What are you talking about? I have a Samsung XE500C21, which is fast enough for surfing the web and running an ssh client (which is also all it does), has 8.5 hours of battery life, and is easy to carry.
It is a threat to everything except doing things by visiting websites or logging in to *nix machines to do real work, which happens to be what I and a lot of other people have been doing for years. It's also fairly close to what smartphones and tablets do.
I also see no signs of manufacturers making things worse; indeed, I see a number of manufacturers creating a greater diversity of models, similar, cheaper, and more capable. Is this a dying platform?
What killed netbooks is that manufacturers stopped making cheap ones, and instead just branded things netbooks that were in the same price range as low-end laptops. Effectively, they stopped catering to the niche that netbooks occupied - cheap portable computers. With Chromebooks, I see none of that happening yet. In fact, you might say that Chromebooks are a netbook revival.
I think your idea of taking advantage of hardware that you already have or can cheaply obtain is a great one. And if you need GPS, WiFi, and a display, some cellphones will give you all these out of the box, whereas the Raspberry Pi won't. So if your choice is between a $1 device plus a $5 add-on, or a $25 device with probably much more expensive add-ons, it seems like a no-brainer.
So let me as you this, wouldn't it be far better for you to get the IOIO and an Aria for your projects?
For your projects, this would seem to be the case. For what I do (hosting website, software development for Unix, IRC, text files and spreadsheets), there isn't a cellphone that I'm aware of that is as nice to work with as my Raspberry Pi. My N900 comes close, but costs a lot more.
Really, it all depends on what you're trying to do.
Your story makes sense, except that Internet Explorer never was the standard. Microsoft was relatively late to come to the Internet.
Before Internet Explorer existed, there was Mosaic. Before Internet Explorer was the most commonly used web browser, Netscape was the most commonly used web browser. Internet Explorer became the most commonly used web browser after an extended "browser war" with Netscape, where both introduced new features that sometimes were and sometimes weren't copied by the other and/or adopted by W3C, the standards body created to increase compatibility across web browsers.
Before Netscape completely disappeared from the radar, they released (I think it was) the next generation of their software as open source, and Mozilla was born.
All this was quite widely reported on.
Certainly, people who chose to only support one web browser were well within their right to do so. However, I have no pity who people or companies who made that choice and are now stuck with the consequences. Claiming that they couldn't have seen this coming is ignoring reality. At that time in the history of the Web there were already multiple browsers and dominant browsers had already fallen. No foresight required, this stuff already happened. And there were already standards to protect you against using features that would later not be available. And there were people at the time telling this to the people making the decisions.
The decision to write non-standard code was a deliberate choice, and the non-standard code not working in other browsers was a consequence that was not only predictable, but already true at the time.
Why Buy a Raspberry Pi When I Have a Perfectly Good Cellphone?
Because you can install your own operating system on your Raspberry Pi, but not on your cellphone?
Because you want to support the Raspberry Pi foundation?
There are many possible answers.
It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features (screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), battery etc) in a much better form factor.
If the combination of those is what you're looking for, then maybe you want a cellphone. Why are you comparing a cellphone against a Raspberry Pi?
The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins? I've been looking for this and can't find any, but does anyone know of any in the corners of the internet? I don't care what phone platform.
What are you going to do with it? How are you planning to do it? You don't care what phone platform? Don't you at least want one that you can run your own code on? Preferably with enough privileges that you can actually drive your shiny peripheral?
Here's the thing: Tell us what you're trying to do, and maybe we can help you, possibly by giving some recommendations for hardware to work with.
As it stands, your question is more flamebait than helpful. You're stating that you think even outdated cellphones are superior to a devices that some of us really like, without stating what purpose you think cellphones are superior for. That gives us little opportunity to be helpful, and plenty of opportunity to feel slighted.
The cheapest option AFAIK is natural gas. The fuel cost per km driven is probably cheaper than diesel, and the recurring tax is also lower. And you can basically buy a cheap gasoline car second hand and convert it to gas, which lots of people do.
The might be concerned about global warming... or... more likely... The Netherlands has had one of the largest oilfields in the world for decades.
I suspect you mean gas, not oil.
So large in fact that for much of the past several decades the Netherlands has had very low gas prices.
Natural gas, maybe. Gasoline, definitely not. Last I checked, the Netherlands was tied with Denmark for most expensive gasoline in the world.
On top of that, their entry into the European union meant that there is now a 19% VAT tax
The Netherlands was one of the founding members of the EU, so there isn't much "entry" to it. Also, the VAT is still under the control of the member states, as far as I know. I also believe the Netherlands recently raised the VAT from 19% to 21%.
