...if it has a screen resolution I like, AND a good processor, that probably means it has Intel Integrated Graphics or something, or an awful pointing device, right?
Also they shouldn't use these silly "C" compiler thingies, instead they should use a couple of wires to short circuit a PCB until the program is in memory!
I think using a game engine is perfectly acceptable in 2015. I don't think we're going to get an avalance of original game ideas if we force everyone who has a great idea for something to learn OpenGL and DirectX.
Firefox is just as bad though, why do they make it so hard to open your bookmarks?
Unfortunately they don't. I know this because it's Ctrl-B, which means you bring it up around 20% of the time you try to paste anything into a dialog, because B is right next to V.
It's like the screenshot and debug report "features" Android has. I don't even know how to trigger either of those. All I know is that something I commonly do is that trigger. I have a directory full of unwanted screenshots to prove it.
Kinda. It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.
Unfortunately the situation in the late 1990s was:
- The major browsers were incompatible.
- IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.
- IE came preinstalled with the standard operating system of that time.
That was it. That was why corporations went with it. It's why they adopted the monoculture in the first place. If Netscape had been a little quicker with Mozilla, or been more enthusiastic about CSS in Netscape 4.x, and if CSS had been a little more complete, things might have been different.
Well, Apple is running a modified OS X on its iDevices, and Android is Linux based. Now, before you state the obvious: in both cases, the primary userland, that is, the userland that you're interacting with right now, is a stripped down power-optimized version.
And that's true of Windows 8.1 if you use the Metro UI too. Yes, OK, the desktop stuff is there, it's on "disk", ready to be swapped into memory if you want to run it, but it's not actually active in any serious way, it's waiting for a mouse click that isn't coming. Start your task manager now if you don't believe me, and take a look at the CPU usage of, say, Explorer (explorer.exe). 0%? That's because you're not doing anything with it. You're reading this web page.
I'm guessing that if I were running one of those "Ubuntu under Android" things that you can get for Android (I've never tried them as every device I've had had some kind of hardware issue preventing it from being likely to work, and the descriptions have always suggested they suck anyway...) I'd also see next to no increase in power usage, after starting it but not actually launching any X11 applications, despite that literally being an entire desktop operating system running on a phone, with all the components being in place.
So there really aren't any power implications when it comes to Microsoft shipping a full version of Windows for power saving devices, as long as - and they do - Microsoft includes a power efficient UI (Metro) for the tasks you'll be using the device for.
The only real reason for Microsoft not to ship their desktop OS on phones is that it takes up way too much disk space. As in "That 32G you get with an HP Stream 8 sounds sweet, but actually Windows takes up about around 20G of it, so get ready to buy an SD card straight away."
That really is it. I'm using that very device. Battery life is pretty ordinary for a tablet. I've seen much worse.
I know it's unlikely, but it's entirely possible the Senator researched the facts and drew his conclusion based upon those facts.
I personally think the STEM shortage H1B thing is more complex, but the view he's expressed isn't unusual from those looking at the facts. The very fact tech companies insist H1-Bs are the right approach, rather than a slight relaxation of green card standards, suggests the motivation here is cheap slave labor, not attracting talent.
Basically to increase page impressions, which means sweet advertising dollars. Essentially you take something that's a known quantity in terms of clickbait, in this case "Google is going to start a mobile phone company!", add some details that seem slightly plausable - it'd be awkward starting from scratch, and they'd obviously not get into bed with Verizon or AT&T as both are too large to allow themselves to be influenced, so you pick the two struggling operators instead, and BANG you end up on the front pages of numerous news aggregators, your links are retweeted wildly, and you get that sweet, sweet advertising cash.
Oh, wait, you meant "Why would Google..."? They wouldn't. The story is ridiculous. Sprint and T-Mo don't even use the same network technology with the exception of LTE, and the latter is suffering from a lack of widely supported standards in key areas.
What's kinda funny about that is that, as I understand it, they're only replacing Metro IE, with the desktop IE staying the same. The Metro IE is, of course, actually a very nice (tablet) browser, much nicer than the tablet versions of Chrome or Safari.
