This is why call centre scripts should never use symbols, like "$1.50", or in this case "$0.015". They should explicitly write out what the person will say, i.e., "one dollar fifty", or "one point five cents". This is because people are incredibly stupid/prone to fluffing things up under stress, especially in a dull repetitive job dealing with annoyed customers.
Anyway, 9 GB in a few hours eh? For casual web browsing? To get to 9 GB would require watching TEN HOURS of TWO MBIT video streams. I suspect YouTube is 500kbps so that's FORTY HOURS of YouTube. To consistently get two mbit on a 3G modem would be a miracle.
If the data can't be provided quickly enough, then all that will happen is that the faster CPU will process what it gets quicker, and then have a nap waiting for some more.
I'm sure Facebook has multiple replicated databases in order to handle the load, and I'm sure that the servers have tonnes of RAM in order to cache information in user sessions to reduce load on the database... Yes? I'm sure they're not using SOAP/XML for internal messaging, but using a binary protocol like Google's protocol buffers, but above that doing all they can to reduce network I/O, such as keeping each user session on the same front-end webserver, etc.
See, Google's system works because Google hires good software engineers who solve problems so that their internal networks can cope.
Good advice. Good quality sleep where you're not thinking of work is great. Being a bit fit helps too. I walk a couple of miles a day, and am lucky to have a window desk so I see the sunlight. If you're in a dark office, or area of the world, then maybe invest in a lightbox. Do some gardening at the weekend as well - exercise, creative, different, sunlight and fresh air.
Actually, before you leave for the day, write a list of what you want to do the next day. And after that, DON'T think of work until you're in the next day. That list is a mental sign to yourself that you're done until the next work day.
And yes, the internet sucks time away. Stopping the cycle is important. Start by checking when you get into work, at lunch, and before home, rather than all the time. Then cut one of these sessions out.
Sole developer is hard. There's no easy answer as people react differently.
I'd say:
1) Get away from the computer for a bit.
2) Do that other project that keeps interrupting your thoughts.
3) Sit down and work out a hard plan with deadlines. Not long term deadlines, but in the near future. If you can't do this, then maybe the project is too fuzzily defined.
4) Do a lot more work with pencil and paper. Only use the computer for programming and post-pencil-paper documentation.
5) Is there anything outside life that's affecting you? Afraid of zombies in red jackets dancing if you fail to finish the project? Is it actually going well, or are you unhappy with it? Ask yourself the hard questions to see if it's that. I.e., you feel it's not worth finishing the project, so you can't.
6) It could just be your work conditions - chair, computer position, desk cleanliness. Or the people around you - interruptions, etc. Make notes of when you get interrupted, and then see what they're like at the end of the week. Like a food diary, you might be surprised.
Yeah, if the great flood happened 40,000 years ago, and one of the brothers was 30,000 years older than the others at that time.
However at a basic level, in that area of the world, given limited travel, but probably enough long-distance travellers/explorers to get around, I imagine your typical middle-easterner would have seen: Black people (Africa); White people (Eurasia); Asian people (East Asia). Cue some story embellishments to the folk tales of pre-history, and you've got an explanation for the three types of people that they were aware of. A couple of thousand years later and you've got yourself a religion that integrated and refactored the folk tales into its creation and ancients myths.
It appears to be a clone of Apple's Quartz 2D (potentially at the widget level, rather than the window level, i.e., beyond Apple have managed because Q2D Extreme never appeared) and Core Animation, but with direct access to OpenGL shaders and functions. There's video functionality as well. Basically a set of APIs selected for being good, that cover a lot of functionality that a modern desktop OS should have. This dictat will get rid of some of the confusion over Linux interfaces, possibly. You can probably implement Gnome and KDE on top of it. I have no idea.
And the clutter webpage does mention to go to the Clutter Blog to see screenshots. If I can get the site to open, that is. No, wait, no screenshots on the Blog, despite the promise. Then again, it is a lower level collection of APIs.
Reminds me of a friend back in school, who slept with a girl, her first time. She'd heard the number 15, but thought it was meant to be inches, and was disappointed when he, err, revealed his hardware!
Yeah, that's what is nice about Imperial units, at least for human measurable things *insert joke about penis length here*. *joke about using 'insert' with 'penis' in previous sentence*.
Doesn't help that the US uses "English" units which are different for gallons, pints, etc. If this was at least consistent these measurement systems could have been viable, at least for day to day things.
Instead we have mass confusion, 568ml containers, etc.
Yeah, but the liver goes to the sickest person amongst all hospitals, not at a single hospital.
