Sizable? I think about 500 books would be described as 'sizable'.
All told it's three 2x1.2 meter shelves full of books and journals and the 100 books is not counting my technical and computer books nor does it count miscellaneous other printed stuff including various books that are family heirlooms dating back to the 17th century which together fill another four similar shelves. The 100 books are just the stuff I like to keep close for my research work. Being able to carry all of those 100 or so books plus several hundred journals around on an iPad would be awesome. Mind you I would probably be better off with a Galaxy Tab since it offers you the option of external storage. If you fill up the 64 Gb on your iPad you are shit out of luck. People keep telling me to use cloud storage which is an OK idea in a world where mobile bandwidth does not cost money.
e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.
That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.
Until about a year ago I would have agreed with you but I think you underestimate the convenience of the technology. Recently, however, I decided to move house and found that moving my sizable library of over a hundred books and a stack of journals is a tiresome undertaking. Additionally over the last year or so some of my books and the majority the journals have been made available in electronic format (Mostly PDF) by the academic societies who publish them which means I can reduce the size of my library by about 50% which translates into many, many kilograms of paper and store much of my library on an iPad or a Galaxy Tab. That does not mean I'm going to trash my bound paper books but having some of them and most of the journals on a tablet is a huge advantage. As many of my future acquisitions as possible will also be in electronic format. The only downside is paying twice for stuff I already own in print but at GBP 3-5 per volue for back issues It won't bleed me dry. Plus most of the societies that publish this stuff are non profits, they did incur costs digitizing back issues going back to the 1960s, and the money isn't exactly likely to flow into the pockets of somebody like Rupert Murdoch (if ever there was a motive to pirate print media it's to keep your money out of that bastards pockets).
Voters do want the 4th amendment respected. It's just that they are so zealous about outlawing abortion and gay marriage that they'd cut off their nose to spite their face.
You are assuming most voters even know what the 4th amendment says.
Or they have been negotiating with Apple for 5 years to take out a license. Most of those negotiations are in secret since most end with an NDA.
Or maybe it just took this long for some patent trolling lawyer to sniff this opportunity out and make the good professor aware of the profit potential of this infringement.
Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.
Yes, that and discovering that you had run out of batteries. Most cassette players back then did not come with an external power supply. Eventually I saved up for a powersupply with a user selectable voltage output.
I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.
I still have my Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48K, complete with joystick and other peripreals. My most enduring memory is not the sound of a program loading from tape it's the "Crrrcccswwwhhzzzzz" sound my cheapass cassette players occasionally made when they ate up my tapes and with them my precious programs. With time I became an expert in cassette player repair. Thankfully those days are over.
I just installed Chrome with a user account created specially for the occasion. I didn't see that choice screen. All I got was a nag screen asking me to make Chrome the default browser for this user, but at least Chrome gave me the option of saying 'no'. If you click your way into the Chrome settings menu Google does offer a very basic "Manage Search Engines..." wizard that comes with four pre-installed search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo and a local engine that specializes in my native language. You can also add other search engines on your own if you are familiar with URL variables and printf style format strings. It's simple enough for a geek but I'm betting most non geeky users (which would be 99.99% of the Google Chrome using public) would not know how to add a search engine that isn't in that list by default.
Long ago I thought we were equal. Obviously, one of us is more equal than the other
The degree of equality depends on the size of the stick you carry and whether or not you have a spine to make tough decisions. Our recent crops of leaders in Europe have been and still are a bunch of pussies, which has been amply demonstrated by the way they have handled all manner of crisis over the last few years starting with the how they let genocide go on for several years in the former Yugoslavia (before the Americans finally kicked them in their collective ass and forced them to solve that problem in the only way Milosevic and his ilk respected) and right up to the current Euro crisis. They seem to have no spine to do what is staring them in the face which is kick Greece and other countries that are incapable of fiscal responsibility out of the Euro zone before it disintegrates.
I hope that this is a sign that saner heads are starting to prevail now that they no longer have an ego-maniac at the helm. Steve Jobs definitely had a very good sense of aesthetics and industrial design, which led to excellent products and services. But by all accounts he was, to put it mildly, an asshole.
I really hope that under the current leadership, Apple will start learning to play more nicely with others without sacrificing the aspects that brought them to the point they're at now.
