Wow, you're really hung up on obscure technical details of the infrastructure. When you make a call the network sends data that it wouldn't send if idle. When you send an SMS the network sends data that it wouldn't send if idle. Contrary to your analogy, SMS doesn't get piggybacked on data packets that would be sent anyway, it just uses a different channel to voice. The fact that (on "vanilla" GSM networks) one kind of data travels down one imaginary tube and another kind of data travels down another imaginary tube is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Your numbers are, erm, interesting. You seem to be assuming that texts are sent at the same rate at 4am as they are during the commercials of a popular TV program. And 100,000 customers per tower? Erm, no. You're out by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Better off financially? Almost certainly, particularly as text conversations are frequently longer than one message each way. But I don't think that's the point. Calls require an instant response and a lot of attention an you can't really multicast voice as effectively. Setting up even a 3-way call takes longer than writing a short text ("Pub tonight?") and sending it to half a dozen friends. Texts, like emails, can be responded to at your leisure. I prefer to receive texts than voice calls for that reason. A-la-carte texts can be absurdly expensive, but packages (available with many hundreds of texts per month if you're a heavy user) will hardly break the bank.
The bandwidth comment in TFS is curious - the bandwidth for voice is also there whether you use it or not as well. Mobile voice and landline networks work that way too - mostly fixed infrastructure costs for the operators, but a pay-per-use model for the consumer. It's nothing new. Increasingly commonly, broadband works like that as well.
It's different in that reading a paper book doesn't require me to have an arm constantly lifted to manipulate its screen.
Constantly? Do you scroll one line at a time?
These things are tablet-PCs with twist displays and a keyboard. You can use them like a laptop when you need to do a lot of input, or like a tablet when you're just reading. The touch screen is useful in tablet mode, when you would operate it very much like a paper book. Occasionally touching the screen to page down is not going to give you gorilla arm any more than occasionally turning a page would.
You can't eliminate the chance of a fatal car accident unless you never go near a road or get in a vehicle, but that doesn't mean wearing a seat belt is a waste of time.
It's not about being humble, it's about knowing the purpose and aims of the company. If the companay makes widgets, the purpose of IT is to help the company make more and better widgets to sell because selling widgets is what pays everybody's salaries. Making your users do unnecessary work to use their tools is bad because it means they're spending less time making widgets to sell. There are too many IT people who think their role is to have an excellent computer system, while forgetting that the only definition of "excellent" which is relevant is the one that helps the company make the most and best widgets. If that means keeping your chief designer happy by letting him use his ancient software on Windows 95 then Windows 95 is an excellent choice of OS.
So, instead of a couple of people spending a couple of days rolling out a password change system that actually works with the way normal people use their systems, you decide to cost everyone in the organisation five minutes or more of their time and force them to lose all state on their systems every single day?
Can you put that on your CV (resume) so I don't waste any time if you apply for a job? Thanks.
I like it. Maybe I'm alone here, but note in the article that Shuttleworth says that some notifications are important and should be treated differently (as "persistent panel indicators") - but there's no reason why you should have to click on "Wifi stopped working" and "Wifi started working", hence distracting you from what you're doing.
Why do you need notifications for WiFi being connected/disconnected at all? Just change the icon in the system tray / menu car / panel / whatever. The big change to notifications should be to get rid of the 95% of them which just say "I did exactly what I'm supposed to do and everything worked fine". Tell me when something unusual happens, tell me when things go wrong, tell me when I need to take action; but don't waste my time telling me everything is running normally.
A right which isn't recognized and protected by more men with guns than will attempt to violate that right is worthless. From a practical point of view, any right which hasn't been granted just doesn't exist.
Are cops also trained to insert a needless dramatic pause and moody look every five seconds? Thanks to David Caruso's constant posing, for a long time I thought CSI:Miami was a parody of Zoolander.