I believe the only "whole new thing" they have in development is a replacement for the shell around IE, not Trident. Not that it's impossible they're working on a new engine anyway, but that isn't what's been announced.
This is ultimately the problem with linux. There is no defined platforms anywhere. Software that wants to use anything can't ever guarantee that it will be there.
Linux is a kernel. It doesn't have a video codec API, and (hopefully, khttpd suggests it's possible) never will.
I'm saying this not to be an ass, but to point out that people don't write video software for kernels. They do it for operating systems. Debian is an operating system. Ubuntu is an operating system. Mint is an operating system. Android is an operating system.
Those do, actually, have predictable support frameworks installed.
What's more, you don't even have to aim at those systems. You can just aim at commonly supported standardized infrastructure such as GNOME, and let the caretakers of the distributions install the software you need for you.
Now you can, if you want, complain that "Oh no, I want my software to run on all the Linuxes", but it's not like anyone's out there complaining that Mac OS X is berefit of video editing software because that Mach kernel it uses doesn't come with a predictable set of video encoding APIs, and have you tried to write a video editor that works on both Darwin AND Mac OS X?
Different issue, but it's ultimately one of those times you recognize you're more likely to be under surveillance simply because you're doing something very similar to what a large number of other people are doing that's illegal. Not even necessarily a majority, but a large enough sub group that you'll be watched.
Think in terms of walking through the red light district in your local city at night, or getting groceries from a convenience store you know is a front for a drug dealing syndicate.
No idea. I've seen attempts to clone many Google apps by third parties, though usually, with some exceptions (Hyper, a third party YouTube client, seems better than the Android YouTube app by a mile), they're pretty dreadful. I gave up looking for decent versions after a while. But Google themselves, producing supported apps that aren't going to break when their APIs do, are ignoring the platform completely.
I can kinda get by with some stuff being missing: for example, I already have Google Voice set up to forward me messages to email. On the other hand, the W8.1 Calendar app seems unaware that Google accounts can have multiple calendars associated with them, and I really don't even know where to begin fixing that (it's not showing anything for anything other than the default calendar.)
For reasons I've never been entirely clear on, a lot of commercial proxy servers market themselves as "VPN providers", I'm guessing they offer connectivity via one of the common VPN protocols, but they resemble your office VPN the same way a legitimate business resembles a "Legitimate business".
Speaking as a new Windows 8.1 Tablet user, having used Android for more than half a decade, I'm realizing pretty quickly that apps actually are something that makes "touch computer" usage much, much, much easier and more efficient.
8.1 has relatively poor app support. As an example, yes, you can use the Microsoft version of the mail app, but it's no GMail, and the GMail website isn't as touch friendly as it could be and using it means eschewing notifications. Google has avoided producing any apps at all for Windows 8.x's tablet mode.
This isn't to say a webapp utopia couldn't be produced, but it'd take a lot of work on the part of web developers, who have difficulty enough producing responsive websites, and have barely begun to scratch the surface of the persistence APIs and other APIs intended to make this a reality - and, of course, those APIs are hardly complete as they are...
Right. Basically ever since someone noticed that women are excluded from certain professions there's never been any attempt to determine whether this is because they're not qualified or interested due to some biological reason. Nobody has ever addressed that issue. It has never been the subject of numerous research programs. The question of whether women are underrepresented in, say, the building profession has always been treated exactly the same way as the question of whether women are underrepresented in the sciences.
Thank you for being the first person in the world to notice this. I expect you to make your report to the Committee of Very Serious Scientists as soon as practically possible so they can end this unnecessary attempts to address diversity issues.
You're right, a takedown notice requesting that a torrent of the latest One Direction song be removed from Google's search engine index is exactly the same as brutally murdering some cartoonists. Because somehow if I can't play back someone else's performance of someone else's song that's interfering, in some way, with my ability to express an opinion.
Slow Down Cowboy!
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But it's worth asking: if a group of terrorists barged into the offices of Stormfront and killed their magazine's top staff members, would we feel the "right" action in response to this atrocity was to buy millions of copies of said magazine, and publish as many racist cartoons from that publication as possible?
