You can't really equate software and music/movies. Music and Movies are consumable products. You get it, you consume it. Maybe you watch it or listen to it more than once, but it's the rare consumer that uses the media as the means to an end.
Most people treat software the same way: they get it, they use it, they have no way to modify it (even without the legal barriers; the issue is that most people aren't programmers). Going the other way, there's a fair number of people who remix music and and make movies containing clips from other films.
Looks to me like the distinction you're drawing isn't really there and you're just being an ignorant snob.
Pop quiz, hotshot. Garry Kasparov is coming to kill you, and the only way to change his mind is for you to beat him at chess. What do you do, what do you?
Challenge him to a game of chess, get him sat down, nice and comfortable, let him take the first move,... then reach across the board and punch him in the mouth as hard as possible.
Multicast? Oh, dear. Do _not_ get me started on the flaws of multicast programmers decided that the lack of information about missed packets in multicast forcing them to rewrite TCP, badly, as an unstable software layer on top of multicast.
Quite apart from the fact that there are uses for multicast above and beyond media streaming (e.g., Ganglia for cluster monitoring) you've got to consider what happens if you're delivering the same stream to multiple hosts in real time. In particular, you don't want to stop the stream to everyone else if one host is hard of hearing. That means you can't use TCP, as that works on the principle of "shout until the other side tells you to stop", which cannot scale beyond a point-to-point connection (it does what it does brilliantly, but that's by clearly not doing some things).
Fire....ummm, they will never get there in time to save my home or family. I have smoke detectors and fire insurance.
Fully privatized fire services have been tried (e.g., in London up until the 19th century) but they're imperfect solutions for a number of reasons. Firstly, fire spreads; your neighbor's fire problem has a tendency to become your fire problem shortly after if it isn't tackled quickly. Secondly, having a bunch of profit-making companies going round saying "Gee, that looks like a very flammable building to me, Joe. Want to buy some insurance?" Well, I don't like where that's going...
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, OR has a very nice collection of air and space exhibits. The "Spruce Goose," Howard Hughes' ill-fated wood composite transport plane, is on display there.
It's a superb museum, utter aerospace geek heaven. They've got a Blackbird. They've got a nuclear missile (no warhead), complete with control bunker. They've got a wonderful collection of aircraft engines. If you're in Portland (e.g., for OSCON) then it's worth hiring a car and taking a trip out there.
Simple, you don't answer the porn charge directly. You instead talk about how Android is about user choice and user freedom, rather than what putzfuck Jobs decrees "acceptable" for you to use.
Actually, what you really do is remake the classic Apple 1984 advert, except this time you have Steve star as Big Brother.
I do use Linux and Windows regularly, I quite like them both for their own reasons, but the whole registry idea was a bad, bad architectural design blunder made by Microsoft.
It was marginally better than keeping everything in WIN.INI like they used to do back in the Bad Old Days. It's just a shame that they didn't pick a better technique like having multiple text files, but then it all dates from when there weren't any user-specific directories either.
It's a poor decision on a crappy foundation to get rid of the faults of the even-worse thing that was there before.
Not only would the rules be transparent and non-ambiguous, but the potential for experimentation and self-analysis would be incredible.
You underestimate the power of people to make things opaque and ambiguous when they think it is in their interest to do so, and Python, being a Turing-complete language (modulo memory limits), would let them do it. It's also an inherent problem: any language that you can't make an unholy mess in is just too trivial to be able to express anything interesting. (With thanks to Kurt Gödel...)
This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America.
No, that behavior is unacceptable, anywhere. Using strong-arm tactics to stop people from claiming their rightful pay is tantamount to slavery (or at least indentured servitude, which is slavery's close cousin) and it is always wrong.
One of the few ways in which western civilization can claim to really be morally superior is that we stop this shit. OK, imperfectly sometimes, but even so we try our best. If we as a civilization can't do something without slavery, it's simply not worth doing; it's that important a core value.
Let's not make excuses for the fact that Blackboard SUCKS in every conceivable way
There are ways it sucks that you've not conceived of. We have the enterprise grade version of Blackboard at work, specially hosted in The Cloud. The only people who don't hate it wholesale seem to be one department (CS, who resolutely stick to Moodle) and the head of IT who believes it is wonderful. Probably because Gartner says it is. I'm just glad that it is not something I ever need to touch personally.
I guess I'll read about the real "bold" endeavors into space carried out by the Chinese and Russian space programs - probably on Slashdot no doubt.
The best thing for America would be if people could go to space through private enterprise, without having to have the government do it for them. In what way would a boondoggle to either the Moon or Mars help with that?
Once you've taken [VAT] off the price difference is usually far lower.
