like a semi-decent gaming rig costs much anymore. You don't need quad GPUs and SSD raid to play Unreal Tournament, you just need a plain $450 PC with a $150 mid-range GPU. Sure, my $7000 workstation eats four instances of Crysis for breakfast, but frankly the same games ran just fine on my previous PC which was already 4 years old (except for Crysis).
I know this for fact, because there's a very inexpensive AMD X3 system sitting at my feet, of which I've built and sold several to cash-strapped gamers, most often with a Radeon 5770 card. They might not crank everything up to "Ultra details" I'll bet it still looks sharper and more fluid than anything OnLive could deliver, because they are unfavorably bottlenecked - that's the nature of online video streaming, you have to choose a compromise between bandwidth and display quality, can't have both.
"OnLive: for suckers, by suckers. The first ten callers will receive a special deal on this bridge we're selling, CALL NOW!"
Imagine how hard it is for us crazies above 150 to conceive of why the sub-150s are even allowed to leave the testing room alive.
The interesting (scary for norms) thing about this Chinese hiring practice is I think it is self-defeating. People will find ways to cheat on the test, and then what ? "You can't fire me, I have over 9000 IQ". A more far-fetched idea is that IQ discrimination could soften the public up to the idea of eugenics. Just like 9/11 opened the door for Americans to get repeatedly assfucked by their own government, having an explicit IQ requirement for a job may eventually spill over to an IQ requirement for subsidized hospital care, or the often-mused birth permit. In the immediate it does imply that higher IQ translates to higher paying jobs, thus segmenting society both financially and intellectually.
I have Dragon Age, I played it for a few hours, arrived at some cliché double-cross in the plot over some emo chick, suddenly wished I had a rocket launcher to kill all those boring old monastery pricks and called it quits. The game has stayed in its box ever since. Everyone is raving about it, I was incredibly annoyed the whole time. Was I even playing the same game ?
So I ask you, what do you like about Dragon Age, and if (when) I give it another chance, what should I be looking for ? Was I simply stuck in a boring prologue, akin to FFXIII's 26-hour "intro" ?
It should be clear to anyone by now that the patent office does not employ anyone even remotely capable of programming, because these simple algorithms wouldn't pass the "could any random dumbass coder figure it out" test.
I've used both Shazam and Midomi, preferring the latter, and while Midomi continues to wow me with its singing/humming and speech recognition, the Shazam algo seemed obvious to me after a half-dozen tests. Like 99% of all audio processing jobs, they run an FFT to translate the raw audio into the frequency domain, then single out the dominant tones. Auto-tune does that, Melodyne does that, multi-band compressors do that, hell even some advanced reverb effects do it. The only "special" thing Shazam does is it serializes those tuples into (presumably) a short string that can be easily searched within a database.
The tech behind Shazam I believe anyone with even modest FFT experience could produce with ease. What's not so obvious is the database of precalculated soundprints they've amassed; that's where the real value is. Any idiot can create a filtered hash of a sound bite, but if he has nothing against which to compare it, the hash is useless. That still isn't an "invention" per-se, just a financial hurdle. I'm guessing Shazam and Midomi have greased the proper palms to gain access to vast music libraries to populate their hash database.
I'm surprised there's no mention of Midomi, which takes the soundprinting idea a bit further by allowing the user to sing or hum the tune - and while I have perfect pitch (but an awful voice), I've had my utterly tone-deaf friend try it and it still worked over half the time.
So Shazam, with their weak algorithm, is patent-trolling while Midomi seems quite confident no one can scratch their better tech. Isn't that the gist of all that's wrong with patents today ?
TRIM performance is directly tied to an SSD's erase performance. All TRIM does is tell the SSD which blocks are free to erase in its spare time. EVERY write to a NAND cell requires an erase, so if the SSD can perform that step while the system is idle, the next write to that cell can be performed immediately.
TRIM allows SSDs to "cheat" by doing some of the work ahead of time. The dirty performance is the normal, sustainable speed you should expect from your SSD. Any gains from TRIM are the result of pre-erasing cells when you're idling... if your system never idles (e.g. a busy database), TRIM won't help at all.
