Hell, here in California, they double tap the taxes, flat taxes per gallon ($.35) and then add sales tax on top of THAT.
Those are different governments. The state collects sales tax. Everyone wants their part of the pie. Now we could stop giving oil company tax breaks. We are taxing users of gas only to pay the producers.
So I'm guessing Sony has it in for Anonymous for reasons totally unrelated to this breach.
Indeed. Anonymous already demonstrated that PSN was designed poorly and made Sony look like fool. Now that someone else has done real damage (not the customers' information was stolen, but that people could get stuff without paying for it. This is the real reason they took it down--lost revenue) after everyone knows that PSN was poorly designed, it opens up Sony for more lawsuits. Because they knew they had issues, but did nothing. Then something serious happens and they look like complete morons. They can't blame anyone other than Anonymous for fear of looking negligent.
And these days, that Chinese or Indian scientists will probably be of higher calibre than the American.
You obviously don't work in the sciences.
While not quite the same, it's fun to read discussion boards for various open-source technologies. You'll see tons of people with -looking names posting questions that reveal they know absolutely nothing about software development. They have a passing familiarity with.NET, and that's it.
I've also worked with companies who have out sourced their software development and it's downright hilarious the problems they encounter because they are trying to save money. They pay someone for a week to do what any half-competent programmer I know would do in 1/2 a day. That's if they actually do the work actually desired, which is even often not the case.
Managers think they are saving money, because they think all developers and scientists are the same. But, that type of cost can't really be factored into their spreadsheet, so they still think they are better off. What's really going to happen is these overseas outsourcing companies will improve their technical skills and then realize, "hey, we don't need clueless overseas management. We can do the entire thing ourselves." And so those domestic service-oriented companies shrink and the foreign service-oriented companies set up shop in the US. Just like making cars.
Cloud-based systems, in particular, like CRM, lead-management, accounting, and likely office software, will be produced overseas and sold here by a company with a small office wherever the taxes are cheapest.
They're certainly more similar than the CD is to the DVD (except, obviously, for diameter). I thought it was widely accepted that Philips and Sony collaborated to produce the compact disc, based on the earlier laserdisc work.
I disagree. Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like. They had video CDs for a time. There are standards as to how to encode stuff to be playable, but they are still much more similar than an analog format.
(I went to Stanford, in CS, in the 1980s. The education was at best mediocre.)
I did my undergrad at CMU and got a masters at Stanford, both in CS. I felt that CMU had the better program, by far, but I was living close to Stanford after graduation. I didn't think it was mediocre in the mid 90s, but grading was easier. They'd fail you at CMU, but not really at Stanford unless you really tried to fail. But, I do value having gone to two different schools.
I've interviewed students from many schools, and Berkeley is the only "top tier" school for CS that I just wouldn't hire from.
Bing's mapping is way, way better than Google. We just took a long car trip and Google's directions were 60 minutes longer than Bing due to poor route selection (i.e. it's better to stay on the freeway a little longer than save a few miles on a very twisty and slow side road.) I was rather in awe at how bad Google's mapping is these days, with my 4 year old car GPS doing a better job locally. It took them 18 months to recognize our new ZIP code, deciding to place us in Denmark or something (when we live in the states.)
But if those unemployed had jobs they'd be paying more taxes...
Which does nothing to help them get reelected. People just barely making it aren't going to contribute significant amounts of money to a campaign, so they are largely irrelevant.
POTS is actually only 7 bits, because the 8th bit is used for control signals. Hence 56k. Also the sample rate is 8000 times but the actual frequency width is only 4 kilohertz.
That applies to the robbed bit T1 interfaces, which can be debatably called POTS vs pure analog that was the original standard. More modern PRI-based T1s are a full 64 kbps since you lose a channel for signaling (23 vs 24 in old robbed bit land.) We use modern PRIs for that get broken down into POTS lines where I work, so no robbed bits. Of course, modems can't do any better than 53 kbps or something lame due to the telcos' petitioning the FCC so they don't have to explain why their network is stuck in the 70s.
And the real question is why they made the bottom strip out of metal since it's not an antenna. Just make it out of plastic and conduction will be less of a problem.Your hand will still affect it, but perhaps not as much.
If you have another explanation, let's hear it, but Apple's explanation is nonsense. Whatever technical goals Apple says they want to achieve, they could simply achieve through small modifications to their scheduler, if need be, on a per-application basis, with much less work for themselves and their developers.
