The idea that a brand new device would have to wait 5 months to get an update to an OS that shipped 2 months prior to purchase was an impossibility in my mind.
Ever heard of testing? Its something that manufacturing companies have learnt is very important to avoid costs associated with warranty claims. When you're developing your own software and hardware, it is easy to give the illusion that there is no effort in rolling out a new OS to all your product range that is still in the market. But when someone else is making the OS, and are not releasing to you significantly earlier than their public announcement, the lag is clearly visible. It was that way with Windows CE/Windows Mobile and is still that way with Android. If Windows Phone had a significant number of devices from multiple manufacturers using it, you'd notice it there too. Currently only Apple and Blackberry have the level of control required to manage the illusion of instantaneous update to all their shipping devices.
but I don't think it's that much better than finding a remote, which should be at least somewhere near the couch.
But between which cushions on which sofa? I have two sofas and an armchair in my lounge with a total of 18 cushions for the remote controls to hide under, between or behind, and many times have wished for the ability to make the remote controls ring.
Is posting FUD on slashdot officially part of your job title at Microsoft, or did you just drink too much kool-aid today? 32GB is an artificial limit newly introduced in Windows 7 in an attempt to force people onto exFAT for removable devices before the last of the VFAT patents expire. FAT32 supports up to 2TB.
In the Tom Tom case, the case was settled without a decision from the court on which patents (if any) Tom Tom were in violation of. In the German case, Microsoft successfully overturned on appeal an anulment of their patent. This is different from deciding that the implementation in Android (or any other system) is in violation of this patent (which will expire in the US in 17 days from now, and in Europe in another year).
FAT over MSC, the solution used in Android 2.x, was found not to be royalty-free; Microsoft has been winning lawsuits with its FAT patents.
Which lawsuits did Microsoft ever win? There were a lot of settlements, involving a whole suite of unidentified patents that might have included the remaining valid VFAT patent (which expires in a couple of months time), but did any of the cases ever get to court?
Regulations designed to protect the incumbent status quo, rather than serving the needs of real users, is the kind of thing that has kept USA out of the picture for telecommunications innovation. USA must import their telecommunications innovation.
France's person income tax is 0% to 75%..not just 75%
Whilst you try to impress us with your details, every good teabagger knows that the only thing that matters is the marginal tax on that billionth dollar you dream of one day making, on the assumption that you won't waste any of your vast wealth on hiring an accountant to minimise your taxes.
If you read the analysis, you'll see it is completely reconstructed; from a touched up lithograph and a blurry photo of a very blurry photo hanging on a wall across the other side of an exhibition hall. But as for gliding off the top of the hill, that hill is a lot flatter than the sand dune that the Kitty Hawk glided off two years later.
Excel is known for considering year 1900 as a leap year even though it's not, but I don't know if this historical bug (carried over from Lotus 1-2-3 according to wikipedia) is still respected. So consider Excel usable to year 1901 to a date I don't know.
A company like Yahoo (maybe even Best Buy) has a number of employees who have been there since the early days, feel a lot of loyalty to the company and believe in the it's ability to turn itself around. But there's a limit to how incompetent the board decisions can be before they give up all hope.
I don't know what labor laws you have in California or Minneapolis, but changes in the terms of your employment that require you to relocate are usually legally treated as a layoff if you chose not to take up the relocation.
It used to work out well for me. My kids were in daycare, which ran from 8:30am (not a minute before), until 5pm (punctual pick up). So I delivered them in the morning, put in most of a day's work before picking them up in the afternoon, then put in some more time in the evening after they were in bed. Meanwhile my wife could work a regular office job where she was expected to be in the office 8:30pm - 5pm, with a 45 minute commute on top of that.
Any management that tries these techniques needs to be fired by the shareholders immediately. The people who leave voluntarily when pushed by these types of harassment are always the most valuable ones, who funnily enough find it easy to get a job elsewhere. The ones you're left with are the ones who are pulling you down in the first place (along with the management team, who are obviously deficient if they think reducing headcount is all that matters in saving their ass).
UK banks are terrible when it comes to "there be dragons" parts of the world. My wife has lost access to her account because she can no longer use internet banking without a non-expired debit card, and cannot register for telephone banking without either logging on to internet banking or going into a branch in person. We spent months trying to resolve this, being told over the phone she just needs to send certain documents, then finding out when nothing happened for several weeks and a follow up call was made that they either have no record of receiving the documents, or they decided they weren't sufficient due to the risk of fraud in the nether regions of the world. After about 6 months, they finally had the helpful suggestion that it would be much easier to "just pop in" to our nearest branch in Hong Kong to sort things out (after all, its only 1500 miles away).