It's estimated that 65% of the price of gas in the Netherlands is now taxes. The end result is the current price of Gas in the Netherlands is the highest in the world at over $9/gallon, and it will continue to climb as their oil fields become more depleted.
65% sounds roughly right for gasoline. Highest in the world sounds about right, too. But it doesn't have much to do with depletion of oil fields; it's really the taxes.
So... concern for Global warming? Or concern for their pocketbook... you be the judge.
Funny thing is, I lived in the Netherlands until about a year and a half ago, and I haven't really heard much talk of people switching to other power sources because of the high prices. I predicted that people would be switching to electric cars for cost reasons before 2015, but I don't really see that happening yet. That said, a lot of people drive Diesel cars, Diesel being somewhat cheaper than gasoline for the same distance driven (taxes on Diesel are lower in the Netherlands). Plus, the Netherlands doesn't have a culture of driving like some other countries; a lot of people ride bikes and/or use public transportation.
If gas were $9/gallon here I'm fairly sure you'd see charging stations popping up all over the place.
Maybe. Somebody has to pay for that. I live in the San Francisco bay area now, and a lot of companies here install charge points for use by employees and/or customers. That's with gasoline being about half the price that it is in the Netherlands. I think it's really more a matter of will than a matter of gasoline prices.
Electric cars and chare points are also kind of a chicken and egg proposition; I can understand why there wouldn't be a lot of will to install charge points if virtually nobody has a vehicle to use them with. As more affordable electric cars hit the market, there should be more demand for charge points.
Keep in mind those charging stations are being powered by coal fired power plants... so this idea that you're saving the environments a little laughable.
That one has been disproven so many times it's getting a bit long in the tooth. First of all, electricity isn't purely generated from coal. In the Netherlands, there are several providers of electricity purely from renewable sources, the big ones being biomass and wind. Since you get to choose your provider, the charge points may actually be powered by 100% renewable energy.
Secondly, comparing energy at the source to energy actually used to drive the wheels, electric cars are so much more efficient than gasoline cars that even if the electricity is almost all produced by burning coal, you can still end up saving on CO_2 emissions. See e.g. http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#electricity for some data points.
The environment has been a talking point in the Netherlands for as long as I can remember (back to the 1980s), but if you look at what actual policies are in place, it really isn't that good. To be sure, it's not the worst, but if they really wanted to do a good job, they could easily copy some policies that are successful in Germany - and they don't. My conclusion is that they're just paying lip service and not actually taking things very seriously.
I am one of those who moved and moved back. I switched to OS X back in the day of PowerPC iBooks. On paper, it was the ideal operating system. Beautiful, supported by commercial software developers, Unixy, and with all the open source software you know and love available. The iBook was also a great machine, easy to carry, great battery life, and surprisingly affordable.
Unfortunately, reality was not so great. The differences from other Unixy systems were small, but annoying. A lot of open source software wouldn't work out of the box. Even when things did work, the experience wasn't the same, e.g. fork was annoyingly slow. I also realized that one of the great assets of the Linux systems I was used to is the package manager. All your software managed with a few simple commands. By comparison, OS X was and is an absolute mess. So I switched back and have been happy since.
I do use a MacBook Pro now for work. It runs, basically, a web browser, and ssh client, a VPN client, and a mail client. That's a manageable amount of software to keep up to date with the hodgepodge of updaters you get. I guess this would have been easier if I used only the software that Apple supplied, but, unfortunately, their mail client doesn't work for the volume of email I get, and the browser has enough of an impact on my productivity that it's worth it to me to install a different one, even though Safari is very good. With all this, I still think I *should* install Debian, if only to keep my windows from being rearranged to useless positions when I plug in / unplug an external monitor.
As for Windows, I use it at home to play games. In my definitely not humble opinion, it does that better than any other OS, but I wouldn't want to use it for anything else. I've tried that, and while I'm sure one can get used to it, it made me run away screaming.
I use a lot of computers just to run a web browser and an SSH client. Chrome OS, your favorite Free operating system, OS X and Windows will all do that just fine. For anything beyond that, I prefer Debian, because, in my experience, it requires the least maintenance effort. If you're used to something else, it may or may not be worth switching.
âoeThis is a significant milestone in Googleâ(TM)s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,â said Allen Lo, Googleâ(TM)s deputy general counsel for patents. âoeWe appreciate MPEG LAâ(TM)s cooperation in making this happen.â
âoeWe are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,â said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn.