Wrong. One of the main reasons to support an explicit API is that it gives the app a chance to free up memory that won't be needed when in the background. Given the limited number of functions that's permitted in the background, most of an application's resources can be freed when in the background (the GUI being the largest of them.) This is very, very important on a device with only 256 M of RAM. It's not a computer with 8 GB of RAM and near infinite swap. (Although it can swap out code pages, but not general writable memory pages.)
It's a smart phone, not a general purpose computer. It needs to be small, light weight and cheap enough for people to want to buy it.The restrictions are all about having a good user experience for non-technical people. Full multitasking would severely limit battery life unless all apps are well behaved. This ensures they are all well behaved or they can't multitask.
My main issue is the constant and momentary freezes. It makes using anything that plays video unwatchable, and is generally annoying all the time. This leads to Firefox seeming to be unresponsive. I click on something, but it takes 5 seconds to register I clicked because it's running some crazy-inefficient housekeeping task in the background. I've tried all the usual suggestions, including cache flushing, turning off extensions, removing the various bloated.sqlite files, increasing the crash persistence times, etc. Removing places.sqlite helped for a 1/2 day or so. It appears that all the caching it does really slows it down and that SQL Lite was a rather poor choice. Do some googling and you will find that many, many people have problems with FF freezing momentarily. CPU usage jumps to near 100% while this happens. No other browsers I use do this.
As a result, I find myself using it less and less since it's just do frustrating.
The outcry is not that Apple is revoking a right but simply that they are deliberately crippling a product... and for what reason?
They don't need a reason.
Then they don't need my business.
And that's the way it should work. I don't visit sites that use Flash (or I'll block them with various plugins. That's my right. I've never seen a single site that Flash added anything to that's beneficial. It's all ads, senseless animations for no reason, or annoying talking heads. And that goes especially for video, Flash video sucks.
Re:It's called "PERSONAL PROPERTY," Apple!
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The manufacturer of your microwave isn't actively going out of its way to block flash. You can legally sell flash for the microwave oven; software installation is a chore but the playing field is level for everyone. You don't sign an EULA when you buy your microwave.
Sure they, most electronic devices with firmware, which is just about everything, have their microcontroller's flash memory locked so you can't read it out and then modify it. Nor do they publish any information about how you could write your own and will refuse (I've asked) any request for such info since it's "proprietary." Not really very different than Apple, but at least they provide SOME way to do development on the device. I'm developing for the iPhone and it's a very nice environment and very well done. Sure, you have to learn Objective C and Cocoa, which is what I'd bet most people have an issue with: they don't want to learn anything new. Get over it.
I've only had my 27" monitor for like a week, so it's too early to say. It's part of an iMac, and while I don't really like the glossy screen, I do fine it more comfortable than the 30" Apple Cinema Display I also have. I do less looking around and I can take in what's happening better. However, it's rather too early to tell.
Indeed, and that's what I use. It's very nice. I even use virtual desktops to keep development stuff in one, web & email in another, database activities in another, and remote desktop-type app in the last one. Being able to see a full (and wide) header file and source file side-by side along with the relevant part of the app all at once is very handy.
The 2560 x 1440 27" monitors aren't too bad, either.
I've been developing software for 18 years, and I've never encountered a time when I couldn't program anymore. 40 hours of work, plus another 10-15 while working on a masters and then back to programming freeware apps on the Mac. Easily 80 hours a week a while ago. Now I just don't have that kind of time, but I never feel as if I'd had enough. I rather like programming, hence pursuing that in college. I have had friends who became programmers just because of the high pay and you couldn't get them to touch a compiler outside of work. Sad, really. In fact, that was one of my major interview questions: do you program outside of work/school? If not, you have no passion and I don't want to work with you.
Now if I had to develop highly analytical software like DSP or stuff involving tons of differential equations, I may feel differently.
They could just force ANI and drop CID, so it's not an issue.
Except one can spoof ANI as well. On purely digital networks, you have to tell the system what number you are calling from, since it wouldn't otherwise know. Some carriers enforce a rule that your outgoing CID and ANI must be a number which you own, but not all do. If you have multiple carriers, they really can't do this effectively, since they don't know what numbers you terminate.
Plus toll free numbers aren't really on the same level as regular ones, since they are ALL redirected via the SMS 800 system to do all sorts of things, including routing based on time of day and originating location. They can also be forwarded to a "local" number or numbers, but they don't have to. Basically, all you could enforce from this law is to make sure people don't set CID to a number which is obviously not theirs, but finding who they really are is hard. I've called by phone company wanting to get call log info and they claim they don't even save it for other than outgoing long distance calls.