All true, but I can still undestand why Apple is pissed off, both Android and the early Samsung devices are blatant iOS and $IPRODUCT knockoffs (excepting the latest ones like the Samsung Galaxy SII where Samsung finally seems to have started doing it's own thing). When the Samsung phones first arived I was shopping for around for a new pone and I actally mistook them the Samsung Galaxy S a cople of times for iPhone 3 series devices, they looked so similar even pretty close up. I just handed an iPhone to a user who migrated straight from Symbian to Samsung/Android well over a year ago. About an hour after handing him the device I ran into him again and asked him how he was getting along with the iPhone. The aswer was "Fine, it's almost exactly like Android."... Me: LOL. Another thing he really liked was that the iPone came with only a handful of apps whereas his Samsung Galaxy Tab came with a whole slew of crappy apps preinstalled you have no use for. It's pretty much the same feeling you got a few years ago when you bought a Dell desktop, oodles upon oodles of crappy preinstalled software.
Does the fourth flavor, torrent, have pro + the media addon "slipstreamed" in or what?
No, the three original flavors of Windows 8 are codenamed: 'chocolate pudding', 'vanilla ice-cream', and 'strawberry marmalade'. The legendary eight flavor of Windows 8 is so delicious, that most people are deemed unworthy to experience it or even utter it's true name. Thus it was hidden away in a heavily guarded and nuclear-strke proof bunker beneath Microsoft HQ.
Would the person who modded me "troll" please point out where my information is incorrect? Read the sayings of Mohammed as recorded by Al Bukhari: "A nation headed by a woman shall never succeed"; "If I have commanded kneeling for somebody, I would command a woman to kneel for her husband", "Women lack brain and religion". And the Qur'an, I think it's in Sura 5, "As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, beat them; but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of other punishment)." Don't deny the truth.
You can split hairs about this all day long but in the end it is pointless to make fundamentalist arguments like "if the Quran tells you to do <some misogynistic act> all moslems must be following that instruction mindlessly". This is especially true because the Bible is full of similar misogynistic and inhumane crap. When was the last time you saw a couple guilty of adultery begin stoned to death at the city gates? (That little gem came from Deuteronomy 22:23-24) Both the Quaran and the Bible were written in very different times long ago and that fact should kept in mind when reading either text. If you really want to convince us that all moslems take every archaic passage in the Qaran seriously then we must by the same logic also argue that all christians do as well. Thankfully most moslems and christians (apart from some die-hard fundies) do not take everything written in the Quaran literally and implement every crazy thing that is written in scripture. Only brainless fundies do that.
If Microsoft hadn't already alienated the world by trying to bully them, then I might care.
Nobody cares anymore that we nerds get off on watching Microsoft begin pounded into the bedrock for even minor transgressions. Hating Microsoft is almost part of the definition of a Nerd these days. That article asks the much more interesting question: Why are you willing to let Google get away with monopolistic behavior that Microsoft gets crucified for? They have a 90% share of the search market and nobody is pounding them into the ground over it. Do people really think that Google are bunch of kindhearted philanthropists who only have the best interests of mankind at heart and don't care about profit? Yeah RIGHT! Of course they are... (sarcasm)...
No, the Romans conquered Greece and stole all their academics wholesale. But Greece had the last laugh because all these academics captured by the Romans became tutors who raised the next generation of Roman elite to in the image of Greece. Roman mythology and culture became Greek in all but name only.
Apert from the fact that the Romans conquered Greece that is just plain wrong. By the time the Roman legions conquered Greece the Romans were already thoroughly hellenized. The nations and tribes of Italy tribes became hellenized during the Homeric age through contact with Greek colonies. This happened way before the Romans even existed as anything more than a small tribal group and certainly before they built their empire. The Romans became hellenized primarily through the Etruscans (a hellenized Italian people) and later through their naval allies which were mostly Greek city states. Sending your children to be educated in Greece or hiring a Greek tutor was fashionable among the Roman patrician class centuries before the legions ever marched off to conquer Greece.
This was a headline for the 1960's. Today its much, much worse - and sadly only now noticed. 3,000 companies? Only? And how many tens of thousands of grain-pickers? China, Iran, you name it - the US and the West are over-run....
