The problem is, apps tend to look and feel too much like they should be running on a desktop
I think IE for WinMo is the classic example. It renders pages like they took the desktop version and told it it has a tiny screen. Text becomes a mangled mass of nonsense when it starts wordwrapping to the next line after each word, and graphics placement is haphazard at best. It's like the browser has no idea it's trying to display on a screen too small to hold a web page. This was one of the reasons I jumped ship to Android: I wanted to be able to access web pages.
There are people out there with hacked ROMs running leaked builds of 6.5, but you can hardly judge the final OS based on hacked ROMs running leaked builds.
In my experience there are somethings you can judge from them. I cooked my own ROMs for years for WM, generally running the bleedingest-edge one I could find. No major shortcomings have ever been dealt with between early leak and public release. Always just serious bug fixes. 6.5 is bloated, as were 6.1 and 6.0. That's not going to get better after RTM.
I have to reboot the phone about once a week to prevent it from locking up when answering or placing calls.
Yes, this. I jumped ship when this fun "feature" reappeared in 6.5, after having been absent since 6.0. I had to reboot my old WM5 Mio A701 twice a day because the module that handles the cell comms would freeze. Upgrades that are downgrades suck.
I don't understand what Ballmer means. What did they screw up?
It's screwed up by being byzantine and awkward. It may be that they're trying to be too one-size-fits-all with Windows Mobile, but the real problem is that it's completely incoherent. I've struggled with four WM phones over the last several years, starting with WM5. I stoically put up with it until recently, when a freind of mine showed me his Developer Preview model Google G2. The Google Android OS is everything WM should be, but isn't. Perhaps WM is a bit hobbled by the necessity of backwards compatibility, but that doesn't explain it entirely. I think there's too many people working on it. Like the old saying goes, "put three teams to work on a compiler and you'll get a three-pass compiler". Break the OS tasking into a bunch of modules, each with a different team, and you get a bunch of modules elbowing each other trying to do stuff.
You know, I would rather deport people like you than hard working or studying immigrants.
He's not talking about immigrants. He's talking about Chinese nationals sent here on the Chinese government's dime to get advanced degrees, after which they are required to return home. There is actually some validity to the argument. State-funded universities take in an awful lot of foreign students because they pay higher tuition fees as non-residents. Trouble is, the state universities are supposed to be there for the education of state residents, space for whom is diminished every time they let a foreign national on a student visa enroll.
there will be a huge crunch in the interim that could set the US and the rest of the world behind in developing new more efficient technologies.
Are you kidding? China sends thousands of students to the US and pays their way to boot. The US is still the best place to get specialized education in a variety of scientific disciplines, and state universities love foreign students because they pay the confiscatory out-of-state resident student fees.
there will be a huge crunch in the interim that could set the US and the rest of the world behind in developing new more efficient technologies.
Behind what, exactly? Behind where we might've been in a magical fairyland where everything happens exactly as we'd like it? Dealing with contingencies isn't a disaster, it's business as usual.
The mine should have not been allowed to close in the first place.
Not allowed? How do you "not allow" private property owners to stop incurring the expense of pulling underpriced dirt out of a hole on their own land? Take the land at gunpoint? Then operate the mine subsidized by tax money to be competitive with Chinese peasant labor? To what end? Why don't we nationalize the entire economy then, Mister Trotsky?
Don't forget "runs crabby old one-off [DOS|2K|XP] targetted microcontroller programming software without a hiccup". Vista barfed on that stuff religiously.
As for the SMB2 flaw... meh. These things are nearly always "chicken little" stories. When you think about it, this one's pretty much a non-starter. First, it has to come from inside the LAN. That means it'll have to come from a box that's been pwned! and controlled remotely. That immediately eliminates exploitation by the general Internet Fuckwad crowd, because you can't just use a locally run utility to send a "reboot packet" to any arbitrary IP address that they want to annoy. As much as I'd love to be able to send a "spank" packet to a jerk on the internet, this ain't gonna do it. What that leaves is the Zombie Net guys and the Disgruntled Employee. Zombie Net guys want to control the boxes secretly, to use them as tools for DDOS or email relay or what have you, so they're not going to really be motivated to add a function that potentially "outs" their conquests while also clobbering potential additional zombies. As for the Disgruntled Employee, this is largely a theoretical extreme case that doesn't actually happen in real life to any great degree. Most disgruntled employees don't have the time, the technical know-how, and/or the desire to craft the sort of software time bomb that would use this exploit. I'd lay money that malicious destruction via rm * -rf in a cron job is a greater threat.
Bank? Banks don't have money. Why do people think banks still have money? Even the ATMs are usually filled from preloaded cartridges brought in armored cars. THe bank itself has maybe $20K in cash, plus one of those exploding dye packets, plus a "panic button" that sends the cops in immediately. Banks haven't been a good target since late 60's, when everything started to go electronic.
No, your math is based on incorrect assumptions. That's like saying a custom-crafted software application earns the writer $50K/hr because you paid $25K for it and it took 30 minutes to install--- even though it took 2 months to write
For a crime like this, you need to include the time spent planning, fencing, and then looking over your shoulder for the next 10 years (or sitting in jail 5 years if you're caught)... and also divide by the number of people doing it.