Yes and no. Wear-leveling happens with or without TRIM, but what TRIM does is tell the SSD controller that a block can be treated as "virgin", meaning it can be overwritten in a single pass. This is an optimization as normally one must read the contents of an entire block, combine it with the incoming data, erase the block on-disk and finally write the newly-merged data.
Contrary to popular ignorance, the slowdown is not caused by "fragmentation" - that's backwards, when the drive is clean it is cheating by skipping part of the write cycle. In other words, an SSD's dirty performance is its normal, sustainable speed. When it is clean, it can go faster because it is being LAZY, by short-cutting the Read-Erase-Update cycle. For obvious reasons, most SSD vendors, particularly in the consumer segment, advertise the maximum speed when really the honest thing would be to advertise the minimum speed.
Dolphin's column view is kind of crap, but that doesn't mean it's useless. Shuffling files and folders around is something I do daily, and it's mighty nice when I can access several dozen folders from one window, rather than having to open a bunch of individual windows and juggle them with Alt-Tab or very meticulous tiling.
That said, the fact that this view is predominantly used on Apple's nerfed OS is quite ridiculous.
I care about Java on the desktop in that I strongly despise it. I'd say over the my 14 years of involuntary contact with Java, I've had about a 50/50 success rate running desktop Java apps. Either they break due to some dependency or hardcoded path failure, or they run but the UI is so absurdly messed up it makes it unusable. Error handling also seems like a chore as more of the time they seem to be ignored.
I'll be 100% frank here: 14 years ago as a teenager, I started learning Java. I built a few web applets and some standalone apps, got extremely fed up with the abysmal performance and boilerplate tedium, and went back to my beloved Pascal/Delphi and C. Years later when I was required to deal with other people's Java apps and code, the pain of it all led me to religiously avoid both Java jobs and Java coders. There is so much navel-gazing in a Java project: interfaces to classes to functions to tag libraries, everything abstracted ten levels deep... are Java coders paid per line of code ?:P There was a joke "Hello World" program that was about 5 pages long, but it wasn't funny to me because that's exactly what most commercial code looks like.
To this day, I see the whole Java universe as a make-work project for millions of incompetent programmers. When job hunting if I am asked if I do Java, I proudly respond "Fuck NO!". Half the time it elicits strong laughter followed by "Amen, brother!", the rest of the time it conveniently ends an interview for a job I would surely hate.
I don't really get why people care about how many bars they get. I have never noticed any impact on call quality or even 3G speed, whether I have one bar or all four. On a jailbroken phone, you can switch the bars to a dB number - not that I know much about it. That may give some insight into the ratio of signal quality to bars. Really, the only time I drop calls is when I walk into an elevator. I spend more time looking at my WiFi strength than my cell bars.
I'm not on AT&T so maybe the Canadian telco cartel puts out better SNR in my area, or maybe I'm of the opinion that if the damn thing works, it ain't broken. Maybe they should change the bars to something idiot-proof like "Perfect / might drop / no service". Anything quantifiable is just a dangerous proposition when dealing with Americans, they always want more of whatever. If the max is 5 bars then 4 is "not good enough". You can thank rampant consumerism for those unrealistic ideals.
Disclosure: I once worked for Dell (briefly), right around the time we learned about the faulty capacitors in GX270 boards. I frankly don't give a crap about the company, I just like their prosumer LCDs.
So Dell found out about the flaky capacitors, right around the same time everyone else noticed motherboards were going "POP-SSsssss..." and dying. It's not Dell's fault that they were sold shitty caps, every other large manufacturer was duped just the same. I also don't think Dell was in the wrong for being cautious about disclosure, because it does indeed depend on how hard you push your PC. Some people still use their "faulty" eight-year-old GX270 without issue to this day; others had them fail within months. It would have been financially irresponsible to replace every single GX270, so we waited for people to call us, and they did. I, for one, was very quick about dispatching new GX270 boards, and with my influential position I encouraged the other 200 techs at our site to do the same. No beating around the bush, no idiotic mock-troubleshooting, even if the warranty had lapsed just swap the board and get on with it. A few weeks later we learned my proactive replacement had become the official policy, as it is the only honest and respectable thing to do.
Dell did right, in my opinion. What do you think Asus, Gigabyte or MSI would do if you reported bad caps, six months after your warranty lapsed ? They'd ship your board back, unrepaired, and charge you for shipping + a diagnostic fee, effectively saying "Our bad, but fuck you anyway".