Since the 1960s? The Cambridge Five were recruited at university back in the 1930s. This sort of thing has probably been going on as long as there have been universities. I bet the Romans infiltrated Greek universities to steal their latest catapult technology.
here have been many multi touch implementations, just because someone was the first to file doesn't mean they were first to think up the general concept. Hell any kindergartner that's given some finger paint is prior art for 'multi touch' as far as I'm concerned.
There are numerous ways to implement multi-touch, you can use different finger gestures than Apple, a more original way is to substitute a camera for the trackpad and use object detection to recognize the gestures, you could also use eye movement or you could go a totally different way and use voice recognition or better yet a headset that recognizes brainwaves. Feel free to contribute by doing some original research. If you are unwilling to do that, pay the patent license or wait for the patents to expire. Patents can be abused but that does not mean they were invented for that purpose any more than axes were invented to help serial killers slaughter innocent families on quiet summer nights in American suburbia. Patents were invented (by the Greeks in 500BC) to give inventors a legal tool to sue the pants off of parasites and bottom-feeders who think they are entitled to hijack other peoples ideas and get rich off them without compensating the original inventor. You can go on and on and on and on about every kindergartner finger-painting being prior art but if it multi touch really is so obvious why did we have laptops and touch-pads for 15-20 years before somebody actually went and implemented this incredibly useful feature? Things are always obvious after somebody else implements them and makes a ton of money and patents are always unfair when a patent prevents you from copying an idea and making a ton of money without compensating the original innovator. Patent abuse is not a good thing and should be rooted out but abolishing patents isn't the way to do it.
I get tired of this bitching like everyone needs a car that can drive tons of miles so that is a reason electrics can't work. No, not at all actually. Some people do. For them, electrics are out. However most other don't, for them it is an option.
I wouldn't buy an electric car for all sorts of reasons and range is the least of my worries. The reasons at the top of the list mostly boil down to infrastructure... For one thing live in an apartment building with first-come-firs-served parking and I can't very well lay 150m+ of electrical cable out of the window of my apartment on the 3rd floor. But assuming I could to secure my own private parking space and install a charging station next to it. How long before the local hooligans wreck it? Or if they nick the thing, charging stations are not exactly cheap to install (checked). What do I do if the idiot in 2C parks his tank^H^H^H^H SUV in my spot (and the two on either side of it), refuses to move it and thus ensures I can't charge my car? I have had the problem before of some asshole parking in a space I was renting and such a problem is neither easy nor cheap to solve. Lawyers cost money. Another point is that the government here has not lowered the taxes and tolls on electrics like they promised 3 years ago during the last election. Finally range is an issue, true you don't need it most of the time but there are times when you really miss it.
At the moment electric cars are nice if you live in your own house in the suburbs with a garage to charge your electric commuter car and a second gas powered vehicle you can fall back on for long range travel. What I want is a pluggable hybrid that enables me to do most of my commuting, say 75-100km on electric power but leaves open the option to go diesel or gas once in a while. Unfortunately few such cars are available and the ones that are are either expensive or they just suck ass. When the selection of cars improves and the Infrastructure is there I'll be the first to sign up for the electrics, until then I'll keep my tiny diesel hatchback.
I sure hope the GOP schmucks are voted into office this November.
The GOP idea of good candidates includes Christianity's answer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and and a living Ken doll who tells jokes about his father shutting down plants and laying off workers. Until their choice of candidates improves they don't stand a chance. Looking on the bright side, and assuming that Sarah Palin represented a low point, the GOP's judgement does seem to be very slowly improving.
I was just wondering how long it would take to hear from the "this isn't exactly what I want therefore I don't see why it would be of use to anyone" brigade.
Hmmmm... If you need it that badly there is an easier way than lurking on Slashdot waiting for them to strike:
1) Turn on your TV. 2) Switch to Fox News. 3) Keep watching until you have gotten your fix of "this isn't exactly what I want therefore I don't see why it would be of use to anyone" chatter. 4) Turn off your TV.
There is clear signs of piracy, that was intentional. Close down ALL of it, all the newspapers, the tv stations, everything, and sort it out in court first.
