Firefox may be getting better as far as the codebase, but they are producing a consistently less compatible browser. It's nearly as bad a the first year or so of Chrome where no commercial website would work. I'm getting mainstream webpages that render incorrectly in Firefox these days.
Blame web devs all you want, I agree they are the sh*theads of CS & IT, but the browser needs to be like a production car on city roads. The maintainers (of the road) do crap work, the car has a suspension to handle it. Firefox is blowing out tires over poor quality asphalt. In the mean time, IE and Chrome ride right over the potholes unnoticed.
I would gladly pay to run Windows Phone on my choice of hardware. Granted a lot of that is motivated by the cheap abundance of runner-up model Android phones (HTC One S is my current) versus a nicely spec'd Windows Phone is going to run full retail or take too much time on Swappa / CL to find.
Either way, the study just confirms something that most people already knew via anecdote or stereotype: iOS users buy into advertising / marketing at a higher rate than other people.
The people who need a truck for it's utility have much greater range needs than a pure EV truck could provide with a battery twice the size of the Model S battery. Most trucks sold are of the cheap 1/2 ton variety which is at a price point way too low for a hybrid or EV. Even Ford's awesome Ecoboost is a hard sale due to the increased cost of a turbo v6 engine over a lesser v8. The crowd that a hybrid could be built for is very small, those with turbo diesels who need even more low end grunt and better cruising mileage. In the 3/4 and 1-ton range this is easily done with heavy duty torque converters and handheld tuners. Turbo diesels leave the factory with about 25-40% of the power and 10-25% of the mileage left out of the computer tune, so clearly that crowd isn't demanding all that they are currently paying for.
Their Windows drivers are nearly as bad as the Linux ones. One of the interesting anecdotes in the tablet PC community is the inability to Frankenstein a driver package with any combination of OpenGL, DirectX, Flash, and x264 acceleration. You only get to pick the former 2 or latter 2 at a given time based on driver version (or one or none in later drivers). The only PVR drivers with any merit are on OSX / iOS in the iShinys where magical OpenGL + x264 support exists (which would be more than enough for Linux OR Windows). Some tablet devices with PVR integrated GPUs have dedicated Broadcom x264 decoders because ImgTec will not license the x264 hardware decoding to Intel on the Atom platform despite the fact that the hardware supports decode and encoding of the streams (Intel has trade show video of dozens of x264 streams being decoded real time and hardware accelerated on an Atom, but consumer drivers won't even decode a single one without dropped frames and out of sync sound).
Competition is not necessarily good when ImgTech is involved. They have a pretty nasty reputation of not providing drivers that work outside of very narrowly defined Linux or Windows builds (not versions, builds, their drivers will break if they find themselves outside the "licensed" environment) they are directly involved with. They've colluded pretty nicely with Apple to have iOS devices having magical GPU performance superiority on their own, identical hardware, again, because they do not license driver source even to top tier partners like Samsung and Intel. There is of course the cautionary tale of the GMA 500 / 600 devices where an Intel employee compiled OpenGL compliant Windows drivers from a source tree he found internally and then was silenced and told the drivers would never see the light of day.
ImgTech is the horror of paranoia and IP defensiveness you would expect from a company that spent over 5 years essentially out of business and bankrupt. They're a little like the pigs in Hannibal. Disappointing too, because they had innovative tech in the 90's (infinite planes & tile rendering) and they have really nice hardware now, but they simply aren't trustworthy.
You will certainly NOT have a Linux / MIPS box where ImgTech is involved.
I just don't get why all the obsession or importance of making Linux the desktop or Linux the gaming platform. Given the poor maintainability of Linux as a highly heterogeneous platform compared to Windows, this makes even less sense. If the argument is to get rid of Microsoft dominance and influence, then why are the proposed champions even less trustworthy, namely Google and Valve (Android & Steam respectively) who have a vastly worse record of maintaining backwards support for software or hardware.
It would make more sense to make a Page-rank (Google style) search the default and make an intelligent Watson answer system a premium micro-payment based ($2-20 yearly for 1k queries or so). Then use to Watson derived answers to boost the page-rank result quality.
This is more or less, what Wolfram is already trying to sell, though their parsing and indexing engine is weak compared to Watson and Google respectively.
Real nerds get a Stirling engine (built from kit acceptable) and hook it up to a DC motor from an RC car to act as a generator. Voltage regulation to 5 V or 12 V via a simple resistor network is similarly acceptable.
Don't forget the part where the MBAs aren't even afraid of security issues coming back to bite them. If the issues snowball hard enough, they just go on a huge spending spree for 6 months, bankrupt and phoenix the company. Ignoring security and legal liability in general has become status quo because being responsible has a negative cost to benefit ratio especially compared to the government backed reincorporation procedure.