The law often doesn't make a distinction between making your victim think you have a deadly weapon and actually possessing one.
Trouble is, it's fairly easy for even a public defender to get a jury to the reasonable doubt point on the matter. Easy to show that the witness only thought they were indicating they had a gun, when in fact they did not and were simply reaching into their pocket for a pillowcase to throw the loot in. Unless there actually is a gun that someone sees, the "with a gun" enhancement seldom flies.
I say you're nuts. My brother never learned his multiplication tables(for a brief period teaching them was considered unnecessary) so to this day he has to pull out a calculator to figure out 47*8. Rote memorization of multiplication tables is an extraordinarily valuable shortcut for doing math in your head.
Problem is, "fair use" isn't a protection, it's a defense. You can claim fair use in court, after you've been sued, and hope the [jury|judge] sides with you.
"Exothermic reaction" means the concrete will be emitting heat and therefore will not make a good pc cooler until the curing is complete.
How much heat do you think curing concrete gives off? By the time it's hard enough to build on, environmental temperature has a much greater effect on the concrete temperature than any residual curing. Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how slashdot geeks don't allow having no practical experience with something (e.g. pouring concrete) stop them from drawing extrapolated conclusions therefrom.
Well it's a good thing no one's ever heard of "tye" copper (google hits = 0), so that won't be an issue. Regular run of the mill drawn copper is perfectly safe poured into concrete. We've been doing it for a long time in the plumbing business with no problems.
Alcohol, and I assume Redline Water Wetter, does not change viscosity to any great extent, and thus my suggesting it first.
If anything, Water Wetter reduces viscosity. It's primary action is as a surface tension reduction agent. Secondarily, it also prevents corrosion. Unlike ethylene glycol, it doesn't make up a significant fraction of the coolant volume. As I recall, the 17 liter cooling system in my VW required only one 350ml bottle of Water Wetter.
The difference is the iPhone had -everything- usable
Except copy/paste, 3G, video recording, and several other features that came standard on other phones of the same period. But yeah, every one of the features they deigned to include worked quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
I give you a trophy for spelling "hare-brained" properly. Plus I think your analysis is correct.
The problem is, apps tend to look and feel too much like they should be running on a desktop
I think IE for WinMo is the classic example. It renders pages like they took the desktop version and told it it has a tiny screen. Text becomes a mangled mass of nonsense when it starts wordwrapping to the next line after each word, and graphics placement is haphazard at best. It's like the browser has no idea it's trying to display on a screen too small to hold a web page. This was one of the reasons I jumped ship to Android: I wanted to be able to access web pages.
Ahhh, there was a verion 5. I guess that one wasn't screwed up?
No, WM5 was very screwed up. Microsoft was doing a commendable job unscrewing until 6.5, when it all started to fall apart.
There are people out there with hacked ROMs running leaked builds of 6.5, but you can hardly judge the final OS based on hacked ROMs running leaked builds.
In my experience there are somethings you can judge from them. I cooked my own ROMs for years for WM, generally running the bleedingest-edge one I could find. No major shortcomings have ever been dealt with between early leak and public release. Always just serious bug fixes. 6.5 is bloated, as were 6.1 and 6.0. That's not going to get better after RTM.
I have to reboot the phone about once a week to prevent it from locking up when answering or placing calls.
Yes, this. I jumped ship when this fun "feature" reappeared in 6.5, after having been absent since 6.0. I had to reboot my old WM5 Mio A701 twice a day because the module that handles the cell comms would freeze. Upgrades that are downgrades suck.
I don't understand what Ballmer means. What did they screw up?
It's screwed up by being byzantine and awkward. It may be that they're trying to be too one-size-fits-all with Windows Mobile, but the real problem is that it's completely incoherent. I've struggled with four WM phones over the last several years, starting with WM5. I stoically put up with it until recently, when a freind of mine showed me his Developer Preview model Google G2. The Google Android OS is everything WM should be, but isn't. Perhaps WM is a bit hobbled by the necessity of backwards compatibility, but that doesn't explain it entirely. I think there's too many people working on it. Like the old saying goes, "put three teams to work on a compiler and you'll get a three-pass compiler". Break the OS tasking into a bunch of modules, each with a different team, and you get a bunch of modules elbowing each other trying to do stuff.
which stick is used for indicators and which for wipers.
Are you kidding? That's one that never moves: it's the one on the left, that you can reach with your hand on the steering wheel.
What are you doing to XP that crashes it? Seriously, I am genuinely curious.
Rome was built on loot, collected via military conquest. Once the sources for tribute were exhausted, the economy really started to decline.
Actually, the vast majority of them do not. They are here on the Chinese government's dime, and it's damn near impossible to get a green card.
You know, I would rather deport people like you than hard working or studying immigrants.
He's not talking about immigrants. He's talking about Chinese nationals sent here on the Chinese government's dime to get advanced degrees, after which they are required to return home. There is actually some validity to the argument. State-funded universities take in an awful lot of foreign students because they pay higher tuition fees as non-residents. Trouble is, the state universities are supposed to be there for the education of state residents, space for whom is diminished every time they let a foreign national on a student visa enroll.
there will be a huge crunch in the interim that could set the US and the rest of the world behind in developing new more efficient technologies.