<sarcasm> I'm confused... Legions upon legions of Slashdot readers have conclusively shown during endless discussions over the last few years that piracy in general is a completely victimless activity. Ergo: ITV is just whining about nothing and whatever Murdoch's corporate goons did in terms of piracy cannot possibly have caused any economic harm to ITV Digital in any way shape or form. This should be a slam dunk case, just get our resident experts in the economics of digital piracy to testify on behalf of Murdoch's NewsCorp. Surely the basic axiom that piracy is a victimless activity does not become invalid just because NewsCorp is doing the cracking and pirating? </sarcasm>
Because it's significantly faster in terms of development time, or in terms of cost (having the less skilled, cheaper programmers work on it).
It's always been a case of write the critical stuff in C/C++. That's why languages like python and perl make doing so so simple.
That is heavily project dependent. If you are in a position where you can work with pure Python (i.e. the tedious job of writing wrappers for external libraries is done by others) then yes, you get RAD benefits but that is not chiseled in stone. If you are forced to combine your own C++ components with Python the picture changes. I am involved in a project that has a specialized OLAP engine, written in C++ for speed (no way around it) and a 3D GUI app that runs on top of it which was written in Python for RAD benefits. The biggest single headache we encountered with Python was that yes, you do code the GUI faster in Python, but you loose a lot of development time screwing around with writing Python wrappers for the C++ APIs of the OLAP engine. Plus, there are also endless deployment headaches. It's not as if every customer's machine comes preloaded with Python and even if it does, believe it or not your app may work with one Python distro but it will crash with the another and there are also incompatibilities between versions of Pyhon and you have no way of knowing what version is default on the target machine. You may end up having to bundle your own Python environment with your app for stability. Eventually the GUI team concluded that they were better off time wise if the just wrote the GUI in C++ using QT.
A US aircraft carrier can keep more planes in the air than most countries entire air force. If that doesn't count as a military base then I don't know what does.
That's not all, a US aircraft carrier group is bigger than most countries entire navies as well and if you thrown in a couple of marine divisions and some landing craft they'd probably give most standing armies on earth as a run for their money as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Sizable? I think about 500 books would be described as 'sizable'.
All told it's three 2x1.2 meter shelves full of books and journals and the 100 books is not counting my technical and computer books nor does it count miscellaneous other printed stuff including various books that are family heirlooms dating back to the 17th century which together fill another four similar shelves. The 100 books are just the stuff I like to keep close for my research work. Being able to carry all of those 100 or so books plus several hundred journals around on an iPad would be awesome. Mind you I would probably be better off with a Galaxy Tab since it offers you the option of external storage. If you fill up the 64 Gb on your iPad you are shit out of luck. People keep telling me to use cloud storage which is an OK idea in a world where mobile bandwidth does not cost money.
e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.
That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.
Until about a year ago I would have agreed with you but I think you underestimate the convenience of the technology. Recently, however, I decided to move house and found that moving my sizable library of over a hundred books and a stack of journals is a tiresome undertaking. Additionally over the last year or so some of my books and the majority the journals have been made available in electronic format (Mostly PDF) by the academic societies who publish them which means I can reduce the size of my library by about 50% which translates into many, many kilograms of paper and store much of my library on an iPad or a Galaxy Tab. That does not mean I'm going to trash my bound paper books but having some of them and most of the journals on a tablet is a huge advantage. As many of my future acquisitions as possible will also be in electronic format. The only downside is paying twice for stuff I already own in print but at GBP 3-5 per volue for back issues It won't bleed me dry. Plus most of the societies that publish this stuff are non profits, they did incur costs digitizing back issues going back to the 1960s, and the money isn't exactly likely to flow into the pockets of somebody like Rupert Murdoch (if ever there was a motive to pirate print media it's to keep your money out of that bastards pockets).
Voters do want the 4th amendment respected. It's just that they are so zealous about outlawing abortion and gay marriage that they'd cut off their nose to spite their face.
You are assuming most voters even know what the 4th amendment says.
Or they have been negotiating with Apple for 5 years to take out a license. Most of those negotiations are in secret since most end with an NDA.
Or maybe it just took this long for some patent trolling lawyer to sniff this opportunity out and make the good professor aware of the profit potential of this infringement.
Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.
Yes, that and discovering that you had run out of batteries. Most cassette players back then did not come with an external power supply. Eventually I saved up for a powersupply with a user selectable voltage output.
I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.