I don't mind that we control the whole thing, I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world and then are supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
Since as I recall U-verse centrally packages ALL television now to allow the back in time DVR feature, wouldn't the prudent thing be for AT&T (even though I dislike them) to offer a commercial product. $5k / month and all they need to do is drop a few U-Verse boxes with unlimited channel lineup packages and maybe a custom workstation that can pull and transcode. I think Time Warner has a similar feature as well to jump back to missed shows.
The bigger joke here, is with all of their investment in infrastructure, that within the RTVF industry, each player doesn't already have a centralized system to control all of their content digitally that they lease out to each other at uncompressed 1080P & 4k. No wonder catching up to Netflix has been such an ordeal.
There have been a couple nice stabs at creating more or less flow chart object based programming and scripting packages based entirely on visual concepts. The missing part for a touchscreen though is still going to be real estate. There just isn't space for the kind of UI which is efficient for this kind of creative content. College students love Google Docs for collaborative work, but you can't produce a properly formatted thesis with it's interface efficiently, similar issues.
If years of work are the number of fans and that fan page's contents and not the software, he's not a developer, he's a marketer. That essentially makes him a non-paying customer of Facebook. The page should absolutely been wiped out if he wasn't going to match the fiduciary contributions of the other marketers who have contracts with Facebook.
The software remains.
Should the crowd here really be supporting marketers? I think we are enlightened enough to see how much they cost our society with a very poor cost to benefit ratio compared to other economic endeavors.
The finance department doesn't communicate when they have taken risks that might cost people their jobs or the company entirely.
HR doesn't let you know how much you should be paid to be paid fairly or what benefits you should get much less what other people get.
Accounting doesn't tell you when the company gets behind on payables and vital services are about to be cut off.
Marketing doesn't tell you when they've botched everything and blown the company cash reserves on a hack job SEO contractor and sales database.
Management doesn't warn you before layoffs.
Security guards don't tell the rest of the company when their cameras are broken.
The cafeteria doesn't tell you when they might have undercooked the chicken.
Seriously, somebody missed the point of specialization. Yes, more communication would be better, and that is why we have so many middle managers. Unfortunately, that field of specialists are the leftovers and weakest at their jobs. Good thing they aren't actually critical, but downsizing them out has always proven difficult. The point of a department is to take care of a given scope of operations and to take the burden of worrying about such things off the other employees.
I'm down with the automated car, and I am a huge driving enthusiast. I will keep driving my fun car on the weekends or even to a track day here and there. For the sake of traffic flow alone, along with the incompetence of the average driver (myself included up until around age 23-25) is more than enough reason for society to put their backs into the push for automated roadways.
There is a bigger issue with self-driving cars that will rear it's ugly head in about 15-20 years when they become ubiquitous. The funding of small towns who have allowed their civic governments to become bloated and dependent on moving infractions is completely out of control. I can't imagine the violence this will be met with as those fiefdoms feel their budgets crumble.
Problems with word problems... so we're saying the AI has a crappy parser and translator. Something tells me the frequently encountered poor communications skills of software developers is going to continue to have a negative influence on the field. Well, the apple does not fall far from the tree as they say.
It's a nice use of speech to text, but ultimately the designer is going to run into the same problem the prose writers have hit, the amount of mental effort to synthesize vocalizations. While Rudd might have the mental flexibility to write medium difficulty code verbally, most people are not so intellectually able. So far, all of the FMRI and similar studies do not bode well for executing complex tasks with vocal commands. Prose writing has shown to be universally superior in quality and throughput using some form of keyboard or pen and paper. Attempts at dictation produce sloppy results, especially once the writer gets past the first few paragraphs they already had laid out mentally.
A Fedex / UPS truck that can deploy short range, high cargo capacity (~25 lbs) drones as they drive through the major streets for deliveries could massively increase the speed and efficiency for that industry. A second or the same truck could swing through sending out a retrieval signal later.
How do the current commercial implementations handle object avoidance of moving objects? I could foresee that current systems which are capable of handling buildings and cars not being so capable at avoiding other small, fast moving drones crossing their airspace.
Heck, even AM radio stations in Cincinnati could have their own traffic quadcopter drone(s). Les could stop beating his chest as he gazes longingly out a window...
If you hit the Powerball, you buy enough of the company to fire the bastard boss and then retire after getting a friend the boss' job and a replacement for yourself.
You're convinced they just don't care, but I've talked to enough "PHP coders" and similar "web designers" who are just dumb by IT and CS standards (though still hover in the 90-110 IQ range). They're the roofers of our industry.
Hrm, is it odd that I meant that metaphor one way and it fits a few others?
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Firefox may be getting better as far as the codebase, but they are producing a consistently less compatible browser. It's nearly as bad a the first year or so of Chrome where no commercial website would work. I'm getting mainstream webpages that render incorrectly in Firefox these days.
