According to the story on InfoWorld, Ballmer says: "Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud, and [he] positioned us well for future success." So I guess that's a vote of confidence for at least some version of cloud computing for Microsoft, and I suspect whatever form it takes it's likely to keep the Windows Azure branding.
I doubt most of those who don't graduate do so because of failing grades. According to the NYT article the GP cites, a great many drop out in frustration:
In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites.
I've heard this, but the 50g was the first HP I ever used. OTOH I am really, really hoping that HP someday comes out with a new model and that they listen to this and other complaints from longtime HP users. I think my HP calculator is a really fantastic product and I would love to hear that HP has recommitted itself to this market.
That might be true, but in my experience the "support" you get from commercial CMS vendors is pretty much worthless. So if we assume that the FOSS support is equally worthless, at the very least FOSS gives you the advantage that you don't have to go through the vendor if there are bugs or other tweaks you want made.
Google speakers do say that there are technical reasons for using their own Dalvik VM
I believe them that this is true, but I have not dived down into the technical details enough to really understand the reasons (and maybe I'm not sufficiently qualified to understand). But here's my hunch:
As I understand it, Microsoft improved upon Java's bytecode concept by having.Net code compile down to something that's a little bit closer to the intermediate language (IL) that comes out of the front end of a compiler. This in turn makes it easier to JIT on the back end. (I'm just half-remembering something Miguel de Icaza said at a Mono talk, here, it's foggy.) I'm guessing stock Java still doesn't do this because "write once, run anywhere" is practically a religion in the mainstream Java community, even if they don't always succeed at it. In the real-world mobile market, on the other hand, you have comparatively few CPU targets -- in fact it's pretty much always ARM, so far -- so Google and RIM feel more comfortable tying their bytecode output a little closer to the base hardware, in return for some improvements in speed and battery performance.
But don't take my word for it, this is just a hunch.
BlackBerry apps are compiled from Java classes into RIM's proprietary.cod format, in much the same way that Java classes must be compiled into the Dalvik code format before being loaded onto Android phones.
As for why, RIM is very tight-lipped about it, but given that they are a Sun licensee that can't be the reason.
I'm guessing it's partly a performance thing (some additional intermediate compilation that the stock JVM doesn't do) and partly a way to make sure you can only access RIM proprietary APIs using RIM-qualified tools. (And maybe a way to make it harder for competitors to decompile the BlackBerry ROMs... as far as I know, the low-level stuff must be signed and therefore possibly encrypted.)
"Surely all your friends were once strangers, yes?" True but irrelevant.
How so? If they strangers once, how did they get to be friends? Perhaps there was some, I dunno... mechanism involved? Something to do with how you each responded to the other, maybe? Like, maybe it's not just an on/off switch, and there are more types of people in the world than "close friend" and "stranger"?
This type of research seems like it might be interesting to people who are trying to map areas of the brain and correlate them to brain function, but to the average Slashdot user it seems to have no application.
On the other hand, the absence of RPN calculators from the majority of retail stores, schools, etc. should be considered when deciding if RPN is better.
Kind of like how the absence of certain CDs from Best Buy and Wal-Mart should be considered when deciding which music is better?
What definition of "friend" are these scientists using? It sounds like they're asking me to pick a few people whom I'm likely to respond to, then some people I've never heard of. Perhaps they should spend more time outside the lab themselves?
How do I know if I really share any interests with someone if I've never met them? Because they say so? "I like long walks on the beach..."
And speaking as someone whose interests include stuff like comic books and horror movies, it is almost never safe to assume you could be friends with someone based on those kinds of attributes. (Too many weirdos.)
Casio's new calc will fail at least in the USA and Canada, because schools generally require kids to use what the teacher uses
At my school, that would be... a brain.
Seriously, calculators were optional. If you wanted to use one and you wanted help from the instructors, you needed to buy a TI because that was typically all they knew. If you wanted to learn how to use an HP or something else on your own, you could do that, and if it helped you get through the problems faster, that was also fine.
Except for tests, that is. In the calculus classes and above, calculators were not allowed on tests.
If there was an actual benefit to RPN it would still be taught instead of being a dead-end in the history of calculators and a standard mini project for CS students.