I still have my Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48K, complete with joystick and other peripreals. My most enduring memory is not the sound of a program loading from tape it's the "Crrrcccswwwhhzzzzz" sound my cheapass cassette players occasionally made when they ate up my tapes and with them my precious programs. With time I became an expert in cassette player repair. Thankfully those days are over.
There is a choice screen when you install Chrome.
I just installed Chrome with a user account created specially for the occasion. I didn't see that choice screen. All I got was a nag screen asking me to make Chrome the default browser for this user, but at least Chrome gave me the option of saying 'no'. If you click your way into the Chrome settings menu Google does offer a very basic "Manage Search Engines..." wizard that comes with four pre-installed search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo and a local engine that specializes in my native language. You can also add other search engines on your own if you are familiar with URL variables and printf style format strings. It's simple enough for a geek but I'm betting most non geeky users (which would be 99.99% of the Google Chrome using public) would not know how to add a search engine that isn't in that list by default.
Long ago I thought we were equal. Obviously, one of us is more equal than the other
The degree of equality depends on the size of the stick you carry and whether or not you have a spine to make tough decisions. Our recent crops of leaders in Europe have been and still are a bunch of pussies, which has been amply demonstrated by the way they have handled all manner of crisis over the last few years starting with the how they let genocide go on for several years in the former Yugoslavia (before the Americans finally kicked them in their collective ass and forced them to solve that problem in the only way Milosevic and his ilk respected) and right up to the current Euro crisis. They seem to have no spine to do what is staring them in the face which is kick Greece and other countries that are incapable of fiscal responsibility out of the Euro zone before it disintegrates.
I hope that this is a sign that saner heads are starting to prevail now that they no longer have an ego-maniac at the helm. Steve Jobs definitely had a very good sense of aesthetics and industrial design, which led to excellent products and services. But by all accounts he was, to put it mildly, an asshole.
I really hope that under the current leadership, Apple will start learning to play more nicely with others without sacrificing the aspects that brought them to the point they're at now.
All true, but I can still undestand why Apple is pissed off, both Android and the early Samsung devices are blatant iOS and $IPRODUCT knockoffs (excepting the latest ones like the Samsung Galaxy SII where Samsung finally seems to have started doing it's own thing). When the Samsung phones first arived I was shopping for around for a new pone and I actally mistook them the Samsung Galaxy S a cople of times for iPhone 3 series devices, they looked so similar even pretty close up. I just handed an iPhone to a user who migrated straight from Symbian to Samsung/Android well over a year ago. About an hour after handing him the device I ran into him again and asked him how he was getting along with the iPhone. The aswer was "Fine, it's almost exactly like Android."... Me: LOL. Another thing he really liked was that the iPone came with only a handful of apps whereas his Samsung Galaxy Tab came with a whole slew of crappy apps preinstalled you have no use for. It's pretty much the same feeling you got a few years ago when you bought a Dell desktop, oodles upon oodles of crappy preinstalled software.
What a bunch of bullcrap. Oracle is not a person.
Corporations are people my friend...
-- Mitt Romney
Does the fourth flavor, torrent, have pro + the media addon "slipstreamed" in or what?
No, the three original flavors of Windows 8 are codenamed: 'chocolate pudding', 'vanilla ice-cream', and 'strawberry marmalade'. The legendary eight flavor of Windows 8 is so delicious, that most people are deemed unworthy to experience it or even utter it's true name. Thus it was hidden away in a heavily guarded and nuclear-strke proof bunker beneath Microsoft HQ.
Hopefully the courts will see it as such and Aero doesn't go bankrupt from fighting this.
I think Aero going bankrupt from this is the general idea behind the lawsuit.
Would the person who modded me "troll" please point out where my information is incorrect? Read the sayings of Mohammed as recorded by Al Bukhari: "A nation headed by a woman shall never succeed"; "If I have commanded kneeling for somebody, I would command a woman to kneel for her husband", "Women lack brain and religion". And the Qur'an, I think it's in Sura 5, "As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, beat them; but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of other punishment)." Don't deny the truth.