Also, prices in the US are usually exclusive of sales taxes so the price you were quoted isn't the amount that you are actually supposed to pay in total. (I can see why you might do this for remote shopping, e.g., over the internet, but why is this policy applied at a small coffee shop where the prices are written on a blackboard? You can't buy there from out of state and they can change the advertised price faster even than a speeding local legislature...)
"Fat binaries" are just a tar-like file with binaries of several architectures.
Not quite. Unix binaries and object files are (and have been for a long time) multi-part files internally. The traditional segments are TEXT (the actual code) and DATA but there are others possible too. All fat binaries do is put in more TEXT segments for different architectures. The net effect is largely to make a few things more complex (compiler, linker, OS executable loader) but most code never looks. For most programmers, the key issue is that you've got to detect more architecture features during compilation rather than configuration.
That it hasn't happened already is probably down to politics. I guess that the distro vendors don't want it and the 3rd-party commercial vendors do.
I won't factor the AC into this calculation because it cools many other things too, but just be aware of it's presence.
As an (inaccurate) rule of thumb, figure on having about 1W of power spent on AC for every watt of power used to heat the place up. That is, double your power to get the estimated total consumption. OK, it's wildly inaccurate as guesses go (details of datacenter layout and exterior climate really matter) but the order of magnitude will be around right. Pumping heat, especially when the temperature gradient isn't very good, it's just not a highly efficient thing to be doing. That's thermodynamics for you...
Technical solution - put a counter in the taser to record the number of "shots". Let the police officer use their taser as much as they like, but whatever their counter reads is how many times they get tasered at the end of the shift.
That can only be a technical support for a procedural solution, i.e., to make sure that every use of a taser is properly accounted for and justified by independent review. (Yes, police discharge of firearms - outside of designated practice - should also be subject to the same review.)
Probably ought to record the time of each discharge though. A pure count is perhaps a little too easy to lie around.
Eclipse might be better than VS, but I've never been able to get it to run fast enough to be usable.
I used to have a lot of problems with that, and then I moved it to a machine with more memory and the problems went away. IOW, it's a bloaty hog but otherwise OK.
The battery has been replaced twice - the last one only worked less than a year. There are some artifacts on the LCD screen. DVD recorder does not record dual layer disks. MagSafe is "repaired" with duck tape; socket plug is very easy to crack when inserting into the tight power socket. Occasionally it doesn't startup (black screen of death). There are issues with Atheros wireless card.
I have never seen any of these problems. My (unreplaced) battery health is still over 90%. This machine has had close to daily use for nearly two years. (Well, don't know about the DVD recorder; not been something I've tried a lot.)
What I can say is that I had an HDD failure. Apple replaced it under warranty, but I'm still very glad that I'd made a full backup shortly before. Backups are Good...
Quality and reliability? It's a fucking urban legend. Read Mac forums; I am far from being alone with these issues.
Never ever anything from Apple.
Sampling across the various laptop owners at work (a somewhat better sample than the Mac forums) I see that there really aren't that many hardware failures; with the exception of my HDD failure, the biggest issue I can remember anyone having was with a warped case, and the failure rate is about the same with high-end Dells. (We get rather a lot of both Macs and Dells as different people have different preferences for what OS to have as native.)
I'm sure there are some perfectly valid niche uses, but I've always felt that PCMCIA and ExpressCard slots were concerning due to the robustness of the connector (number of insertions) and stress on the surrounding components and the card itself because you've got this big lever sticking out...
Physically, PCMCIA isn't a problem in my experience. For many years I used a Cisco PCMCIA card in a Dell laptop for wireless networking; it worked well and got a lot of use. (The Dell was from about the last generation before wireless got included as part of the standard package.) Not sure what you'd use it for now though.
The higher suicide levels among France Telecom employees seems to be true. The article I read on it (in the Economist IIRC) said that it was probably something to do with it being a privatized form where things were not going too well in internal-management terms. (I may have misremembered that.)
No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature.
That's untrue. I've seen them in a number of places running displays as, in effect, embedded systems with a bit more grunt than normal. For example, I know for sure that Barcelona Supercomputer Center has one in its lobby, showing the current loading, heat levels, etc. of their facility.
...No I think I'm right... It should have been Sony who paid out, but instead it was Amazon. Amazon shouldn't have had to pay out.
UK consumer law says it was Amazon who was liable. There was no contract of sale between Sony and the consumer. (Yes, the consumer is in a privileged position in UK law. It's one of the better pieces of UK legislation.)
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You can't really equate software and music/movies. Music and Movies are consumable products. You get it, you consume it. Maybe you watch it or listen to it more than once, but it's the rare consumer that uses the media as the means to an end.
Most people treat software the same way: they get it, they use it, they have no way to modify it (even without the legal barriers; the issue is that most people aren't programmers). Going the other way, there's a fair number of people who remix music and and make movies containing clips from other films.