Blame web devs all you want, I agree they are the sh*theads of CS & IT, but the browser needs to be like a production car on city roads. The maintainers (of the road) do crap work, the car has a suspension to handle it. Firefox is blowing out tires over poor quality asphalt. In the mean time, IE and Chrome ride right over the potholes unnoticed.
I would gladly pay to run Windows Phone on my choice of hardware. Granted a lot of that is motivated by the cheap abundance of runner-up model Android phones (HTC One S is my current) versus a nicely spec'd Windows Phone is going to run full retail or take too much time on Swappa / CL to find.
Either way, the study just confirms something that most people already knew via anecdote or stereotype: iOS users buy into advertising / marketing at a higher rate than other people.
Draw your own conclusions and discuss.
The people who need a truck for it's utility have much greater range needs than a pure EV truck could provide with a battery twice the size of the Model S battery. Most trucks sold are of the cheap 1/2 ton variety which is at a price point way too low for a hybrid or EV. Even Ford's awesome Ecoboost is a hard sale due to the increased cost of a turbo v6 engine over a lesser v8. The crowd that a hybrid could be built for is very small, those with turbo diesels who need even more low end grunt and better cruising mileage. In the 3/4 and 1-ton range this is easily done with heavy duty torque converters and handheld tuners. Turbo diesels leave the factory with about 25-40% of the power and 10-25% of the mileage left out of the computer tune, so clearly that crowd isn't demanding all that they are currently paying for.
Their Windows drivers are nearly as bad as the Linux ones. One of the interesting anecdotes in the tablet PC community is the inability to Frankenstein a driver package with any combination of OpenGL, DirectX, Flash, and x264 acceleration. You only get to pick the former 2 or latter 2 at a given time based on driver version (or one or none in later drivers). The only PVR drivers with any merit are on OSX / iOS in the iShinys where magical OpenGL + x264 support exists (which would be more than enough for Linux OR Windows). Some tablet devices with PVR integrated GPUs have dedicated Broadcom x264 decoders because ImgTec will not license the x264 hardware decoding to Intel on the Atom platform despite the fact that the hardware supports decode and encoding of the streams (Intel has trade show video of dozens of x264 streams being decoded real time and hardware accelerated on an Atom, but consumer drivers won't even decode a single one without dropped frames and out of sync sound).
Competition is not necessarily good when ImgTech is involved. They have a pretty nasty reputation of not providing drivers that work outside of very narrowly defined Linux or Windows builds (not versions, builds, their drivers will break if they find themselves outside the "licensed" environment) they are directly involved with. They've colluded pretty nicely with Apple to have iOS devices having magical GPU performance superiority on their own, identical hardware, again, because they do not license driver source even to top tier partners like Samsung and Intel. There is of course the cautionary tale of the GMA 500 / 600 devices where an Intel employee compiled OpenGL compliant Windows drivers from a source tree he found internally and then was silenced and told the drivers would never see the light of day.
ImgTech is the horror of paranoia and IP defensiveness you would expect from a company that spent over 5 years essentially out of business and bankrupt. They're a little like the pigs in Hannibal. Disappointing too, because they had innovative tech in the 90's (infinite planes & tile rendering) and they have really nice hardware now, but they simply aren't trustworthy.
You will certainly NOT have a Linux / MIPS box where ImgTech is involved.
I just don't get why all the obsession or importance of making Linux the desktop or Linux the gaming platform. Given the poor maintainability of Linux as a highly heterogeneous platform compared to Windows, this makes even less sense. If the argument is to get rid of Microsoft dominance and influence, then why are the proposed champions even less trustworthy, namely Google and Valve (Android & Steam respectively) who have a vastly worse record of maintaining backwards support for software or hardware.
It would make more sense to make a Page-rank (Google style) search the default and make an intelligent Watson answer system a premium micro-payment based ($2-20 yearly for 1k queries or so). Then use to Watson derived answers to boost the page-rank result quality.
This is more or less, what Wolfram is already trying to sell, though their parsing and indexing engine is weak compared to Watson and Google respectively.
Real nerds get a Stirling engine (built from kit acceptable) and hook it up to a DC motor from an RC car to act as a generator. Voltage regulation to 5 V or 12 V via a simple resistor network is similarly acceptable.
Don't forget the part where the MBAs aren't even afraid of security issues coming back to bite them. If the issues snowball hard enough, they just go on a huge spending spree for 6 months, bankrupt and phoenix the company. Ignoring security and legal liability in general has become status quo because being responsible has a negative cost to benefit ratio especially compared to the government backed reincorporation procedure.