You can split hairs about this all day long but in the end it is pointless to make fundamentalist arguments like "if the Quran tells you to do <some misogynistic act> all moslems must be following that instruction mindlessly". This is especially true because the Bible is full of similar misogynistic and inhumane crap. When was the last time you saw a couple guilty of adultery begin stoned to death at the city gates? (That little gem came from Deuteronomy 22:23-24) Both the Quaran and the Bible were written in very different times long ago and that fact should kept in mind when reading either text. If you really want to convince us that all moslems take every archaic passage in the Qaran seriously then we must by the same logic also argue that all christians do as well. Thankfully most moslems and christians (apart from some die-hard fundies) do not take everything written in the Quaran literally and implement every crazy thing that is written in scripture. Only brainless fundies do that.
If Microsoft hadn't already alienated the world by trying to bully them, then I might care.
Nobody cares anymore that we nerds get off on watching Microsoft begin pounded into the bedrock for even minor transgressions. Hating Microsoft is almost part of the definition of a Nerd these days. That article asks the much more interesting question: Why are you willing to let Google get away with monopolistic behavior that Microsoft gets crucified for? They have a 90% share of the search market and nobody is pounding them into the ground over it. Do people really think that Google are bunch of kindhearted philanthropists who only have the best interests of mankind at heart and don't care about profit? Yeah RIGHT! Of course they are... (sarcasm)...
E) Believes Ayn Rand was a serious philosopher
Philosopher? She was an egocentric lunatic.
No, the Romans conquered Greece and stole all their academics wholesale. But Greece had the last laugh because all these academics captured by the Romans became tutors who raised the next generation of Roman elite to in the image of Greece. Roman mythology and culture became Greek in all but name only.
Apert from the fact that the Romans conquered Greece that is just plain wrong. By the time the Roman legions conquered Greece the Romans were already thoroughly hellenized. The nations and tribes of Italy tribes became hellenized during the Homeric age through contact with Greek colonies. This happened way before the Romans even existed as anything more than a small tribal group and certainly before they built their empire. The Romans became hellenized primarily through the Etruscans (a hellenized Italian people) and later through their naval allies which were mostly Greek city states. Sending your children to be educated in Greece or hiring a Greek tutor was fashionable among the Roman patrician class centuries before the legions ever marched off to conquer Greece.
This was a headline for the 1960's. Today its much, much worse - and sadly only now noticed. 3,000 companies? Only? And how many tens of thousands of grain-pickers? China, Iran, you name it - the US and the West are over-run....
Since the 1960s? The Cambridge Five were recruited at university back in the 1930s. This sort of thing has probably been going on as long as there have been universities. I bet the Romans infiltrated Greek universities to steal their latest catapult technology.
here have been many multi touch implementations, just because someone was the first to file doesn't mean they were first to think up the general concept. Hell any kindergartner that's given some finger paint is prior art for 'multi touch' as far as I'm concerned.
There are numerous ways to implement multi-touch, you can use different finger gestures than Apple, a more original way is to substitute a camera for the trackpad and use object detection to recognize the gestures, you could also use eye movement or you could go a totally different way and use voice recognition or better yet a headset that recognizes brainwaves. Feel free to contribute by doing some original research. If you are unwilling to do that, pay the patent license or wait for the patents to expire. Patents can be abused but that does not mean they were invented for that purpose any more than axes were invented to help serial killers slaughter innocent families on quiet summer nights in American suburbia. Patents were invented (by the Greeks in 500BC) to give inventors a legal tool to sue the pants off of parasites and bottom-feeders who think they are entitled to hijack other peoples ideas and get rich off them without compensating the original inventor. You can go on and on and on and on about every kindergartner finger-painting being prior art but if it multi touch really is so obvious why did we have laptops and touch-pads for 15-20 years before somebody actually went and implemented this incredibly useful feature? Things are always obvious after somebody else implements them and makes a ton of money and patents are always unfair when a patent prevents you from copying an idea and making a ton of money without compensating the original innovator. Patent abuse is not a good thing and should be rooted out but abolishing patents isn't the way to do it.
I get tired of this bitching like everyone needs a car that can drive tons of miles so that is a reason electrics can't work. No, not at all actually. Some people do. For them, electrics are out. However most other don't, for them it is an option.