Whatever. When I took a stats class a while ago I bought an HP RPN calculator, taught myself how to use it, and got results consistently faster than anybody else in the class. You're the one who sounds like the old man, because you can't learn anything new without being taught it in a class, even if it could be an advantage for you. You'd rather just say "why would anybody want that" -- but while one anecdote might not equal data, not even having an anecdote (because you never tried it) equals nothing at all.
One answer that maybe nobody else will come up with: Easy UI.
I just find it a lot faster and easier to punch up some calculations on a device that has a whole mess of purpose-built buttons on the front of it, rather than trying to do the same with a standard keyboard that was never intended for scientific calculation. You can write up programs and key them to buttons, too.
Disclaimer: I use an HP 50g. Your experience with a TI or Casio calculator may vary. RPN, baby.
Technically speaking, RIM (Blackberry) was the first mobile OS to come up with that workaround.
Whut? The About screen of my BlackBerry 8120 clearly says: "This device is Java-powered, containing tested and compatible Java virtual machine software from Sun Microsystems, Inc.," plus a big fat "Java Powered" logo and a Sun trademark and copyright notice. Not only that, but you can code for BlackBerry with J2ME. Doesn't sound to me like RIM worked around much...
On the other hand, IMDB has a total of 75 credits for Bradbury, while Dick only gets 19. Granted, many of these are for TV series and some are work that Bradbury himself did for Hollywood.
No knock to Dick, but for sheer number of adaptations in all media I think Bradbury takes the cake. E.C. comics got a lot of heat from Bradbury for adapting his stories without asking (or paying) him, and that was all in the early 50s -- and I suspect some radio plays predate that.
High debt software is often replaced with an off the shelf solution with a much lower cost. As examples, at home, I no longer use Photoshop. Gimp is the replacement. Open Office replaced MS Office. Natulus replaced Nero or EZ CD Creator. Ubuntu replaced Windows on most machines. I don't pay for expensive upgrades when possible. Many small companies are making the same move.
I'm sorry, but I think you'd have to be a very, very small company for such changes to make much of a difference to your bottom line. Compare $700 spent on a licensed copy of Photoshop to the $50,000 you might spend on one employee to use that software for a year. The trade-off you've made is that you've forced that employee to use the Gimp, which, being a less functional, less well-supported program that has fewer qualified professional users (potential employees) than Photoshop, incurs much more "IT debt" over the employee's tenure at your company in the form of work-arounds, Google searches, and other support and maintenance.
TFA isn't talking about "MS debt" (whatever that means). It's talking about how the neverending tendency toward complexity in IT systems -- adding modern features as bolt-on upgrades to legacy systems, for example -- increases the amount of support and maintenance that is necessary to sustain them.
Hate the Microsoft Word GUI? Try this: Open Word 2010, press F11. Bang, blank page, no UI widgets. I'm not sure how many versions back this works, but I suspect it's several.
I take the position that word processors have had a detriment on clarity of writing. It's too easy to not have to keep everything in you head when writing with a word processor.
The lack of word processors never stopped any writer from rattling off a bloated, over-long manuscript.
The difference was that publishers used to hire and retain people whose job was to edit said manuscripts. The lack of editing in modern fiction is pathetically obvious. Established writers (say, Stephen King) seem to get to put pretty much whatever they want between two covers and nobody so much as bats an eye, but even books by first-time authors show up full of typos, bad grammar, and poorly-handled plots. Apparently publishers no longer draw a line between good books and healthy book sales.
Having to do so every time he creates a new document.
What?? Set the goddamn default font, dude... even a typewriter needs a ribbon and a sheet of paper before you use it. In Word 2010 there's a great big "Set as Default" button on the Font dialog box.
Word is not a decent tool for getting text into the computer. It starts slowly, vi starts without visible delay.
Starts slowly? What ancient hardware/version of Word are you using? The splash screen for Word 2010 includes a little box that allows you to abort opening the program if you double-clicked its icon by mistake. Unfortunately, I can't move my hand fast enough to click it before I'm staring at a new blank document. Typing "vi filename" actually takes longer.
Word also gets slowed down, when typing text, since it does formatting in realtime.
Are you saying this as something you've actually observed or are you just making assumptions? Last week I did some pretty extensive editing on a 973-page Word document with no slowdowns whatsoever. Global search-and-replace took a couple of seconds.