Jobs was probably within 3 months of death when the donor liver arrived. He was the sickest person of his blood type in the country, hence the liver went to him. That's how the organ donor system operates. It doesn't select based upon wealth.
What is true is that he won't bankrupt himself paying for the ~$1m operation unlike other people in the US. Then again, he was an orphan raised by adoptive parents, and made all his money himself, so maybe people shout just shut the fuck up.
Well, unless you download the free iPhone SDK and develop applications using that, which you can then distribute to up to 100 people without involving iTunes. That's a lot of tape copying on the C64! Hardly ideal though, it's rather limiting in this day and age.
Of course you can't code ON the iPhone itself, unless there's a website out there with a Javascript editor and execution environment. Then again, a bluetooth keyboard would be handy first. Not that I think a simple BASIC environment should be blocked, it's quite ridiculous.
Compilers aren't a simple problem that you can 'throw devs at'.
Maybe the Intel compiler could be used, but it breaks on anything non-trivial.
Or we can suck up the 15% performance degradation, especially if it is due to profiled optimisations on Windows, and just be happy that it is twice as fast in terms of Javascript, that might make Slashdot usable on a netbook again. It's certainly going to be faster than IE8 on Windows, and that is what most Windows users will be using in the end.
I only hope that Canonical make it available for 8.10, because we can't all upgrade to 9.04 because some companies (looks at VIA) take 6 months to get their drivers updated.
The important line from the article: "Theora uses 1600kbps, or about 60% more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 to reach about the same quality."
Also useful to get some scale: "The uncompressed clip is 349 megabytes, while the 1600kbps Theora clip is 2 megabytes -- Theora may lag Mpeg-4 at this time, but it still yields great compression."
and "Theora is significantly better than Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 required about 2400 kbps to hit the subjective quality level above, 50% higher than Theora's bandwidth."
Some things I would have liked to have seen: 250kbps, 500kbps, 2mbps, 8mbps videos, with subjective quality difference (rather than same subjective quality at different bitrates). Theora is apparently very good at lower bitrates, and not everybody has an awesome broadband connection, so they may be forced to watch lower-bitrate streams. Does the HTML5 video tag support selecting streams based upon available bandwidth?
Your inability to comprehend simple English shows sorely.
When the cost of developing a top notch game is said to be $20m or more, it is easy to start thinking that the programming costs are actually significant in this. That's why I pointed out that by far the greatest cost isn't programming. The PS3 will cost more to develop for than the 360, but it's generally worth while because it adds 5% onto the cost of the project (I'm assuming $2m to code the 360 version, and $3m for the PS3 version, if you have any real figures them feel free to disclose them, or discuss your own personal figures, or discuss how much code can be shared), for 30% more market share.
However, as I pointed out elsewhere here (or was it somewhere else) I do think that Cell was a technology that was too early for its own good, that the rewards of programming it aren't high enough for the effort required. The 360 really is a better console design.
The media companies seem to think consumers are made out of money, but the value proposition for a HD movie is only a couple of quid more than the standard DVD.
And I think paying more than £5 for a DVD is silly, myself, unless it's a top notch DVD. On the other hand I'll happily wait three years after a film comes out before watching it (same with computer games) unless again, it's top notch.
There is no argument for £20+ movies. Are they trying to charge the purchaser for their viewing of the film, their family, their friends? Because that's the only way to get any value out of a purchase, for friends to set up "movie collectives" and lend the media around.
You haven't factored in that many people like to own physical copies of the media they buy (although the next generation looks like it won't have the same need to own what they've paid for), and that it's hard to match a 40mbps BluRay movie with a 8mbps HD download - and that's if you live in an area that gets decent enough broadband service for that to be viable. I imagine that there will be enough people, even in 5 years time, who won't want to download HD movies, to keep physical media attractive. And for that, I say hurrah.
5 seconds to open terminal? Are you running your HD in basic ATA PIO mode?
Or maybe the 16GB SSD in your Celeron powered netbook is very slow... what Linux distro are you using?
Ubuntu 8.10 on a VIA C7 at 1.2GHz (1GB RAM, 120GB HD) loads Gnome Terminal in a couple of seconds. That's a crappy CPU, slow HD. Firefox loads in a third of the time you're talking about.
Yes, I followed up with another post once I got through the submitter's whining. It does seem rather inflexible on T-Mobile's part to not even allow someone to pay up front in order to skip the credit check.
The issue isn't the credit check though, it's with providing the SSN. Now if T-Mobile's customer systems are keyed on SSN, then there is a major problem - and I think this might be the case. Don't you have laws about SSN usage within private companies?
