Seriously, sad as it may be, nobody's interested in Symbian. Look at the job market. Plenty of people want iPhone and Android developers, but few want Symbian. And while it is a hugely successful OS, it's losing market share rapidly.
So what's the solution? Nokia decided to team up with Microsoft. This at least means that they have an OS that could be relevant. There's the strong brand name that will at least interest some developers to port their apps to WP7. And Microsoft are pretty friendly to developers. It will be possible to develop using visual studio and Microsoft will make sure there's as much overlap as possible with their desktop targeted SDK.
Re:Nokia and Microsoft join forces for combined FA
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Why Nokia Is Toast
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It's true that Microsoft is not a good brand. The company is successful because people need their main product.
That said, the XBox has done pretty well at market penetration. Part of this being that Microsoft made a very good product. Techy types are willing to forgive Microsoft for being Microsoft as long as the company comes up with a sufficiently good product. Whether they will manage this is the important point, and it will take something to be significantly better than both Android and iPhone.
The hierarchical file system is a nice structure when dealing with floppy disks, was adequately suited for a system where people were creating a few dozen documents, but it's felt a little dated for a while.
I'd just like a new paradigm that doesn't rely on backwards compatibility, and uses metadata as a primary means of associating files with each other.
Sure. Specific cases where there's specific information that absolutely must be kept secure.
But would you really fire a secretary for checking her home email account once a day. Most of the places I've worked haven't had particularly valuable information stored on the network (mostly presentation and video games companies).
If you had that policy there, I think about 90% of the people I've worked with would have been fired if there was a zero tolerance personal internet use policy.
I suppose technically they could. Seems a bit extreme though. Given the options of verbal warning, written warnings, demotion or dismissal, dismissal seems like something of a nuclear option.
Excessive internet use is a written warning at worst (probably verbal), and occasional personal use is usually tolerated.
But then the nature of what they say shouldn't be considered.
Firing someone for using facebook at work would seem a little extreme. A simple request to stop doing that would be considered a more measured first response.
Seems to end up with the employees being essentially slaves, easily bullied into doing things outside the contract agreement. Because the employer has such a strong bargaining position this is not a reciprocal effect.
I have no idea how Assange's lawyers think this is going to work. They're presumably smart people who understand the law but the obvious counter to this is that the argument is completely beside the point since nobody is even talking about extradition to the US.
My only guess is that they see the extradition to Sweden as inevitable (which seems odd), and want to make sure that the Swedish prosecutors throw in a load of unnecessary agreements not to extradite him to the US.
Well, we can at least see it as a victory. ACS:Law -TNG is probably not going to try such sleazy tactics and neither will any of the other legal firms since they clearly don't work.
What you haven't had is a neo-Nazi, a theocracist, a state separatist, a racial segregationist, an anarchist, a communist or a world federalist.
All of these philosophies have at least some subscribers. They could put up a candidate for a local government position, and raise enough funds across the nation from supporters of that ideology. At least some of them would even benefit some wealthy interests, so why aren't there any candidates for these political ideologies?
The thing is, democracy works even if people don't choose to take part.
If I ran on a platform that would be popular with 1% of the voters, I simply wouldn't bother to run. I'd have to either adjust my policies to be desirable to a larger number of voters or not run.
For all the perceived difference between the left and the right, the policies are actually remarkably similar. You get considerably more difference between countries than within a country. All mainstream US parties in the southern US would be seen as very right wing by European standards and all Northern European mainstream parties would be seen as very left wing in the US. So you end up with two parties who do offer a choice, but it's a choice that makes very little difference to most people.
This isn't a bad thing. The will of the people has already affected policy, and eliminated all the terrible choices before the election even started. The fact that we never see the terrible choices means there's a perception that democracy doesn't have any effect but I think this is at least partly an illusion.
Yes, I meant to add a disclaimer to that effect. The GGP made rather an extreme example.
This policy would prevent a street sweeper from saying that the council's policy on schools for the disabled is harmful, or the head of IT from complaining that the council spends too much on travel.
Funny how we think it's so invasive when an employer looks at (mostly public) speech they don't like and punishes you for it, but we don't think it's so invasive when an employer demands your bodily fluids which for damned sure are not public.
Fair point, but I expect there's broad agreement that this is at least as invasive on a liberal site such as Slashdot.
