By the way, I now own a wifi-only Xoom. It is a fine device, with a few really idiotic warts like no USB on the media dock. And no way to connect a mouse to it. This is really frustrating, because all it needs is a mouse and it is a full blown computer.
On the other hand, the sound that comes out of the media dock speakers is amazing, it has to be heard. The screen out of the box is not the brightest but can be adjusted up to be above reproach. The screen resolution is stunning. The user interface only gets a c+, it gets the job done. It was easy enough for my 7 year old to figure out pretty much instantly. I had to pry the thing away once flash was up and she got onto her favorite game sites.
At $600 I do not consider this device overpriced. Build quality is far beyond a netbook, say, as is the shiny factor. Color me a fanboy. Makes it all the more irritating when Google does stupid things like restricting the source or being slow to update with USB host support.
I absolutely hate the design decision that says the user should not be allowed to shut down an application. I understand Rubin's argument, but it is only an argument. Real users like to tidy things up. Having no way to make an application disappear from the active applications list is just very irritating.
Sigh. One thing Google is not very good at is listening to users.
Whilst tivoisation is a problem and is already happening I see another motive here - only approved partners get to release a properly functional tablet, for an entire year.
So... the plan is to achieve exactly the opposite of the Android phone effect, where Apple's product was overtaken by a veritable horde of competing products? Now nice of Google to take those steps carefully designed to ensure that Apple only has to worry about a handful of competitors in this space. How nice of Google to allow Apple to shift the debate from "which Android tablet should I get?" to "should I get an Android tablet?".
I'd say the REAL goal is a slow but sure march towards TiVoization
It is also possible that Google learned a lesson from the backlash over the initial closed source announcement and will be more careful about walking the open source walk in future, but pride keeps Rubin from backing down specifically on Honeycomb. Pride, it's a nasty thing.
What is it about PSN that warrants such a long downtime? Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up. It doesn't take two weeks!
I suspect that restoring their user data from backups was never tested and turns out to be harder then they hope. Perhaps they now find themselves writing a lot of custom code trying to rebuild a database without dangling links and halfway up to date. I also think that Sony worked hard at digging themselves a very deep karma hole and now they have fallen into it.
So catting a file is stupidly clumsy so you are pretty much forced to create an alias to make it tolerable, but of course you will normally not have created that alias and typing in the whole command without the alias is a big pain, so chances are you simply won't carry out the task that the Unix guy would have already completed while you are still trying to find a place to store your alias permanently.
And why does working with Microsoft products always turn out to be just like this?
The article doesn't say that more intelligent people are more easily distracted. It says that a specific region of the brain has more grey matter in children than in adults. When some adults fail to prune the extra grey matter, they tend be more more easily distracted than those who develop normally.
To paraphrase: if your brain doesn't rot in the usual way, you won't become a perfect cog.
Seriously, I should revisit Suse considering my preference for KDE. Especially now that they are out from under the thumb of certain Novell VPs whose names I will not mention because it makes me spit.
I completely ignore Plasma and that works fine for me. One day maybe I'll play with it and find out why it was worth taking such a PR hit over. Or not. In the mean time it doesn't get in my way and that is why I like KDE.
KDE has improved *greatly* since its 4.4.x days. It is a lot snappier, less buggy and doesn't clutter up your desktop like it used to.
Mostly true, however I made the mistake of upgrading to Unbuntu 11.04 day before yesterday and besides trashing my Catalyst driver unrecoverably I now have a really nasty new bug: mouse clicks stop working for all widgets except window decorations, usually once each day on resume.
I have some less than polite comments about how Ubuntu version upgrades also force install the latest bleeding edge kernel without asking, but that only cost a couple of hours while this new KDE bug constantly forces me to restart the desktop. Sigh.
And don't ask me why I'm posting my bug report to Slashdot;-)
Completely agree, KDE is the only desktop that just does its job and doesn't try to force me into some flavor of the month weirdo man machine interface experiment. All is forgiven.
The numerous reports that have been out all show varying views of the procedure. Some don't even mention the crash. Others mentioned 4 helicopters were actually on scene. Which makes sense, being there were 25 or so seals.
There were also reports of a complete backup team of 24, which to me makes it more likely the backup choppers were chinooks. Even three Blackhawks would be stressed to carry more than 50 people plus weapons and cargo.
the author from the blog where I found the image of what could be the "stealth hawk" have a interesting theory: To ensure they got to the house without being noticed by the Pakistanis, it is possible that the Chinnoks were also stealth versions.
Standing off some distance and being more easily detected would also have been something of a diversion.