Or yes, pre-paying the entire plan should be an option (even if you have to wait a week for the payment to be properly cleared). Sadly the in-store person won't have the power, nor will her direct manager. I guess that this option is so rarely requested that it hasn't been created as an option in the sales systems. However it does give the phone company money up-front which is preferable to getting it spread out over a couple of years.
As someone in the UK, our credit checks are done on name and address, not a state-supplied identity number (not yet anyway). I don't see why your government ID number should be given out to non-government entities, especially if that number can be easily used for fraud. Can't T-Mobile run a credit check on name + address?
So the gist of this story is that the submitter doesn't understand finance?
A Palm Pre, or any other smartphone, costs a boat load and is subsidised by the carrier, but you need a contract to pay back the cost of the phone. In effect you are getting a $400 - $800 loan, depending on the device, the phone, and the contract/amount it is subsidised.
Now normal loans (not just "car loans" which are just one type of typically unsecured loan) usually have a credit check because it would be stupid to lend money to someone with a credit history that is all arrears and defaults. The poster probably doesn't realise that many, many people actually live life in debt, arrears and defaulting, and that a simple credit check can remove a lot of risk for the phone companies.
The obvious solution in this case is to allow someone to buy the Palm Pre at full price, and then supply them with a rolling contract (without subsidy cost factored in).
Sadly the act of posting a comment inline using Ajax should be smooth and seamless, yet it's slower than actually loading a "post a comment" page, and reloading the discussion afterwards. Far far slower. I don't think Slashdot's servers can handle the massive amount of Ajax requests that it
Never mind how messed up everything is, odd rendering errors, that "comment level" slider that appears in different places (and in which the bars don't fit). The developers clearly don't know CSS, and they don't understand data structures and algorithms hence the poor performance modifying threaded discussions.
Clicking on "Options" just now has made the fan on my computer turn on, and Firefox hung for about 10 seconds. It's appalling.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why call centre scripts should never use symbols, like "$1.50", or in this case "$0.015". They should explicitly write out what the person will say, i.e., "one dollar fifty", or "one point five cents". This is because people are incredibly stupid/prone to fluffing things up under stress, especially in a dull repetitive job dealing with annoyed customers.
Anyway, 9 GB in a few hours eh? For casual web browsing? To get to 9 GB would require watching TEN HOURS of TWO MBIT video streams. I suspect YouTube is 500kbps so that's FORTY HOURS of YouTube. To consistently get two mbit on a 3G modem would be a miracle.
Well CPUs process data.
If the data can't be provided quickly enough, then all that will happen is that the faster CPU will process what it gets quicker, and then have a nap waiting for some more.
I'm sure Facebook has multiple replicated databases in order to handle the load, and I'm sure that the servers have tonnes of RAM in order to cache information in user sessions to reduce load on the database... Yes? I'm sure they're not using SOAP/XML for internal messaging, but using a binary protocol like Google's protocol buffers, but above that doing all they can to reduce network I/O, such as keeping each user session on the same front-end webserver, etc.
See, Google's system works because Google hires good software engineers who solve problems so that their internal networks can cope.
Good music that. Rubicon as well.
Good advice. Good quality sleep where you're not thinking of work is great. Being a bit fit helps too. I walk a couple of miles a day, and am lucky to have a window desk so I see the sunlight. If you're in a dark office, or area of the world, then maybe invest in a lightbox. Do some gardening at the weekend as well - exercise, creative, different, sunlight and fresh air.
Actually, before you leave for the day, write a list of what you want to do the next day. And after that, DON'T think of work until you're in the next day. That list is a mental sign to yourself that you're done until the next work day.
And yes, the internet sucks time away. Stopping the cycle is important. Start by checking when you get into work, at lunch, and before home, rather than all the time. Then cut one of these sessions out.
Sole developer is hard. There's no easy answer as people react differently.
I'd say:
1) Get away from the computer for a bit.
2) Do that other project that keeps interrupting your thoughts.
3) Sit down and work out a hard plan with deadlines. Not long term deadlines, but in the near future. If you can't do this, then maybe the project is too fuzzily defined.
4) Do a lot more work with pencil and paper. Only use the computer for programming and post-pencil-paper documentation.
5) Is there anything outside life that's affecting you? Afraid of zombies in red jackets dancing if you fail to finish the project? Is it actually going well, or are you unhappy with it? Ask yourself the hard questions to see if it's that. I.e., you feel it's not worth finishing the project, so you can't.
6) It could just be your work conditions - chair, computer position, desk cleanliness. Or the people around you - interruptions, etc. Make notes of when you get interrupted, and then see what they're like at the end of the week. Like a food diary, you might be surprised.