I'm using my SheevaPlug mostly as a file server. It's also running rtorrent and my one almighty Emacs session which contains my org-mode agenda, IRC client, and various and sundry other services. I've had it for less than a year, and by my estimation it's paid for itself already in reduced power consumption (compared to the clunker old desktop machine that had previously been serving that purpose).
Thnaks. This is the sort of answer I wanted. What people are actually using it for rather than could possibly use it for.
I've got some other plans for it, which mostly seem to involve messing around, drinking beer and reading man pages at 2 AM. And I figure that in itself is a use, right?
But you don't have one. And you clearly don't see a device like this as worth the investment otherwise you'd have bought one.
Even if you did have a need for something to do those jobs, is this device really in any way more convenient in the real world? If so, why isn't everyone using them? If not, what is the extremely specific niche where someone has a need to run a server but only has 30cm^2 of office space and a plug socket to dedicate to it?
Why is it false? Approval voting requires tactical voting for anyone who has a second favourite candidate. They have to choose whether or not to select based on their favourite's chance of success.
The analysis doesn't take into account the effect that the probability of regret will have on the level of tactical voting.
I'd have thought we'd have an experiment that comes up with say 0.3464kg and another that comes up with 0.0765kg, and they want to define the kilogram as 1/0.3464 * the result of the first one or 1/0.0765 * the result of the second one. But both of these would give exactly the same mass as the other.
Or if the measurements are inconsistent, they should just pick the one with the smallest variance within that experiment.
"Heavy" and "light" can mean either more or less mass or more or less weight. Since the term was clarified by the parenthesis it means less massive and so cannot get "lighter".
There are dozens of different voting systems. Possibly hundreds. FPTP is one of the worst. Approval voting has certain advantages over that but doesn't do anything to discourage tactical voting or give a result that close to what the majority wants.
Why not choose a better system?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, sad as it may be, nobody's interested in Symbian. Look at the job market. Plenty of people want iPhone and Android developers, but few want Symbian. And while it is a hugely successful OS, it's losing market share rapidly.
So what's the solution? Nokia decided to team up with Microsoft. This at least means that they have an OS that could be relevant. There's the strong brand name that will at least interest some developers to port their apps to WP7. And Microsoft are pretty friendly to developers. It will be possible to develop using visual studio and Microsoft will make sure there's as much overlap as possible with their desktop targeted SDK.
It's true that Microsoft is not a good brand. The company is successful because people need their main product.
That said, the XBox has done pretty well at market penetration. Part of this being that Microsoft made a very good product. Techy types are willing to forgive Microsoft for being Microsoft as long as the company comes up with a sufficiently good product. Whether they will manage this is the important point, and it will take something to be significantly better than both Android and iPhone.
The hierarchical file system is a nice structure when dealing with floppy disks, was adequately suited for a system where people were creating a few dozen documents, but it's felt a little dated for a while.
I'd just like a new paradigm that doesn't rely on backwards compatibility, and uses metadata as a primary means of associating files with each other.
Sure. Specific cases where there's specific information that absolutely must be kept secure.
But would you really fire a secretary for checking her home email account once a day. Most of the places I've worked haven't had particularly valuable information stored on the network (mostly presentation and video games companies).
If you had that policy there, I think about 90% of the people I've worked with would have been fired if there was a zero tolerance personal internet use policy.
I suppose technically they could. Seems a bit extreme though. Given the options of verbal warning, written warnings, demotion or dismissal, dismissal seems like something of a nuclear option.
Excessive internet use is a written warning at worst (probably verbal), and occasional personal use is usually tolerated.
Not sure how that works. Doesn't that mean you have freedom of speech in every country, it's just that the consequence may be your execution?
But then the nature of what they say shouldn't be considered.
Firing someone for using facebook at work would seem a little extreme. A simple request to stop doing that would be considered a more measured first response.
We've tried that.
Seems to end up with the employees being essentially slaves, easily bullied into doing things outside the contract agreement. Because the employer has such a strong bargaining position this is not a reciprocal effect.
I have no idea how Assange's lawyers think this is going to work. They're presumably smart people who understand the law but the obvious counter to this is that the argument is completely beside the point since nobody is even talking about extradition to the US.
My only guess is that they see the extradition to Sweden as inevitable (which seems odd), and want to make sure that the Swedish prosecutors throw in a load of unnecessary agreements not to extradite him to the US.
Well, we can at least see it as a victory. ACS:Law -TNG is probably not going to try such sleazy tactics and neither will any of the other legal firms since they clearly don't work.
