but an iPhone costs a fuck of a lot more than a cheap Chinese Android device does.
Why single out the $80 Android phone for its Chinese origin? It is not as if the fruit company has its phones made somewhere else after all. This reasonable priced Anrdoid phone is made by Huawei (the largest Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer ATW) while Cupertino sends its manufacturing orders to Foxconn. I have not heard much about bad things happening at Huawei's manufacturing plants, but that does not mean much of course. Foxconn, as you may remember, has been in the news rather frequently because of several lethal accidents in conjunction with their contracts with the fruit company. The Bill of Materials (BOM) for the most recent flat, rectangualar screened, rounded cornered fruit phone seems to have been around $180 at its time of introduction in 2010. It is sold for 4.5 times as much. How much do you guess the BOM for the Huawei is?
There's absolutely nothing as damaging to the environment as having more kids, especially when you have more than 2, which is all you need to have to replace yourself (and spouse).
The 'replacement factor' for humans in the western world is actually larger than 1, ie. the average couple has to have somewhere around 2.1 children to keep the population stable. If you think about it it does make sense as not every human is able to reproduce for one or more reasons (more boys than girls are born, some of those die before they get the chance to reproduce, etc). In a street of 10 houses, each housing a single family with 2 children, one of those families would need to have 3 children to keep the numbers up.
But I'm going to drive one anyway, and fuck you if you think you're going to stop me.
Oh, no need for that. With your attitude you'll be stopped soon enough without me or anyone else here bothering a thing. We'll just drive by the scene on our bikes and in our cars without feeling any need to destroy bumpers or pop airbags.
Video compression is a mature area and you have to fight teeth and nails get your IP in the standard (I attended the VCEG/MPEG standardization meetings for h264, I witnessed the blood first hand). The IP holders are huge companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA, and they have very decent research labs.These guys are not fucking around, they do their patent research before fighting to push their IP in.
Just read again what you just wrote. A mature area... fight teeth and nails to get your IP into the standard... fighting to push your IP in
The way you describe it, 'IP' is to technological progress what a virus is to an evolving organism: something that should be fought, 'tooth and nail', to be destroyed. Something that tries to hitch a ride on your success, attempting to leech sustenance without giving back. A parasite.
The answer to all these questions about why consumption products in Europe cost more than in the US is really simple, and should be understood by anyone who has ever followed Economy 101. Europeans seem to be willing to pay more for consumption products. If they stopped buying those fruitpads at the customary inflated European price St. Jobs would lower the prices over here. Since they keep on buying, prices stay high. Same goes for just about any other product which can not be stuffed inside a padded envelope and shipped from mainland China.
It is also here where the big lie about globalization gets exposed. Just try to buy that tablet in the US to have it shipped over here. Go on, log on to Amazon (et al), order something and try to have it shipped to Ye Olde Worlde. The many variations of 'This product can not be shipped to the location you provided' will quickly sour your globalization experience. In the case of Amazon they might mention their European operations, with many of the same products. For European prices... so no sale there either.
As long as globalization only works for the one behind the cash register I'd say stuff it - I'm voting with my wallet. Of course that means I'm 'confined' to running older, often second hand hardware, but that suits me just fine. I'll order some spare parts from mainland China for next to nothing, have the goods arrive within two weeks, use them to repair the old conker and raise a virtual middle finger to the globalized but strangely territorial peddlers of consumption goods.
Typed on a recycled 2006 model notebook - no sale for you, HP...
The toilet here on my farm sports a 'Designed for Windows XP' logo, as does the toilet paper holder so he must be building on previous experience here...
I have a Mac Book. I am above all this nonsense PC people have to deal with.
Silly fanboi, Macs are PCs. PCs with their own share of problems, from bulging batteries to failing keyboards (Dutch, use some translator if you can't read it) to, well, attitude problems in its users it seems...
Have you ever put a web page and code side by side, splitting a wide screen monitor in half?
No, I put them top to bottom. That way, they both have the whole screen width to play with, no horizontal scrolling needed. It helps if you use a tiling window manager as that takes care of the tedious window positioning for you - I just press Alt-Spacebar to switch between top-bottom, left-right, left-stacked right, fullscreen and sometimes other layouts in Xmonad (on *nix, obviously).
Solar Impulse HB-SIA landed safely in Brussels, Switzerland
Switzerland is not a member of the EU so it does not make sense to move the de-facto capitol of said union there. Why not just keep it to Brussels, Belgium instead?
it is nice to be able to keep reference docs and 4-5 pages of code on the screen at the same time. No more alt-tabbing your brain out to get to the right window either.
