In the 80s I was studying for my Physics degree. I wasted a lot of one year playing Elite but my Beeb redeemed itself when it came to my final year project. I computerised a first year lab practical experiment. I designed sensors, hardware to connect the sensors to my Beeb. I designed hardware to connect my Beeb to drive the equipment. I wrote the software in a mash of BASIC and assembler using interrupts and events. It even had a real time read out and scope (custom pixel plotting routines FTW). I got a first for the project after convincing the examiners during my viva that I hadn't faked the results and they were genuine. It saved my degree.
I used to code in my spare time too. I've had stuff published in Acorn User. Towards the end of the 80s I graduated in more ways than one. I got my degree and moved on to Acorn's ARM machines and learnt ARM assembler. Again getting stuff written and published. I used Acorn machines right the way through to the mid 90s. I wrote my thesis on one. Finally I moved on to PCs when Linux became a bit more mature but I didn't leave Acorns completely behind as I start playing with Linux on ARM and was asked to talk about Linux on Acorn machines. Now-a-days I'm a software consultant specialising in embedded devices and linux on embedded devices. I deal with MIPS and SH platforms but also an awful lot of ARM platforms. All thanks to my Beeb.
What are you comparing to? RISC PCs when they first came out blew away PCs of the day. Similarly the earlier machines beat the competition performance wise at the time they were released. Loading a program in to memory makes it run *faster* than continually having to access the disk. PCs did the latter because their apps were far larger for the same functionality and wouldn't fit in memory.
Performance cars are safer because they have better brakes, better acceleration (and talk to any safety expert and accelerating out of a problem is often more useful than trying to stop), better handling, and so on. A 150MPH car is safer to drive at 70MPH than an 80MPH car.
What I would like to see is our government actually spending some of that 85 pence in the pound on sorting out public transport.
You're obviously far to young to remember the time before her. Wilson and Callahan almost let the country go bankrupt. Every nationalised industry was being subsidised to great extent. The national debt was horrendous. No one worked. There was garbage on the streets, power strikes, three days weeks and rotten cars. Something had to be done. Alas Maggie got too big for her boots and went slightly nuts (just like Blair did) and I feel that all PMs should have a maximum of two terms. I'm not Tory, I'm Lib Dem, but on the whole the country was cancerous and needed curing and sometimes cures themselves cause damage.
How is that possible? Next we'll be hearing that someone has been fired for favouring gravitational theory over the possibility that apples fall to the ground merely because they love the ground, want to be near it, cherish it, and make friends with it...
There's one reason why they would limit the target hardware. To limit the target hardware!
One of the issues with Windows is that they have to support such a multitude of hardware either themselves or having the vendors write the drivers. This obviously hurts quality. It is a lot easy to write code for a small subset of hardware.
Admittedly if you had a machine that totally matches the spec of a Mac model then there's no reason why it couldn't run OS-X but then you have the issue of support. Most users wouldn't understand the difference between one configuration of hardware and another and try and run OS-X on unsuitable machines. This would be more of a headache to Apple than any benefits. I don't think its elitism as to why they stick to just their machines but partly for management simplicity.
As for low end machines I actually want everything I get on a Mac. I use wi-fi, bluetooth, and so on. So if I'm going to have to spec a machine with the same spec as a Mac and like OS-X why not just buy a Mac!
You're missing something. Windows' ancestor is basically a task switcher, a way of running several applications at a time, whilst working on one at a time. On OS-X it is intended that you are using several applications all at the same time since the integration between applications is better. For example you can just drag an image out of Safari in to an e-mail window to attach it, and so on. Admittedly on small screens there's not necessarily the space to do this in which case just drag out the window to fill the screen. On big screens I never maximise apps.
Cheap hardware like Dell? My Dell laptop is actually lower specced than a Mac Book but cost the company more. If fact if you do a like for like you'll find the price difference is negligible.
Packet switched networking was invented in the UK. Milnet was invented in the US. The expansion to the academic community was being mirrored in the UK by JANET. HTTP/HTML was invented by a Brit stationed in Switzerland. The UK domain was created before the standardisation of country domains which is why we have UK and not the Ukraine who had to have UKR. Technically we're also GB since the top level domains were based upon the same scheme as the country recognition for cars. The internet doesn't really have an inventor. It is a combination of various ideas from various people in various countries and has evolved rather than being developed.
I've never got the point of wireless synching...
on
ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You still have to charge the thing. How difficult is it to plug your player in before you go to bed and in the morning it's charged and synched.