Your anecdotal consumer grade experiences are spot on, perhaps we are witnessing another example of marketing win over engineering.
Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing. Underneath Android is still Linux, anything that needs to avoid garbage collection can easily run outside of the dalvik VM.
The number one foreign investor for bankrolling large scale manufacturing startup is the Chinese Government, conditional on moving manufacturing to China. And the costs are huge, so investment options are limited; a startup has no credit record, so they need to pay suppliers up front, and as the product is unproven, distributors won't pay until the product has left the retail shelves.
Normally the distributors that are doing all the work of selling and distributing the tickets would get wholesale rates in order to compensate them for taking on this workload, and take their profit from there rather than adding on surcharges. Maybe its just transparency in where the money is flowing (in which case, why does it stop at the promoter? I want to see how much of the ticket price is going to the performers I'm going to see), but to the customer it has the appearance of being ripped off - especially since the surcharges are usually in the fine print on posters etc, and there often isn't any way to pay the headline ticket price.
CDs in NZ topped out at around $35 for new releases before the supermarket chains started taking the market away from record stores, and online sales started growing. I do think you've got your exchange rates around the wrong way though. The NZ dollar hasn't been valued that high since before the days of CDs, and perhaps even cassettes (which certainly weren't priced at $20 in the pre-CD days - I recall buying them in the late 1980's for $7.99, although the top prices may have been $9.99 or $12.99 (and later rose to $20, when the exchange rate with $US was around 0.6).
More of the money you pay goes to the artist with Bandcamp too, rather than the distributor taking 30% (standard across the major online music stores) and record company accounting taking most of the rest.
You do realize that Japanese input systems all insert these characters right? You don't have to go to some special menu or select some special option. Type in the sound for "house" (because that's how you enter Japanese, by sound) and press "convert" (to get the various characters that fit that sound) and along with the various kanji for house the emoji appear as well.
I predict illiteracy becoming a big problem in Japan in the near future. It has already happened to an extent with the movement from paper to keyboard input, but as emoji start to supplant kanji in everyday use, more and more teenagers are going to start forgetting which kanji is which. Do they really want to be making this movement back to writing with pictograms as a society?
The volume manager in Android is hardcoded to trigger automounting only on FAT partitions by default. A modified ROM would be needed to use ext2/3/4 on the SD card.
But that's not really a problem for Microsoft, because SDHC cards top out at 32GB, which will be bottom of the range by the time the FAT patents expire. Anything from 64GB up requires SDXC, and Microsoft worked hard to make sure that their new exFAT filesystem was written into the SDXC standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of testing? Its something that manufacturing companies have learnt is very important to avoid costs associated with warranty claims. When you're developing your own software and hardware, it is easy to give the illusion that there is no effort in rolling out a new OS to all your product range that is still in the market. But when someone else is making the OS, and are not releasing to you significantly earlier than their public announcement, the lag is clearly visible. It was that way with Windows CE/Windows Mobile and is still that way with Android. If Windows Phone had a significant number of devices from multiple manufacturers using it, you'd notice it there too. Currently only Apple and Blackberry have the level of control required to manage the illusion of instantaneous update to all their shipping devices.
But between which cushions on which sofa? I have two sofas and an armchair in my lounge with a total of 18 cushions for the remote controls to hide under, between or behind, and many times have wished for the ability to make the remote controls ring.
Is posting FUD on slashdot officially part of your job title at Microsoft, or did you just drink too much kool-aid today? 32GB is an artificial limit newly introduced in Windows 7 in an attempt to force people onto exFAT for removable devices before the last of the VFAT patents expire. FAT32 supports up to 2TB.
In the Tom Tom case, the case was settled without a decision from the court on which patents (if any) Tom Tom were in violation of. In the German case, Microsoft successfully overturned on appeal an anulment of their patent. This is different from deciding that the implementation in Android (or any other system) is in violation of this patent (which will expire in the US in 17 days from now, and in Europe in another year).
Which lawsuits did Microsoft ever win? There were a lot of settlements, involving a whole suite of unidentified patents that might have included the remaining valid VFAT patent (which expires in a couple of months time), but did any of the cases ever get to court?
Regulations designed to protect the incumbent status quo, rather than serving the needs of real users, is the kind of thing that has kept USA out of the picture for telecommunications innovation. USA must import their telecommunications innovation.
Whilst you try to impress us with your details, every good teabagger knows that the only thing that matters is the marginal tax on that billionth dollar you dream of one day making, on the assumption that you won't waste any of your vast wealth on hiring an accountant to minimise your taxes.