Charlie Hebdo published some pretty awful shit. Like a cartoon comparing raped sex slaves to welfare queens. There was no level of "down" they weren't prepared to punch to.
Fuck the terrorists, but the right response to terrorism is to continue doing what you would have done anyway, not to blindly give kneejerk support to anything that can be associated as positive for their victims.
No no no! We must vilify the world's largest religion because, as the world's largest, it also has the largest number of extremists.
Remember: Muslim terrorism should be blamed on all Muslims. We should also make shit up and repeat it repeatedly like claiming Muslims never condemn it.
Irish Republicans on the other hand? We should only blame Catholics if our audience contains certain certain Protestant groups, otherwise the religious angle should never be mentioned.
Irish Protestants? Nah, they only ever engage in "revenge attacks". That's not even terrorism! (And the Scot-Irish Protestant origins of the Klan have nothing to do with its actions, which BTW aren't acts of terrorism because, hello, they're Americans!)
The Stern Gang? While I'm an anti-semite just to bring that up! Besides they were fighting a brutal undemocratic dictatorship which uh wasn't Nazi Germany but was nearby on the other side of the North Sea!
(You know, I wouldn't mind the general nuttiness so much if we agreed that ideological extremism is an evil that leads to terrorism, and that most religions are guilty of that, but no, instead we pretend there's issues with one, and only one, religion, and demonize _all_ followers of that religion as somehow untrustworthy and inclined to violence in a way others aren't. Some even pretend to be saying that, but they never, ever, condemn non-Islamic terrorism in the same way, and they always take pains to single out Islam by name and condemn its followers universally.)
As I've said before, I can't tell if the next Hitler, the real one, not some easily overthrowable tin-pot dictator, the next one that organizes an actual holocaust, will be an Islamic figure from the East, or a Christian from the West.
and there's something to be said about a passing a law that not even the Kennedy's or Clinton's could.
Not in this case. Obamacare is in many ways an example of how nothing gets passed today. You probably treat it as a big deal because (1) it passed, and (2) the Republicans painted it as tyranny.
But it's a minor tweak around the edges of the existing system. It introduces some subsidies, creates a mandate for something that was essentially necessary anyway and that most people had, and most people who didn't desperately wanted to have, and it sets some standards. Beyond that it's the same crap we've had for the last few decades. Virtually everyone on employer plans (which is most of us) has seen little change in their coverage, just some tweaks in pricing and coverage that are indistinguishable from the yearly changes we used to see before the ACA was passed.
As was pointed out at the time, it was essentially the system that the Republicans would have passed had they been arm twisted into addressing concerns with healthcare. As in, we know they would, because they did once already, in MA, and because the same concepts had been essentially Republican Party policy during the Gingrich years in the 1990s.
Obamacare isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the VA health system or Medicare. It isn't radical. It isn't even a good idea, propping up, as it does, the current abysmal system. It was a milquetoast law passed in an atmosphere where only milquetoast laws pass, marketed as radical by Republicans and Democrats alike who had every incentive to avoid mentioning how pathetic it is.
If Blue Cross doesn't pay for your cancer treatment, you can sue, lose, have even less money to battle cancer, and then see absolutely nothing be done about it as people blame you and Blue Cross for being in a situation where you have a contract with Blue Cross that does not cover your particular type of life threatening cancer. And BC won't lose business as it's a large enough name that it's assumed if it's doing it, everyone else is too.
If, OTOH, the government refuses to cover your cancer treatment, there's at least a chance you'll see a public outcry, massive public sympathy, politicians - eager to see themselves sticking up for their constituents - getting involved, and the policy reversed. You know, Democracy.
The latter is how it works in countries with Single Payer. I speak from experience. The NHS isn't perfect, its waiting lists are legendary, but nobody blames the victim when they're denied an expensive but necessary treatment due to some bureaucratic rule, and usually politicians are there to step in and get bad policy making reversed.