Are you kidding? China sends thousands of students to the US and pays their way to boot. The US is still the best place to get specialized education in a variety of scientific disciplines, and state universities love foreign students because they pay the confiscatory out-of-state resident student fees.
there will be a huge crunch in the interim that could set the US and the rest of the world behind in developing new more efficient technologies.
Behind what, exactly? Behind where we might've been in a magical fairyland where everything happens exactly as we'd like it? Dealing with contingencies isn't a disaster, it's business as usual.
The mine should have not been allowed to close in the first place.
Not allowed? How do you "not allow" private property owners to stop incurring the expense of pulling underpriced dirt out of a hole on their own land? Take the land at gunpoint? Then operate the mine subsidized by tax money to be competitive with Chinese peasant labor? To what end? Why don't we nationalize the entire economy then, Mister Trotsky?
Don't forget "runs crabby old one-off [DOS|2K|XP] targetted microcontroller programming software without a hiccup". Vista barfed on that stuff religiously.
As for the SMB2 flaw... meh. These things are nearly always "chicken little" stories. When you think about it, this one's pretty much a non-starter. First, it has to come from inside the LAN. That means it'll have to come from a box that's been pwned! and controlled remotely. That immediately eliminates exploitation by the general Internet Fuckwad crowd, because you can't just use a locally run utility to send a "reboot packet" to any arbitrary IP address that they want to annoy. As much as I'd love to be able to send a "spank" packet to a jerk on the internet, this ain't gonna do it. What that leaves is the Zombie Net guys and the Disgruntled Employee. Zombie Net guys want to control the boxes secretly, to use them as tools for DDOS or email relay or what have you, so they're not going to really be motivated to add a function that potentially "outs" their conquests while also clobbering potential additional zombies. As for the Disgruntled Employee, this is largely a theoretical extreme case that doesn't actually happen in real life to any great degree. Most disgruntled employees don't have the time, the technical know-how, and/or the desire to craft the sort of software time bomb that would use this exploit. I'd lay money that malicious destruction via rm * -rf in a cron job is a greater threat.
Who does that leave?
Bank? Banks don't have money. Why do people think banks still have money? Even the ATMs are usually filled from preloaded cartridges brought in armored cars. THe bank itself has maybe $20K in cash, plus one of those exploding dye packets, plus a "panic button" that sends the cops in immediately. Banks haven't been a good target since late 60's, when everything started to go electronic.
$3000 in 31 seconds is $351,000 an hour.
No, your math is based on incorrect assumptions. That's like saying a custom-crafted software application earns the writer $50K/hr because you paid $25K for it and it took 30 minutes to install--- even though it took 2 months to write
For a crime like this, you need to include the time spent planning, fencing, and then looking over your shoulder for the next 10 years (or sitting in jail 5 years if you're caught)... and also divide by the number of people doing it.
The law often doesn't make a distinction between making your victim think you have a deadly weapon and actually possessing one.
Trouble is, it's fairly easy for even a public defender to get a jury to the reasonable doubt point on the matter. Easy to show that the witness only thought they were indicating they had a gun, when in fact they did not and were simply reaching into their pocket for a pillowcase to throw the loot in. Unless there actually is a gun that someone sees, the "with a gun" enhancement seldom flies.
yeah, in my day they just called that "smash n' grab".
I say you're nuts. My brother never learned his multiplication tables(for a brief period teaching them was considered unnecessary) so to this day he has to pull out a calculator to figure out 47*8. Rote memorization of multiplication tables is an extraordinarily valuable shortcut for doing math in your head.
Problem is, "fair use" isn't a protection, it's a defense. You can claim fair use in court, after you've been sued, and hope the [jury|judge] sides with you.
"Exothermic reaction" means the concrete will be emitting heat and therefore will not make a good pc cooler until the curing is complete.
How much heat do you think curing concrete gives off? By the time it's hard enough to build on, environmental temperature has a much greater effect on the concrete temperature than any residual curing. Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how slashdot geeks don't allow having no practical experience with something (e.g. pouring concrete) stop them from drawing extrapolated conclusions therefrom.
Well it's a good thing no one's ever heard of "tye" copper (google hits = 0), so that won't be an issue. Regular run of the mill drawn copper is perfectly safe poured into concrete. We've been doing it for a long time in the plumbing business with no problems.
Alcohol, and I assume Redline Water Wetter, does not change viscosity to any great extent, and thus my suggesting it first.
If anything, Water Wetter reduces viscosity. It's primary action is as a surface tension reduction agent. Secondarily, it also prevents corrosion. Unlike ethylene glycol, it doesn't make up a significant fraction of the coolant volume. As I recall, the 17 liter cooling system in my VW required only one 350ml bottle of Water Wetter.
The difference is the iPhone had -everything- usable
Except copy/paste, 3G, video recording, and several other features that came standard on other phones of the same period. But yeah, every one of the features they deigned to include worked quite well.