I wouldn't buy an electric car for all sorts of reasons and range is the least of my worries. The reasons at the top of the list mostly boil down to infrastructure... For one thing live in an apartment building with first-come-firs-served parking and I can't very well lay 150m+ of electrical cable out of the window of my apartment on the 3rd floor. But assuming I could to secure my own private parking space and install a charging station next to it. How long before the local hooligans wreck it? Or if they nick the thing, charging stations are not exactly cheap to install (checked). What do I do if the idiot in 2C parks his tank^H^H^H^H SUV in my spot (and the two on either side of it), refuses to move it and thus ensures I can't charge my car? I have had the problem before of some asshole parking in a space I was renting and such a problem is neither easy nor cheap to solve. Lawyers cost money. Another point is that the government here has not lowered the taxes and tolls on electrics like they promised 3 years ago during the last election. Finally range is an issue, true you don't need it most of the time but there are times when you really miss it.
At the moment electric cars are nice if you live in your own house in the suburbs with a garage to charge your electric commuter car and a second gas powered vehicle you can fall back on for long range travel. What I want is a pluggable hybrid that enables me to do most of my commuting, say 75-100km on electric power but leaves open the option to go diesel or gas once in a while. Unfortunately few such cars are available and the ones that are are either expensive or they just suck ass. When the selection of cars improves and the Infrastructure is there I'll be the first to sign up for the electrics, until then I'll keep my tiny diesel hatchback.
I sure hope the GOP schmucks are voted into office this November.
The GOP idea of good candidates includes Christianity's answer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and and a living Ken doll who tells jokes about his father shutting down plants and laying off workers. Until their choice of candidates improves they don't stand a chance. Looking on the bright side, and assuming that Sarah Palin represented a low point, the GOP's judgement does seem to be very slowly improving.
I was just wondering how long it would take to hear from the "this isn't exactly what I want therefore I don't see why it would be of use to anyone" brigade.
Hmmmm... If you need it that badly there is an easier way than lurking on Slashdot waiting for them to strike:
1) Turn on your TV.
2) Switch to Fox News.
3) Keep watching until you have gotten your fix of "this isn't exactly what I want therefore I don't see why it would be of use to anyone" chatter.
4) Turn off your TV.
Repeat as often as your addiction requires.
There is clear signs of piracy, that was intentional. Close down ALL of it, all the newspapers, the tv stations, everything, and sort it out in court first.
<sarcasm>
I'm confused... Legions upon legions of Slashdot readers have conclusively shown during endless discussions over the last few years that piracy in general is a completely victimless activity. Ergo: ITV is just whining about nothing and whatever Murdoch's corporate goons did in terms of piracy cannot possibly have caused any economic harm to ITV Digital in any way shape or form. This should be a slam dunk case, just get our resident experts in the economics of digital piracy to testify on behalf of Murdoch's NewsCorp. Surely the basic axiom that piracy is a victimless activity does not become invalid just because NewsCorp is doing the cracking and pirating?
</sarcasm>
Because it's significantly faster in terms of development time, or in terms of cost (having the less skilled, cheaper programmers work on it).
It's always been a case of write the critical stuff in C/C++. That's why languages like python and perl make doing so so simple.
That is heavily project dependent. If you are in a position where you can work with pure Python (i.e. the tedious job of writing wrappers for external libraries is done by others) then yes, you get RAD benefits but that is not chiseled in stone. If you are forced to combine your own C++ components with Python the picture changes. I am involved in a project that has a specialized OLAP engine, written in C++ for speed (no way around it) and a 3D GUI app that runs on top of it which was written in Python for RAD benefits. The biggest single headache we encountered with Python was that yes, you do code the GUI faster in Python, but you loose a lot of development time screwing around with writing Python wrappers for the C++ APIs of the OLAP engine. Plus, there are also endless deployment headaches. It's not as if every customer's machine comes preloaded with Python and even if it does, believe it or not your app may work with one Python distro but it will crash with the another and there are also incompatibilities between versions of Pyhon and you have no way of knowing what version is default on the target machine. You may end up having to bundle your own Python environment with your app for stability. Eventually the GUI team concluded that they were better off time wise if the just wrote the GUI in C++ using QT.
A US aircraft carrier can keep more planes in the air than most countries entire air force. If that doesn't count as a military base then I don't know what does.
That's not all, a US aircraft carrier group is bigger than most countries entire navies as well and if you thrown in a couple of marine divisions and some landing craft they'd probably give most standing armies on earth as a run for their money as well.
Land of the Foreclosed, home of the Banking Gangsters.
The correct term is 'Banksters'.