"Why would I buy a laptop or a PC for my staff ever again I could buy them a single tablet – or even pocket sized phone – that just connects to a dock or cable and viola - it’s now a fully fledged PC, running all my corporate software, legacy or otherwise on a full sized monitor with keyboard and mouse."
Because Windows RT (that is: the tablet version of Windows 8, which is most certainly not the same thing as Windows Mobile) - does NOT run "legacy" applications. It's ARM only, which means any Win32 or Win64 application just simply won't execute.
So, certainly feel free to buy Windows RT tablets, and Windows 8 phones - but good luck using them as desktop replacements unless all your applications are Metro applications from the Microsoft store.
Perhaps you need to do a little more research first.
There is no evidence Twitter themselves were "hacked". This is likely the password file from a spambot c&c network.
All* the twitter accounts shown follow the same naming and password rules. This is not typical of how a random selection of users would set up their account. In addition all/most of these accounts are or were suspended (typically this is for spam).
* I may have missed one, but given several others point out the same...
"But isn't Git easy to install and use" Yes, for certain users and environments. In my experience, The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.
Mercurial tooling isn't as polished as the Subversion equivalents, but it's lightyears ahead of the Git tooling.
I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
All chicken breasts will need to be appropriately covered before being allowed on the intertubes. Naked chicken breasts will be blocked unless an appropriate 'Proof of Age' mechanism is in place.
Anyone having pictures of naked chicken breasts from a chicken under the age of 18 will be reported to the AFP.
We're a dev shop. Having a VM farm has saved our IT guys so much time and money. We used to buy dedicated boxes - some projects would get their own, most would share on some conglomerate box. Weird shit happened, stuff would never get uninstalled after a project was over, and people would be tripping over each other all the time (One person needs to reboot a box, the other was trying to debug some arcane issue). In short: a nightmare.
Now, we buy a AUD$6k box from $brand, hook it up to our SAN, and run anywhere up to 24 VMs on that one box at once. Each project gets one VM, possibly two or three if we need to simulate complex setups, or need multiple concurrent environments. If one project needs to do something resource heavy like do load testing, we can allocate a bunch more resources, set up a virtual network with a series of load-testing clients on a 10GbE network, and have at it usually without affecting other projects.
At the end of a project, we shut the VMs down for that project, and eventually archive them off. If a client comes back needing changes - that VM can be back online within 15 minutes. It's still in the same state as when we last worked on the project - its a bit more difficult to do that with physical hardware.
Our internal 'production' servers (email, source control, wiki, intranet, etc) are all virtualised too - although they get their own dedicated hardware pool where appropriate.
Backups are as simple as snapshotting the SAN and exporting the backup to tape. Push one button, and in a few hours go to the server room to pick up tapes. Having a huge number of boxes needing to run the backups themselves takes longer, and is generally more error prone.
Even for client production environments we recommend clients use Virtualisation. Most of our clients don't need bare metal performance, and it's generally better (cheaper, faster throughput) to simply clone an existing machine and load-balance the VMs, than go to bare-metal OS+app installs.
If something weird goes on with the production instance that we can't reproduce - we get snapshots sent over.
I'm not sure we could go back to pre-virtualisation now.
While GET does in practice change stuff on the server, the idea is that it should be repeatable without adverse effect.
So, calling GET on a document might increase a hit counter, or update some other information - having me repeatedly call that function again should be safe.
However using GET for Updating Account Details, or Moving money (just some purely/random/ examples) is just plain bad design.
The example of signing GET requests is useful in some situations, but *mostly* not necessary if the design is right.
Windows Server 2008 shares the same driver model as Vista.
That means that if your device has Vista drivers for your architecture, you're fine.
I've been using 2008 as a desktop since the launch, and I've only had a few application incompatabilities.
Most of these incompatabilties were fixed by enabling XP SP2 Compatability mode for the app, or for really stubborn things: Running an XP Virtual Machine.
Yes, Running a VM uses more ram - but thre are significant benefits of isolating XP-specific bits to a VM and running most of your environment under 2008. Performance is not noticably different if you have hardware virtualisation and a decent amount of RAM (4GB+).
It's quite possible that the old LCD display is a 6 bit (256k colours) panel, which to display colours which didn't fit exactly onto that colour space, flickers between two on either 'side'. It's called 'temporal dithering'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Applications
Theoretically you shouldn't be able to notice this, but it's the same with low refresh rates on CRTs - some people can notice it directly, others indirectly through eyestrain.