Code.org is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. I see it more as complementary to things that are already out there.
For those who want to learn, there is plenty of good material freely available on the Internet. And for those who don't have Internet access, you can learn to program without it, too (I learned from a book back before the Web existed).
There are also projects like Raspberry Pi that aim to get more hackable devices in the hands of kids, which I think is very important. Many of us learned to code back when computers had BASIC interpreters. Many current computers come without development environments, which makes it harder to get started. So having computers out there that lower the barrier to entry again is huge.
All that is great for people who are or become interested in software development by themselves. What code.org is doing is trying to interest people who otherwise wouldn't be interested. It's saying, "Hey, you may never have thought about this, or you may have decided it's not for you, but learn a bit of it, because you'll be better off no matter what career you end up choosing."
All this comes from the realization that having more people know how to program is a Good Thing. Even people who don't want to become software developers can benefit from knowing how to program. Even if they don't end up programming, it teaches logical thinking. And some people who wouldn't otherwise become software developers will become software developers because of these efforts. And lowering the barriers will lead to more awesome things being done, whether the end result is a computer program or something else.
These are all things I've felt for years, and I'm glad to see some icons of the software industry throwing their weight behind this campaign. The truth is, there are a lot of misconceptions about programming, and a lot of people end up not even looking into it because of these misconceptions. This campaign tries to do something about that. I'm all for it.
Speaking as a Wii owner, the Wii U just doesn't offer enough to get excited about. I was really excited about the Wii. Taking gaming from sitting still with a gamepad in hand to standing up and doing things was exciting. I saw people having fun with the Wii and decided that I wanted one, too. It's the first console I ever bought, although I would have bought a console back before color monitors were common on PCs, if I had had the money back then.
The Wii U doesn't really compel me. Perhaps that will change if I see more people playing cool games on it. As it is, my PC has better graphics and Kinect sounds exciting with being able to play games without having to hold a controller. Compared to the Wii I already have, the Wii U offers a new controller that I don't really know what to do with. It seems unwieldy. If I were to buy a console now it would probably be a Wii U, but given that I already have a Wii, I'm not really in a hurry to upgrade.
Part of the story here is that the Wii is really good. I really like it. The one thing that I feel is wrong with it is that its graphics capabilities are really underwhelming. The Wii U certainly improves things, but, as far as I can tell, it's already a couple of generations behind PC graphics, so by the time the Wii U has been on the market for a couple of years, its graphics capabilities will be woefully outdated. At some point, we may reach the point where graphics have become good enough and this won't be a big deal anymore, but I feel we're not quite there yet.
Web browsers are complex software, I would say on about the same level as Oracle's Java implementation, or the Flash plugin. The ones in common use are all written in C++, which is perfectly capable of expressing programs with exploitable security holes in them. I would say that the probability that your web browser is free of exploitable holes is about the same as the probability of that being true of Java or Flash. In other words, I hope waking up from that dream won't be too harsh.
When you use someone else's platform, you don't own your content and you don't have control over the platform.
This is true. On the other hand, you are also shifting the maintenance burden to someone else. Keeping the software up to date w.r.t. features, bug fixes, or at least security fixes. Fighting spam. Keeping the platform that the software runs on (operating system, hardware) usable. Making sure backups are kept up to date and regularly tested.
It's a trade-off, and there are good reasons for wanting to be in control and good reasons for wanting others to do the work.
I think the real solution to the control issue, in many cases, is to make sure it is easy to get the data out and use it, and then regularly get a copy of the data you care about and store it somewhere. Exactly like making a backup, which you should be doing no matter who hosts the data, you or someone else. If you do this, you are protected against data loss and unwanted changes.
If you make sure you always have usable backups of your data, the only thing you still need to worry about is other people using that data. To some extent, that is something you need to worry about no matter who hosts the data, but, of course, the realistic threats are somewhat different for, say, hosting the data only on computers only you have an account on vs. hosting the data on a computer that is maintained by someone else. For me, personally, I have no issue having my website on someone else's computer, but I do have an issue with this for email.
I like Emacs's features and find vim seriously lacking. But Emacs key bindings hurt my hands. I use viper, but it confuses me (or rather, I confuse it when I press escape). Maybe I'll give evil a shot.
Let's not forget that Tesla has already sunk $500M in taxpayer money down this rathole and still doesn't have a product.
WTF? I'm guessing you're ignoring the fact that they've sold and delivered more than 2400 of the Roadster since 2008 and are currently selling and delivering the Model S?