What you haven't had is a neo-Nazi, a theocracist, a state separatist, a racial segregationist, an anarchist, a communist or a world federalist.
All of these philosophies have at least some subscribers. They could put up a candidate for a local government position, and raise enough funds across the nation from supporters of that ideology. At least some of them would even benefit some wealthy interests, so why aren't there any candidates for these political ideologies?
The thing is, democracy works even if people don't choose to take part.
If I ran on a platform that would be popular with 1% of the voters, I simply wouldn't bother to run. I'd have to either adjust my policies to be desirable to a larger number of voters or not run.
For all the perceived difference between the left and the right, the policies are actually remarkably similar. You get considerably more difference between countries than within a country. All mainstream US parties in the southern US would be seen as very right wing by European standards and all Northern European mainstream parties would be seen as very left wing in the US. So you end up with two parties who do offer a choice, but it's a choice that makes very little difference to most people.
This isn't a bad thing. The will of the people has already affected policy, and eliminated all the terrible choices before the election even started. The fact that we never see the terrible choices means there's a perception that democracy doesn't have any effect but I think this is at least partly an illusion.
Yes, I meant to add a disclaimer to that effect. The GGP made rather an extreme example.
This policy would prevent a street sweeper from saying that the council's policy on schools for the disabled is harmful, or the head of IT from complaining that the council spends too much on travel.
Funny how we think it's so invasive when an employer looks at (mostly public) speech they don't like and punishes you for it, but we don't think it's so invasive when an employer demands your bodily fluids which for damned sure are not public.
Fair point, but I expect there's broad agreement that this is at least as invasive on a liberal site such as Slashdot.
You also can't insist that they continue to employ you after you call them asshats. Free speech has consequences too, you see.
Why not? You're an employee of the city, not the city administrators.
If it doesn't affect your ability to do your job then they have no justification to sack the employee.
Well, you could do that.
Or you could complain and try to get things to change, thus meaning you and possible thousands of other people don't have to move.
The nice thing about modern civilisations is that the populace has some say in how things are run.
I'm using my SheevaPlug mostly as a file server. It's also running rtorrent and my one almighty Emacs session which contains my org-mode agenda, IRC client, and various and sundry other services. I've had it for less than a year, and by my estimation it's paid for itself already in reduced power consumption (compared to the clunker old desktop machine that had previously been serving that purpose).
Thnaks. This is the sort of answer I wanted. What people are actually using it for rather than could possibly use it for.
I've got some other plans for it, which mostly seem to involve messing around, drinking beer and reading man pages at 2 AM. And I figure that in itself is a use, right?
Sure is. Just somewhat specialised as a niche.
But you don't have one. And you clearly don't see a device like this as worth the investment otherwise you'd have bought one.
Even if you did have a need for something to do those jobs, is this device really in any way more convenient in the real world? If so, why isn't everyone using them? If not, what is the extremely specific niche where someone has a need to run a server but only has 30cm^2 of office space and a plug socket to dedicate to it?
I see.
So do people use them for this?
It's cool and all, and it's nice that it doesn't take up any office space at all, but what do people use these for?
Does anyone actually have something like this and use it for a serious purpose?
Why is it false? Approval voting requires tactical voting for anyone who has a second favourite candidate. They have to choose whether or not to select based on their favourite's chance of success.
The analysis doesn't take into account the effect that the probability of regret will have on the level of tactical voting.
I sort of see... But I'd have thought one would give the same result as a sample mass, so I'm still a bit lost.
Still, does seem that averaging them would be a rather poor result since it is guaranteed to be wrong.
I'd have thought we'd have an experiment that comes up with say 0.3464kg and another that comes up with 0.0765kg, and they want to define the kilogram as 1/0.3464 * the result of the first one or 1/0.0765 * the result of the second one. But both of these would give exactly the same mass as the other.
Or if the measurements are inconsistent, they should just pick the one with the smallest variance within that experiment.
Clearly I'm missing something here.
"Heavy" and "light" can mean either more or less mass or more or less weight. Since the term was clarified by the parenthesis it means less massive and so cannot get "lighter".
There are dozens of different voting systems. Possibly hundreds. FPTP is one of the worst. Approval voting has certain advantages over that but doesn't do anything to discourage tactical voting or give a result that close to what the majority wants. Why not choose a better system?