Slashdot Mirror
They have, IIRC, gone after manufacturers of cellphone jammers in the past, so it wouldn't surprise me.
Aw crap, Slashdot killed the joke. There was supposed to be an embedded "nc" command in that hostname.
There's lots more information at my site http://dsfnjsaxshnc-lmachine7.... ...
Also they shouldn't use these silly "C" compiler thingies, instead they should use a couple of wires to short circuit a PCB until the program is in memory!
I think using a game engine is perfectly acceptable in 2015. I don't think we're going to get an avalance of original game ideas if we force everyone who has a great idea for something to learn OpenGL and DirectX.
Unfortunately they don't. I know this because it's Ctrl-B, which means you bring it up around 20% of the time you try to paste anything into a dialog, because B is right next to V.
It's like the screenshot and debug report "features" Android has. I don't even know how to trigger either of those. All I know is that something I commonly do is that trigger. I have a directory full of unwanted screenshots to prove it.
Kinda. It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.
Unfortunately the situation in the late 1990s was:
- The major browsers were incompatible.
- IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.
- IE came preinstalled with the standard operating system of that time.
That was it. That was why corporations went with it. It's why they adopted the monoculture in the first place. If Netscape had been a little quicker with Mozilla, or been more enthusiastic about CSS in Netscape 4.x, and if CSS had been a little more complete, things might have been different.
Well, Apple is running a modified OS X on its iDevices, and Android is Linux based. Now, before you state the obvious: in both cases, the primary userland, that is, the userland that you're interacting with right now, is a stripped down power-optimized version.
And that's true of Windows 8.1 if you use the Metro UI too. Yes, OK, the desktop stuff is there, it's on "disk", ready to be swapped into memory if you want to run it, but it's not actually active in any serious way, it's waiting for a mouse click that isn't coming. Start your task manager now if you don't believe me, and take a look at the CPU usage of, say, Explorer (explorer.exe). 0%? That's because you're not doing anything with it. You're reading this web page.
I'm guessing that if I were running one of those "Ubuntu under Android" things that you can get for Android (I've never tried them as every device I've had had some kind of hardware issue preventing it from being likely to work, and the descriptions have always suggested they suck anyway...) I'd also see next to no increase in power usage, after starting it but not actually launching any X11 applications, despite that literally being an entire desktop operating system running on a phone, with all the components being in place.
So there really aren't any power implications when it comes to Microsoft shipping a full version of Windows for power saving devices, as long as - and they do - Microsoft includes a power efficient UI (Metro) for the tasks you'll be using the device for.
The only real reason for Microsoft not to ship their desktop OS on phones is that it takes up way too much disk space. As in "That 32G you get with an HP Stream 8 sounds sweet, but actually Windows takes up about around 20G of it, so get ready to buy an SD card straight away."
That really is it. I'm using that very device. Battery life is pretty ordinary for a tablet. I've seen much worse.
What if your preconceived position is unbiased?
I know it's unlikely, but it's entirely possible the Senator researched the facts and drew his conclusion based upon those facts.
I personally think the STEM shortage H1B thing is more complex, but the view he's expressed isn't unusual from those looking at the facts. The very fact tech companies insist H1-Bs are the right approach, rather than a slight relaxation of green card standards, suggests the motivation here is cheap slave labor, not attracting talent.
Basically to increase page impressions, which means sweet advertising dollars. Essentially you take something that's a known quantity in terms of clickbait, in this case "Google is going to start a mobile phone company!", add some details that seem slightly plausable - it'd be awkward starting from scratch, and they'd obviously not get into bed with Verizon or AT&T as both are too large to allow themselves to be influenced, so you pick the two struggling operators instead, and BANG you end up on the front pages of numerous news aggregators, your links are retweeted wildly, and you get that sweet, sweet advertising cash.
Oh, wait, you meant "Why would Google..."? They wouldn't. The story is ridiculous. Sprint and T-Mo don't even use the same network technology with the exception of LTE, and the latter is suffering from a lack of widely supported standards in key areas.