I can do that on my 5 to 10 year old notebooks with 1024x768 to 1280x800 screens, Just use a tiling window manager and keep the relevant windows in view, put the documentation on a separate workspace if you have trouble reading small print - Alt-2 for documentation, Alt-1 for code, no guessing involved. It works even better with multiple screens but as that severely limits mobility I'm not interested.
A cheap and failed attempt to copy the "i" meme from Apple,
Apple? What do they have to do with this? KDE's K-obsession and Gnome's similar G-naming predates the Apple hype by quite a bit. When KDE got started in 1996 Apple was still selling beige boxes with a crashy OS which lacked memory protection and only did 'cooperative multitasking'. It was not until 2001 that Apple finally launched its own Unix-based desktop operating system. Should I say that Apple copied KDE and Gnome...? and CDE... and Solaris... and Ultrix... and Apollo/Domain... and all the others. Come to think of it, this would not have been the first time that Apple based its offerings on something it gleaned from some other team - Xerox PARC is where the WIMP-interface got started after all.
In short, stop comparing everything computer-related to Apple as if they are the bellwether which all others slavishly follow.
Even more important than the price tag is the fact that with free software you don't expose your company to the risk of license compliance audits by software vendors. You can skip the whole useless license bookkeeping you need when using proprietary software. You can just plunk a new machine on a desk, install the usual bunch of software and start using that machine for what you bought it for. This is freedom. This is free software. Freedom to use *your* computer at *your* terms.
Or like any laptop/notebook screen? Or like many flat screens? What is a tablet after all but a computing device in a screen form factor?
I'm typing this on a salvaged HP DV6000. If you chop off the screen and stick a fruit on the back it might be taken for one of those trendy pad-things.
Verdict: Jobs Inc. is still full of it, they have learned zilch from those heinous look&feel lawsuits. They might have success, but they are losers.
Would you rather they count out-of-state license plates or something equally mind-numbing?
Yes, of course I would rather have my children come up with something to entertain themselves then to have them spoon-fed with commercial drivel. I remember these car trips from when I was younger. Every power line looked like a cable car or railway line, license plates were interesting as well - but this is Europe so they might be more varied than in the US - and the great blue (and all to often gray) yonder was (and is) full of surprises.
And another thing... assuming that there is more than one grown-up in the car, that person could maybe do something with the kids? Try it, it's fun!
Boeing? You mean that manufacturer of convertiblecommuterairliners? Maybe they should use some of that 'flimsy carbon fiber' in their planes to keep the roofs on - I heard they were planning to do so in their forthcoming yet somehow yet even more delayed machine (or was that just a dream?).
I think murder laws are stupid. So come over here and let's discuss it like real anarchists.
I see where you are trying to get with that quote, but it does not mean what you seem to think it does. If you were to discuss murder laws like 'real anarchists' (whatever those might be) you should be fine apart from possibly having your ears talked off about anarchism.
"Your freedom ends where mine begins" is a common tenet in anarchism. Since my freedom includes the freedom to be alive, murder is just as much a crime in an anarchistic society as it is in a nation-state like the one and I live in.
In other words, anarchism is not the same as lawlessness. Read up about it and you'll see what I mean. Anarchism centers on the abolishment of the state, not on lawlessness. Of course there are probably as many flavours of anarchism as there are anarchists so it is hard to say what 'anarchism' really means to any single individual...
...would be to find a way to drain those parasites at the top of more or less the entire finance system and many other sectors of the excessive riches they have misappropriated. The scum which acts as top suit of company A and sits in the board of directors of company B,C and D which colludes with the other scum which heads B and sits in A, C and D's board, approving each others thievery.
As long as those parasites hold sway over the banks it does not seem to make that much sense to go on a saving spree. Compare it to storing all your grain in a rat-infested silo in the hope to save it for when it is needed. By the time you need your grain the rats will have gone off with most, and spoiled the rest.
Just like the besuited-and-tied rats in those board rooms, really...
My experience with Chromium (I have not tried any Google-branded versions) is that it gets bogged down loading tabs in the background and stays unresponsive until the last tab has finished loading, where Firefox slows down but stays responsive. While Chromium might shine on multicore and/or multiprocessor machines in my experience it loses out to Firefox/Seamonkey on single-processor hardware. This has made me use Chromium for 'quick' browsing fixes - look up that address while no browser happens to be running - while I keep to Firefox or Seamonkey for the long haul sessions.