Then it saves the document in binary encoding, which is a really bad idea, if you want to not loose your data, with a couple of bit errors.
Got bad news for you; ASCII is a "binary encoding," too.
It also tends to correct spelling as you type, this slows down your typing.
Really? Saves me a lot of time correcting typos.
It has a nasty habit of changing i to I, despite having looked around and changed the language to swedish.
In Word 2010 you can click the little button that appears next to the change and tell it to "stop changing i to I." And at the same time it would have remembered to capitalize Swedish for you.
This slows down the typing, so word is about the worst tool to type in text to a computer.
Or maybe you don't know how to use the tools and you have strange typing habits?
In other words: No argument in the first place. Seriously, go read the electrical codes for your state and then go build a house from scratch. You sound like a child.
Nothing profound but it's nice to be in touch with people I haven't seen in a while. Not many, I'll admit; I ignore the vast majority of people on the list. It's simply another tool for facilitating communication.
Indeed. If anything, it's a great way to stay within shouting distance of people who "really, really want to stay in touch" -- but this way you don't actually have to go for drinks with them. In my experience, most of the people you don't really plan to stay actively in touch with don't have much to say to you either; but if something fun comes up it's nice to know you might hear about it.
That said, I'm not really bothered by everybody's bullshit posts either. The way I figure it, if you're not interested in random chitchat from your peer group, Facebook really is the wrong place for you. To me, Facebook is essentially just one, long, never-ending night at the bar. Anybody who takes me too seriously or who expects me to take them deadly seriously on Facebook is doing it wrong. And "work contacts" can fuck right off.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the story on InfoWorld , Ballmer says: "Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud, and [he] positioned us well for future success." So I guess that's a vote of confidence for at least some version of cloud computing for Microsoft, and I suspect whatever form it takes it's likely to keep the Windows Azure branding.
I doubt most of those who don't graduate do so because of failing grades. According to the NYT article the GP cites, a great many drop out in frustration:
In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites.
I do have mod points, but I honestly don't know how to mod a post that parallels Wikileaks with Death Row Records.
I've heard this, but the 50g was the first HP I ever used. OTOH I am really, really hoping that HP someday comes out with a new model and that they listen to this and other complaints from longtime HP users. I think my HP calculator is a really fantastic product and I would love to hear that HP has recommitted itself to this market.
That might be true, but in my experience the "support" you get from commercial CMS vendors is pretty much worthless. So if we assume that the FOSS support is equally worthless, at the very least FOSS gives you the advantage that you don't have to go through the vendor if there are bugs or other tweaks you want made.
Sorry to double-reply...
Google speakers do say that there are technical reasons for using their own Dalvik VM
I believe them that this is true, but I have not dived down into the technical details enough to really understand the reasons (and maybe I'm not sufficiently qualified to understand). But here's my hunch:
As I understand it, Microsoft improved upon Java's bytecode concept by having .Net code compile down to something that's a little bit closer to the intermediate language (IL) that comes out of the front end of a compiler. This in turn makes it easier to JIT on the back end. (I'm just half-remembering something Miguel de Icaza said at a Mono talk, here, it's foggy.) I'm guessing stock Java still doesn't do this because "write once, run anywhere" is practically a religion in the mainstream Java community, even if they don't always succeed at it. In the real-world mobile market, on the other hand, you have comparatively few CPU targets -- in fact it's pretty much always ARM, so far -- so Google and RIM feel more comfortable tying their bytecode output a little closer to the base hardware, in return for some improvements in speed and battery performance.
But don't take my word for it, this is just a hunch.
BlackBerry apps are compiled from Java classes into RIM's proprietary .cod format, in much the same way that Java classes must be compiled into the Dalvik code format before being loaded onto Android phones.
As for why, RIM is very tight-lipped about it, but given that they are a Sun licensee that can't be the reason.
I'm guessing it's partly a performance thing (some additional intermediate compilation that the stock JVM doesn't do) and partly a way to make sure you can only access RIM proprietary APIs using RIM-qualified tools. (And maybe a way to make it harder for competitors to decompile the BlackBerry ROMs ... as far as I know, the low-level stuff must be signed and therefore possibly encrypted.)
