So anyone who's ever worked at FB as an engineer will have likely downloaded copies of all their friends' / family's / ex-girlfriends' inboxes, chat history, etc.
It just struck me as funny that all of that sounds really ominous and important to somebody who's maybe 20 years old... and when you get a bit older, married, and have kids it all just sounds so stupid:) OMG, my chat logs!
I'm not trying to be a bastard... its seriously just making me laugh right now at all the dumb stuff I used to worry about:)
Facebook doesn't play hardball with change control
Just because they include another gesture to reach the home screen doesn't imply that they are going to remove the home button and I don't believe any credible source has suggested this... It's just a stupid extrapolation from the new gesture they've added.
The most important reason the home button will stay is just the obviousness... If you don't know what to do (and lots of both young and old people don't) they have a point of reference to get back to sanity... That button will not go away unless / until something equally obvious can take its place and a 5 fingered gesture certainly doesn't fill that role.
I have seen this repeatedly over the years... People who are slow typists or more generally are not proficient in using keyboard shortcuts or other features their editors / IDEs are more reluctant to certain kinds of changes to their code... i.e. small things like renaming, general cleanup, refactoring... They find it frustrating and so they make smaller changes with poorer results.
It may not be a big issue in general, but it obviously a hindrance to productivity and changes how someone things about the cost / benefit of making changes.
Not free now, but cheap and closer to free as time goes on. That is the story with all technology. Stability control operates on electronic braking, which is already in essentially all cars now. That is why I said it is essentially just mandating software (and a few accelerometers probably).
Adjusted for inflation, cars are not insanely more expensive than they were 50 or 100 years ago, but they are insanely better.
Exactly, and when it becomes a required piece of safety equipment they won't be able to charge those markups any more... Of course they'll probably find a way to make the base model suck and charge for the HD backup system or whatever...
What bothers me about some of the (other) comments on here on Slashdot (which should know better) is that this is not an intrusive, usage hampering, CYA silliness... This is something obviously beneficial that long term will be about as expensive as the software to run it... i.e. trending towards zero. The cost of the camera and display will essentially be nothing in a few years (e.g. color LCD displays in magazines!). So it's really almost purely a question of whether it's a good regulatory issue.
How much does it cost to add seat belts to a car design today? Essentially zero, because everyone designs for them from the start and the cost of the material is negligible compared to the car. The same will be true of the backup cameras. The cost of the silicon will go towards zero in production. It's just a matter of setting a standard so that everyone does it and people can come to expect it.
Did you know that in 2012 all new cars are going to be required to include electronic stability control? (The horror!) What does that cost? Well, at this point it's basically some software... which probably makes it more expensive than the hardware due to patents, etc. But at some point that issue will go away and it will cost about zero to add to a car.
That was WAY cheaper, because making a dual master as opposed to a single one adds very little brake line and only one fitting at the master, plus some changes to the piston. This is adding a video screen and camera.
In three years I doubt if the cost of a 9" non-touch lcd screen will be more than $1. Low res camera elements are so ubiquitous in phones now that they probably cost less than $1 in bulk today. There is no reason that adding a camera will add anything at all to the cost of the car in production... It will be effectively like a stylistic decision... except one that will make us all safer.
It will probably end up adding $20 to the cost of an automobile costing tens of thousands, make the world a safer place, reduce nuisance collisions, make the next generation of drivers able to assume that they will be there where they expect them (no surprises)...
How much did it cost to add dual circuit brakes to every car? How many deaths due to outright break failure per year would there be otherwise... I'd bet fewer than the back-overs.
And maybe you'd like to save a few bucks and not have seat belts in your car too?
We're all in this together. It's called progress... Things advance to the point where a majority of us agree that that will be the new normal and we spec it out and move on. You'll get the benefits whether you like them or not.
I just pulled my checking account to CSV going back to 03/2006. I'm not sure if transaction load affects how much they keep but I had 1572 transactions on that account.
I have been with FirstIB.com for over ten years and they've always been ahead of the curve.
