Wrong again! Not much works quite as well as a book for wiping your arse. The Bible for preference... Nice soft pages, and plenty of them. Can last a whole year is nobody gets diarrhoea.
All the comments about OEMs and MS's historical model of dealing with them look wrong to me. Looks to me more like MS wants to imitate Apple's strategy:
1. own the platform 2. keep it shut tight as a drum 3. milk the "content streams" for revenue 4. profit wildly
Their deal with Nokia buys them a phone distribution channel. Now they want/need a tablet. Don't they already own a television company? Lots of me-too-ism going on there. Thankfully Apple (much as I despise their model) will bury MS at that game, and, with a little luck they'll just slowly wither away. Can't happen soon enough for me.
For exactly this reason, everybody should have their own personal URL shortener service. Those short URLs started out as a mere convenience, driven by Twitter's stupid 140char limit on messages, but suddenly turned out to have a much more meaningful and important use.
Conventional web analytics are only accessible to the people who created and host the content under analysis. They can track where their audience came from, when and how, but nobody else does. If I refer people to some web-stuff I'd like to get an idea of how many people I influenced - how many people followed my recommendation. It is a measure of my own reputation and influence, so highly personal. URL-shorteners give us a way to measure, with a reasonable degree of accuracy and assurance, the influence we have in persuading others to follow our webby blatherings.
So I wrote one. It's a Java-based one (for reasons described at http://1.mikro2nd.net/xtN8) so won't suit everybody's needs. Free under AGPL. Still very rough, but usable.
You're forgetting the fact that those motors and batteries require advanced metals, which, in turn, means heavy mining and refining, distribution and manufacturing infrastructure... all pretty much unlikely without cheap, abundant, portable and (above all) dense energy. Outside of oil (and maybe natgas) I don't presently see it.
Given that the oil peak has probably already passed us by, and given the brilliant level of foresight, planning and innovation we're putting into reducing our energy usage, I'm predicting that I'll be using my legs as my primary mode of transportation. If I'm lucky it might be some horse's legs.
Mind you, it's a bloody long way from Cape Town to Paris on foot...
AFAIK Jason's never reviewed any Pakt books (nor any other publishers') so I don't understand your comment. Perhaps you're referring to the author of the review? I was referring to the author of the book.
Honestly, the review does, indeed, smell like astroturf, hence my suggestion... I would far rather have seen an honest, genuine review. So far I'm quite enjoying the book (since I'm also in the process of learning my way around Android), but any review I might write here is going to be suspect, yes?
The author's blog is a good chance to check out his writing, coverage of the kinds of development he's done, and depth of technical expertise. It's also worth mentioning that he is the designer of the EodSQL open-source (LGPL) O/R bridge for Java.
Disclosure: The author is my son, so yeah - proud Dad talking, but seriously check his work out for yourself if you (like me) think the review leaves something to be desired. Personally I'm still reading the book, so can't evaluate yet...
Actually I've seen people offering trades in precision all the way down to.0001BC. I still question the point of limiting the total amount to 20million BC (or 2^11 fractional-units). Whilst I understand the intent behind placing an absolute limit on the number of BC in circulation, I don't believe the number chosen provides enough liquidity to sustain global-scale economics.
"The diety-led Hebrews" - does this mean that Abraham was a really skinny guy? Or just that he had some books to sell "Smash Idols to Lose 60 Mina in 30 Days"?
The only real answer is a completely distributed, decentralised, no-SPoF DNS system. Always remember how to tell when a politician is lying - and, yes, both the US DoC oversight and the UN whatever-mythical-regulatory-body-might-be-invented are/would be ultimately controlled by political animals.
While I'm sure that the major motivations for this move goes around Twitter wanting to spam users with "promoted tweets" and such, as suggested by several other commenters above, I wonder to what degree they also feel threatened by the fact that their "new Twitter" web UI sucks so badly that many users don't want it. I tried the new UI for a little while, and found it confusing, waaay too busy, inconsistent and just generally horrible, and flipped back to the old UI.