Libertarian verse socialist is a good analogy and the reason why I publish using BSD licence. If the code is to be truly free then someone must have the right to modify it and close source it. Anything else is not free. I don't mind and I'm the author so why should anyone else? I am a libertarian in my politics too and currently can't stand the socialist nanny state the UK is turning in to...
Don't compare consumer/embedded devices with desktop or server OSes. The two are not the same.
In the latter the customer is the end user. Generally an individual customer has no sway since they are just one in millions. An individual user is generally powerless against Apple or Microsoft say.
In the embedded market the customer is not the end user but the developer of the device who usually pays a licence on each device sold which can amount to an awful lot of money. In that case developers can have a significant influence over the supplier of the operating system. If there's a bug you get on the phone and report the issue and pressure for a fix.
Its where you want the responsibility to lie. If you are a middleman who, for example, develops a device by subcontracting for the hardware and developing the software, and you have the hardware built by more than one supplier, it is actually more scalable and manageable to have each supplier provide a set of drivers to a defined API and you never see the source. If there's a problem you get the manufacturer to fix it. It's part of the contract for the hardware. You don't want to have engineers debugging and maintaining multiple code bases. You validate the thing and if doesn't pass you get them to fix it.
Because they are benefiting from a mature, open source, and well understood pre-established operating system. If there was no Linux they would have to spend much more development costs in building their own OS for their devices.
Me laughs loudly. I'm currently working on an embedded product using this mature, well understood, well established operating system. We're currently investigating a core operating system issue which should work but just doesn't in this case and results in a crash which is recreatable with a small test application. We've found the cause and it will be released to the open source community but its such an obvious fault I'm surprised that no one has found it so far. It would have definitely been found if there were unit tests and quality control procedures which there aren't. We found it because we have unit tests and quality control procedures for our software which runs on the top.
Because I know linux quite well and will stick my arms, up to the pits, in to the code, I'll not use it as a day to day operating system. I have a Mac. Considering the relative user base size I'm not surprised that commercial companies avoid the issue of developing for Linux.
When anyone requires starts requiring proof of gender I wonder how they define the genders in the first place. Appearance? Role? Chromosomal sex?
The issue is that actually nature gets it wrong quite often. We all start developing as female regardless of chromosomes but various triggers cause male sexual characteristics to develop. Sometimes that doesn't work. There are women who were born women but are chromosomally male (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome).
One of my pet rants it the argument about marriage being the union of one mad and one woman. No one ever defines what they are. Should a woman with CAIS (Chromosomally male) marry a woman or a man? Also what about those who are neither? At least 1 in 1000 babies has some level of sex ambiguity. I know someone with one ovary and one testes.
This is a can of worms that these guys really don't want to open...
Okay it's thicker, but it's also smaller, and although it has a smaller screen my SE K800i has all of what you list plus 3G, MMS, video calls, a 3Mp camera, a video camera, decent bluetooth with PAN, and a media player which will play iTunes+ tunes and H264 video. Okay it doesn't look as flash as the iPhone (and yes we analysed one at work which we'd bought in LA) but it was *free*.
The primary use for my phone, apart from being a phone and occasionally media player, is providing my laptop a network when I'm away from wi-fi. That's the one thing the iPhone fails abismally on.
Oh yes. I am a Mac fan. I have apple laptops and desktops, a mac mini connected to the TV and so on. But I'm not buying an iPhone in the current guise. It's just too out of date. The SE does what I need and syncs seemlessly with my macs.
In UK law there are a couple of interesting cases in contract and tort which basically mean that when you buy something, like a box containing a CD containing software, your contract is with the seller of the software i.e. the shop and not the first supplier, i.e. Microsoft. And secondly terms of a contract have to be visible at the time the contract is made. I.e. when you buy the software. Since the EULA is *inside* the box by then it's too late.
The name says it all doesn't it. For your information I'm quite cute, ask my three lovers, I earn good money, and I have the high score on the arcade machine down my local club;-)
For decades Hollywood has been changing European history or having the US taking claim for discoveries, victories and so on (capturing the Enigma machine, changing a brave member of crew on the Titanic in to a villain, etc). Where was the outcry. Now this is happening and you're all up in arms...
Tough. It's just the movies. Stop crying in your weak chemical beer and live with it.
Slashdot Mirror
An awful lot to be honest!