NIO provides three additional capabilities to Java:
* select style I/O - managing a bunch of connections with one or more threads (instead of requiring a thread per I/O)
* direct buffers - allow Java to use raw byte buffers from the native OS without having to copy all of the data into and out of the virtual machine for every operation
* channels - which have better defined characteristics for interrupting I/O
Select style I/O is an architectural change to your app that may or may not improve performance depending on your design. Direct buffers are an implementation improvement that will generally improve performance for simple copy operations.
Pat Niemeyer Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates
When I was in China in 2004 I was surprised to find that internet access appeared completely unfettered. I stayed in both Beijing and Xi'an and had no trouble accessing both secure and non-secure sites including my bank, CNN, etc. from hotels, coffee shops, and people's homes. I didn't go out of my way to look for something I could not access, but I never ran into anything either.
I think another way to see the word game here is that they are enumerating genders and not objects. Real objects are not interchangeable... if there are two boys they could be born in two different orders:
Boy1 Boy2 Boy2 Boy1 Girl1 Boy1 Boy1 Girl1
=1/2
Or to put it another way - In the real world given that "at least one is a boy" we know that the boy was born either first or second... so write it as two trees and average them together to get 1/2.
Possibility 1 - boy born first: Boy Girl Boy Boy =1/2
Possibility 2 - boy born second: Girl Boy Boy Boy =1/2
It uses a spaced repetition algorithm and has some features such as not introducing more than a few new cards into the pool at a time (so that you are never overwhelmed).
Also - ChinesePod is an excellent source for spoken language lessons... some free.
- slow initial load time of the interpreter. - GUI designers for layout and graphical elements
True... although third parties would have sprung up to take care of the GUI designer issue if there had been more demand. Sun did make attempts in this area, but they couldn't overcome their earlier mistakes.
The slow startup issue could have been addressed earlier with a resident VM strategy... but they wanted to wait for an perfect isolation API... and they wasted a decade on that and it never mattered.
The bigger problem though was going with a native AWT from the start instead of a mostly Java implementation like the current Swing. Netscape wanted a native look and feel so they caved and put out this mess that was the original AWT that didn't work consistently across platforms and wasn't truly extensible... and that was a lot of people's first exposure to Java. Then Microsoft froze progress there in their browsers and the rest is history.
Maybe we could create a VM based language designed for networked applications, with a full blown security model down to the bytecode and performance as good as a static language.... And to make people comfortable we could name it something that sounds like JavaScript... I dunno... like Java.. Java... I can't think of one:)
Oh, and then Microsoft can adopt it just enough to completely derail it and prevent it from becoming useful in the browser market... And Sun can let the UI and media implementations lag permanently 5 years behind because it doesn't help them sell more server hardware... And the whole thing can just fester until Google comes along and teams of the smartest people in the world waste years of their lives building a layer of sanity over the JavaScript mess that is acceptable enough to write apps for...
I haven't studied this topic in detail, so maybe I'm wrong, but it does just seem on the surface like a desperate attempt by Cisco to get people to buy unnecessary, specialized hardware for cloud computing platforms. The whole point of the cloud is to scale everything on commodity hardware. If there is some overhead in routing inside the cloud then it would seem that the answer is to scale it up a small amount to accommodate that... Is there something magic in those Cisco boxes that can't be done in a generic machine?
Intellij is the best. I regularly use the vim plugin for Intellij and the one for Eclipse. Intellij has much better integration. It does have some hurdles when there are new releases (it's a free plugin so no one is being payed to update it... though I keep hoping that JetBrains will adopt it formally).
Intellij's key binding is also the most sophisticated in general.
And with version 9 there is now a free community edition...
The existing Paypal Payments Pro API is as you describe (though it's $30/mo now) and it does let you accept credit cards on your site directly. The new API lets you do some more sophisticated things on the back end (like Amazon FPS currently does) including splitting payments among multiple receivers or making payments to many receivers at the same time. There is also micropayment support.
The limitation that I see at the moment is that the new API only lets you make payments with a paypal account - you can't (yet, they say they are looking into it) do these fancier things with a raw credit card payment. This is also a limitation of Amazon FPS as far as I know - you can only make payments with an amazon account, not a raw credit card... which seriously limits the usefulness of these systems for consumer applications right now, as far as I can see.