That's credible. Now please explain to me how they got 24 seals complete with combat equipment, two flight crews, a body and lots of swag - total at least 6,000 pounds - out in the one remaining chopper.
Why hasn't Microsoft pulled the plug on Mono already, if that is what they want to do?
Because most of us have been smart enough to steer clear of Mono, therefore pulling the plug now would do little to no damage, therefore Microsoft has not done it yet. Duh.
We don't need to know much more about Mono than that people like you support it. We know that Mono is a patent trap and that Microsoft wants open source projects to use it for that reason and no amount of rhetoric from you will change that fact or somehow turn the cynical thugs at Microsoft into freedom loving pals of ours.
Seriously? After what I said, that is the response that is supposed to put me in my place? I suppose I will have to just concede to your superior argument and wit (or lack thereof).
You are so far out in fairytale land you hardly merit a response. But let me try: nobody cares whether Miguel de Icaza is crushed by Microsoft or not. And don't worry he won't be, because he is Microsoft's man, always has been from the day I met him ten years ago.
People in this community (to which you obviously do not belong) care about preserving their freedom. And Microsoft's.NET promises to do the opposite of that.
In all the MSDN conference media -which I do not define as MSDN proper, but programmer conference media-, Microsoft has not only embraces Mono but showcases it.
Since I know Microsoft well, that is all the reason I need to avoid Mono now and forever.
Did you... not see the recent Microsoft PDC conference video where Miguel De Icaza himself presented on Mono?
I hope you are not under the misapprehension that Miguel de Icaza has a shred of credibility left with anyone, least of all me.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I now own a wifi-only Xoom. It is a fine device, with a few really idiotic warts like no USB on the media dock. And no way to connect a mouse to it. This is really frustrating, because all it needs is a mouse and it is a full blown computer.
On the other hand, the sound that comes out of the media dock speakers is amazing, it has to be heard. The screen out of the box is not the brightest but can be adjusted up to be above reproach. The screen resolution is stunning. The user interface only gets a c+, it gets the job done. It was easy enough for my 7 year old to figure out pretty much instantly. I had to pry the thing away once flash was up and she got onto her favorite game sites.
At $600 I do not consider this device overpriced. Build quality is far beyond a netbook, say, as is the shiny factor. Color me a fanboy. Makes it all the more irritating when Google does stupid things like restricting the source or being slow to update with USB host support.
I absolutely hate the design decision that says the user should not be allowed to shut down an application. I understand Rubin's argument, but it is only an argument. Real users like to tidy things up. Having no way to make an application disappear from the active applications list is just very irritating.
Sigh. One thing Google is not very good at is listening to users.
Whilst tivoisation is a problem and is already happening I see another motive here - only approved partners get to release a properly functional tablet, for an entire year.
So... the plan is to achieve exactly the opposite of the Android phone effect, where Apple's product was overtaken by a veritable horde of competing products? Now nice of Google to take those steps carefully designed to ensure that Apple only has to worry about a handful of competitors in this space. How nice of Google to allow Apple to shift the debate from "which Android tablet should I get?" to "should I get an Android tablet?".
I'd say the REAL goal is a slow but sure march towards TiVoization
It is also possible that Google learned a lesson from the backlash over the initial closed source announcement and will be more careful about walking the open source walk in future, but pride keeps Rubin from backing down specifically on Honeycomb. Pride, it's a nasty thing.
What is it about PSN that warrants such a long downtime? Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up. It doesn't take two weeks!
I suspect that restoring their user data from backups was never tested and turns out to be harder then they hope. Perhaps they now find themselves writing a lot of custom code trying to rebuild a database without dangling links and halfway up to date. I also think that Sony worked hard at digging themselves a very deep karma hole and now they have fallen into it.
So catting a file is stupidly clumsy so you are pretty much forced to create an alias to make it tolerable, but of course you will normally not have created that alias and typing in the whole command without the alias is a big pain, so chances are you simply won't carry out the task that the Unix guy would have already completed while you are still trying to find a place to store your alias permanently.
And why does working with Microsoft products always turn out to be just like this?
The article doesn't say that more intelligent people are more easily distracted. It says that a specific region of the brain has more grey matter in children than in adults. When some adults fail to prune the extra grey matter, they tend be more more easily distracted than those who develop normally.
To paraphrase: if your brain doesn't rot in the usual way, you won't become a perfect cog.
The us military uses metric.
Oh you mean like kiloyards?