Whilst I'm really not a lawyer, it's worth pointing out that the legal use of the word "Conspiracy" doesn't necessarily imply that it was a Government/Anarchic/Terrorism related thing.
As ever, Wikipedia has something to say on the matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(crime)
"In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between natural persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement."
There's two main versions of the.NET CLR (Runtime): 1.1, and 2.0..NET 1.1 runs on.NET CLR 1.1.NET 2.0 through to.NET 3.5 runs on.NET CLR 2.0
Effectively,.NET 3.0 and 3.5 were language extensions on top of 2.0. They still execute ontop of the same CLR.
If memory serves, Mono has recently announced full feature compliance against.NET 1.1, and they're now targetting full feature compliance against.NET 2.0.
That doesn't mean.NET 3.5 apps won't run. It just means certain bits (such as LINQ, WPF, WCF, Anonymous Types, etc) are either not present or not completely implemented yet.
In either case, Silverlight/Moonlight are seperate from the.NET / Mono codebases. Yes, they have shared code, however since Silverlight 2.0 is a vastly cut down version of the.NET Framework.
This makes full feature compliance of Silverlight 2.0 by the Moonlight crowd that much easier, since the majority of the functionality that is used in Silverlight is already implemented in Mono.
As for Moonlight/Mono being just MS PR, I think Miguel De Icaza might have something quite strong to say about that.
- Novell is actually using Mono to implement apps on their Linux desktop.
- Second Life, amongst other reasonably big apps, is using Mono to provide (or improve) pluggable/scriptable functionality in their apps.
Someone is attempting to reuse an old joke on Slashdot.
Would you like to: 1. Dispatch Microsoft Anti-Fun Squad. (In Soviet Russia, anti-fun squad make joke of you!) 2. Create a beowulf cluster of these 3. ??? 4. Profit!
"Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
First of all - it's not threading itself that is the issue. And the answer is no - Future versions of Windows won't ever be as perfectly smooth as BeOS was/is.
Why? Because of backwards compatibility that's built into each version of Windows. Even in 32bit versions of Windows Vista, you can take your poorly built 16bit Win 3.11 App that did all sorts of wrong things, and still expect that it'll work just the same as it did on 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP. Sure, you might need to run with Admin rights, and it won't be able to handle long file names - but still, it'll probably work.
It's precisely this in-built backward compatability that is Windows' biggest strength, and it's biggest weakness. For every version of Windows, Microsoft has to spend vast amounts of time ensuring that apps, where possible, continue to work. Despite large changes to architecture and how things operate.
Sure, MS could say 'screw it' and break compatibility - after all, they did (to a limited extent) with Vista already. But then you're resetting your OS's application base back to (practically) zero. Oh, and don't forget drivers - they're important too. As anyone who jumped on the early Vista builds and noticed their graphics card ran like crap will tell you.
I'll probably get flamed for this next bit, but Linux and (to some extent Mac OS) developers are more willing to break things between OS versions. So, running an older version of some app on a newer version of the OS is more likely to break. The trade off is that apps on Linux are more likely to be open source, so at least someone can update it to fix whatever the issue was.
- Will. (Who writes Windows "Business Software" for a living and has absolutely no issue spinning up threads on a server backend as needed to process data. Just don't mention the UI.)
First of all - there was no SQL Server 2003. Perhaps you're talking about Visual Studio.NET 2003?
"In 2003 you had to have 2 or 3 different applications up in order to create a table, populate it with data and then view the table data."
With the MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager (comes with MS SQL Server 2000 - it's part of the client tools on the install CD), you can perform almost any action on the server - from creating databases, tables, views, users, through to all the scheduling, full-text index setup, etc etc.
If you need to perform particularly complex tasks (executing a pre-prepared, or complex query) that can't be done in the GUI - the Query Analyser is two clicks away from the main Enterprise Manager window (Tools -> Query Analyser)
"Plus transact SQL was like an (even more) retarded version of SQL+"
That's pretty much a matter of opinion - I find T-SQL very easy to use and learn. Help and reference material is one F1 key away, and if that doesn't do it - Googling on MSDN is usually the best source of examples and references.
My experiences with using PL/SQL under Oracle have been less than ideal - on several occasions I've had to stop using Oracle and switch to an MS SQL / MySQL environment, simply because I was spending far too much time trying to get the DB up and running. I suppose if I had several months and a good reference on hand -- that might all be different, but there's not an easy learning curve in PL/SQL (even for someone who has a decent amount of experience with other DBMSs). YMMV.