What's kinda funny about that is that, as I understand it, they're only replacing Metro IE, with the desktop IE staying the same. The Metro IE is, of course, actually a very nice (tablet) browser, much nicer than the tablet versions of Chrome or Safari.
So they're changing it.
I believe the only "whole new thing" they have in development is a replacement for the shell around IE, not Trident. Not that it's impossible they're working on a new engine anyway, but that isn't what's been announced.
Linux is a kernel. It doesn't have a video codec API, and (hopefully, khttpd suggests it's possible) never will.
I'm saying this not to be an ass, but to point out that people don't write video software for kernels. They do it for operating systems. Debian is an operating system. Ubuntu is an operating system. Mint is an operating system. Android is an operating system.
Those do, actually, have predictable support frameworks installed.
What's more, you don't even have to aim at those systems. You can just aim at commonly supported standardized infrastructure such as GNOME, and let the caretakers of the distributions install the software you need for you.
Now you can, if you want, complain that "Oh no, I want my software to run on all the Linuxes", but it's not like anyone's out there complaining that Mac OS X is berefit of video editing software because that Mach kernel it uses doesn't come with a predictable set of video encoding APIs, and have you tried to write a video editor that works on both Darwin AND Mac OS X?
Another option might be bluetooth for the keyboard, and Miracast for the display.
Different issue, but it's ultimately one of those times you recognize you're more likely to be under surveillance simply because you're doing something very similar to what a large number of other people are doing that's illegal. Not even necessarily a majority, but a large enough sub group that you'll be watched.
Think in terms of walking through the red light district in your local city at night, or getting groceries from a convenience store you know is a front for a drug dealing syndicate.
No idea. I've seen attempts to clone many Google apps by third parties, though usually, with some exceptions (Hyper, a third party YouTube client, seems better than the Android YouTube app by a mile), they're pretty dreadful. I gave up looking for decent versions after a while. But Google themselves, producing supported apps that aren't going to break when their APIs do, are ignoring the platform completely.
I can kinda get by with some stuff being missing: for example, I already have Google Voice set up to forward me messages to email. On the other hand, the W8.1 Calendar app seems unaware that Google accounts can have multiple calendars associated with them, and I really don't even know where to begin fixing that (it's not showing anything for anything other than the default calendar.)
This is a press release not a piece of legislation.
That's not what's meant by VPN in this context.
For reasons I've never been entirely clear on, a lot of commercial proxy servers market themselves as "VPN providers", I'm guessing they offer connectivity via one of the common VPN protocols, but they resemble your office VPN the same way a legitimate business resembles a "Legitimate business".
Speaking as a new Windows 8.1 Tablet user, having used Android for more than half a decade, I'm realizing pretty quickly that apps actually are something that makes "touch computer" usage much, much, much easier and more efficient.
8.1 has relatively poor app support. As an example, yes, you can use the Microsoft version of the mail app, but it's no GMail, and the GMail website isn't as touch friendly as it could be and using it means eschewing notifications. Google has avoided producing any apps at all for Windows 8.x's tablet mode.
This isn't to say a webapp utopia couldn't be produced, but it'd take a lot of work on the part of web developers, who have difficulty enough producing responsive websites, and have barely begun to scratch the surface of the persistence APIs and other APIs intended to make this a reality - and, of course, those APIs are hardly complete as they are...
Right. Basically ever since someone noticed that women are excluded from certain professions there's never been any attempt to determine whether this is because they're not qualified or interested due to some biological reason. Nobody has ever addressed that issue. It has never been the subject of numerous research programs. The question of whether women are underrepresented in, say, the building profession has always been treated exactly the same way as the question of whether women are underrepresented in the sciences.
Thank you for being the first person in the world to notice this. I expect you to make your report to the Committee of Very Serious Scientists as soon as practically possible so they can end this unnecessary attempts to address diversity issues.
You're right, a takedown notice requesting that a torrent of the latest One Direction song be removed from Google's search engine index is exactly the same as brutally murdering some cartoonists. Because somehow if I can't play back someone else's performance of someone else's song that's interfering, in some way, with my ability to express an opinion.