Looks to me like the distinction you're drawing isn't really there and you're just being an ignorant snob.
Pop quiz, hotshot. Garry Kasparov is coming to kill you, and the only way to change his mind is for you to beat him at chess. What do you do, what do you?
Challenge him to a game of chess, get him sat down, nice and comfortable, let him take the first move, ... then reach across the board and punch him in the mouth as hard as possible.
Don't play their game, play yours.
Multicast? Oh, dear. Do _not_ get me started on the flaws of multicast programmers decided that the lack of information about missed packets in multicast forcing them to rewrite TCP, badly, as an unstable software layer on top of multicast.
Quite apart from the fact that there are uses for multicast above and beyond media streaming (e.g., Ganglia for cluster monitoring) you've got to consider what happens if you're delivering the same stream to multiple hosts in real time. In particular, you don't want to stop the stream to everyone else if one host is hard of hearing. That means you can't use TCP, as that works on the principle of "shout until the other side tells you to stop", which cannot scale beyond a point-to-point connection (it does what it does brilliantly, but that's by clearly not doing some things).
Fire....ummm, they will never get there in time to save my home or family. I have smoke detectors and fire insurance.
Fully privatized fire services have been tried (e.g., in London up until the 19th century) but they're imperfect solutions for a number of reasons. Firstly, fire spreads; your neighbor's fire problem has a tendency to become your fire problem shortly after if it isn't tackled quickly. Secondly, having a bunch of profit-making companies going round saying "Gee, that looks like a very flammable building to me, Joe. Want to buy some insurance?" Well, I don't like where that's going...
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, OR has a very nice collection of air and space exhibits. The "Spruce Goose," Howard Hughes' ill-fated wood composite transport plane, is on display there.
It's a superb museum, utter aerospace geek heaven. They've got a Blackbird. They've got a nuclear missile (no warhead), complete with control bunker. They've got a wonderful collection of aircraft engines. If you're in Portland (e.g., for OSCON) then it's worth hiring a car and taking a trip out there.
Simple, you don't answer the porn charge directly. You instead talk about how Android is about user choice and user freedom, rather than what putzfuck Jobs decrees "acceptable" for you to use.
Actually, what you really do is remake the classic Apple 1984 advert, except this time you have Steve star as Big Brother.
I do use Linux and Windows regularly, I quite like them both for their own reasons, but the whole registry idea was a bad, bad architectural design blunder made by Microsoft.
It was marginally better than keeping everything in WIN.INI like they used to do back in the Bad Old Days. It's just a shame that they didn't pick a better technique like having multiple text files, but then it all dates from when there weren't any user-specific directories either.
It's a poor decision on a crappy foundation to get rid of the faults of the even-worse thing that was there before.
True, but netbeans and the BBC don't serve ads.
The BBC does, but only outside the UK.
Working 50 hours a week and not making enough to afford even a modest apartment is pretty damned bad.
That's so unlike working in Silicon Valley used to be.
Not only would the rules be transparent and non-ambiguous, but the potential for experimentation and self-analysis would be incredible.
You underestimate the power of people to make things opaque and ambiguous when they think it is in their interest to do so, and Python, being a Turing-complete language (modulo memory limits), would let them do it. It's also an inherent problem: any language that you can't make an unholy mess in is just too trivial to be able to express anything interesting. (With thanks to Kurt Gödel...)
This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America.
No, that behavior is unacceptable, anywhere. Using strong-arm tactics to stop people from claiming their rightful pay is tantamount to slavery (or at least indentured servitude, which is slavery's close cousin) and it is always wrong.
One of the few ways in which western civilization can claim to really be morally superior is that we stop this shit. OK, imperfectly sometimes, but even so we try our best. If we as a civilization can't do something without slavery, it's simply not worth doing; it's that important a core value.
(Yes, I feel strongly about it!)
Let's not make excuses for the fact that Blackboard SUCKS in every conceivable way
There are ways it sucks that you've not conceived of. We have the enterprise grade version of Blackboard at work, specially hosted in The Cloud. The only people who don't hate it wholesale seem to be one department (CS, who resolutely stick to Moodle) and the head of IT who believes it is wonderful. Probably because Gartner says it is. I'm just glad that it is not something I ever need to touch personally.
I guess I'll read about the real "bold" endeavors into space carried out by the Chinese and Russian space programs - probably on Slashdot no doubt.
The best thing for America would be if people could go to space through private enterprise, without having to have the government do it for them. In what way would a boondoggle to either the Moon or Mars help with that?
Once you've taken [VAT] off the price difference is usually far lower.