In the 80s I was studying for my Physics degree. I wasted a lot of one year playing Elite but my Beeb redeemed itself when it came to my final year project. I computerised a first year lab practical experiment. I designed sensors, hardware to connect the sensors to my Beeb. I designed hardware to connect my Beeb to drive the equipment. I wrote the software in a mash of BASIC and assembler using interrupts and events. It even had a real time read out and scope (custom pixel plotting routines FTW). I got a first for the project after convincing the examiners during my viva that I hadn't faked the results and they were genuine. It saved my degree.
I used to code in my spare time too. I've had stuff published in Acorn User. Towards the end of the 80s I graduated in more ways than one. I got my degree and moved on to Acorn's ARM machines and learnt ARM assembler. Again getting stuff written and published. I used Acorn machines right the way through to the mid 90s. I wrote my thesis on one. Finally I moved on to PCs when Linux became a bit more mature but I didn't leave Acorns completely behind as I start playing with Linux on ARM and was asked to talk about Linux on Acorn machines. Now-a-days I'm a software consultant specialising in embedded devices and linux on embedded devices. I deal with MIPS and SH platforms but also an awful lot of ARM platforms. All thanks to my Beeb.
What are you comparing to? RISC PCs when they first came out blew away PCs of the day. Similarly the earlier machines beat the competition performance wise at the time they were released. Loading a program in to memory makes it run *faster* than continually having to access the disk. PCs did the latter because their apps were far larger for the same functionality and wouldn't fit in memory.
I was going to say that given her past Sophie keeps her head down now-a-days.
Performance cars are safer because they have better brakes, better acceleration (and talk to any safety expert and accelerating out of a problem is often more useful than trying to stop), better handling, and so on. A 150MPH car is safer to drive at 70MPH than an 80MPH car.
What I would like to see is our government actually spending some of that 85 pence in the pound on sorting out public transport.
You're obviously far to young to remember the time before her. Wilson and Callahan almost let the country go bankrupt. Every nationalised industry was being subsidised to great extent. The national debt was horrendous. No one worked. There was garbage on the streets, power strikes, three days weeks and rotten cars. Something had to be done. Alas Maggie got too big for her boots and went slightly nuts (just like Blair did) and I feel that all PMs should have a maximum of two terms. I'm not Tory, I'm Lib Dem, but on the whole the country was cancerous and needed curing and sometimes cures themselves cause damage.
How is that possible? Next we'll be hearing that someone has been fired for favouring gravitational theory over the possibility that apples fall to the ground merely because they love the ground, want to be near it, cherish it, and make friends with it...
What a stupid bunch of primitives...l
Only if you're a USAean. If you live somewhere in the first world they're referring to the Chrimble holiday season...
I wouldn't know. I run neither on my XP Laptop.
There's one reason why they would limit the target hardware. To limit the target hardware!
One of the issues with Windows is that they have to support such a multitude of hardware either themselves or having the vendors write the drivers. This obviously hurts quality. It is a lot easy to write code for a small subset of hardware.
Admittedly if you had a machine that totally matches the spec of a Mac model then there's no reason why it couldn't run OS-X but then you have the issue of support. Most users wouldn't understand the difference between one configuration of hardware and another and try and run OS-X on unsuitable machines. This would be more of a headache to Apple than any benefits. I don't think its elitism as to why they stick to just their machines but partly for management simplicity.
As for low end machines I actually want everything I get on a Mac. I use wi-fi, bluetooth, and so on. So if I'm going to have to spec a machine with the same spec as a Mac and like OS-X why not just buy a Mac!
You're missing something. Windows' ancestor is basically a task switcher, a way of running several applications at a time, whilst working on one at a time. On OS-X it is intended that you are using several applications all at the same time since the integration between applications is better. For example you can just drag an image out of Safari in to an e-mail window to attach it, and so on. Admittedly on small screens there's not necessarily the space to do this in which case just drag out the window to fill the screen. On big screens I never maximise apps.
Cheap hardware like Dell? My Dell laptop is actually lower specced than a Mac Book but cost the company more. If fact if you do a like for like you'll find the price difference is negligible.
Yes but I think uk predated ISO3166. The standard is different because it took account of necessary changes.
Packet switched networking was invented in the UK. Milnet was invented in the US. The expansion to the academic community was being mirrored in the UK by JANET. HTTP/HTML was invented by a Brit stationed in Switzerland. The UK domain was created before the standardisation of country domains which is why we have UK and not the Ukraine who had to have UKR. Technically we're also GB since the top level domains were based upon the same scheme as the country recognition for cars. The internet doesn't really have an inventor. It is a combination of various ideas from various people in various countries and has evolved rather than being developed.