But it's worth asking: if a group of terrorists barged into the offices of Stormfront and killed their magazine's top staff members, would we feel the "right" action in response to this atrocity was to buy millions of copies of said magazine, and publish as many racist cartoons from that publication as possible?
Charlie Hebdo published some pretty awful shit. Like a cartoon comparing raped sex slaves to welfare queens. There was no level of "down" they weren't prepared to punch to.
Fuck the terrorists, but the right response to terrorism is to continue doing what you would have done anyway, not to blindly give kneejerk support to anything that can be associated as positive for their victims.
No no no! We must vilify the world's largest religion because, as the world's largest, it also has the largest number of extremists.
Remember: Muslim terrorism should be blamed on all Muslims. We should also make shit up and repeat it repeatedly like claiming Muslims never condemn it.
Irish Republicans on the other hand? We should only blame Catholics if our audience contains certain certain Protestant groups, otherwise the religious angle should never be mentioned.
Irish Protestants? Nah, they only ever engage in "revenge attacks". That's not even terrorism! (And the Scot-Irish Protestant origins of the Klan have nothing to do with its actions, which BTW aren't acts of terrorism because, hello, they're Americans!)
The Stern Gang? While I'm an anti-semite just to bring that up! Besides they were fighting a brutal undemocratic dictatorship which uh wasn't Nazi Germany but was nearby on the other side of the North Sea!
(You know, I wouldn't mind the general nuttiness so much if we agreed that ideological extremism is an evil that leads to terrorism, and that most religions are guilty of that, but no, instead we pretend there's issues with one, and only one, religion, and demonize _all_ followers of that religion as somehow untrustworthy and inclined to violence in a way others aren't. Some even pretend to be saying that, but they never, ever, condemn non-Islamic terrorism in the same way, and they always take pains to single out Islam by name and condemn its followers universally.)
As I've said before, I can't tell if the next Hitler, the real one, not some easily overthrowable tin-pot dictator, the next one that organizes an actual holocaust, will be an Islamic figure from the East, or a Christian from the West.
Not in this case. Obamacare is in many ways an example of how nothing gets passed today. You probably treat it as a big deal because (1) it passed, and (2) the Republicans painted it as tyranny.
But it's a minor tweak around the edges of the existing system. It introduces some subsidies, creates a mandate for something that was essentially necessary anyway and that most people had, and most people who didn't desperately wanted to have, and it sets some standards. Beyond that it's the same crap we've had for the last few decades. Virtually everyone on employer plans (which is most of us) has seen little change in their coverage, just some tweaks in pricing and coverage that are indistinguishable from the yearly changes we used to see before the ACA was passed.
As was pointed out at the time, it was essentially the system that the Republicans would have passed had they been arm twisted into addressing concerns with healthcare. As in, we know they would, because they did once already, in MA, and because the same concepts had been essentially Republican Party policy during the Gingrich years in the 1990s.
Obamacare isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the VA health system or Medicare. It isn't radical. It isn't even a good idea, propping up, as it does, the current abysmal system. It was a milquetoast law passed in an atmosphere where only milquetoast laws pass, marketed as radical by Republicans and Democrats alike who had every incentive to avoid mentioning how pathetic it is.
If Blue Cross doesn't pay for your cancer treatment, you can sue, lose, have even less money to battle cancer, and then see absolutely nothing be done about it as people blame you and Blue Cross for being in a situation where you have a contract with Blue Cross that does not cover your particular type of life threatening cancer. And BC won't lose business as it's a large enough name that it's assumed if it's doing it, everyone else is too.
If, OTOH, the government refuses to cover your cancer treatment, there's at least a chance you'll see a public outcry, massive public sympathy, politicians - eager to see themselves sticking up for their constituents - getting involved, and the policy reversed. You know, Democracy.
The latter is how it works in countries with Single Payer. I speak from experience. The NHS isn't perfect, its waiting lists are legendary, but nobody blames the victim when they're denied an expensive but necessary treatment due to some bureaucratic rule, and usually politicians are there to step in and get bad policy making reversed.