I recently did some integration with the other Paypal API (website payments "standard) - the one which requires that you shuffle the user off to their pages and then get them back at the end. It worked fairly well, though I have to say that their documentation and examples are terrible... Hopefully their new API will come with some better developer docs.
I recently started switching over to CFLs and was impressed at the color temperature of the newer models. The 2700k models really do look exactly like an incandescent (if that's what you want). What I wasn't expecting was the terribly slow warm up... Maybe I have a few bad bulbs, but it takes a full minute for the bulb to warm up, during which time I'd say it ramps up from the equivalent of about a 20W to its full 60W... The color also seems to stabilize as it warms up.
I wish all CFLs were required to list their color temperature, CRI, and warm up time on the box, so that consumers could know what they are buying.
Every piece of GPL software ever distributed was initially limited to running on a subset of the computers that existed at some point in time and required some outlay of money to subsequently use and distribute (computers and internet connections aren't generally free). This is just an extreme case.
BTW, you can download the iPhone dev kit for free and use the simulator if you want... Someday there will undoubtedly be other, more free platforms that emulate these devices.
Just last week NOVA had an episode on this topic. Prior to that I was under the impression that it had been settled that they were simply adapted regular humans. However the NOVA episode implied strongly that there is a consensus building that they are actually a different species. They presented brain shape, tooth shape, and wrist bone shape studies that didn't line up with modern humans.
The most interesting part of the article to me was that they said they wanted the benefits of a type system, which then ended up reproducing in large part in their code. They also wanted the stability of the JVM and they use Java collections from Scala. Hmmm... I wonder what other language they could have chosen that would have had all of those features, an existing messaging system, and developers on every street corner?
Slashdot Mirror
So anyone who's ever worked at FB as an engineer will have likely downloaded copies of all their friends' / family's / ex-girlfriends' inboxes, chat history, etc.
It just struck me as funny that all of that sounds really ominous and important to somebody who's maybe 20 years old... and when you get a bit older, married, and have kids it all just sounds so stupid :) OMG, my chat logs!
I'm not trying to be a bastard... its seriously just making me laugh right now at all the dumb stuff I used to worry about :)
Facebook doesn't play hardball with change control
Pat
Just because they include another gesture to reach the home screen doesn't imply that they are going to remove the home button and I don't believe any credible source has suggested this... It's just a stupid extrapolation from the new gesture they've added.
The most important reason the home button will stay is just the obviousness... If you don't know what to do (and lots of both young and old people don't) they have a point of reference to get back to sanity... That button will not go away unless / until something equally obvious can take its place and a 5 fingered gesture certainly doesn't fill that role.
Pat
I have seen this repeatedly over the years... People who are slow typists or more generally are not proficient in using keyboard shortcuts or other features their editors / IDEs are more reluctant to certain kinds of changes to their code... i.e. small things like renaming, general cleanup, refactoring... They find it frustrating and so they make smaller changes with poorer results.
It may not be a big issue in general, but it obviously a hindrance to productivity and changes how someone things about the cost / benefit of making changes.
Not free now, but cheap and closer to free as time goes on. That is the story with all technology. Stability control operates on electronic braking, which is already in essentially all cars now. That is why I said it is essentially just mandating software (and a few accelerometers probably).
Adjusted for inflation, cars are not insanely more expensive than they were 50 or 100 years ago, but they are insanely better.
Pat
Exactly, and when it becomes a required piece of safety equipment they won't be able to charge those markups any more... Of course they'll probably find a way to make the base model suck and charge for the HD backup system or whatever...
What bothers me about some of the (other) comments on here on Slashdot (which should know better) is that this is not an intrusive, usage hampering, CYA silliness... This is something obviously beneficial that long term will be about as expensive as the software to run it... i.e. trending towards zero. The cost of the camera and display will essentially be nothing in a few years (e.g. color LCD displays in magazines!). So it's really almost purely a question of whether it's a good regulatory issue.