The other thing to note is that while the overall mileage of the drive is nearly the same, the detour involved much more city driving. That means slower driving, and that means running the car for a much longer period. If the detour through the city added an extra 30 minutes of running-time to the trip, that would have meant more energy use regardless of the nearly-identical distance.
Not necessarily. The energy per mile is governed by a complex equation. Time is certainly a factor, but so is speed. Lower speed means less drag. Some cars (e.g. the Prius) actually get better mileage in city traffic than on the highway. The EPA ratings for the model S are rather close: 38 kWh / 100 mi city vs. 37 kWh / 100 mi highway for the 85kWh model. I really wouldn't dare to predict what would have been more efficient for Mr. Broder's trip.
I don't understand the summary, but riddle me this: Is there any good reason not to use end-to-end encryption?
We've had PGP since 1991 and SSL and SSH since 1995. Some of these were developed in response to plaintext sniffing attacks. That means that the fact that communication in the clear is a security risk and the fact that there are people listening to your communications in order to obtain sensitive information haven't been news, and easy ways to protect your communications against this have been available, for over 15 years.
Coming from the Microsoft world I have been very surprised at how little attention Apple pays to legacy compatibility. It's only recently become impossible to run 16 bit Windows apps in the latest Microsoft OS. Compare that to the constant forced churn in Apple desktop software.
Huh? Are you talking about the sample Apple that let desktop software developed for 68K CPUs run on Power Macs, software developed for classic Mac OS run on OS X, and software compiled for PowerPC to run on x86?
Are you talking about the same Microsoft that replaced Visual Basic with the incompatible VB.NET, changed the way to develop for smartphones in Visual Studio 2008 and then again in 2010, so that applications developed in VS 2008 will only compile in that version? The same Microsoft that pushed PlaysForSure DRM, and then released the Zune with an incompatible DRM scheme, so that the music its allies had been selling wouldn't play on the Zune? The same Microsoft that got half the world writing code that only worked in Internet Explorer 6, and then broke compatibility in IE7, that pushed Silverlight as the primary way to develop for Windows Phone, and then discontinued Silverlight?
Maybe, coming from the Microsoft world, you really are used to better backward compatibility than what you've seen from Apple. But both companies have cases where they went to great length to preserve backward compatibility and cases where they didn't.
Speaking English as a second language and having worked with several developers who speak English as their second language (if at all), I am tempted to say "all the good ones speak English."
Almost everything related to software development is described in English. It may be described in other languages as well, but I don't know any other language in which as much information is available. The APIs are generally based on English. Diagnostics are pretty much always available in English. Most questions and answers on the Internet are probably in English. English is not that hard to learn, and you will get a lot of benefit from just being able to read it. Really, if you do software development, you should learn English.
Most software developers I know are good enough at English that they can at least make themselves understood. Those who don't can at least read computer English. Without that, they would be seriously handicapped. Is that an audience you want to cater to? There may be good reasons to do so, but I personally would rather spend my time on other things.
I feel we're talking past each other. I'm saying I don't admire the creation of a proprietary protocol for Internet telephony.
You're saying that I could create an open solution that works. You're right. I could. But that doesn't mean I admire the person or company that switched us away from open solutions to their proprietary one.
What I would have admired is someone improving and/or promoting the open solutions so that we would now have interoperable voice over IP similar to how we have interoperable phones, IP stacks, and email. And, like me, Skype's creators could have done that, but chose not to.
Think about that a little more. Did anyone hold a gun to the world to force them to switch? No. Clearly the open standards failed the world somehow.
Of course. I didn't claim anybody forced people to use Skype. Skype won because they made a product that people liked and marketed it successfully. A lot of people didn't know that you could "call people for free" using your computer, until they were told about Skype.
However, none of that invalidates the point that Skype creates vendor-lock in by means of their proprietary protocol. I don't admire people who do that, particularly when they do it in an area where open protocols already exist.
you have to admire the original skypes creator, 5+ years and still nobody has managed to crack the protocol
This is actually why I vehemently resent Skype's creator. We used to have open protocols that enabled us to do voice over IP, video chat, and video conferencing. Then in came Skype with a proprietary protocol enabling a subset of these features, and they made billions converting the world from open standards to their vendor-lock in.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? I have a Samsung XE500C21, which is fast enough for surfing the web and running an ssh client (which is also all it does), has 8.5 hours of battery life, and is easy to carry.
It is a threat to everything except doing things by visiting websites or logging in to *nix machines to do real work, which happens to be what I and a lot of other people have been doing for years. It's also fairly close to what smartphones and tablets do.