Despite Twitter repeated entreaties to "upgrade to the new Twitter" - Why on Earth would anyone bother? This means that alternative UIs will definitely get a boost if Twitter decides to force their crapulatious "new UI" down our throats.
For professional purposes? Really? I, too am on linkedin, and have never, not even once, derived any professional benefit from being there. Seriously, I think linkedin is 100% useless for its stated purpose.
So, all very nice, we'll be able to have always-on computers that don't pig out on energy, BUT...
How much of the software we use can handle running for long periods of time without crashing? Not many, in my experience.
What with memory leaks, bounds overflows and who knows what else, some of which may be an oversight in your own code, but more likely is a bug inside some library you're using, or a compiler bug, or linker bug, or...
As anybody who has tried it and knows, writing software that runs for weeks and months on end without restarting is really quite hard. And it's no bloody use if the hardware can stay up for months on end if the software can't.
(And, not having used Windows in about 14 years, I'm not talking about that piece of shite.)
Waaayyy too late, dude! The bloatware from IBM is already entrenched, and it's called J2EE. After all, they had to something with theat stinking pile of poo called the San Francisco Framework that came out of Taligent...
"BEA Systems (who bought WebLogic - leading J2EE container)..."
There. Fixed that for ya.
In the early days (around '98 or thereabouts) if you wanted to write Java code that talked to an Oracle database you went to download it from Weblogic's website (long before they were acquired by BEA). It wasn't so much the case that Oracle's driver implementations were crap, it was that they just plain didn't exist!
Weblogic had a bloody good app server; sad that they got totally borged and reborged.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I see "Hugh Pickens" my eyes glaze over, and I just move on... to reddit or El Reg or anywhere the hell else.
Let's not even get into the fact that the language of the summary verges on incomprehensible...
They won't be searching for chunks of dead trees.
Wrong again! Not much works quite as well as a book for wiping your arse. The Bible for preference... Nice soft pages, and plenty of them. Can last a whole year is nobody gets diarrhoea.
All the comments about OEMs and MS's historical model of dealing with them look wrong to me. Looks to me more like MS wants to imitate Apple's strategy:
1. own the platform
2. keep it shut tight as a drum
3. milk the "content streams" for revenue
4. profit wildly
Their deal with Nokia buys them a phone distribution channel. Now they want/need a tablet. Don't they already own a television company? Lots of me-too-ism going on there. Thankfully Apple (much as I despise their model) will bury MS at that game, and, with a little luck they'll just slowly wither away. Can't happen soon enough for me.
They wanted to make sure they only had to deal with the smart people.
Not much chance of that on this planet.
For exactly this reason, everybody should have their own personal URL shortener service. Those short URLs started out as a mere convenience, driven by Twitter's stupid 140char limit on messages, but suddenly turned out to have a much more meaningful and important use.
Conventional web analytics are only accessible to the people who created and host the content under analysis. They can track where their audience came from, when and how, but nobody else does. If I refer people to some web-stuff I'd like to get an idea of how many people I influenced - how many people followed my recommendation. It is a measure of my own reputation and influence, so highly personal. URL-shorteners give us a way to measure, with a reasonable degree of accuracy and assurance, the influence we have in persuading others to follow our webby blatherings.
So I wrote one. It's a Java-based one (for reasons described at http://1.mikro2nd.net/xtN8) so won't suit everybody's needs. Free under AGPL. Still very rough, but usable.
Good thing they're explicitly illegal in such backwards jurisdictions as South Africa...
(I wonder when MS will get around to bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying the relevant Minister and kakistocrats to fix that.)
[Click anon shortened link]
[Sees start of Happy Tree Friends]
[Nauseated as soon as point becomes evident]
[Click DISLIKE button]
"This feature is not available right now. Please try again later."
Not to mention that comments are disabled on the video.
Yeah. And all te googlers bonus depends on social networky success this year. ROTFL.
You're forgetting the fact that those motors and batteries require advanced metals, which, in turn, means heavy mining and refining, distribution and manufacturing infrastructure... all pretty much unlikely without cheap, abundant, portable and (above all) dense energy. Outside of oil (and maybe natgas) I don't presently see it.