Want to read a binary file? Get-Content -Path C:\binary.file -Encoding Byte
Wow, that is powerful! Contrast with the same thing, much more difficult to express in Unix:
cat [filename]
[/sarcasm]
Powershell is actually very powerful as it can extend or be extended by the .Net framework.
Excuse me while I shudder.
Ubuntu bunnies breed faster.
Seriously, I should revisit Suse considering my preference for KDE. Especially now that they are out from under the thumb of certain Novell VPs whose names I will not mention because it makes me spit.
I completely ignore Plasma and that works fine for me. One day maybe I'll play with it and find out why it was worth taking such a PR hit over. Or not. In the mean time it doesn't get in my way and that is why I like KDE.
KDE has improved *greatly* since its 4.4.x days. It is a lot snappier, less buggy and doesn't clutter up your desktop like it used to.
Mostly true, however I made the mistake of upgrading to Unbuntu 11.04 day before yesterday and besides trashing my Catalyst driver unrecoverably I now have a really nasty new bug: mouse clicks stop working for all widgets except window decorations, usually once each day on resume.
I have some less than polite comments about how Ubuntu version upgrades also force install the latest bleeding edge kernel without asking, but that only cost a couple of hours while this new KDE bug constantly forces me to restart the desktop. Sigh.
And don't ask me why I'm posting my bug report to Slashdot ;-)
Completely agree, KDE is the only desktop that just does its job and doesn't try to force me into some flavor of the month weirdo man machine interface experiment. All is forgiven.
The numerous reports that have been out all show varying views of the procedure. Some don't even mention the crash. Others mentioned 4 helicopters were actually on scene. Which makes sense, being there were 25 or so seals.
There were also reports of a complete backup team of 24, which to me makes it more likely the backup choppers were chinooks. Even three Blackhawks would be stressed to carry more than 50 people plus weapons and cargo.
hi, 2011 was on the phone just now and he asked could you stop using illogical imperial measurements and just use kg's and the like, kthxbai!
Blackhawk is an American aircraft, it lifts pounds, not kilos don't you know.
the author from the blog where I found the image of what could be the "stealth hawk" have a interesting theory: To ensure they got to the house without being noticed by the Pakistanis, it is possible that the Chinnoks were also stealth versions.
Standing off some distance and being more easily detected would also have been something of a diversion.
That's credible. Now please explain to me how they got 24 seals complete with combat equipment, two flight crews, a body and lots of swag - total at least 6,000 pounds - out in the one remaining chopper.
You know Bill doesn't work there anymore, right?
Ballmer gone yet?
Why hasn't Microsoft pulled the plug on Mono already, if that is what they want to do?
Because most of us have been smart enough to steer clear of Mono, therefore pulling the plug now would do little to no damage, therefore Microsoft has not done it yet. Duh.
We don't need to know much more about Mono than that people like you support it. We know that Mono is a patent trap and that Microsoft wants open source projects to use it for that reason and no amount of rhetoric from you will change that fact or somehow turn the cynical thugs at Microsoft into freedom loving pals of ours.
He proved the naysayers wrong.
No he didn't.
Seriously? After what I said, that is the response that is supposed to put me in my place? I suppose I will have to just concede to your superior argument and wit (or lack thereof).
You are so far out in fairytale land you hardly merit a response. But let me try: nobody cares whether Miguel de Icaza is crushed by Microsoft or not. And don't worry he won't be, because he is Microsoft's man, always has been from the day I met him ten years ago.
People in this community (to which you obviously do not belong) care about preserving their freedom. And Microsoft's .NET promises to do the opposite of that.
I'm going to hold off and give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they've matured with age, and hope I'm right
As far as I can see Microsoft remains the same gang of thugs it always was.
You know who you are.
I'm going to hold off and give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they've matured with age, and hope I'm right
As far as I can see Microsoft remains the same gang of thugs it always was.
[Miguel] has not been crushed under the legal might if Microsoft.
Hardly. He's Microsoft's biggest friend.
He proved the naysayers wrong.
No he didn't.
In all the MSDN conference media -which I do not define as MSDN proper, but programmer conference media-, Microsoft has not only embraces Mono but showcases it.
Since I know Microsoft well, that is all the reason I need to avoid Mono now and forever.
Did you... not see the recent Microsoft PDC conference video where Miguel De Icaza himself presented on Mono?
I hope you are not under the misapprehension that Miguel de Icaza has a shred of credibility left with anyone, least of all me.
What part of sideloading isn't open?
Having to register with AT&T as a developer in order to get the drivers needed to adb install an app.
Wow, that sucks. Good thing T-Mobile is not nearly so evil. Oh, wait