That was basically my experience. Tons of clueless techs who weren't authorized to actually fix anything. The "inside" tech blamed it on the "outside" tech and vice-versa. Why one guy couldn't touch wires inside AND outside my house is anyone's guess. The TV picture was full of static, but he said the signal level was great. Amplify a poor quality signal and you get a strong, yet poor signal. Whatever. I'm with Verizon now, but I still get a mailer from Comcast at least once a week wanting me back. Not going to happen after the manager promised he'd get it resolved in a week and call me back. A month later, I was an Xcustomer.
They actually measured my "high speed" internet connection at 128 kbps download to their own speed test servers. I think it just came down to it would cost more to fix and lose a customer. The fun part was waiting for the tech, who was paid per job, waiting on hold for 45 minutes to get an agent to reset something. That was priceless.
I had Comcast when living in DC and they sucked there, too. They "audited" the apartment building by just disconnecting everyone and seeing who complained and verified they were a customer. Pathetic.
I thought it was somewhat interesting, but way, way too simplistic. Seems they were trying to push more their ideals and not a plot so much. And that sound track. Just horrible, horrible crap.
And Soylent Green was indeed a way, way better movie. It actually had a plot that was given more than 5 minutes of writer time. Of course, now that everyone knows the secret, I'm not sure a remake would work too well.
Yes, this is the main reason I end up placing comments in the code (not around a function body, which I only do when I want JavaDoc for something not entirely obvious.)
Code that interacts with other code can make things complicated, so adding a comment stating why things were done in one place in order to support something else are helpful. Commenting complex code is handy, too. However, most code just isn't complex if written well, but there are cases where it needs to be complicated. (Implementing non-obvious mathematical formulas, for example.)
OK, I lied, another case is to document lock ordering for concurrent code. I typically comment the prerequisites for calling a function, e.g. "queue must be locked before calling." Keeps me from having to remember my clever assumptions. Oh, and documenting internal file / network structures is a good idea.
Oh well. Eventually the people there will get smart, like I did, and leave.
Exactly like my wife did. No jobs and no opportunity. Half of the state is on drugs, based on her survey of friends and relatives, because there is just no way to get ahead. It's very sad, because the people are nice and it's rather pretty there with all the lakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, here in California, they double tap the taxes, flat taxes per gallon ($.35) and then add sales tax on top of THAT.
Those are different governments. The state collects sales tax. Everyone wants their part of the pie. Now we could stop giving oil company tax breaks. We are taxing users of gas only to pay the producers.
Got me. I stopped getting any after posting a few non-positive things about liberal politics.
So I'm guessing Sony has it in for Anonymous for reasons totally unrelated to this breach.
Indeed. Anonymous already demonstrated that PSN was designed poorly and made Sony look like fool. Now that someone else has done real damage (not the customers' information was stolen, but that people could get stuff without paying for it. This is the real reason they took it down--lost revenue) after everyone knows that PSN was poorly designed, it opens up Sony for more lawsuits. Because they knew they had issues, but did nothing. Then something serious happens and they look like complete morons. They can't blame anyone other than Anonymous for fear of looking negligent.
Indeed, I agree. That's what I was taught in chemistry class. Hydrogen Hydroxide all the way.
And these days, that Chinese or Indian scientists will probably be of higher calibre than the American.
You obviously don't work in the sciences.
While not quite the same, it's fun to read discussion boards for various open-source technologies. You'll see tons of people with -looking names posting questions that reveal they know absolutely nothing about software development. They have a passing familiarity with .NET, and that's it.
I've also worked with companies who have out sourced their software development and it's downright hilarious the problems they encounter because they are trying to save money. They pay someone for a week to do what any half-competent programmer I know would do in 1/2 a day. That's if they actually do the work actually desired, which is even often not the case.
Managers think they are saving money, because they think all developers and scientists are the same. But, that type of cost can't really be factored into their spreadsheet, so they still think they are better off. What's really going to happen is these overseas outsourcing companies will improve their technical skills and then realize, "hey, we don't need clueless overseas management. We can do the entire thing ourselves." And so those domestic service-oriented companies shrink and the foreign service-oriented companies set up shop in the US. Just like making cars.
Cloud-based systems, in particular, like CRM, lead-management, accounting, and likely office software, will be produced overseas and sold here by a company with a small office wherever the taxes are cheapest.
They're certainly more similar than the CD is to the DVD (except, obviously, for diameter). I thought it was widely accepted that Philips and Sony collaborated to produce the compact disc, based on the earlier laserdisc work.
I disagree. Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like. They had video CDs for a time. There are standards as to how to encode stuff to be playable, but they are still much more similar than an analog format.