I don't mind that we control the whole thing, I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world and then are supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
Since as I recall U-verse centrally packages ALL television now to allow the back in time DVR feature, wouldn't the prudent thing be for AT&T (even though I dislike them) to offer a commercial product. $5k / month and all they need to do is drop a few U-Verse boxes with unlimited channel lineup packages and maybe a custom workstation that can pull and transcode. I think Time Warner has a similar feature as well to jump back to missed shows.
The bigger joke here, is with all of their investment in infrastructure, that within the RTVF industry, each player doesn't already have a centralized system to control all of their content digitally that they lease out to each other at uncompressed 1080P & 4k. No wonder catching up to Netflix has been such an ordeal.
There have been a couple nice stabs at creating more or less flow chart object based programming and scripting packages based entirely on visual concepts. The missing part for a touchscreen though is still going to be real estate. There just isn't space for the kind of UI which is efficient for this kind of creative content. College students love Google Docs for collaborative work, but you can't produce a properly formatted thesis with it's interface efficiently, similar issues.
If years of work are the number of fans and that fan page's contents and not the software, he's not a developer, he's a marketer. That essentially makes him a non-paying customer of Facebook. The page should absolutely been wiped out if he wasn't going to match the fiduciary contributions of the other marketers who have contracts with Facebook.
The software remains.
Should the crowd here really be supporting marketers? I think we are enlightened enough to see how much they cost our society with a very poor cost to benefit ratio compared to other economic endeavors.
The finance department doesn't communicate when they have taken risks that might cost people their jobs or the company entirely.
HR doesn't let you know how much you should be paid to be paid fairly or what benefits you should get much less what other people get.
Accounting doesn't tell you when the company gets behind on payables and vital services are about to be cut off.
Marketing doesn't tell you when they've botched everything and blown the company cash reserves on a hack job SEO contractor and sales database.
Management doesn't warn you before layoffs.
Security guards don't tell the rest of the company when their cameras are broken.
The cafeteria doesn't tell you when they might have undercooked the chicken.
Seriously, somebody missed the point of specialization. Yes, more communication would be better, and that is why we have so many middle managers. Unfortunately, that field of specialists are the leftovers and weakest at their jobs. Good thing they aren't actually critical, but downsizing them out has always proven difficult. The point of a department is to take care of a given scope of operations and to take the burden of worrying about such things off the other employees.
Is this the plan for saving Best Buy. If so, I'm not so sure it is going to work.
I'm down with the automated car, and I am a huge driving enthusiast. I will keep driving my fun car on the weekends or even to a track day here and there. For the sake of traffic flow alone, along with the incompetence of the average driver (myself included up until around age 23-25) is more than enough reason for society to put their backs into the push for automated roadways.
There is a bigger issue with self-driving cars that will rear it's ugly head in about 15-20 years when they become ubiquitous. The funding of small towns who have allowed their civic governments to become bloated and dependent on moving infractions is completely out of control. I can't imagine the violence this will be met with as those fiefdoms feel their budgets crumble.
Problems with word problems... so we're saying the AI has a crappy parser and translator. Something tells me the frequently encountered poor communications skills of software developers is going to continue to have a negative influence on the field. Well, the apple does not fall far from the tree as they say.
Intel dropping hints like that is just as likely to be sending their competition down fiscal rabbit holes searching for the "really cool" stuff.
It's a nice use of speech to text, but ultimately the designer is going to run into the same problem the prose writers have hit, the amount of mental effort to synthesize vocalizations. While Rudd might have the mental flexibility to write medium difficulty code verbally, most people are not so intellectually able. So far, all of the FMRI and similar studies do not bode well for executing complex tasks with vocal commands. Prose writing has shown to be universally superior in quality and throughput using some form of keyboard or pen and paper. Attempts at dictation produce sloppy results, especially once the writer gets past the first few paragraphs they already had laid out mentally.
A Fedex / UPS truck that can deploy short range, high cargo capacity (~25 lbs) drones as they drive through the major streets for deliveries could massively increase the speed and efficiency for that industry. A second or the same truck could swing through sending out a retrieval signal later.
How do the current commercial implementations handle object avoidance of moving objects? I could foresee that current systems which are capable of handling buildings and cars not being so capable at avoiding other small, fast moving drones crossing their airspace.
Well, I think we already know which one will be able to survive landing on the ground from more than 3 feet...
Heck, even AM radio stations in Cincinnati could have their own traffic quadcopter drone(s). Les could stop beating his chest as he gazes longingly out a window...
If you hit the Powerball, you buy enough of the company to fire the bastard boss and then retire after getting a friend the boss' job and a replacement for yourself.
You're convinced they just don't care, but I've talked to enough "PHP coders" and similar "web designers" who are just dumb by IT and CS standards (though still hover in the 90-110 IQ range). They're the roofers of our industry.
Hrm, is it odd that I meant that metaphor one way and it fits a few others?