How much does it cost to add seat belts to a car design today? Essentially zero, because everyone designs for them from the start and the cost of the material is negligible compared to the car. The same will be true of the backup cameras. The cost of the silicon will go towards zero in production. It's just a matter of setting a standard so that everyone does it and people can come to expect it.
Did you know that in 2012 all new cars are going to be required to include electronic stability control? (The horror!) What does that cost? Well, at this point it's basically some software... which probably makes it more expensive than the hardware due to patents, etc. But at some point that issue will go away and it will cost about zero to add to a car.
Pat
That was WAY cheaper, because making a dual master as opposed to a single one adds very little brake line and only one fitting at the master, plus some changes to the piston. This is adding a video screen and camera.
In three years I doubt if the cost of a 9" non-touch lcd screen will be more than $1. Low res camera elements are so ubiquitous in phones now that they probably cost less than $1 in bulk today. There is no reason that adding a camera will add anything at all to the cost of the car in production... It will be effectively like a stylistic decision... except one that will make us all safer.
It will probably end up adding $20 to the cost of an automobile costing tens of thousands, make the world a safer place, reduce nuisance collisions, make the next generation of drivers able to assume that they will be there where they expect them (no surprises)...
How much did it cost to add dual circuit brakes to every car? How many deaths due to outright break failure per year would there be otherwise... I'd bet fewer than the back-overs.
And maybe you'd like to save a few bucks and not have seat belts in your car too?
We're all in this together. It's called progress... Things advance to the point where a majority of us agree that that will be the new normal and we spec it out and move on. You'll get the benefits whether you like them or not.
Pat
I just pulled my checking account to CSV going back to 03/2006. I'm not sure if transaction load affects how much they keep but I had 1572 transactions on that account.
I have been with FirstIB.com for over ten years and they've always been ahead of the curve.
- Pat Niemeyer
NIO provides three additional capabilities to Java:
* select style I/O - managing a bunch of connections with one or more threads (instead of requiring a thread per I/O)
* direct buffers - allow Java to use raw byte buffers from the native OS without having to copy all of the data into and out of the virtual machine for every operation
* channels - which have better defined characteristics for interrupting I/O
Select style I/O is an architectural change to your app that may or may not improve performance depending on your design. Direct buffers are an implementation improvement that will generally improve performance for simple copy operations.
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates
When I was in China in 2004 I was surprised to find that internet access appeared completely unfettered. I stayed in both Beijing and Xi'an and had no trouble accessing both secure and non-secure sites including my bank, CNN, etc. from hotels, coffee shops, and people's homes. I didn't go out of my way to look for something I could not access, but I never ran into anything either.
I think another way to see the word game here is that they are enumerating genders and not objects. Real objects are not interchangeable... if there are two boys they could be born in two different orders:
Boy1 Boy2
Boy2 Boy1
Girl1 Boy1
Boy1 Girl1
=1/2
Or to put it another way - In the real world given that "at least one is a boy" we know that the boy was born either first or second... so write it as two trees and average them together to get 1/2.
Possibility 1 - boy born first:
Boy Girl
Boy Boy
=1/2
Possibility 2 - boy born second:
Girl Boy
Boy Boy
=1/2
Both are equally likely possibilities so:
Possibility 1 + Possibility 2 = 1/2.
Pat
I didn't know what Escapist was until now... but my task for the day is to go sign up and post about adblock and get banned.
The open source Mnemosyne flash card system is excellent:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
It uses a spaced repetition algorithm and has some features such as not introducing more than a few new cards into the pool at a time (so that you are never overwhelmed).
Also - ChinesePod is an excellent source for spoken language lessons... some free.
- slow initial load time of the interpreter.
- GUI designers for layout and graphical elements
True... although third parties would have sprung up to take care of the GUI designer issue if there had been more demand. Sun did make attempts in this area, but they couldn't overcome their earlier mistakes.
The slow startup issue could have been addressed earlier with a resident VM strategy... but they wanted to wait for an perfect isolation API... and they wasted a decade on that and it never mattered.
The bigger problem though was going with a native AWT from the start instead of a mostly Java implementation like the current Swing. Netscape wanted a native look and feel so they caved and put out this mess that was the original AWT that didn't work consistently across platforms and wasn't truly extensible... and that was a lot of people's first exposure to Java. Then Microsoft froze progress there in their browsers and the rest is history.