"Find in files" or grep search every file every time. For many thousands of files that can take a while. With an index, like the ones desktop search tools build, it would take a couple of seconds. When finding anything takes a few seconds you can eliminate many tedious processes. When it's quicker to search than to navigate a filesystem, there's not much point organising many classes of information at all. I organise my code, but I never organise my email. I don't even erase the old stuff, I just search and Spotlight finds the right message in a few seconds. Spotlight is faster than using the mouse for launching applications that aren't in the dock too. It's horribly inefficient that it finds everything on my system with "pho" in it when I use it to launch Photoshop, but given Photoshop is already there at the top of the list by the time I have hit the 'o' I just don't care.
If you've never had a system with fast, pervasive desktop search you really can't understand how it can change the way you work. Grep, find, "find in files" and so on suck donkey balls in comparison.
Uh, locate is desktop search. Just bad desktop search. It only does filenames and typically the index is only updated once per day. Spotlight indexex content as well as filenames and does it on the fly.
(Plus, it's debit cards which have PINs, not credit cards)
Most credit cards do, or at least can, have a PIN so you can use them to withdraw cash from a cash machine (ATM). In the UK, and increasingly in the rest of the world, you now enter your PIN rather than signing a piece of paper when making purchases too.
What a load of empty, bullshit rhetoric. "In a race, the ones who look behind them fall over. Those who look ahead at least finish (a key requirement in winning)."? Fuck off.
The amount of sound reflected would vary depending on the material it bounced off. Wooden chairs are quieter than metal chairs at any frequency. In principle I see no reason why single-frequency sonar couldn't tell the difference between a typical metal chair and a typical wooden chair. The time gives the range and the intensity of the return gives a hint about its composition. I'm sure it's just trained on the chairs it knows and has pretty limited experience, so would get confused about chairs which were very different to the ones it's encountered, but I don't see any reason not to believe it's doing what they say it's doing.
Modern desktop systems have giga bytes of memory, hundreds of giga bytes of disk and multi core processors... and in the Adobe example you are using it to display PDF documents or Flash movies. Your application would typically be using less that 1% of the available resources.
I'm guessing you've never visited websites with Flash ads or tried to search a moderately sized document in Acrobat. Those two applications use a lot more than 1% of the CPU and RAM.
Missiles were launched by mouse click on British submarines (and others, I expect) before they switched to Windows, so even though HM Navy's sailors are among the best trained and most professional in the world, I do still rather hope they have a confirmation dialog.
I find System Shock 2's spiritual successor, Bioshock, is one of the scariest games I've played in a long time. It's not fear of you (your character) getting killed, but it's so immersive - a story you care about, atmospheric environments the noises the Splicers make and the weird things they say make the whole thing distinctly creepy.
As far as being concerned about my character, I find Metal Gear Solid games affect me the most. Just lying under a truck while the enemy wanders past can be remarkably tense. Less so in MGS 4 on the easier levels, which you can almost play as a regular FPS. Bored of sneaking? Just pull out an M60 and go Rambo. Then get a 25 minute cut scene where nothing happens apart from lingering shots of Naomi's tits.
The analog sticks on the DualShock 3 are a good 2mm further apart than on the DualShock 2. If you turn it upside down you'll notice the L2 and R2 buttons are now pseudo-triggers to ensure your fingers slip off them at a crucial moment even more easily than before. It only took me a several minutes of careful side-by-side comparison to notice those differences. The DualShock 3 is revolutionary I tell you, revolutionary!
I've been a Gran Turismo and Metal Gear fan for the best part of a decade, I bought my PS3 when GT5p came out. I like driving games and while Forza seems pretty decent (and is way more complete than GT5p), the Xbox wheel is garbage. The 360 is pretty cheap now and there are rumours of a price cut, which would make it absurdly cheap, so I may get one eventually.
Sony are douchebags, but I've never been forced to buy Sony kit due to their illegal abuse of market dominance. For a long time I had no choice but to run Windows if I wanted to work. I've found it pretty trivial to avoid Sony's attempts at lock-in, but until fairly recently found it impossible to avoid Microsoft's.