"Of course now that TOAD works on MS-SQL this may not matter much to database diehards," I suppose if you're getting paid at the Oracle consultant level, then the licence cost for TOAD isn't going to be of any matter to you. For those of us who are either freelancing - or working for a company that isn't keen on buying more expensive bits of software, then this isn't going to help.
The biggest advantage for SQL Server is that they ship Enterprise Manager in the box. It makes help and maintaining a db (to a point) fairly painless, and helps to flatten the learning curve.
"Of course, those savings would be negated if they somehow hit something 'expensive'..."
They're testing this in the desert... to be precise: the south australian desert.
The only thing "expensive" that might cause some issues would be if they went really off target and hit Pine Gap - then the Yanks will want to invade. If they hit Adelade - "oops, my bad", no big loss.
"The whole beginning of the book is how someone predicting doom wanted to make an encyclopedia of all knowledge to speed up the coming of the next great civilization."
I believe you'll find that psychohistory was the tool which would shorten the time that (fictional) society would spend in chaos.
The encyclopedia galactica of which you talk was supposedly a way to (in essence) get a bunch of smart people out of the way, so that they could be the "seed" from which the new foundation would spring.
It's been a while since I've read the Foundation & Empire series, but iirc, the above is correct.
You forgot a few things: You'll read/watch your GoogleNews on your portable next-gen flexible GooglePaper, or listen to it on your Google Radio.
You'll drink GoogleGulp to keep your fluids (and brain performance) up. It may even provide all the nutrients you could possibly need.
You'll wear 'smart' Google Wear which will interface with the GoogleChip in your brain to automaticly do searches, make calls over the Free Google-Wireless, and let Google index everything in your head.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. Exactly...
Cross-posting my comment I made over there:
"Why would I buy a laptop or a PC for my staff ever again I could buy them a single tablet – or even pocket sized phone – that just connects to a dock or cable and viola - it’s now a fully fledged PC, running all my corporate software, legacy or otherwise on a full sized monitor with keyboard and mouse."
Because Windows RT (that is: the tablet version of Windows 8, which is most certainly not the same thing as Windows Mobile) - does NOT run "legacy" applications. It's ARM only, which means any Win32 or Win64 application just simply won't execute.
So, certainly feel free to buy Windows RT tablets, and Windows 8 phones - but good luck using them as desktop replacements unless all your applications are Metro applications from the Microsoft store.
Perhaps you need to do a little more research first.
They're still in the process of docking it (watching the live feed now).
There is no evidence Twitter themselves were "hacked".
This is likely the password file from a spambot c&c network.
All* the twitter accounts shown follow the same naming and password rules. This is not typical of how a random selection of users would set up their account.
In addition all/most of these accounts are or were suspended (typically this is for spam).
* I may have missed one, but given several others point out the same...
Ref: Reddit: 55.000+ Twitter usernames and passwords leaked
From TFA, it supports HDCP 2.0 - so it's encrypting that content, at least.
You'll need to set HDCP policies for your donkey porn from now on. (Please)
Why not? I hear Julian Assange knows a few hot swedish chicks...
*ahem*
From 2006: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/01/1255225
"But isn't Git easy to install and use"
Yes, for certain users and environments.
In my experience, The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.
Mercurial tooling isn't as polished as the Subversion equivalents, but it's lightyears ahead of the Git tooling.
I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
All chicken breasts will need to be appropriately covered before being allowed on the intertubes.
Naked chicken breasts will be blocked unless an appropriate 'Proof of Age' mechanism is in place.
Anyone having pictures of naked chicken breasts from a chicken under the age of 18 will be reported to the AFP.
We're a dev shop. Having a VM farm has saved our IT guys so much time and money.
We used to buy dedicated boxes - some projects would get their own, most would share on some conglomerate box. Weird shit happened, stuff would never get uninstalled after a project was over, and people would be tripping over each other all the time (One person needs to reboot a box, the other was trying to debug some arcane issue). In short: a nightmare.
Now, we buy a AUD$6k box from $brand, hook it up to our SAN, and run anywhere up to 24 VMs on that one box at once.
Each project gets one VM, possibly two or three if we need to simulate complex setups, or need multiple concurrent environments. If one project needs to do something resource heavy like do load testing, we can allocate a bunch more resources, set up a virtual network with a series of load-testing clients on a 10GbE network, and have at it usually without affecting other projects.
At the end of a project, we shut the VMs down for that project, and eventually archive them off. If a client comes back needing changes - that VM can be back online within 15 minutes. It's still in the same state as when we last worked on the project - its a bit more difficult to do that with physical hardware.
Our internal 'production' servers (email, source control, wiki, intranet, etc) are all virtualised too - although they get their own dedicated hardware pool where appropriate.