I also see no signs of manufacturers making things worse; indeed, I see a number of manufacturers creating a greater diversity of models, similar, cheaper, and more capable. Is this a dying platform?
What killed netbooks is that manufacturers stopped making cheap ones, and instead just branded things netbooks that were in the same price range as low-end laptops. Effectively, they stopped catering to the niche that netbooks occupied - cheap portable computers. With Chromebooks, I see none of that happening yet. In fact, you might say that Chromebooks are a netbook revival.
You've got the best reply by far.
You honor me. *makes a bow*
I think your idea of taking advantage of hardware that you already have or can cheaply obtain is a great one. And if you need GPS, WiFi, and a display, some cellphones will give you all these out of the box, whereas the Raspberry Pi won't. So if your choice is between a $1 device plus a $5 add-on, or a $25 device with probably much more expensive add-ons, it seems like a no-brainer.
So let me as you this, wouldn't it be far better for you to get the IOIO and an Aria for your projects?
For your projects, this would seem to be the case. For what I do (hosting website, software development for Unix, IRC, text files and spreadsheets), there isn't a cellphone that I'm aware of that is as nice to work with as my Raspberry Pi. My N900 comes close, but costs a lot more.
Really, it all depends on what you're trying to do.
Your story makes sense, except that Internet Explorer never was the standard. Microsoft was relatively late to come to the Internet.
Before Internet Explorer existed, there was Mosaic. Before Internet Explorer was the most commonly used web browser, Netscape was the most commonly used web browser. Internet Explorer became the most commonly used web browser after an extended "browser war" with Netscape, where both introduced new features that sometimes were and sometimes weren't copied by the other and/or adopted by W3C, the standards body created to increase compatibility across web browsers.
Before Netscape completely disappeared from the radar, they released (I think it was) the next generation of their software as open source, and Mozilla was born.
All this was quite widely reported on.
Certainly, people who chose to only support one web browser were well within their right to do so. However, I have no pity who people or companies who made that choice and are now stuck with the consequences. Claiming that they couldn't have seen this coming is ignoring reality. At that time in the history of the Web there were already multiple browsers and dominant browsers had already fallen. No foresight required, this stuff already happened. And there were already standards to protect you against using features that would later not be available. And there were people at the time telling this to the people making the decisions.
The decision to write non-standard code was a deliberate choice, and the non-standard code not working in other browsers was a consequence that was not only predictable, but already true at the time.
Why Buy a Raspberry Pi When I Have a Perfectly Good Cellphone?
Because you can install your own operating system on your Raspberry Pi, but not on your cellphone?
Because you want to support the Raspberry Pi foundation?
There are many possible answers.
It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features (screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), battery etc) in a much better form factor.
If the combination of those is what you're looking for, then maybe you want a cellphone. Why are you comparing a cellphone against a Raspberry Pi?
The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins? I've been looking for this and can't find any, but does anyone know of any in the corners of the internet? I don't care what phone platform.
What are you going to do with it? How are you planning to do it? You don't care what phone platform? Don't you at least want one that you can run your own code on? Preferably with enough privileges that you can actually drive your shiny peripheral?
Here's the thing: Tell us what you're trying to do, and maybe we can help you, possibly by giving some recommendations for hardware to work with.
As it stands, your question is more flamebait than helpful. You're stating that you think even outdated cellphones are superior to a devices that some of us really like, without stating what purpose you think cellphones are superior for. That gives us little opportunity to be helpful, and plenty of opportunity to feel slighted.
The cheapest option AFAIK is natural gas. The fuel cost per km driven is probably cheaper than diesel, and the recurring tax is also lower. And you can basically buy a cheap gasoline car second hand and convert it to gas, which lots of people do.
Natural gas or LPG? Asking because I'm curious.
The might be concerned about global warming... or... more likely... The Netherlands has had one of the largest oilfields in the world for decades.
I suspect you mean gas, not oil.
So large in fact that for much of the past several decades the Netherlands has had very low gas prices.
Natural gas, maybe. Gasoline, definitely not. Last I checked, the Netherlands was tied with Denmark for most expensive gasoline in the world.
On top of that, their entry into the European union meant that there is now a 19% VAT tax
The Netherlands was one of the founding members of the EU, so there isn't much "entry" to it. Also, the VAT is still under the control of the member states, as far as I know. I also believe the Netherlands recently raised the VAT from 19% to 21%.