Maybe we could create a VM based language designed for networked applications, with a full blown security model down to the bytecode and performance as good as a static language.... And to make people comfortable we could name it something that sounds like JavaScript... I dunno... like Java.. Java... I can't think of one :)
Oh, and then Microsoft can adopt it just enough to completely derail it and prevent it from becoming useful in the browser market... And Sun can let the UI and media implementations lag permanently 5 years behind because it doesn't help them sell more server hardware... And the whole thing can just fester until Google comes along and teams of the smartest people in the world waste years of their lives building a layer of sanity over the JavaScript mess that is acceptable enough to write apps for...
I haven't studied this topic in detail, so maybe I'm wrong, but it does just seem on the surface like a desperate attempt by Cisco to get people to buy unnecessary, specialized hardware for cloud computing platforms. The whole point of the cloud is to scale everything on commodity hardware. If there is some overhead in routing inside the cloud then it would seem that the answer is to scale it up a small amount to accommodate that... Is there something magic in those Cisco boxes that can't be done in a generic machine?
Intellij is the best. I regularly use the vim plugin for Intellij and the one for Eclipse. Intellij has much better integration. It does have some hurdles when there are new releases (it's a free plugin so no one is being payed to update it... though I keep hoping that JetBrains will adopt it formally).
Intellij's key binding is also the most sophisticated in general.
And with version 9 there is now a free community edition...
Maybe... though I bet optically shiny is probably not as big a deal as radio shiny... at least today.
Also, maybe you can coat your shiny thing with something dark that is burned off?
I'm sure people have worked through the options, just throwing it out there :)
Wouldn't making your plane or missile shiny / reflective defeat these things pretty easily?
The existing Paypal Payments Pro API is as you describe (though it's $30/mo now) and it does let you accept credit cards on your site directly. The new API lets you do some more sophisticated things on the back end (like Amazon FPS currently does) including splitting payments among multiple receivers or making payments to many receivers at the same time. There is also micropayment support.
The limitation that I see at the moment is that the new API only lets you make payments with a paypal account - you can't (yet, they say they are looking into it) do these fancier things with a raw credit card payment. This is also a limitation of Amazon FPS as far as I know - you can only make payments with an amazon account, not a raw credit card... which seriously limits the usefulness of these systems for consumer applications right now, as far as I can see.
I recently did some integration with the other Paypal API (website payments "standard) - the one which requires that you shuffle the user off to their pages and then get them back at the end. It worked fairly well, though I have to say that their documentation and examples are terrible... Hopefully their new API will come with some better developer docs.
Pat
I recently started switching over to CFLs and was impressed at the color temperature of the newer models. The 2700k models really do look exactly like an incandescent (if that's what you want). What I wasn't expecting was the terribly slow warm up... Maybe I have a few bad bulbs, but it takes a full minute for the bulb to warm up, during which time I'd say it ramps up from the equivalent of about a 20W to its full 60W... The color also seems to stabilize as it warms up.
I wish all CFLs were required to list their color temperature, CRI, and warm up time on the box, so that consumers could know what they are buying.
Every piece of GPL software ever distributed was initially limited to running on a subset of the computers that existed at some point in time and required some outlay of money to subsequently use and distribute (computers and internet connections aren't generally free). This is just an extreme case.
BTW, you can download the iPhone dev kit for free and use the simulator if you want... Someday there will undoubtedly be other, more free platforms that emulate these devices.
Just last week NOVA had an episode on this topic. Prior to that I was under the impression that it had been settled that they were simply adapted regular humans. However the NOVA episode implied strongly that there is a consensus building that they are actually a different species. They presented brain shape, tooth shape, and wrist bone shape studies that didn't line up with modern humans.
The most interesting part of the article to me was that they said they wanted the benefits of a type system, which then ended up reproducing in large part in their code. They also wanted the stability of the JVM and they use Java collections from Scala. Hmmm... I wonder what other language they could have chosen that would have had all of those features, an existing messaging system, and developers on every street corner?