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Wow, you're really hung up on obscure technical details of the infrastructure. When you make a call the network sends data that it wouldn't send if idle. When you send an SMS the network sends data that it wouldn't send if idle. Contrary to your analogy, SMS doesn't get piggybacked on data packets that would be sent anyway, it just uses a different channel to voice. The fact that (on "vanilla" GSM networks) one kind of data travels down one imaginary tube and another kind of data travels down another imaginary tube is completely and utterly irrelevant.
It only costs nothing if you think national telecoms networks cost nothing to build and operate.
Your numbers are, erm, interesting. You seem to be assuming that texts are sent at the same rate at 4am as they are during the commercials of a popular TV program. And 100,000 customers per tower? Erm, no. You're out by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Better off financially? Almost certainly, particularly as text conversations are frequently longer than one message each way. But I don't think that's the point. Calls require an instant response and a lot of attention an you can't really multicast voice as effectively. Setting up even a 3-way call takes longer than writing a short text ("Pub tonight?") and sending it to half a dozen friends. Texts, like emails, can be responded to at your leisure. I prefer to receive texts than voice calls for that reason. A-la-carte texts can be absurdly expensive, but packages (available with many hundreds of texts per month if you're a heavy user) will hardly break the bank.
The bandwidth comment in TFS is curious - the bandwidth for voice is also there whether you use it or not as well. Mobile voice and landline networks work that way too - mostly fixed infrastructure costs for the operators, but a pay-per-use model for the consumer. It's nothing new. Increasingly commonly, broadband works like that as well.
It's different in that reading a paper book doesn't require me to have an arm constantly lifted to manipulate its screen.
Constantly? Do you scroll one line at a time?
These things are tablet-PCs with twist displays and a keyboard. You can use them like a laptop when you need to do a lot of input, or like a tablet when you're just reading. The touch screen is useful in tablet mode, when you would operate it very much like a paper book. Occasionally touching the screen to page down is not going to give you gorilla arm any more than occasionally turning a page would.
You don't know how to pronounce Psion? The p is silent, as in the swimming pool.
You can't eliminate the chance of a fatal car accident unless you never go near a road or get in a vehicle, but that doesn't mean wearing a seat belt is a waste of time.
It's not about being humble, it's about knowing the purpose and aims of the company. If the companay makes widgets, the purpose of IT is to help the company make more and better widgets to sell because selling widgets is what pays everybody's salaries. Making your users do unnecessary work to use their tools is bad because it means they're spending less time making widgets to sell. There are too many IT people who think their role is to have an excellent computer system, while forgetting that the only definition of "excellent" which is relevant is the one that helps the company make the most and best widgets. If that means keeping your chief designer happy by letting him use his ancient software on Windows 95 then Windows 95 is an excellent choice of OS.
So, instead of a couple of people spending a couple of days rolling out a password change system that actually works with the way normal people use their systems, you decide to cost everyone in the organisation five minutes or more of their time and force them to lose all state on their systems every single day?
Can you put that on your CV (resume) so I don't waste any time if you apply for a job? Thanks.
I like it. Maybe I'm alone here, but note in the article that Shuttleworth says that some notifications are important and should be treated differently (as "persistent panel indicators") - but there's no reason why you should have to click on "Wifi stopped working" and "Wifi started working", hence distracting you from what you're doing.
Why do you need notifications for WiFi being connected/disconnected at all? Just change the icon in the system tray / menu car / panel / whatever. The big change to notifications should be to get rid of the 95% of them which just say "I did exactly what I'm supposed to do and everything worked fine". Tell me when something unusual happens, tell me when things go wrong, tell me when I need to take action; but don't waste my time telling me everything is running normally.
A right which isn't recognized and protected by more men with guns than will attempt to violate that right is worthless. From a practical point of view, any right which hasn't been granted just doesn't exist.
Are cops also trained to insert a needless dramatic pause and moody look every five seconds? Thanks to David Caruso's constant posing, for a long time I thought CSI:Miami was a parody of Zoolander.