Humbug. Here in Sweden we have mandatory inspections on motor vehicles and trailers. Those inspections could until recently (in true Swedish form) only be performed by a state-mandated partly privately owned commercial entity ('Aktiebolag Svensk Bilprovning' or 'publicly traded company Swedish Car Inspections'), giving this company a good overview of brand- and model-specific problems. They publish these statistics on the web, making it possible to compare on overall reliability as well as specific model-related problems. Skoda actually turns out to be more reliable than average and more reliable than VW - this also goes for corrosion resistance.
If you read Swedish or use an online translator you can have a look at the current incarnation of Bilprovningen's comparison site for more information on this subject.
Now if you really want to see some problematic cars, have a look at eg. Chrysler, Chevrolet, Jeep, Pontiac (you might start to notice a pattern), Landrover, Renault and others. If it comes from Asia it generally does allright. If it comes from Europe it varies (Renault is worse than average) but most do allright. If it comes from the US it generally has more problems than average.
"The in gear acceleration times are 50-70 mph in 5.6 seconds, quicker than BMW's 330i which takes 6.0 seconds. 20-40 mph in 2.4 seconds is as quick as the Lotus Elise 111R. Despite this the Fabia vRS can achieve better than 6.2 L/100 km (46 mpg-imp; 38 mpg-US). If driven carefully some drivers have experienced MPG rates of 65-70 mpg over long periods. The Fabia VRS has a top speed of approximately 130 mph (210 km/h)."
Maybe the intention was to use the laser reflectors on the head of the thing to create a laser microphone? That would require no power whatsoever on the bug - but a line of sight to the laser.
Modern Islam is not exactly a hotbed for scientific exploration and discovery, the reverse is true. This has not always been the case however as you'll probably know. While Europe was ravaged by norsemen and later held by the leash by restrictive and vindictive Christian churches in the early middle ages, the Islamic world was a place where scientific curiosity was not only allowed but even encouraged. Standing on the shoulders of earlier scientists from eg. Greece, India and China, scholars in the Islamic world produced many works which are still held in high regard. This was the Islamic golden age.
And then, something happened. Religious intolerance was probably one of the factors in the decline of scientific discovery in the Islamic world, led by theologists like Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059-1111) who used the tools of the philosophers to undermine philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Of course these developments happened in a span of centuries, not decades. It would not surprise me though if the decline of scientific learning in the Islamic world started just like it seems to happen in the United States of America, by religious zealots trying to undermine and discredit science and scientists and subverting science teaching to their own purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Why single out the $80 Android phone for its Chinese origin? It is not as if the fruit company has its phones made somewhere else after all. This reasonable priced Anrdoid phone is made by Huawei (the largest Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer ATW) while Cupertino sends its manufacturing orders to Foxconn. I have not heard much about bad things happening at Huawei's manufacturing plants, but that does not mean much of course. Foxconn, as you may remember, has been in the news rather frequently because of several lethal accidents in conjunction with their contracts with the fruit company. The Bill of Materials (BOM) for the most recent flat, rectangualar screened, rounded cornered fruit phone seems to have been around $180 at its time of introduction in 2010. It is sold for 4.5 times as much. How much do you guess the BOM for the Huawei is?
The 'replacement factor' for humans in the western world is actually larger than 1, ie. the average couple has to have somewhere around 2.1 children to keep the population stable. If you think about it it does make sense as not every human is able to reproduce for one or more reasons (more boys than girls are born, some of those die before they get the chance to reproduce, etc). In a street of 10 houses, each housing a single family with 2 children, one of those families would need to have 3 children to keep the numbers up.
Oh, no need for that. With your attitude you'll be stopped soon enough without me or anyone else here bothering a thing. We'll just drive by the scene on our bikes and in our cars without feeling any need to destroy bumpers or pop airbags.
Just read again what you just wrote. A mature area... fight teeth and nails to get your IP into the standard... fighting to push your IP in
The way you describe it, 'IP' is to technological progress what a virus is to an evolving organism: something that should be fought, 'tooth and nail', to be destroyed. Something that tries to hitch a ride on your success, attempting to leech sustenance without giving back. A parasite.
Don't you think that posting this once is enough?
Just because David Gerard does not admit to be a troll does not mean he has no tail...