The fraud they've committed to organize this meeting is peanuts compared to the numerous frauds they have planned DURING the meeting.
There's a reason people protest the G20. It's yet another CFR / Bilderberg type of gig where a handful of crooked lying bastards discuss exactly how and how hard they are going to fuck us during the following year.
Me, I wish some of those security guards would take advantage of the situation and turn against their employers. Fuck unicorns, let the fascists eat lead.
But that's just the problem... English borrows from every other language, but the words are either taken directly from the native pronunciation, or bastardized into more familiar phonemes and used as one-off slang.
Take "shopping" for example. Americans say "SHAW-ping", the French say "shuh-PEENG!". We actually take your word, say it like we would a French word, and from there we stem it as usual:
infinitive: shopper (shuh-PAY) past: shoppais (shuh-PEH) future: shopperai (shuh-puh-RAY) state: shoppé (shuh-PAY like the infinitive)
Once you learn one such anglicism, you can apply the same tranformation to just about any other verb. So in reality, for each new word you learn, you actually acquire all the dozens of variations on that word, no special pronunciation just the same familiar patterns.
Hey that's great. If the dumb kids at Waterloo are excited about 20 bytes / sec, I have this here bleeding-edge V32 modem that'll do over one thousand bytes per second over a plain old telephone line. You can't imagine all the fun I had downloading JPGs on this thing back in the 80's^H^H^H^Hfuture telecommunications lab. Mmmm.. V32, that's like four mustang engines on a modem.
Slashdot Mirror
Excluding CPU and Ram variations, Dell offers what, a dozen desktop platform and a half-dozen notebooks ? Each one of those sells several million units. Don't you think it would be rather trivial to book ONE GUY (of the 65000 or so people they employ) to do Linux testing on each distinct model ? Hell I could probably do it all in a week or two.
Dell's treatment of Linux overall has been a joke. I've never seen any decent SKU offered with Linux, only the most craptacular bargain-barrel ones like these "laptops" with a single-core AMD processor. What if I want the i7 with 8gb of Ram ? The damned hardware is already expensive enough as it is, I don't need to blow an extra $200 on Windows 7 Ultimate just because Dell thinks I'm a sucker. If they must pigeonhole software with hardware, at least put Ubuntu on the shit ones, and Gentoo on the big ones :) Or better yet: give me a blank hard drive. Naked, empty, unviolated. The first thing most geeks do anyway is wipe the disk and install a clean OS without crapware.
There needs to be new blood in the ISP industry. I personally think we should have a nationwide government-run fiber network, just like any other public utility. Failing that, a wealthy thrill-seeking investor could do in a pinch. It's not exactly difficult to undercut the big boys, you just have to swallow the very costly barrier to entry. These monolithic 19th-century telcos simply don't have the flexibility to compete, and they all know it, which is why they never rock the boat...
Why don't cities bill pedestrians and motorists by the number of miles they've traveled so the bedridden and terminally-handicapped don't pay for streets they don't use ? You could also add a door-crossing fee to the bill as well. They could offer weight tiers for the users so the fatter the walker, the more expensive the amount per mile.
The internet has evolved to a point where it is seen as a public utility. It should be offered, managed and subsidized like any other public utility. Governments build roads and waterworks, each of which are orders of magnitude more costly to deploy and maintain than even the most exotic data networks.
If our government can piss $1B on a moronic G20 meeting and related psyops, surely they could spend that money to build a national ISP that makes Rogers look like a science fair runner-up.
FTA:
“ensure we are giving those with higher demands the option to choose more speed or bandwidth while ensuring those whose needs are not as great to have lower priced tiers,”
And yet, they are lowering the cap on the "Extreme" service by 12%.
For comparison, I push out an average of 4500gb a month on my colocated web server, and it costs less than my residential cable internet. What Rogers is charging for overage is about 200 times my relatively high bulk cost, considering I'm small peas in the colo world.
Dude, they punish and blackmail EVERY TIER. My internet bill is about $120 because I am one of those who consistently uses more than 95gb per month. According to Rogers, people who use that kind of bandwidth can only be evil pirates. According to my own traffic logs, I am a geek who really values offsite backups, remote desktop access and ferrying new content to/from my web server somewhere in Seattle.
