Look on the bright side. The closest I've seen to an unlimited data plan in the UK was $150/month (no, that's not a typo), and only gave you unlimited off-peak data.
Which is why the UK tends to look slightly confused when people suggest using their phones for data...
Agree. Not enough content, too expensive, too high risk, not enough benefit. Frankly at this point I couldn't care if both formats flop and we're stuck with regular DVDs for another 5 years until someone tries HD again. Ideally with less arguing this time.
Do you run your PC 24/7? If so, I'd suggest you stop; while some people have strange ideas about hard drives dying faster if they have to spin down/up regularly, for consumer grade hard drives leaving them on is a lot worse for them. This came out back in the days of the IBM Deathstar drives, when IBM was going "But... you're not meant to keep your drives turned on all the time!".
Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...
Agree, absolutely. Considering the number of possible states, for example, that a car can be in. Okay, start with the gears, then you've got lights on and off, windscreen wipers, air conditioning, CD player... maybe 100-200 states in total, right? Now, consider how many states a computer program can be in, it's many, many orders of magnitude higher.
Consider each instruction a moving part. I'll accept high level language instructions if it makes you feel better. That puts most of the programs I work on, each of them relatively small (except their web apps, so they're bloody massive in comparison to most web apps), at around 100,000 moving parts. If you went to an engineer and told them to design, build, test, and roll out to users a machine with 100,000 parts in 4 months (okay, okay, so it took us 6 to get these stable), they'd just laugh at you, yet it's not an unreasonable request for a programmer.
Okay, firstly, I'd be bloody amazed if the pages in question validate. The guy goesn't give any link to the site, though, so I can't tell.
Secondly... if you're using lots of client side Javascript to make a site work, you're asking for trouble. Google can do this, because they have massive dev and QA teams. If you don't have the manpower to do enough testing (for example, in the beta period) and fix problems, maybe you should make your site simpler.
Every single web application I work on, worked perfectly in IE 7. Even, yes, the ones that use Javascript. This is achieved by:
Validating all pages. Okay, they're dynamically generated, so it's possible an error will slip past testing, but this really helps.
Testing under multiple browsers. The dev team works with Firefox and Safari, and does a QA pass under IE after any major revisions.
Minimising use of Javascript. If Javascript doesn't provide a significant obvious benefit to the user interface, it doesn't get used.
But seriously, I agree. I'd love, and I'm sure I'm not alone, the university I work for to use GMail for all its e-mail (the supplied web mail service is... well, lets say suboptimal). However, this is not going to happen, for reasons ranging from confidentiality (I'm sure students would love Google to have a copy of all their e-mail, for example) to reliability (I just love it when I can't even read my existing e-mail, when our network link goes down). Personally, I'm more expecting Google to release a stand alone GMail appliance, much like the Google search appliance, at some point. Where by some point, I'm thinking 2010 at this rate.
Until then, we'll stick with the lousy service that fits our needs, rather than moving to a great service that doesn't...
I can't shake this cynical feeling it's less NASA's vision, and more the politicians that set their budget's vision. NASA I believe is quite happy doing unmanned stuff in space, it's politicians that liked manned missions because it makes better press...
Yes, but this has very little to do with exploring space, and everything to do with working out how to get stuff done more easily, in space. Where a good starting point is to stop having to send people (and all the support kit for them) up every time...
What particularly bugs me is that when I bought a new LCD TV last year, I discovered it had no power switch. It has a standby button, but the only way of turning it off is at the wall/powerstrip. On a related note, decidedly unhappy with the Wii's 24-hour on mode; I'd be more accepting if it wasn't required for things like Mii transfer to work, but there's no way of telling it to do network maintenance when it's first turned on each day.
Agree. I SpamCop a lot of my spam, and these days I get equal quantities random European countries, and US, as origins. Mail logs for the server I maintain doesn't show any serious change in the volume of spam detected, either.
I think there used to be a lot of Taiwanese spam, but you're right, it's been cleared up...
Yeah... now anyone looking for an elegant, easy to use but over expensive hardware/software combination with a serious lack of 3rd party software now gets a Mac.
So far, the only thing that's impressed me from Bethesda is their designs. Their implementation of those designs tends to be appalling. Oblivion was painfully bad in places; I once fought my way through one of the Oblivion gate areas, finally dragged my broken body back to town, rested up, stepped outside down and was promptly chewed to death by a passing wolf. The entire idea of assuming that characters are leveling up because their combat skills are going up ignores half the classes you could play in the game, and repeatedly resulted in me facing opponents against which I had no chance, as random encounters, let alone the main game.