The answer to all these questions about why consumption products in Europe cost more than in the US is really simple, and should be understood by anyone who has ever followed Economy 101. Europeans seem to be willing to pay more for consumption products. If they stopped buying those fruitpads at the customary inflated European price St. Jobs would lower the prices over here. Since they keep on buying, prices stay high. Same goes for just about any other product which can not be stuffed inside a padded envelope and shipped from mainland China.
It is also here where the big lie about globalization gets exposed. Just try to buy that tablet in the US to have it shipped over here. Go on, log on to Amazon (et al), order something and try to have it shipped to Ye Olde Worlde. The many variations of 'This product can not be shipped to the location you provided' will quickly sour your globalization experience. In the case of Amazon they might mention their European operations, with many of the same products. For European prices... so no sale there either.
As long as globalization only works for the one behind the cash register I'd say stuff it - I'm voting with my wallet. Of course that means I'm 'confined' to running older, often second hand hardware, but that suits me just fine. I'll order some spare parts from mainland China for next to nothing, have the goods arrive within two weeks, use them to repair the old conker and raise a virtual middle finger to the globalized but strangely territorial peddlers of consumption goods.
Typed on a recycled 2006 model notebook - no sale for you, HP...
The toilet here on my farm sports a 'Designed for Windows XP' logo, as does the toilet paper holder so he must be building on previous experience here...
Silly fanboi, Macs are PCs. PCs with their own share of problems, from bulging batteries to failing keyboards (Dutch, use some translator if you can't read it) to, well, attitude problems in its users it seems...
No, I put them top to bottom. That way, they both have the whole screen width to play with, no horizontal scrolling needed. It helps if you use a tiling window manager as that takes care of the tedious window positioning for you - I just press Alt-Spacebar to switch between top-bottom, left-right, left-stacked right, fullscreen and sometimes other layouts in Xmonad (on *nix, obviously).
Switzerland is not a member of the EU so it does not make sense to move the de-facto capitol of said union there. Why not just keep it to Brussels, Belgium instead?
I can do that on my 5 to 10 year old notebooks with 1024x768 to 1280x800 screens, Just use a tiling window manager and keep the relevant windows in view, put the documentation on a separate workspace if you have trouble reading small print - Alt-2 for documentation, Alt-1 for code, no guessing involved. It works even better with multiple screens but as that severely limits mobility I'm not interested.
Apple? What do they have to do with this? KDE's K-obsession and Gnome's similar G-naming predates the Apple hype by quite a bit. When KDE got started in 1996 Apple was still selling beige boxes with a crashy OS which lacked memory protection and only did 'cooperative multitasking'. It was not until 2001 that Apple finally launched its own Unix-based desktop operating system. Should I say that Apple copied KDE and Gnome...? and CDE... and Solaris... and Ultrix... and Apollo/Domain... and all the others. Come to think of it, this would not have been the first time that Apple based its offerings on something it gleaned from some other team - Xerox PARC is where the WIMP-interface got started after all.
In short, stop comparing everything computer-related to Apple as if they are the bellwether which all others slavishly follow.
Even more important than the price tag is the fact that with free software you don't expose your company to the risk of license compliance audits by software vendors. You can skip the whole useless license bookkeeping you need when using proprietary software. You can just plunk a new machine on a desk, install the usual bunch of software and start using that machine for what you bought it for. This is freedom. This is free software. Freedom to use *your* computer at *your* terms.
Or like any laptop/notebook screen? Or like many flat screens? What is a tablet after all but a computing device in a screen form factor?
I'm typing this on a salvaged HP DV6000. If you chop off the screen and stick a fruit on the back it might be taken for one of those trendy pad-things.
Verdict: Jobs Inc. is still full of it, they have learned zilch from those heinous look&feel lawsuits. They might have success, but they are losers.
Yes, of course I would rather have my children come up with something to entertain themselves then to have them spoon-fed with commercial drivel. I remember these car trips from when I was younger. Every power line looked like a cable car or railway line, license plates were interesting as well - but this is Europe so they might be more varied than in the US - and the great blue (and all to often gray) yonder was (and is) full of surprises.
And another thing... assuming that there is more than one grown-up in the car, that person could maybe do something with the kids? Try it, it's fun!
No appletainment in this house, thank you...
Boeing? You mean that manufacturer of convertible commuter airliners? Maybe they should use some of that 'flimsy carbon fiber' in their planes to keep the roofs on - I heard they were planning to do so in their forthcoming yet somehow yet even more delayed machine (or was that just a dream?).