Given that the oil peak has probably already passed us by, and given the brilliant level of foresight, planning and innovation we're putting into reducing our energy usage, I'm predicting that I'll be using my legs as my primary mode of transportation. If I'm lucky it might be some horse's legs.
Mind you, it's a bloody long way from Cape Town to Paris on foot...
AFAIK Jason's never reviewed any Pakt books (nor any other publishers') so I don't understand your comment. Perhaps you're referring to the author of the review? I was referring to the author of the book.
Honestly, the review does, indeed, smell like astroturf, hence my suggestion... I would far rather have seen an honest, genuine review. So far I'm quite enjoying the book (since I'm also in the process of learning my way around Android), but any review I might write here is going to be suspect, yes?
Disclosure: The author is my son, so yeah - proud Dad talking, but seriously check his work out for yourself if you (like me) think the review leaves something to be desired. Personally I'm still reading the book, so can't evaluate yet...
Actually I've seen people offering trades in precision all the way down to .0001BC. I still question the point of limiting the total amount to 20million BC (or 2^11 fractional-units). Whilst I understand the intent behind placing an absolute limit on the number of BC in circulation, I don't believe the number chosen provides enough liquidity to sustain global-scale economics.
"The diety-led Hebrews" - does this mean that Abraham was a really skinny guy? Or just that he had some books to sell "Smash Idols to Lose 60 Mina in 30 Days"?
Can't really see the French government applying any of those against Airbus, can you?
The only real answer is a completely distributed, decentralised, no-SPoF DNS system. Always remember how to tell when a politician is lying - and, yes, both the US DoC oversight and the UN whatever-mythical-regulatory-body-might-be-invented are/would be ultimately controlled by political animals.
While I'm sure that the major motivations for this move goes around Twitter wanting to spam users with "promoted tweets" and such, as suggested by several other commenters above, I wonder to what degree they also feel threatened by the fact that their "new Twitter" web UI sucks so badly that many users don't want it. I tried the new UI for a little while, and found it confusing, waaay too busy, inconsistent and just generally horrible, and flipped back to the old UI.
Despite Twitter repeated entreaties to "upgrade to the new Twitter" - Why on Earth would anyone bother? This means that alternative UIs will definitely get a boost if Twitter decides to force their crapulatious "new UI" down our throats.
http://dot-p2p.org/ for just one of many of the projects going on.
For professional purposes? Really? I, too am on linkedin, and have never, not even once, derived any professional benefit from being there. Seriously, I think linkedin is 100% useless for its stated purpose.
After all the travails and troubles this mission has encountered, actually recovering comet dust is - at last - cosmic justice.
So, all very nice, we'll be able to have always-on computers that don't pig out on energy, BUT...
How much of the software we use can handle running for long periods of time without crashing? Not many, in my experience.
What with memory leaks, bounds overflows and who knows what else, some of which may be an oversight in your own code, but more likely is a bug inside some library you're using, or a compiler bug, or linker bug, or...
As anybody who has tried it and knows, writing software that runs for weeks and months on end without restarting is really quite hard. And it's no bloody use if the hardware can stay up for months on end if the software can't.
(And, not having used Windows in about 14 years, I'm not talking about that piece of shite.)
Don't you worry about X. You let me worry about X!
Waaayyy too late, dude! The bloatware from IBM is already entrenched, and it's called J2EE. After all, they had to something with theat stinking pile of poo called the San Francisco Framework that came out of Taligent...
"BEA Systems (who bought WebLogic - leading J2EE container)..."
There. Fixed that for ya.
In the early days (around '98 or thereabouts) if you wanted to write Java code that talked to an Oracle database you went to download it from Weblogic's website (long before they were acquired by BEA). It wasn't so much the case that Oracle's driver implementations were crap, it was that they just plain didn't exist!
Weblogic had a bloody good app server; sad that they got totally borged and reborged.
Watching to see what's going to happen on 1 Jan when the phone co's get told to cut off 85% of their revenue stream...
It strikes me that this sort of thing needs a name. "BP Syndrome"? "The BP Response"? "PepsiCo got BP'd"?