It's estimated that 65% of the price of gas in the Netherlands is now taxes. The end result is the current price of Gas in the Netherlands is the highest in the world at over $9/gallon, and it will continue to climb as their oil fields become more depleted.
65% sounds roughly right for gasoline. Highest in the world sounds about right, too. But it doesn't have much to do with depletion of oil fields; it's really the taxes.
So... concern for Global warming? Or concern for their pocketbook... you be the judge.
Funny thing is, I lived in the Netherlands until about a year and a half ago, and I haven't really heard much talk of people switching to other power sources because of the high prices. I predicted that people would be switching to electric cars for cost reasons before 2015, but I don't really see that happening yet. That said, a lot of people drive Diesel cars, Diesel being somewhat cheaper than gasoline for the same distance driven (taxes on Diesel are lower in the Netherlands). Plus, the Netherlands doesn't have a culture of driving like some other countries; a lot of people ride bikes and/or use public transportation.
If gas were $9/gallon here I'm fairly sure you'd see charging stations popping up all over the place.
Maybe. Somebody has to pay for that. I live in the San Francisco bay area now, and a lot of companies here install charge points for use by employees and/or customers. That's with gasoline being about half the price that it is in the Netherlands. I think it's really more a matter of will than a matter of gasoline prices.
Electric cars and chare points are also kind of a chicken and egg proposition; I can understand why there wouldn't be a lot of will to install charge points if virtually nobody has a vehicle to use them with. As more affordable electric cars hit the market, there should be more demand for charge points.
Keep in mind those charging stations are being powered by coal fired power plants... so this idea that you're saving the environments a little laughable.
That one has been disproven so many times it's getting a bit long in the tooth. First of all, electricity isn't purely generated from coal. In the Netherlands, there are several providers of electricity purely from renewable sources, the big ones being biomass and wind. Since you get to choose your provider, the charge points may actually be powered by 100% renewable energy.
Secondly, comparing energy at the source to energy actually used to drive the wheels, electric cars are so much more efficient than gasoline cars that even if the electricity is almost all produced by burning coal, you can still end up saving on CO_2 emissions. See e.g. http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#electricity for some data points.
I wish I had points to mod you up.
The environment has been a talking point in the Netherlands for as long as I can remember (back to the 1980s), but if you look at what actual policies are in place, it really isn't that good. To be sure, it's not the worst, but if they really wanted to do a good job, they could easily copy some policies that are successful in Germany - and they don't. My conclusion is that they're just paying lip service and not actually taking things very seriously.
I am one of those who moved and moved back. I switched to OS X back in the day of PowerPC iBooks. On paper, it was the ideal operating system. Beautiful, supported by commercial software developers, Unixy, and with all the open source software you know and love available. The iBook was also a great machine, easy to carry, great battery life, and surprisingly affordable.
Unfortunately, reality was not so great. The differences from other Unixy systems were small, but annoying. A lot of open source software wouldn't work out of the box. Even when things did work, the experience wasn't the same, e.g. fork was annoyingly slow. I also realized that one of the great assets of the Linux systems I was used to is the package manager. All your software managed with a few simple commands. By comparison, OS X was and is an absolute mess. So I switched back and have been happy since.
I do use a MacBook Pro now for work. It runs, basically, a web browser, and ssh client, a VPN client, and a mail client. That's a manageable amount of software to keep up to date with the hodgepodge of updaters you get. I guess this would have been easier if I used only the software that Apple supplied, but, unfortunately, their mail client doesn't work for the volume of email I get, and the browser has enough of an impact on my productivity that it's worth it to me to install a different one, even though Safari is very good. With all this, I still think I *should* install Debian, if only to keep my windows from being rearranged to useless positions when I plug in / unplug an external monitor.
As for Windows, I use it at home to play games. In my definitely not humble opinion, it does that better than any other OS, but I wouldn't want to use it for anything else. I've tried that, and while I'm sure one can get used to it, it made me run away screaming.
I use a lot of computers just to run a web browser and an SSH client. Chrome OS, your favorite Free operating system, OS X and Windows will all do that just fine. For anything beyond that, I prefer Debian, because, in my experience, it requires the least maintenance effort. If you're used to something else, it may or may not be worth switching.
âoeThis is a significant milestone in Googleâ(TM)s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,â said Allen Lo, Googleâ(TM)s deputy general counsel for patents. âoeWe appreciate MPEG LAâ(TM)s cooperation in making this happen.â
âoeWe are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,â said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn.
I LOLed.
Thanks! I wish I could mod you up, but, since I don't have mod points today, I'll just deliver my thanks by comment.