Backups are as simple as snapshotting the SAN and exporting the backup to tape. Push one button, and in a few hours go to the server room to pick up tapes. Having a huge number of boxes needing to run the backups themselves takes longer, and is generally more error prone.
Even for client production environments we recommend clients use Virtualisation. Most of our clients don't need bare metal performance, and it's generally better (cheaper, faster throughput) to simply clone an existing machine and load-balance the VMs, than go to bare-metal OS+app installs.
If something weird goes on with the production instance that we can't reproduce - we get snapshots sent over.
I'm not sure we could go back to pre-virtualisation now.
It wasn't about him using Telstra equipment, time, or resouces (since he didn't - or so he claims).
It was that people assumed just because he worked for Telstra, that his opinions and mocking of Stephen Conroy were somehow planned by Telstra.
While GET does in practice change stuff on the server, the idea is that it should be repeatable without adverse effect.
So, calling GET on a document might increase a hit counter, or update some other information - having me repeatedly call that function again should be safe.
However using GET for Updating Account Details, or Moving money (just some purely /random/ examples) is just plain bad design.
The example of signing GET requests is useful in some situations, but *mostly* not necessary if the design is right.
Windows Server 2008 shares the same driver model as Vista.
That means that if your device has Vista drivers for your architecture, you're fine.
I've been using 2008 as a desktop since the launch, and I've only had a few application incompatabilities.
Most of these incompatabilties were fixed by enabling XP SP2 Compatability mode for the app, or for really stubborn things: Running an XP Virtual Machine.
Yes, Running a VM uses more ram - but thre are significant benefits of isolating XP-specific bits to a VM and running most of your environment under 2008. Performance is not noticably different if you have hardware virtualisation and a decent amount of RAM (4GB+).
It's quite possible that the old LCD display is a 6 bit (256k colours) panel, which to display colours which didn't fit exactly onto that colour space, flickers between two on either 'side'. It's called 'temporal dithering'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Applications
Theoretically you shouldn't be able to notice this, but it's the same with low refresh rates on CRTs - some people can notice it directly, others indirectly through eyestrain.
Whilst I'm really not a lawyer, it's worth pointing out that the legal use of the word "Conspiracy" doesn't necessarily imply that it was a Government/Anarchic/Terrorism related thing.
As ever, Wikipedia has something to say on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(crime)
"In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between natural persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement."
There's two main versions of the .NET CLR (Runtime): 1.1, and 2.0. .NET 1.1 runs on .NET CLR 1.1 .NET 2.0 through to .NET 3.5 runs on .NET CLR 2.0
.NET 3.0 and 3.5 were language extensions on top of 2.0. They still execute ontop of the same CLR.
.NET 1.1, and they're now targetting full feature compliance against .NET 2.0.
.NET 3.5 apps won't run. It just means certain bits (such as LINQ, WPF, WCF, Anonymous Types, etc) are either not present or not completely implemented yet.
.NET / Mono codebases. Yes, they have shared code, however since Silverlight 2.0 is a vastly cut down version of the .NET Framework.
Effectively,
If memory serves, Mono has recently announced full feature compliance against
That doesn't mean
In either case, Silverlight/Moonlight are seperate from the
This makes full feature compliance of Silverlight 2.0 by the Moonlight crowd that much easier, since the majority of the functionality that is used in Silverlight is already implemented in Mono.
As for Moonlight/Mono being just MS PR, I think Miguel De Icaza might have something quite strong to say about that.
- Novell is actually using Mono to implement apps on their Linux desktop.
- Second Life, amongst other reasonably big apps, is using Mono to provide (or improve) pluggable/scriptable functionality in their apps.
Someone is attempting to reuse an old joke on Slashdot.
Would you like to:
1. Dispatch Microsoft Anti-Fun Squad. (In Soviet Russia, anti-fun squad make joke of you!)
2. Create a beowulf cluster of these
3. ???
4. Profit!
"Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
First of all - it's not threading itself that is the issue. And the answer is no - Future versions of Windows won't ever be as perfectly smooth as BeOS was/is.
Why? Because of backwards compatibility that's built into each version of Windows.
Even in 32bit versions of Windows Vista, you can take your poorly built 16bit Win 3.11 App that did all sorts of wrong things, and still expect that it'll work just the same as it did on 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP. Sure, you might need to run with Admin rights, and it won't be able to handle long file names - but still, it'll probably work.