Also, prices in the US are usually exclusive of sales taxes so the price you were quoted isn't the amount that you are actually supposed to pay in total. (I can see why you might do this for remote shopping, e.g., over the internet, but why is this policy applied at a small coffee shop where the prices are written on a blackboard? You can't buy there from out of state and they can change the advertised price faster even than a speeding local legislature...)
"Fat binaries" are just a tar-like file with binaries of several architectures.
Not quite. Unix binaries and object files are (and have been for a long time) multi-part files internally. The traditional segments are TEXT (the actual code) and DATA but there are others possible too. All fat binaries do is put in more TEXT segments for different architectures. The net effect is largely to make a few things more complex (compiler, linker, OS executable loader) but most code never looks. For most programmers, the key issue is that you've got to detect more architecture features during compilation rather than configuration.
That it hasn't happened already is probably down to politics. I guess that the distro vendors don't want it and the 3rd-party commercial vendors do.
I won't factor the AC into this calculation because it cools many other things too, but just be aware of it's presence.
As an (inaccurate) rule of thumb, figure on having about 1W of power spent on AC for every watt of power used to heat the place up. That is, double your power to get the estimated total consumption. OK, it's wildly inaccurate as guesses go (details of datacenter layout and exterior climate really matter) but the order of magnitude will be around right. Pumping heat, especially when the temperature gradient isn't very good, it's just not a highly efficient thing to be doing. That's thermodynamics for you...
Technical solution - put a counter in the taser to record the number of "shots". Let the police officer use their taser as much as they like, but whatever their counter reads is how many times they get tasered at the end of the shift.
That can only be a technical support for a procedural solution, i.e., to make sure that every use of a taser is properly accounted for and justified by independent review. (Yes, police discharge of firearms - outside of designated practice - should also be subject to the same review.)
Probably ought to record the time of each discharge though. A pure count is perhaps a little too easy to lie around.
Where I work the customer service phone monkeys in the cube farm next to me use the speakerphone. THE GOD DAMN SPEAKERPHONE.
That's inhuman. Strike back! Learn to yodel. Practice at your desk.
Eclipse might be better than VS, but I've never been able to get it to run fast enough to be usable.
I used to have a lot of problems with that, and then I moved it to a machine with more memory and the problems went away. IOW, it's a bloaty hog but otherwise OK.
I own MBP produced in 2008.
So do I.
The battery has been replaced twice - the last one only worked less than a year.
There are some artifacts on the LCD screen.
DVD recorder does not record dual layer disks.
MagSafe is "repaired" with duck tape; socket plug is very easy to crack when inserting into the tight power socket.
Occasionally it doesn't startup (black screen of death).
There are issues with Atheros wireless card.
I have never seen any of these problems. My (unreplaced) battery health is still over 90%. This machine has had close to daily use for nearly two years. (Well, don't know about the DVD recorder; not been something I've tried a lot.)
What I can say is that I had an HDD failure. Apple replaced it under warranty, but I'm still very glad that I'd made a full backup shortly before. Backups are Good...
Quality and reliability? It's a fucking urban legend.
Read Mac forums; I am far from being alone with these issues.
Never ever anything from Apple.
Sampling across the various laptop owners at work (a somewhat better sample than the Mac forums) I see that there really aren't that many hardware failures; with the exception of my HDD failure, the biggest issue I can remember anyone having was with a warped case, and the failure rate is about the same with high-end Dells. (We get rather a lot of both Macs and Dells as different people have different preferences for what OS to have as native.)
I'm sure there are some perfectly valid niche uses, but I've always felt that PCMCIA and ExpressCard slots were concerning due to the robustness of the connector (number of insertions) and stress on the surrounding components and the card itself because you've got this big lever sticking out...
Physically, PCMCIA isn't a problem in my experience. For many years I used a Cisco PCMCIA card in a Dell laptop for wireless networking; it worked well and got a lot of use. (The Dell was from about the last generation before wireless got included as part of the standard package.) Not sure what you'd use it for now though.
The higher suicide levels among France Telecom employees seems to be true. The article I read on it (in the Economist IIRC) said that it was probably something to do with it being a privatized form where things were not going too well in internal-management terms. (I may have misremembered that.)
Depends on whether your name is Buster...
No one bought a PS3 specifically for the otheros feature.
That's untrue. I've seen them in a number of places running displays as, in effect, embedded systems with a bit more grunt than normal. For example, I know for sure that Barcelona Supercomputer Center has one in its lobby, showing the current loading, heat levels, etc. of their facility.
...No I think I'm right... It should have been Sony who paid out, but instead it was Amazon. Amazon shouldn't have had to pay out.
UK consumer law says it was Amazon who was liable. There was no contract of sale between Sony and the consumer. (Yes, the consumer is in a privileged position in UK law. It's one of the better pieces of UK legislation.)