Rogers is ass, but they're the lesser of several evils up here. Bell's network conks out on a daily basis, even when it's up the speed is pathetic and latency is worse than my old 9600 baud. All the other "ISPs" are Bell resellers, cheaper but equally fucked - even the legendary TekSavvy is at the mercy of Bell's colonary spasms.
And I have yet to hear any word about residential fiber up here. What Bell calls "Fibe" is just ADSL 2 and the fiber terminates at the DSLAM, like it has for 15 years.
What do I want ? Simple. I want a 100mbit shared line in my building. They call this place "Silicon Valley North", well then where's my fucking pipe ?
If I guess by the number of WiFi networks I've scanned, at least 25 tenants have broadband in my building alone. Now being a sysadmin, I know a thing or two about fiber, and I know that 25 times $50 a month is enough to bring a 100mb line here. With a bit of infrastructure, that could be aggregated up to a gbit line to service a few city blocks. It's certainly more bandwidth than Rogers is providing us.
Don't forget Gary Jules' "Mad World" either...
I think it's kinda funny,
I think it's kinda sad,
That goalie we just traded
was the best we ever had.
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take,
Our manager's a retard,
It's a very very... mad world.
Fair use or not, I for one am sick of every Youtube video having a goddamned top-40 hip-hop soundtrack.
I don't need 50-Cent to tell me again how often he's been shot in the face, while I'm trying to follow some lame tutorial about a piece of software that was designed by proto-germanic sado-masochists.
Maybe Youtube should have a heuristic that says "You seem to be 12 years old and/or an imbecile. Click OK to remove this vapid audio track, or click Cancel to be blessed by the almighty banhammer."
From the very moment this idiotic service was announced, we geeks simply "did the math" and predicted this outcome rather precisely. Even if they had instantaneous video compression, they still can't exceed the base latency of the network. If it's already difficult to just receive conventional multiplayer packets quickly enough, then streaming a 100-fold larger video sure as shit won't make things any faster.
It's not like a semi-decent gaming rig costs much anymore. You don't need quad GPUs and SSD raid to play Unreal Tournament, you just need a plain $450 PC with a $150 mid-range GPU. Sure, my $7000 workstation eats four instances of Crysis for breakfast, but frankly the same games ran just fine on my previous PC which was already 4 years old (except for Crysis).
I know this for fact, because there's a very inexpensive AMD X3 system sitting at my feet, of which I've built and sold several to cash-strapped gamers, most often with a Radeon 5770 card. They might not crank everything up to "Ultra details" I'll bet it still looks sharper and more fluid than anything OnLive could deliver, because they are unfavorably bottlenecked - that's the nature of online video streaming, you have to choose a compromise between bandwidth and display quality, can't have both.
"OnLive: for suckers, by suckers. The first ten callers will receive a special deal on this bridge we're selling, CALL NOW!"
Imagine how hard it is for us crazies above 150 to conceive of why the sub-150s are even allowed to leave the testing room alive.
The interesting (scary for norms) thing about this Chinese hiring practice is I think it is self-defeating. People will find ways to cheat on the test, and then what ? "You can't fire me, I have over 9000 IQ". A more far-fetched idea is that IQ discrimination could soften the public up to the idea of eugenics. Just like 9/11 opened the door for Americans to get repeatedly assfucked by their own government, having an explicit IQ requirement for a job may eventually spill over to an IQ requirement for subsidized hospital care, or the often-mused birth permit. In the immediate it does imply that higher IQ translates to higher paying jobs, thus segmenting society both financially and intellectually.
Nah they just licensed Diebold's tech, which resulted in negative fractions, so they instead took 10 million from some unsuspecting Floridian.
Ok fellow nerds, help a brother out.
I have Dragon Age, I played it for a few hours, arrived at some cliché double-cross in the plot over some emo chick, suddenly wished I had a rocket launcher to kill all those boring old monastery pricks and called it quits. The game has stayed in its box ever since. Everyone is raving about it, I was incredibly annoyed the whole time. Was I even playing the same game ?