There were other issues, including but not limited to a whole swarm of bugs, but the monster leveling got to me most...
Yeah - joining the console market for this generation would be incredible financial suicide. All three of the major consoles have launched (except the PS3 in about half the world, but never mind), everyone who was waiting for a specific console is now trying to get hold of one. Unless Apple is about to launch a games console imminently, it'd be coming out so far into this generation people would barely notice.
There's a decent chance one of the major console manufacturers will give up making hardware after this generation, and if that happened it would provide an ideal opportunity for Apple to join the market...
Okay, but how does he know they haven't been subpoenaed? Obviously, as a spokes person, someone should tell him if they _have_ been, but the lack of anyone telling him does not mean they haven't been. So he has to check to be 100% sure. This seems normal to me...
No, it isn't. It's the first thing to do, certainly, but not the only test. No browser is 100% standards compliant, and knowing which bits of the standards you can safely use is a nightmare.
Now, if people are finding new browsers frequently break their sites, I'd suggest they have some serious robustness issues (I work on a 300 page web application, which had only cosmetic issues on IE7, and required under an hour to correct). People seem concerningly unwilling to compromise between stability, future safety, and appearance.
In particular; 3 require a malicious local user (two patches to ATS, and the one to VPN) and 7 require local user action to work (the third ATS patch, and the patches to CFNetwork, Finder, gnuzip, Installer, perl and Webkit). Most of the Security Framework issues mean that a certificate may not be correctly rejected if it has been revoked. The Installer patch means that users must now authenticate themselves as being an administrator for some actions, and is a patch to ensure a level of security above that of Windows.
I would consider only the the AirPort and WebKit patches to be critical; the rest apply to parts of the OS that must people won't be using!
This isn't as bad as the article that counted all security alerts about UN*X software, and compared it to the security alert count for Windows OS only, but still...
Personally, I think it would be good to see SoR open sourced so budding MMO designers could look through what the Ryzom developers did, and learn from it. However, I seem to remember large parts of the core engine are already OS, and I also wouldn't suggest it's worth the sums it's likely to cost to get the source.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. Cool, thanks, well that's Orange off my likely next carrier list then :)
Look on the bright side. The closest I've seen to an unlimited data plan in the UK was $150/month (no, that's not a typo), and only gave you unlimited off-peak data.
Which is why the UK tends to look slightly confused when people suggest using their phones for data...
Agree. Not enough content, too expensive, too high risk, not enough benefit. Frankly at this point I couldn't care if both formats flop and we're stuck with regular DVDs for another 5 years until someone tries HD again. Ideally with less arguing this time.
Do you run your PC 24/7? If so, I'd suggest you stop; while some people have strange ideas about hard drives dying faster if they have to spin down/up regularly, for consumer grade hard drives leaving them on is a lot worse for them. This came out back in the days of the IBM Deathstar drives, when IBM was going "But... you're not meant to keep your drives turned on all the time!".
Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...
Agree, absolutely. Considering the number of possible states, for example, that a car can be in. Okay, start with the gears, then you've got lights on and off, windscreen wipers, air conditioning, CD player... maybe 100-200 states in total, right? Now, consider how many states a computer program can be in, it's many, many orders of magnitude higher.
Consider each instruction a moving part. I'll accept high level language instructions if it makes you feel better. That puts most of the programs I work on, each of them relatively small (except their web apps, so they're bloody massive in comparison to most web apps), at around 100,000 moving parts. If you went to an engineer and told them to design, build, test, and roll out to users a machine with 100,000 parts in 4 months (okay, okay, so it took us 6 to get these stable), they'd just laugh at you, yet it's not an unreasonable request for a programmer.
You just made an argument for closed source and DRM. While I agree with you, I believe that may be a hanging offence around here anyway :)
Okay, firstly, I'd be bloody amazed if the pages in question validate. The guy goesn't give any link to the site, though, so I can't tell.
Secondly... if you're using lots of client side Javascript to make a site work, you're asking for trouble. Google can do this, because they have massive dev and QA teams. If you don't have the manpower to do enough testing (for example, in the beta period) and fix problems, maybe you should make your site simpler.
Every single web application I work on, worked perfectly in IE 7. Even, yes, the ones that use Javascript. This is achieved by:
Oh yes, that went so well for the PS3 :)
Bah! Unbeliever!