You still have to charge the thing. How difficult is it to plug your player in before you go to bed and in the morning it's charged and synched.
Libertarian verse socialist is a good analogy and the reason why I publish using BSD licence. If the code is to be truly free then someone must have the right to modify it and close source it. Anything else is not free. I don't mind and I'm the author so why should anyone else? I am a libertarian in my politics too and currently can't stand the socialist nanny state the UK is turning in to...
Don't compare consumer/embedded devices with desktop or server OSes. The two are not the same.
In the latter the customer is the end user. Generally an individual customer has no sway since they are just one in millions. An individual user is generally powerless against Apple or Microsoft say.
In the embedded market the customer is not the end user but the developer of the device who usually pays a licence on each device sold which can amount to an awful lot of money. In that case developers can have a significant influence over the supplier of the operating system. If there's a bug you get on the phone and report the issue and pressure for a fix.
Its where you want the responsibility to lie. If you are a middleman who, for example, develops a device by subcontracting for the hardware and developing the software, and you have the hardware built by more than one supplier, it is actually more scalable and manageable to have each supplier provide a set of drivers to a defined API and you never see the source. If there's a problem you get the manufacturer to fix it. It's part of the contract for the hardware. You don't want to have engineers debugging and maintaining multiple code bases. You validate the thing and if doesn't pass you get them to fix it.
Because they are benefiting from a mature, open source, and well understood pre-established operating system. If there was no Linux they would have to spend much more development costs in building their own OS for their devices.
Me laughs loudly. I'm currently working on an embedded product using this mature, well understood, well established operating system. We're currently investigating a core operating system issue which should work but just doesn't in this case and results in a crash which is recreatable with a small test application. We've found the cause and it will be released to the open source community but its such an obvious fault I'm surprised that no one has found it so far. It would have definitely been found if there were unit tests and quality control procedures which there aren't. We found it because we have unit tests and quality control procedures for our software which runs on the top.
Because I know linux quite well and will stick my arms, up to the pits, in to the code, I'll not use it as a day to day operating system. I have a Mac. Considering the relative user base size I'm not surprised that commercial companies avoid the issue of developing for Linux.
When anyone requires starts requiring proof of gender I wonder how they define the genders in the first place. Appearance? Role? Chromosomal sex?
The issue is that actually nature gets it wrong quite often. We all start developing as female regardless of chromosomes but various triggers cause male sexual characteristics to develop. Sometimes that doesn't work. There are women who were born women but are chromosomally male (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome).
One of my pet rants it the argument about marriage being the union of one mad and one woman. No one ever defines what they are. Should a woman with CAIS (Chromosomally male) marry a woman or a man? Also what about those who are neither? At least 1 in 1000 babies has some level of sex ambiguity. I know someone with one ovary and one testes.
This is a can of worms that these guys really don't want to open...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train
I hope the German one turns out to be more technically reliable.
...was a hallucination.
Okay it's thicker, but it's also smaller, and although it has a smaller screen my SE K800i has all of what you list plus 3G, MMS, video calls, a 3Mp camera, a video camera, decent bluetooth with PAN, and a media player which will play iTunes+ tunes and H264 video. Okay it doesn't look as flash as the iPhone (and yes we analysed one at work which we'd bought in LA) but it was *free*.
The primary use for my phone, apart from being a phone and occasionally media player, is providing my laptop a network when I'm away from wi-fi. That's the one thing the iPhone fails abismally on.
Oh yes. I am a Mac fan. I have apple laptops and desktops, a mac mini connected to the TV and so on. But I'm not buying an iPhone in the current guise. It's just too out of date. The SE does what I need and syncs seemlessly with my macs.
In UK law there are a couple of interesting cases in contract and tort which basically mean that when you buy something, like a box containing a CD containing software, your contract is with the seller of the software i.e. the shop and not the first supplier, i.e. Microsoft. And secondly terms of a contract have to be visible at the time the contract is made. I.e. when you buy the software. Since the EULA is *inside* the box by then it's too late.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
;-)
The name says it all doesn't it. For your information I'm quite cute, ask my three lovers, I earn good money, and I have the high score on the arcade machine down my local club
For decades Hollywood has been changing European history or having the US taking claim for discoveries, victories and so on (capturing the Enigma machine, changing a brave member of crew on the Titanic in to a villain, etc). Where was the outcry. Now this is happening and you're all up in arms...
Tough. It's just the movies. Stop crying in your weak chemical beer and live with it.