So I ask you, what do you like about Dragon Age, and if (when) I give it another chance, what should I be looking for ? Was I simply stuck in a boring prologue, akin to FFXIII's 26-hour "intro" ?
It should be clear to anyone by now that the patent office does not employ anyone even remotely capable of programming, because these simple algorithms wouldn't pass the "could any random dumbass coder figure it out" test.
I've used both Shazam and Midomi, preferring the latter, and while Midomi continues to wow me with its singing/humming and speech recognition, the Shazam algo seemed obvious to me after a half-dozen tests. Like 99% of all audio processing jobs, they run an FFT to translate the raw audio into the frequency domain, then single out the dominant tones. Auto-tune does that, Melodyne does that, multi-band compressors do that, hell even some advanced reverb effects do it. The only "special" thing Shazam does is it serializes those tuples into (presumably) a short string that can be easily searched within a database.
The tech behind Shazam I believe anyone with even modest FFT experience could produce with ease. What's not so obvious is the database of precalculated soundprints they've amassed; that's where the real value is. Any idiot can create a filtered hash of a sound bite, but if he has nothing against which to compare it, the hash is useless. That still isn't an "invention" per-se, just a financial hurdle. I'm guessing Shazam and Midomi have greased the proper palms to gain access to vast music libraries to populate their hash database.
I'm surprised there's no mention of Midomi, which takes the soundprinting idea a bit further by allowing the user to sing or hum the tune - and while I have perfect pitch (but an awful voice), I've had my utterly tone-deaf friend try it and it still worked over half the time.
So Shazam, with their weak algorithm, is patent-trolling while Midomi seems quite confident no one can scratch their better tech. Isn't that the gist of all that's wrong with patents today ?
TRIM performance is directly tied to an SSD's erase performance. All TRIM does is tell the SSD which blocks are free to erase in its spare time. EVERY write to a NAND cell requires an erase, so if the SSD can perform that step while the system is idle, the next write to that cell can be performed immediately.
TRIM allows SSDs to "cheat" by doing some of the work ahead of time. The dirty performance is the normal, sustainable speed you should expect from your SSD. Any gains from TRIM are the result of pre-erasing cells when you're idling... if your system never idles (e.g. a busy database), TRIM won't help at all.
Yes and no. Wear-leveling happens with or without TRIM, but what TRIM does is tell the SSD controller that a block can be treated as "virgin", meaning it can be overwritten in a single pass. This is an optimization as normally one must read the contents of an entire block, combine it with the incoming data, erase the block on-disk and finally write the newly-merged data.
Contrary to popular ignorance, the slowdown is not caused by "fragmentation" - that's backwards, when the drive is clean it is cheating by skipping part of the write cycle. In other words, an SSD's dirty performance is its normal, sustainable speed. When it is clean, it can go faster because it is being LAZY, by short-cutting the Read-Erase-Update cycle. For obvious reasons, most SSD vendors, particularly in the consumer segment, advertise the maximum speed when really the honest thing would be to advertise the minimum speed.
Dolphin's column view is kind of crap, but that doesn't mean it's useless. Shuffling files and folders around is something I do daily, and it's mighty nice when I can access several dozen folders from one window, rather than having to open a bunch of individual windows and juggle them with Alt-Tab or very meticulous tiling.
That said, the fact that this view is predominantly used on Apple's nerfed OS is quite ridiculous.
I care about Java on the desktop in that I strongly despise it. I'd say over the my 14 years of involuntary contact with Java, I've had about a 50/50 success rate running desktop Java apps. Either they break due to some dependency or hardcoded path failure, or they run but the UI is so absurdly messed up it makes it unusable. Error handling also seems like a chore as more of the time they seem to be ignored.
I'll be 100% frank here: 14 years ago as a teenager, I started learning Java. I built a few web applets and some standalone apps, got extremely fed up with the abysmal performance and boilerplate tedium, and went back to my beloved Pascal/Delphi and C. Years later when I was required to deal with other people's Java apps and code, the pain of it all led me to religiously avoid both Java jobs and Java coders. There is so much navel-gazing in a Java project: interfaces to classes to functions to tag libraries, everything abstracted ten levels deep... are Java coders paid per line of code ? :P There was a joke "Hello World" program that was about 5 pages long, but it wasn't funny to me because that's exactly what most commercial code looks like.