"Find in files" or grep search every file every time. For many thousands of files that can take a while. With an index, like the ones desktop search tools build, it would take a couple of seconds. When finding anything takes a few seconds you can eliminate many tedious processes. When it's quicker to search than to navigate a filesystem, there's not much point organising many classes of information at all. I organise my code, but I never organise my email. I don't even erase the old stuff, I just search and Spotlight finds the right message in a few seconds. Spotlight is faster than using the mouse for launching applications that aren't in the dock too. It's horribly inefficient that it finds everything on my system with "pho" in it when I use it to launch Photoshop, but given Photoshop is already there at the top of the list by the time I have hit the 'o' I just don't care.
If you've never had a system with fast, pervasive desktop search you really can't understand how it can change the way you work. Grep, find, "find in files" and so on suck donkey balls in comparison.
Uh, locate is desktop search. Just bad desktop search. It only does filenames and typically the index is only updated once per day. Spotlight indexex content as well as filenames and does it on the fly.
(Plus, it's debit cards which have PINs, not credit cards)
Most credit cards do, or at least can, have a PIN so you can use them to withdraw cash from a cash machine (ATM). In the UK, and increasingly in the rest of the world, you now enter your PIN rather than signing a piece of paper when making purchases too.
What a load of empty, bullshit rhetoric. "In a race, the ones who look behind them fall over. Those who look ahead at least finish (a key requirement in winning)."? Fuck off.
We're talking about application-level protocols (layers 5-7 in the OSI model), you pedantic git.
The amount of sound reflected would vary depending on the material it bounced off. Wooden chairs are quieter than metal chairs at any frequency. In principle I see no reason why single-frequency sonar couldn't tell the difference between a typical metal chair and a typical wooden chair. The time gives the range and the intensity of the return gives a hint about its composition. I'm sure it's just trained on the chairs it knows and has pretty limited experience, so would get confused about chairs which were very different to the ones it's encountered, but I don't see any reason not to believe it's doing what they say it's doing.
Modern desktop systems have giga bytes of memory, hundreds of giga bytes of disk and multi core processors ... and in the Adobe example you are using it to display PDF documents or Flash movies. Your application would typically be using less that 1% of the available resources.
I'm guessing you've never visited websites with Flash ads or tried to search a moderately sized document in Acrobat. Those two applications use a lot more than 1% of the CPU and RAM.
Missiles were launched by mouse click on British submarines (and others, I expect) before they switched to Windows, so even though HM Navy's sailors are among the best trained and most professional in the world, I do still rather hope they have a confirmation dialog.
sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture:
A perfect illustration of the fact that copyright terms are way too long.
Waiting on a jetpack? They've been around for decades. The one used in Thunderball (1965) was real, for example.
I find System Shock 2's spiritual successor, Bioshock, is one of the scariest games I've played in a long time. It's not fear of you (your character) getting killed, but it's so immersive - a story you care about, atmospheric environments the noises the Splicers make and the weird things they say make the whole thing distinctly creepy.
As far as being concerned about my character, I find Metal Gear Solid games affect me the most. Just lying under a truck while the enemy wanders past can be remarkably tense. Less so in MGS 4 on the easier levels, which you can almost play as a regular FPS. Bored of sneaking? Just pull out an M60 and go Rambo. Then get a 25 minute cut scene where nothing happens apart from lingering shots of Naomi's tits.
The analog sticks on the DualShock 3 are a good 2mm further apart than on the DualShock 2. If you turn it upside down you'll notice the L2 and R2 buttons are now pseudo-triggers to ensure your fingers slip off them at a crucial moment even more easily than before. It only took me a several minutes of careful side-by-side comparison to notice those differences. The DualShock 3 is revolutionary I tell you, revolutionary!
I've been a Gran Turismo and Metal Gear fan for the best part of a decade, I bought my PS3 when GT5p came out. I like driving games and while Forza seems pretty decent (and is way more complete than GT5p), the Xbox wheel is garbage. The 360 is pretty cheap now and there are rumours of a price cut, which would make it absurdly cheap, so I may get one eventually.
Sony are douchebags, but I've never been forced to buy Sony kit due to their illegal abuse of market dominance. For a long time I had no choice but to run Windows if I wanted to work. I've found it pretty trivial to avoid Sony's attempts at lock-in, but until fairly recently found it impossible to avoid Microsoft's.