I see where you are trying to get with that quote, but it does not mean what you seem to think it does. If you were to discuss murder laws like 'real anarchists' (whatever those might be) you should be fine apart from possibly having your ears talked off about anarchism.
"Your freedom ends where mine begins" is a common tenet in anarchism. Since my freedom includes the freedom to be alive, murder is just as much a crime in an anarchistic society as it is in a nation-state like the one and I live in.
In other words, anarchism is not the same as lawlessness. Read up about it and you'll see what I mean. Anarchism centers on the abolishment of the state, not on lawlessness. Of course there are probably as many flavours of anarchism as there are anarchists so it is hard to say what 'anarchism' really means to any single individual...
...would be to find a way to drain those parasites at the top of more or less the entire finance system and many other sectors of the excessive riches they have misappropriated. The scum which acts as top suit of company A and sits in the board of directors of company B,C and D which colludes with the other scum which heads B and sits in A, C and D's board, approving each others thievery.
As long as those parasites hold sway over the banks it does not seem to make that much sense to go on a saving spree. Compare it to storing all your grain in a rat-infested silo in the hope to save it for when it is needed. By the time you need your grain the rats will have gone off with most, and spoiled the rest.
Just like the besuited-and-tied rats in those board rooms, really...
My experience with Chromium (I have not tried any Google-branded versions) is that it gets bogged down loading tabs in the background and stays unresponsive until the last tab has finished loading, where Firefox slows down but stays responsive. While Chromium might shine on multicore and/or multiprocessor machines in my experience it loses out to Firefox/Seamonkey on single-processor hardware. This has made me use Chromium for 'quick' browsing fixes - look up that address while no browser happens to be running - while I keep to Firefox or Seamonkey for the long haul sessions.
Humbug. Here in Sweden we have mandatory inspections on motor vehicles and trailers. Those inspections could until recently (in true Swedish form) only be performed by a state-mandated partly privately owned commercial entity ('Aktiebolag Svensk Bilprovning' or 'publicly traded company Swedish Car Inspections'), giving this company a good overview of brand- and model-specific problems. They publish these statistics on the web, making it possible to compare on overall reliability as well as specific model-related problems. Skoda actually turns out to be more reliable than average and more reliable than VW - this also goes for corrosion resistance.
If you read Swedish or use an online translator you can have a look at the current incarnation of Bilprovningen's comparison site for more information on this subject.
Now if you really want to see some problematic cars, have a look at eg. Chrysler, Chevrolet, Jeep, Pontiac (you might start to notice a pattern), Landrover, Renault and others. If it comes from Asia it generally does allright. If it comes from Europe it varies (Renault is worse than average) but most do allright. If it comes from the US it generally has more problems than average.
And thus the next generation of botnets found its purpose...
You mean one of these?
"The in gear acceleration times are 50-70 mph in 5.6 seconds, quicker than BMW's 330i which takes 6.0 seconds. 20-40 mph in 2.4 seconds is as quick as the Lotus Elise 111R. Despite this the Fabia vRS can achieve better than 6.2 L/100 km (46 mpg-imp; 38 mpg-US). If driven carefully some drivers have experienced MPG rates of 65-70 mpg over long periods. The Fabia VRS has a top speed of approximately 130 mph (210 km/h)."
Nothing wrong with that I'd say?
Maybe the intention was to use the laser reflectors on the head of the thing to create a laser microphone? That would require no power whatsoever on the bug - but a line of sight to the laser.
That would be vegetarian furniture.
Modern Islam is not exactly a hotbed for scientific exploration and discovery, the reverse is true. This has not always been the case however as you'll probably know. While Europe was ravaged by norsemen and later held by the leash by restrictive and vindictive Christian churches in the early middle ages, the Islamic world was a place where scientific curiosity was not only allowed but even encouraged. Standing on the shoulders of earlier scientists from eg. Greece, India and China, scholars in the Islamic world produced many works which are still held in high regard. This was the Islamic golden age.
And then, something happened. Religious intolerance was probably one of the factors in the decline of scientific discovery in the Islamic world, led by theologists like Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059-1111) who used the tools of the philosophers to undermine philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Of course these developments happened in a span of centuries, not decades. It would not surprise me though if the decline of scientific learning in the Islamic world started just like it seems to happen in the United States of America, by religious zealots trying to undermine and discredit science and scientists and subverting science teaching to their own purposes.