"Surely all your friends were once strangers, yes?"
True but irrelevant.
How so? If they strangers once, how did they get to be friends? Perhaps there was some, I dunno... mechanism involved? Something to do with how you each responded to the other, maybe? Like, maybe it's not just an on/off switch, and there are more types of people in the world than "close friend" and "stranger"?
This type of research seems like it might be interesting to people who are trying to map areas of the brain and correlate them to brain function, but to the average Slashdot user it seems to have no application.
On the other hand, the absence of RPN calculators from the majority of retail stores, schools, etc. should be considered when deciding if RPN is better.
Kind of like how the absence of certain CDs from Best Buy and Wal-Mart should be considered when deciding which music is better?
The subject of this research is baffling to me.
Surely all your friends were once strangers, yes?
What definition of "friend" are these scientists using? It sounds like they're asking me to pick a few people whom I'm likely to respond to, then some people I've never heard of. Perhaps they should spend more time outside the lab themselves?
How do I know if I really share any interests with someone if I've never met them? Because they say so? "I like long walks on the beach..."
And speaking as someone whose interests include stuff like comic books and horror movies, it is almost never safe to assume you could be friends with someone based on those kinds of attributes. (Too many weirdos.)
Who is surprised by their results?
Calculate the average age of the drivers in the household ... implementing this type of logic can be fiendishly difficult
Really? Or was your example too simplistic?
Either the data is readily available or you need a human to obtain the data. Add, divide... pretty easy, no? What am I missing?
Casio's new calc will fail at least in the USA and Canada, because schools generally require kids to use what the teacher uses
At my school, that would be ... a brain.
Seriously, calculators were optional. If you wanted to use one and you wanted help from the instructors, you needed to buy a TI because that was typically all they knew. If you wanted to learn how to use an HP or something else on your own, you could do that, and if it helped you get through the problems faster, that was also fine.
Except for tests, that is. In the calculus classes and above, calculators were not allowed on tests.
If there was an actual benefit to RPN it would still be taught instead of being a dead-end in the history of calculators and a standard mini project for CS students.
Whatever. When I took a stats class a while ago I bought an HP RPN calculator, taught myself how to use it, and got results consistently faster than anybody else in the class. You're the one who sounds like the old man, because you can't learn anything new without being taught it in a class, even if it could be an advantage for you. You'd rather just say "why would anybody want that" -- but while one anecdote might not equal data, not even having an anecdote (because you never tried it) equals nothing at all.
One answer that maybe nobody else will come up with: Easy UI.
I just find it a lot faster and easier to punch up some calculations on a device that has a whole mess of purpose-built buttons on the front of it, rather than trying to do the same with a standard keyboard that was never intended for scientific calculation. You can write up programs and key them to buttons, too.
Disclaimer: I use an HP 50g. Your experience with a TI or Casio calculator may vary. RPN, baby.
Technically speaking, RIM (Blackberry) was the first mobile OS to come up with that workaround.
Whut? The About screen of my BlackBerry 8120 clearly says: "This device is Java-powered, containing tested and compatible Java virtual machine software from Sun Microsystems, Inc.," plus a big fat "Java Powered" logo and a Sun trademark and copyright notice. Not only that, but you can code for BlackBerry with J2ME. Doesn't sound to me like RIM worked around much...
On the other hand, IMDB has a total of 75 credits for Bradbury, while Dick only gets 19. Granted, many of these are for TV series and some are work that Bradbury himself did for Hollywood.
No knock to Dick, but for sheer number of adaptations in all media I think Bradbury takes the cake. E.C. comics got a lot of heat from Bradbury for adapting his stories without asking (or paying) him, and that was all in the early 50s -- and I suspect some radio plays predate that.
High debt software is often replaced with an off the shelf solution with a much lower cost. As examples, at home, I no longer use Photoshop. Gimp is the replacement. Open Office replaced MS Office. Natulus replaced Nero or EZ CD Creator. Ubuntu replaced Windows on most machines. I don't pay for expensive upgrades when possible. Many small companies are making the same move.