Code.org is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. I see it more as complementary to things that are already out there.
For those who want to learn, there is plenty of good material freely available on the Internet. And for those who don't have Internet access, you can learn to program without it, too (I learned from a book back before the Web existed).
There are also projects like Raspberry Pi that aim to get more hackable devices in the hands of kids, which I think is very important. Many of us learned to code back when computers had BASIC interpreters. Many current computers come without development environments, which makes it harder to get started. So having computers out there that lower the barrier to entry again is huge.
All that is great for people who are or become interested in software development by themselves. What code.org is doing is trying to interest people who otherwise wouldn't be interested. It's saying, "Hey, you may never have thought about this, or you may have decided it's not for you, but learn a bit of it, because you'll be better off no matter what career you end up choosing."
All this comes from the realization that having more people know how to program is a Good Thing. Even people who don't want to become software developers can benefit from knowing how to program. Even if they don't end up programming, it teaches logical thinking. And some people who wouldn't otherwise become software developers will become software developers because of these efforts. And lowering the barriers will lead to more awesome things being done, whether the end result is a computer program or something else.
These are all things I've felt for years, and I'm glad to see some icons of the software industry throwing their weight behind this campaign. The truth is, there are a lot of misconceptions about programming, and a lot of people end up not even looking into it because of these misconceptions. This campaign tries to do something about that. I'm all for it.
Speaking as a Wii owner, the Wii U just doesn't offer enough to get excited about. I was really excited about the Wii. Taking gaming from sitting still with a gamepad in hand to standing up and doing things was exciting. I saw people having fun with the Wii and decided that I wanted one, too. It's the first console I ever bought, although I would have bought a console back before color monitors were common on PCs, if I had had the money back then.
The Wii U doesn't really compel me. Perhaps that will change if I see more people playing cool games on it. As it is, my PC has better graphics and Kinect sounds exciting with being able to play games without having to hold a controller. Compared to the Wii I already have, the Wii U offers a new controller that I don't really know what to do with. It seems unwieldy. If I were to buy a console now it would probably be a Wii U, but given that I already have a Wii, I'm not really in a hurry to upgrade.
Part of the story here is that the Wii is really good. I really like it. The one thing that I feel is wrong with it is that its graphics capabilities are really underwhelming. The Wii U certainly improves things, but, as far as I can tell, it's already a couple of generations behind PC graphics, so by the time the Wii U has been on the market for a couple of years, its graphics capabilities will be woefully outdated. At some point, we may reach the point where graphics have become good enough and this won't be a big deal anymore, but I feel we're not quite there yet.
a safe browser
A what?
Web browsers are complex software, I would say on about the same level as Oracle's Java implementation, or the Flash plugin. The ones in common use are all written in C++, which is perfectly capable of expressing programs with exploitable security holes in them. I would say that the probability that your web browser is free of exploitable holes is about the same as the probability of that being true of Java or Flash. In other words, I hope waking up from that dream won't be too harsh.
When you use someone else's platform, you don't own your content and you don't have control over the platform.
This is true. On the other hand, you are also shifting the maintenance burden to someone else. Keeping the software up to date w.r.t. features, bug fixes, or at least security fixes. Fighting spam. Keeping the platform that the software runs on (operating system, hardware) usable. Making sure backups are kept up to date and regularly tested.
It's a trade-off, and there are good reasons for wanting to be in control and good reasons for wanting others to do the work.
I think the real solution to the control issue, in many cases, is to make sure it is easy to get the data out and use it, and then regularly get a copy of the data you care about and store it somewhere. Exactly like making a backup, which you should be doing no matter who hosts the data, you or someone else. If you do this, you are protected against data loss and unwanted changes.
If you make sure you always have usable backups of your data, the only thing you still need to worry about is other people using that data. To some extent, that is something you need to worry about no matter who hosts the data, but, of course, the realistic threats are somewhat different for, say, hosting the data only on computers only you have an account on vs. hosting the data on a computer that is maintained by someone else. For me, personally, I have no issue having my website on someone else's computer, but I do have an issue with this for email.
I like Emacs's features and find vim seriously lacking. But Emacs key bindings hurt my hands. I use viper, but it confuses me (or rather, I confuse it when I press escape). Maybe I'll give evil a shot.
Let's not forget that Tesla has already sunk $500M in taxpayer money down this rathole and still doesn't have a product.
WTF? I'm guessing you're ignoring the fact that they've sold and delivered more than 2400 of the Roadster since 2008 and are currently selling and delivering the Model S?