(I went to Stanford, in CS, in the 1980s. The education was at best mediocre.)
I did my undergrad at CMU and got a masters at Stanford, both in CS. I felt that CMU had the better program, by far, but I was living close to Stanford after graduation. I didn't think it was mediocre in the mid 90s, but grading was easier. They'd fail you at CMU, but not really at Stanford unless you really tried to fail. But, I do value having gone to two different schools.
I've interviewed students from many schools, and Berkeley is the only "top tier" school for CS that I just wouldn't hire from.
Bing's mapping is way, way better than Google. We just took a long car trip and Google's directions were 60 minutes longer than Bing due to poor route selection (i.e. it's better to stay on the freeway a little longer than save a few miles on a very twisty and slow side road.) I was rather in awe at how bad Google's mapping is these days, with my 4 year old car GPS doing a better job locally. It took them 18 months to recognize our new ZIP code, deciding to place us in Denmark or something (when we live in the states.)
Is NASA supposed to be a jobs program or a space program?
I think every government program is a jobs program. Having worked for the US Government, I can attest that it does nothing well or efficiently.
But if those unemployed had jobs they'd be paying more taxes...
Which does nothing to help them get reelected. People just barely making it aren't going to contribute significant amounts of money to a campaign, so they are largely irrelevant.
POTS is actually only 7 bits, because the 8th bit is used for control signals. Hence 56k. Also the sample rate is 8000 times but the actual frequency width is only 4 kilohertz.
That applies to the robbed bit T1 interfaces, which can be debatably called POTS vs pure analog that was the original standard. More modern PRI-based T1s are a full 64 kbps since you lose a channel for signaling (23 vs 24 in old robbed bit land.) We use modern PRIs for that get broken down into POTS lines where I work, so no robbed bits. Of course, modems can't do any better than 53 kbps or something lame due to the telcos' petitioning the FCC so they don't have to explain why their network is stuck in the 70s.
What other company could get away with producing a product like this and succeed?
If it's software, then Microsoft. :)
And the real question is why they made the bottom strip out of metal since it's not an antenna. Just make it out of plastic and conduction will be less of a problem.Your hand will still affect it, but perhaps not as much.
If you have another explanation, let's hear it, but Apple's explanation is nonsense. Whatever technical goals Apple says they want to achieve, they could simply achieve through small modifications to their scheduler, if need be, on a per-application basis, with much less work for themselves and their developers.
Wrong. One of the main reasons to support an explicit API is that it gives the app a chance to free up memory that won't be needed when in the background. Given the limited number of functions that's permitted in the background, most of an application's resources can be freed when in the background (the GUI being the largest of them.) This is very, very important on a device with only 256 M of RAM. It's not a computer with 8 GB of RAM and near infinite swap. (Although it can swap out code pages, but not general writable memory pages.)
It's a smart phone, not a general purpose computer. It needs to be small, light weight and cheap enough for people to want to buy it.The restrictions are all about having a good user experience for non-technical people. Full multitasking would severely limit battery life unless all apps are well behaved. This ensures they are all well behaved or they can't multitask.
My main issue is the constant and momentary freezes. It makes using anything that plays video unwatchable, and is generally annoying all the time. This leads to Firefox seeming to be unresponsive. I click on something, but it takes 5 seconds to register I clicked because it's running some crazy-inefficient housekeeping task in the background. I've tried all the usual suggestions, including cache flushing, turning off extensions, removing the various bloated .sqlite files, increasing the crash persistence times, etc. Removing places.sqlite helped for a 1/2 day or so. It appears that all the caching it does really slows it down and that SQL Lite was a rather poor choice. Do some googling and you will find that many, many people have problems with FF freezing momentarily. CPU usage jumps to near 100% while this happens. No other browsers I use do this.
As a result, I find myself using it less and less since it's just do frustrating.
The outcry is not that Apple is revoking a right but simply that they are deliberately crippling a product ... and for what reason?
They don't need a reason.
Then they don't need my business.
And that's the way it should work. I don't visit sites that use Flash (or I'll block them with various plugins. That's my right. I've never seen a single site that Flash added anything to that's beneficial. It's all ads, senseless animations for no reason, or annoying talking heads. And that goes especially for video, Flash video sucks.
The manufacturer of your microwave isn't actively going out of its way to block flash. You can legally sell flash for the microwave oven; software installation is a chore but the playing field is level for everyone. You don't sign an EULA when you buy your microwave.