I'm sorry, but I think you'd have to be a very, very small company for such changes to make much of a difference to your bottom line. Compare $700 spent on a licensed copy of Photoshop to the $50,000 you might spend on one employee to use that software for a year. The trade-off you've made is that you've forced that employee to use the Gimp, which, being a less functional, less well-supported program that has fewer qualified professional users (potential employees) than Photoshop, incurs much more "IT debt" over the employee's tenure at your company in the form of work-arounds, Google searches, and other support and maintenance.
TFA isn't talking about "MS debt" (whatever that means). It's talking about how the neverending tendency toward complexity in IT systems -- adding modern features as bolt-on upgrades to legacy systems, for example -- increases the amount of support and maintenance that is necessary to sustain them.
Technically, he's the Sci-Fi author that's had the most stories turned into films.
Really? Not Ray Bradbury?
Hate the Microsoft Word GUI? Try this: Open Word 2010, press F11. Bang, blank page, no UI widgets. I'm not sure how many versions back this works, but I suspect it's several.
I take the position that word processors have had a detriment on clarity of writing. It's too easy to not have to keep everything in you head when writing with a word processor.
The lack of word processors never stopped any writer from rattling off a bloated, over-long manuscript.
The difference was that publishers used to hire and retain people whose job was to edit said manuscripts. The lack of editing in modern fiction is pathetically obvious. Established writers (say, Stephen King) seem to get to put pretty much whatever they want between two covers and nobody so much as bats an eye, but even books by first-time authors show up full of typos, bad grammar, and poorly-handled plots. Apparently publishers no longer draw a line between good books and healthy book sales.
so if you don't have hills to climb, they're a great option. also, in rainy nasty whether you burn through chains and cog sets in a hurry.
What's crazy is that they're insanely popular/fashionable here in San Francisco, where we have nothing but hills and good weather all year round.
Having to do so every time he creates a new document.
What?? Set the goddamn default font, dude... even a typewriter needs a ribbon and a sheet of paper before you use it. In Word 2010 there's a great big "Set as Default" button on the Font dialog box.
Word is not a decent tool for getting text into the computer. It starts slowly, vi starts without visible delay.
Starts slowly? What ancient hardware/version of Word are you using? The splash screen for Word 2010 includes a little box that allows you to abort opening the program if you double-clicked its icon by mistake. Unfortunately, I can't move my hand fast enough to click it before I'm staring at a new blank document. Typing "vi filename" actually takes longer.
Word also gets slowed down, when typing text, since it does formatting in realtime.
Are you saying this as something you've actually observed or are you just making assumptions? Last week I did some pretty extensive editing on a 973-page Word document with no slowdowns whatsoever. Global search-and-replace took a couple of seconds.
Then it saves the document in binary encoding, which is a really bad idea, if you want to not loose your data, with a couple of bit errors.
Got bad news for you; ASCII is a "binary encoding," too.
It also tends to correct spelling as you type, this slows down your typing.
Really? Saves me a lot of time correcting typos.
It has a nasty habit of changing i to I, despite having looked around and changed the language to swedish.
In Word 2010 you can click the little button that appears next to the change and tell it to "stop changing i to I." And at the same time it would have remembered to capitalize Swedish for you.
This slows down the typing, so word is about the worst tool to type in text to a computer.
Or maybe you don't know how to use the tools and you have strange typing habits?
In other words: No argument in the first place. Seriously, go read the electrical codes for your state and then go build a house from scratch. You sound like a child.
If you need someone to hold your hand to learn HTML, you are in the wrong business.
Spoken like someone who's never built a cross-browser compatible Web site.
Nothing profound but it's nice to be in touch with people I haven't seen in a while. Not many, I'll admit; I ignore the vast majority of people on the list. It's simply another tool for facilitating communication.
Indeed. If anything, it's a great way to stay within shouting distance of people who "really, really want to stay in touch" -- but this way you don't actually have to go for drinks with them. In my experience, most of the people you don't really plan to stay actively in touch with don't have much to say to you either; but if something fun comes up it's nice to know you might hear about it.
That said, I'm not really bothered by everybody's bullshit posts either. The way I figure it, if you're not interested in random chitchat from your peer group, Facebook really is the wrong place for you. To me, Facebook is essentially just one, long, never-ending night at the bar. Anybody who takes me too seriously or who expects me to take them deadly seriously on Facebook is doing it wrong. And "work contacts" can fuck right off.