Bonus points for mentioning Thorium, but...
So...they're less effective than internal combustion engine based vehicles AND they cause more carbon to be dumped into the environment.
Where did you get that from?
They all contaminate the environment worse than the things they're supposed to replace.
[citation needed]
The other thing to note is that while the overall mileage of the drive is nearly the same, the detour involved much more city driving. That means slower driving, and that means running the car for a much longer period. If the detour through the city added an extra 30 minutes of running-time to the trip, that would have meant more energy use regardless of the nearly-identical distance.
Not necessarily. The energy per mile is governed by a complex equation. Time is certainly a factor, but so is speed. Lower speed means less drag. Some cars (e.g. the Prius) actually get better mileage in city traffic than on the highway. The EPA ratings for the model S are rather close: 38 kWh / 100 mi city vs. 37 kWh / 100 mi highway for the 85kWh model. I really wouldn't dare to predict what would have been more efficient for Mr. Broder's trip.
I don't understand the summary, but riddle me this: Is there any good reason not to use end-to-end encryption?
We've had PGP since 1991 and SSL and SSH since 1995. Some of these were developed in response to plaintext sniffing attacks. That means that the fact that communication in the clear is a security risk and the fact that there are people listening to your communications in order to obtain sensitive information haven't been news, and easy ways to protect your communications against this have been available, for over 15 years.
Coming from the Microsoft world I have been very surprised at how little attention Apple pays to legacy compatibility. It's only recently become impossible to run 16 bit Windows apps in the latest Microsoft OS. Compare that to the constant forced churn in Apple desktop software.
Huh? Are you talking about the sample Apple that let desktop software developed for 68K CPUs run on Power Macs, software developed for classic Mac OS run on OS X, and software compiled for PowerPC to run on x86?
Are you talking about the same Microsoft that replaced Visual Basic with the incompatible VB.NET, changed the way to develop for smartphones in Visual Studio 2008 and then again in 2010, so that applications developed in VS 2008 will only compile in that version? The same Microsoft that pushed PlaysForSure DRM, and then released the Zune with an incompatible DRM scheme, so that the music its allies had been selling wouldn't play on the Zune? The same Microsoft that got half the world writing code that only worked in Internet Explorer 6, and then broke compatibility in IE7, that pushed Silverlight as the primary way to develop for Windows Phone, and then discontinued Silverlight?
Maybe, coming from the Microsoft world, you really are used to better backward compatibility than what you've seen from Apple. But both companies have cases where they went to great length to preserve backward compatibility and cases where they didn't.
Speaking English as a second language and having worked with several developers who speak English as their second language (if at all), I am tempted to say "all the good ones speak English."
Almost everything related to software development is described in English. It may be described in other languages as well, but I don't know any other language in which as much information is available. The APIs are generally based on English. Diagnostics are pretty much always available in English. Most questions and answers on the Internet are probably in English. English is not that hard to learn, and you will get a lot of benefit from just being able to read it. Really, if you do software development, you should learn English.
Most software developers I know are good enough at English that they can at least make themselves understood. Those who don't can at least read computer English. Without that, they would be seriously handicapped. Is that an audience you want to cater to? There may be good reasons to do so, but I personally would rather spend my time on other things.
Ah, another Dwarf Fortress player.
I feel we're talking past each other. I'm saying I don't admire the creation of a proprietary protocol for Internet telephony.
You're saying that I could create an open solution that works. You're right. I could. But that doesn't mean I admire the person or company that switched us away from open solutions to their proprietary one.
What I would have admired is someone improving and/or promoting the open solutions so that we would now have interoperable voice over IP similar to how we have interoperable phones, IP stacks, and email. And, like me, Skype's creators could have done that, but chose not to.
Think about that a little more. Did anyone hold a gun to the world to force them to switch? No. Clearly the open standards failed the world somehow.
Of course. I didn't claim anybody forced people to use Skype. Skype won because they made a product that people liked and marketed it successfully. A lot of people didn't know that you could "call people for free" using your computer, until they were told about Skype.
However, none of that invalidates the point that Skype creates vendor-lock in by means of their proprietary protocol. I don't admire people who do that, particularly when they do it in an area where open protocols already exist.
you have to admire the original skypes creator, 5+ years and still nobody has managed to crack the protocol
This is actually why I vehemently resent Skype's creator. We used to have open protocols that enabled us to do voice over IP, video chat, and video conferencing. Then in came Skype with a proprietary protocol enabling a subset of these features, and they made billions converting the world from open standards to their vendor-lock in.