If you read the analysis, you'll see it is completely reconstructed; from a touched up lithograph and a blurry photo of a very blurry photo hanging on a wall across the other side of an exhibition hall.
But as for gliding off the top of the hill, that hill is a lot flatter than the sand dune that the Kitty Hawk glided off two years later.
2099 if their bugs are consistent.
A company like Yahoo (maybe even Best Buy) has a number of employees who have been there since the early days, feel a lot of loyalty to the company and believe in the it's ability to turn itself around. But there's a limit to how incompetent the board decisions can be before they give up all hope.
I don't know what labor laws you have in California or Minneapolis, but changes in the terms of your employment that require you to relocate are usually legally treated as a layoff if you chose not to take up the relocation.
It used to work out well for me. My kids were in daycare, which ran from 8:30am (not a minute before), until 5pm (punctual pick up). So I delivered them in the morning, put in most of a day's work before picking them up in the afternoon, then put in some more time in the evening after they were in bed. Meanwhile my wife could work a regular office job where she was expected to be in the office 8:30pm - 5pm, with a 45 minute commute on top of that.
Any management that tries these techniques needs to be fired by the shareholders immediately. The people who leave voluntarily when pushed by these types of harassment are always the most valuable ones, who funnily enough find it easy to get a job elsewhere. The ones you're left with are the ones who are pulling you down in the first place (along with the management team, who are obviously deficient if they think reducing headcount is all that matters in saving their ass).
Barclays, but they're all the same.
UK banks are terrible when it comes to "there be dragons" parts of the world. My wife has lost access to her account because she can no longer use internet banking without a non-expired debit card, and cannot register for telephone banking without either logging on to internet banking or going into a branch in person. We spent months trying to resolve this, being told over the phone she just needs to send certain documents, then finding out when nothing happened for several weeks and a follow up call was made that they either have no record of receiving the documents, or they decided they weren't sufficient due to the risk of fraud in the nether regions of the world. After about 6 months, they finally had the helpful suggestion that it would be much easier to "just pop in" to our nearest branch in Hong Kong to sort things out (after all, its only 1500 miles away).
Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing. Underneath Android is still Linux, anything that needs to avoid garbage collection can easily run outside of the dalvik VM.
The number one foreign investor for bankrolling large scale manufacturing startup is the Chinese Government, conditional on moving manufacturing to China. And the costs are huge, so investment options are limited; a startup has no credit record, so they need to pay suppliers up front, and as the product is unproven, distributors won't pay until the product has left the retail shelves.
Consider it a preemptive strike in the age old editor wars before someone accuses Google Glasses of violating privacy.
Normally the distributors that are doing all the work of selling and distributing the tickets would get wholesale rates in order to compensate them for taking on this workload, and take their profit from there rather than adding on surcharges. Maybe its just transparency in where the money is flowing (in which case, why does it stop at the promoter? I want to see how much of the ticket price is going to the performers I'm going to see), but to the customer it has the appearance of being ripped off - especially since the surcharges are usually in the fine print on posters etc, and there often isn't any way to pay the headline ticket price.
CDs in NZ topped out at around $35 for new releases before the supermarket chains started taking the market away from record stores, and online sales started growing. I do think you've got your exchange rates around the wrong way though. The NZ dollar hasn't been valued that high since before the days of CDs, and perhaps even cassettes (which certainly weren't priced at $20 in the pre-CD days - I recall buying them in the late 1980's for $7.99, although the top prices may have been $9.99 or $12.99 (and later rose to $20, when the exchange rate with $US was around 0.6).
More of the money you pay goes to the artist with Bandcamp too, rather than the distributor taking 30% (standard across the major online music stores) and record company accounting taking most of the rest.
Insist on plugins that produce audio having a mute() function call, otherwise they end up on the browser's blacklist.
I predict illiteracy becoming a big problem in Japan in the near future. It has already happened to an extent with the movement from paper to keyboard input, but as emoji start to supplant kanji in everyday use, more and more teenagers are going to start forgetting which kanji is which. Do they really want to be making this movement back to writing with pictograms as a society?
The volume manager in Android is hardcoded to trigger automounting only on FAT partitions by default. A modified ROM would be needed to use ext2/3/4 on the SD card.
But that's not really a problem for Microsoft, because SDHC cards top out at 32GB, which will be bottom of the range by the time the FAT patents expire. Anything from 64GB up requires SDXC, and Microsoft worked hard to make sure that their new exFAT filesystem was written into the SDXC standard.