Sure they, most electronic devices with firmware, which is just about everything, have their microcontroller's flash memory locked so you can't read it out and then modify it. Nor do they publish any information about how you could write your own and will refuse (I've asked) any request for such info since it's "proprietary." Not really very different than Apple, but at least they provide SOME way to do development on the device. I'm developing for the iPhone and it's a very nice environment and very well done. Sure, you have to learn Objective C and Cocoa, which is what I'd bet most people have an issue with: they don't want to learn anything new. Get over it.
I've only had my 27" monitor for like a week, so it's too early to say. It's part of an iMac, and while I don't really like the glossy screen, I do fine it more comfortable than the 30" Apple Cinema Display I also have. I do less looking around and I can take in what's happening better. However, it's rather too early to tell.
Indeed, and that's what I use. It's very nice. I even use virtual desktops to keep development stuff in one, web & email in another, database activities in another, and remote desktop-type app in the last one. Being able to see a full (and wide) header file and source file side-by side along with the relevant part of the app all at once is very handy.
The 2560 x 1440 27" monitors aren't too bad, either.
I've been developing software for 18 years, and I've never encountered a time when I couldn't program anymore. 40 hours of work, plus another 10-15 while working on a masters and then back to programming freeware apps on the Mac. Easily 80 hours a week a while ago. Now I just don't have that kind of time, but I never feel as if I'd had enough. I rather like programming, hence pursuing that in college. I have had friends who became programmers just because of the high pay and you couldn't get them to touch a compiler outside of work. Sad, really. In fact, that was one of my major interview questions: do you program outside of work/school? If not, you have no passion and I don't want to work with you.
Now if I had to develop highly analytical software like DSP or stuff involving tons of differential equations, I may feel differently.
They could just force ANI and drop CID, so it's not an issue.
Except one can spoof ANI as well. On purely digital networks, you have to tell the system what number you are calling from, since it wouldn't otherwise know. Some carriers enforce a rule that your outgoing CID and ANI must be a number which you own, but not all do. If you have multiple carriers, they really can't do this effectively, since they don't know what numbers you terminate.
Plus toll free numbers aren't really on the same level as regular ones, since they are ALL redirected via the SMS 800 system to do all sorts of things, including routing based on time of day and originating location. They can also be forwarded to a "local" number or numbers, but they don't have to. Basically, all you could enforce from this law is to make sure people don't set CID to a number which is obviously not theirs, but finding who they really are is hard. I've called by phone company wanting to get call log info and they claim they don't even save it for other than outgoing long distance calls.
That was basically my experience. Tons of clueless techs who weren't authorized to actually fix anything. The "inside" tech blamed it on the "outside" tech and vice-versa. Why one guy couldn't touch wires inside AND outside my house is anyone's guess. The TV picture was full of static, but he said the signal level was great. Amplify a poor quality signal and you get a strong, yet poor signal. Whatever. I'm with Verizon now, but I still get a mailer from Comcast at least once a week wanting me back. Not going to happen after the manager promised he'd get it resolved in a week and call me back. A month later, I was an Xcustomer.
They actually measured my "high speed" internet connection at 128 kbps download to their own speed test servers. I think it just came down to it would cost more to fix and lose a customer. The fun part was waiting for the tech, who was paid per job, waiting on hold for 45 minutes to get an agent to reset something. That was priceless.
I had Comcast when living in DC and they sucked there, too. They "audited" the apartment building by just disconnecting everyone and seeing who complained and verified they were a customer. Pathetic.
I thought it was somewhat interesting, but way, way too simplistic. Seems they were trying to push more their ideals and not a plot so much. And that sound track. Just horrible, horrible crap.
And Soylent Green was indeed a way, way better movie. It actually had a plot that was given more than 5 minutes of writer time. Of course, now that everyone knows the secret, I'm not sure a remake would work too well.
Yes, this is the main reason I end up placing comments in the code (not around a function body, which I only do when I want JavaDoc for something not entirely obvious.)
Code that interacts with other code can make things complicated, so adding a comment stating why things were done in one place in order to support something else are helpful. Commenting complex code is handy, too. However, most code just isn't complex if written well, but there are cases where it needs to be complicated. (Implementing non-obvious mathematical formulas, for example.)
OK, I lied, another case is to document lock ordering for concurrent code. I typically comment the prerequisites for calling a function, e.g. "queue must be locked before calling." Keeps me from having to remember my clever assumptions. Oh, and documenting internal file / network structures is a good idea.
Oh well. Eventually the people there will get smart, like I did, and leave.
Exactly like my wife did. No jobs and no opportunity. Half of the state is on drugs, based on her survey of friends and relatives, because there is just no way to get ahead. It's very sad, because the people are nice and it's rather pretty there with all the lakes.