To this day, I see the whole Java universe as a make-work project for millions of incompetent programmers. When job hunting if I am asked if I do Java, I proudly respond "Fuck NO!". Half the time it elicits strong laughter followed by "Amen, brother!", the rest of the time it conveniently ends an interview for a job I would surely hate.
I don't really get why people care about how many bars they get. I have never noticed any impact on call quality or even 3G speed, whether I have one bar or all four. On a jailbroken phone, you can switch the bars to a dB number - not that I know much about it. That may give some insight into the ratio of signal quality to bars. Really, the only time I drop calls is when I walk into an elevator. I spend more time looking at my WiFi strength than my cell bars.
I'm not on AT&T so maybe the Canadian telco cartel puts out better SNR in my area, or maybe I'm of the opinion that if the damn thing works, it ain't broken. Maybe they should change the bars to something idiot-proof like "Perfect / might drop / no service". Anything quantifiable is just a dangerous proposition when dealing with Americans, they always want more of whatever. If the max is 5 bars then 4 is "not good enough". You can thank rampant consumerism for those unrealistic ideals.
InfoWorld's Bill Snyder is feeling lonely, so he wrote a vitriolic puff piece titled "the ignominious decline of Dell"
FTFY, you self-righteous he-cunt.
Disclosure: I once worked for Dell (briefly), right around the time we learned about the faulty capacitors in GX270 boards. I frankly don't give a crap about the company, I just like their prosumer LCDs.
So Dell found out about the flaky capacitors, right around the same time everyone else noticed motherboards were going "POP-SSsssss..." and dying. It's not Dell's fault that they were sold shitty caps, every other large manufacturer was duped just the same. I also don't think Dell was in the wrong for being cautious about disclosure, because it does indeed depend on how hard you push your PC. Some people still use their "faulty" eight-year-old GX270 without issue to this day; others had them fail within months. It would have been financially irresponsible to replace every single GX270, so we waited for people to call us, and they did. I, for one, was very quick about dispatching new GX270 boards, and with my influential position I encouraged the other 200 techs at our site to do the same. No beating around the bush, no idiotic mock-troubleshooting, even if the warranty had lapsed just swap the board and get on with it. A few weeks later we learned my proactive replacement had become the official policy, as it is the only honest and respectable thing to do.
Dell did right, in my opinion. What do you think Asus, Gigabyte or MSI would do if you reported bad caps, six months after your warranty lapsed ? They'd ship your board back, unrepaired, and charge you for shipping + a diagnostic fee, effectively saying "Our bad, but fuck you anyway".
The fraud they've committed to organize this meeting is peanuts compared to the numerous frauds they have planned DURING the meeting.
There's a reason people protest the G20. It's yet another CFR / Bilderberg type of gig where a handful of crooked lying bastards discuss exactly how and how hard they are going to fuck us during the following year.
Me, I wish some of those security guards would take advantage of the situation and turn against their employers. Fuck unicorns, let the fascists eat lead.
But that's just the problem... English borrows from every other language, but the words are either taken directly from the native pronunciation, or bastardized into more familiar phonemes and used as one-off slang.
Take "shopping" for example. Americans say "SHAW-ping", the French say "shuh-PEENG!". We actually take your word, say it like we would a French word, and from there we stem it as usual:
infinitive: shopper (shuh-PAY)
past: shoppais (shuh-PEH)
future: shopperai (shuh-puh-RAY)
state: shoppé (shuh-PAY like the infinitive)
Once you learn one such anglicism, you can apply the same tranformation to just about any other verb. So in reality, for each new word you learn, you actually acquire all the dozens of variations on that word, no special pronunciation just the same familiar patterns.
the largest drawback to this scheme is the cellcos. Everything is a major cash cow for them.
FTFY. YW!
Hey that's great. If the dumb kids at Waterloo are excited about 20 bytes / sec, I have this here bleeding-edge V32 modem that'll do over one thousand bytes per second over a plain old telephone line. You can't imagine all the fun I had downloading JPGs on this thing back in the 80's^H^H^H^Hfuture telecommunications lab. Mmmm.. V32, that's like four mustang engines on a modem.
That would explain the terrible driving.
BAZINGA!