But seriously, I agree. I'd love, and I'm sure I'm not alone, the university I work for to use GMail for all its e-mail (the supplied web mail service is... well, lets say suboptimal). However, this is not going to happen, for reasons ranging from confidentiality (I'm sure students would love Google to have a copy of all their e-mail, for example) to reliability (I just love it when I can't even read my existing e-mail, when our network link goes down). Personally, I'm more expecting Google to release a stand alone GMail appliance, much like the Google search appliance, at some point. Where by some point, I'm thinking 2010 at this rate.
Until then, we'll stick with the lousy service that fits our needs, rather than moving to a great service that doesn't...
I can't shake this cynical feeling it's less NASA's vision, and more the politicians that set their budget's vision. NASA I believe is quite happy doing unmanned stuff in space, it's politicians that liked manned missions because it makes better press...
Yes, but this has very little to do with exploring space, and everything to do with working out how to get stuff done more easily, in space. Where a good starting point is to stop having to send people (and all the support kit for them) up every time...
What particularly bugs me is that when I bought a new LCD TV last year, I discovered it had no power switch. It has a standby button, but the only way of turning it off is at the wall/powerstrip. On a related note, decidedly unhappy with the Wii's 24-hour on mode; I'd be more accepting if it wasn't required for things like Mii transfer to work, but there's no way of telling it to do network maintenance when it's first turned on each day.
Agree. I SpamCop a lot of my spam, and these days I get equal quantities random European countries, and US, as origins. Mail logs for the server I maintain doesn't show any serious change in the volume of spam detected, either.
I think there used to be a lot of Taiwanese spam, but you're right, it's been cleared up...
Yeah... now anyone looking for an elegant, easy to use but over expensive hardware/software combination with a serious lack of 3rd party software now gets a Mac.
(Posted from my MacBook Pro)
No, not a word processor document, please attach it as as PDF!
Me, I'm waiting for him to do a month of OpenBSD bugs...
*taptaptap* Hey, never knew that. Although, personally, I'd have expected enter to load the file...
So far, the only thing that's impressed me from Bethesda is their designs. Their implementation of those designs tends to be appalling. Oblivion was painfully bad in places; I once fought my way through one of the Oblivion gate areas, finally dragged my broken body back to town, rested up, stepped outside down and was promptly chewed to death by a passing wolf. The entire idea of assuming that characters are leveling up because their combat skills are going up ignores half the classes you could play in the game, and repeatedly resulted in me facing opponents against which I had no chance, as random encounters, let alone the main game.
There were other issues, including but not limited to a whole swarm of bugs, but the monster leveling got to me most...
Daunting? I still have nightmares *shivers*
(Although that was on Debian, which is not the easiest platform to install MythTV on, by a long way)
Hired? HIRED??? No, you sell them time on the bikes, as a cheaper alternative to going to the gym!
Yeah - joining the console market for this generation would be incredible financial suicide. All three of the major consoles have launched (except the PS3 in about half the world, but never mind), everyone who was waiting for a specific console is now trying to get hold of one. Unless Apple is about to launch a games console imminently, it'd be coming out so far into this generation people would barely notice.
There's a decent chance one of the major console manufacturers will give up making hardware after this generation, and if that happened it would provide an ideal opportunity for Apple to join the market...
Okay, but how does he know they haven't been subpoenaed? Obviously, as a spokes person, someone should tell him if they _have_ been, but the lack of anyone telling him does not mean they haven't been. So he has to check to be 100% sure. This seems normal to me...
No, it isn't. It's the first thing to do, certainly, but not the only test. No browser is 100% standards compliant, and knowing which bits of the standards you can safely use is a nightmare.
Now, if people are finding new browsers frequently break their sites, I'd suggest they have some serious robustness issues (I work on a 300 page web application, which had only cosmetic issues on IE7, and required under an hour to correct). People seem concerningly unwilling to compromise between stability, future safety, and appearance.
In particular; 3 require a malicious local user (two patches to ATS, and the one to VPN) and 7 require local user action to work (the third ATS patch, and the patches to CFNetwork, Finder, gnuzip, Installer, perl and Webkit). Most of the Security Framework issues mean that a certificate may not be correctly rejected if it has been revoked. The Installer patch means that users must now authenticate themselves as being an administrator for some actions, and is a patch to ensure a level of security above that of Windows.
I would consider only the the AirPort and WebKit patches to be critical; the rest apply to parts of the OS that must people won't be using!
This isn't as bad as the article that counted all security alerts about UN*X software, and compared it to the security alert count for Windows OS only, but still...
Personally, I think it would be good to see SoR open sourced so budding MMO designers could look through what the Ryzom developers did, and learn from it. However, I seem to remember large parts of the core engine are already OS, and I also wouldn't suggest it's worth the sums it's likely to cost to get the source.