It's precisely this in-built backward compatability that is Windows' biggest strength, and it's biggest weakness. For every version of Windows, Microsoft has to spend vast amounts of time ensuring that apps, where possible, continue to work. Despite large changes to architecture and how things operate.
Sure, MS could say 'screw it' and break compatibility - after all, they did (to a limited extent) with Vista already. But then you're resetting your OS's application base back to (practically) zero. Oh, and don't forget drivers - they're important too. As anyone who jumped on the early Vista builds and noticed their graphics card ran like crap will tell you.
I'll probably get flamed for this next bit, but Linux and (to some extent Mac OS) developers are more willing to break things between OS versions. So, running an older version of some app on a newer version of the OS is more likely to break. The trade off is that apps on Linux are more likely to be open source, so at least someone can update it to fix whatever the issue was.
- Will.
(Who writes Windows "Business Software" for a living and has absolutely no issue spinning up threads on a server backend as needed to process data. Just don't mention the UI.)
The latest terrorist craze is (apparently) to put liquid explosives in drink bottles (supposedly in a false bottom).p lot.html
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/europe/11
I it's not hard to see that the next logical step for terrorists would be to put explosives in semi-solid form such as toothpaste.
First of all - there was no SQL Server 2003.
Perhaps you're talking about Visual Studio.NET 2003?
"In 2003 you had to have 2 or 3 different applications up in order to create a table, populate it with data and then view the table data."
With the MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager (comes with MS SQL Server 2000 - it's part of the client tools on the install CD), you can perform almost any action on the server - from creating databases, tables, views, users, through to all the scheduling, full-text index setup, etc etc.
If you need to perform particularly complex tasks (executing a pre-prepared, or complex query) that can't be done in the GUI - the Query Analyser is two clicks away from the main Enterprise Manager window (Tools -> Query Analyser)
"Plus transact SQL was like an (even more) retarded version of SQL+"
That's pretty much a matter of opinion - I find T-SQL very easy to use and learn. Help and reference material is one F1 key away, and if that doesn't do it - Googling on MSDN is usually the best source of examples and references.
My experiences with using PL/SQL under Oracle have been less than ideal - on several occasions I've had to stop using Oracle and switch to an MS SQL / MySQL environment, simply because I was spending far too much time trying to get the DB up and running. I suppose if I had several months and a good reference on hand -- that might all be different, but there's not an easy learning curve in PL/SQL (even for someone who has a decent amount of experience with other DBMSs). YMMV.
"Of course now that TOAD works on MS-SQL this may not matter much to database diehards,"
I suppose if you're getting paid at the Oracle consultant level, then the licence cost for TOAD isn't going to be of any matter to you. For those of us who are either freelancing - or working for a company that isn't keen on buying more expensive bits of software, then this isn't going to help.
The biggest advantage for SQL Server is that they ship Enterprise Manager in the box.
It makes help and maintaining a db (to a point) fairly painless, and helps to flatten the learning curve.
obj sonofa = new child(enumSex.Male)
"Of course, those savings would be negated if they somehow hit something 'expensive'..."
They're testing this in the desert... to be precise: the south australian desert.
The only thing "expensive" that might cause some issues would be if they went really off target and hit Pine Gap - then the Yanks will want to invade. If they hit Adelade - "oops, my bad", no big loss.
*hides*
Not sure of the definition of "some", but in the 23 odd minutes, the only bit I found remotely funny was the lift scene.
C'mon, these guys arn't funny -- just sad. Which, considering some of the geeks I know, is really saying something.
I believe you'll find that psychohistory was the tool which would shorten the time that (fictional) society would spend in chaos.
The encyclopedia galactica of which you talk was supposedly a way to (in essence) get a bunch of smart people out of the way, so that they could be the "seed" from which the new foundation would spring.
It's been a while since I've read the Foundation & Empire series, but iirc, the above is correct.
You're not missing anything.
Canon's EOS 1Ds Mark II and 20D cameras do Wireless + FTP Uploading too, given the appropriate wireless adaptor (WFT-E1, for both of them).
Note for anyone fact checking: The Canon EOS 20D needs a firmware update (free) to support the WFT-E1, but otherwise works fine on wireless.
You forgot a few things:
You'll read/watch your GoogleNews on your portable next-gen flexible GooglePaper, or listen to it on your Google Radio.
You'll drink GoogleGulp to keep your fluids (and brain performance) up. It may even provide all the nutrients you could possibly need.
You'll wear 'smart' Google Wear which will interface with the GoogleChip in your brain to automaticly do searches, make calls over the Free Google-Wireless, and let Google index everything in your head.
Welcome to the GoogleMatrix, plug in.