Ah, that's one way to get a quick tan I'm sure.
We could sell time in it to celebrities.
Or just run animals* through for quick roast dinners.
* or celebrities
Yeah, if the great flood happened 40,000 years ago, and one of the brothers was 30,000 years older than the others at that time.
However at a basic level, in that area of the world, given limited travel, but probably enough long-distance travellers/explorers to get around, I imagine your typical middle-easterner would have seen: Black people (Africa); White people (Eurasia); Asian people (East Asia). Cue some story embellishments to the folk tales of pre-history, and you've got an explanation for the three types of people that they were aware of. A couple of thousand years later and you've got yourself a religion that integrated and refactored the folk tales into its creation and ancients myths.
It appears to be a clone of Apple's Quartz 2D (potentially at the widget level, rather than the window level, i.e., beyond Apple have managed because Q2D Extreme never appeared) and Core Animation, but with direct access to OpenGL shaders and functions. There's video functionality as well. Basically a set of APIs selected for being good, that cover a lot of functionality that a modern desktop OS should have. This dictat will get rid of some of the confusion over Linux interfaces, possibly. You can probably implement Gnome and KDE on top of it. I have no idea.
And the clutter webpage does mention to go to the Clutter Blog to see screenshots. If I can get the site to open, that is. No, wait, no screenshots on the Blog, despite the promise. Then again, it is a lower level collection of APIs.
Reminds me of a friend back in school, who slept with a girl, her first time. She'd heard the number 15, but thought it was meant to be inches, and was disappointed when he, err, revealed his hardware!
Yeah, that's what is nice about Imperial units, at least for human measurable things *insert joke about penis length here*. *joke about using 'insert' with 'penis' in previous sentence*.
Doesn't help that the US uses "English" units which are different for gallons, pints, etc. If this was at least consistent these measurement systems could have been viable, at least for day to day things.
Instead we have mass confusion, 568ml containers, etc.
Yeah, but the liver goes to the sickest person amongst all hospitals, not at a single hospital.
Jobs was probably within 3 months of death when the donor liver arrived. He was the sickest person of his blood type in the country, hence the liver went to him. That's how the organ donor system operates. It doesn't select based upon wealth.
What is true is that he won't bankrupt himself paying for the ~$1m operation unlike other people in the US. Then again, he was an orphan raised by adoptive parents, and made all his money himself, so maybe people shout just shut the fuck up.
Well, unless you download the free iPhone SDK and develop applications using that, which you can then distribute to up to 100 people without involving iTunes. That's a lot of tape copying on the C64! Hardly ideal though, it's rather limiting in this day and age.
Of course you can't code ON the iPhone itself, unless there's a website out there with a Javascript editor and execution environment. Then again, a bluetooth keyboard would be handy first. Not that I think a simple BASIC environment should be blocked, it's quite ridiculous.
Compilers aren't a simple problem that you can 'throw devs at'.
Maybe the Intel compiler could be used, but it breaks on anything non-trivial.
Or we can suck up the 15% performance degradation, especially if it is due to profiled optimisations on Windows, and just be happy that it is twice as fast in terms of Javascript, that might make Slashdot usable on a netbook again. It's certainly going to be faster than IE8 on Windows, and that is what most Windows users will be using in the end.
I only hope that Canonical make it available for 8.10, because we can't all upgrade to 9.04 because some companies (looks at VIA) take 6 months to get their drivers updated.
The important line from the article: "Theora uses 1600kbps, or about 60% more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 to reach about the same quality."
Also useful to get some scale: "The uncompressed clip is 349 megabytes, while the 1600kbps Theora clip is 2 megabytes -- Theora may lag Mpeg-4 at this time, but it still yields great compression."
and "Theora is significantly better than Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 required about 2400 kbps to hit the subjective quality level above, 50% higher than Theora's bandwidth."
Some things I would have liked to have seen: 250kbps, 500kbps, 2mbps, 8mbps videos, with subjective quality difference (rather than same subjective quality at different bitrates). Theora is apparently very good at lower bitrates, and not everybody has an awesome broadband connection, so they may be forced to watch lower-bitrate streams. Does the HTML5 video tag support selecting streams based upon available bandwidth?
Your inability to comprehend simple English shows sorely.
When the cost of developing a top notch game is said to be $20m or more, it is easy to start thinking that the programming costs are actually significant in this. That's why I pointed out that by far the greatest cost isn't programming. The PS3 will cost more to develop for than the 360, but it's generally worth while because it adds 5% onto the cost of the project (I'm assuming $2m to code the 360 version, and $3m for the PS3 version, if you have any real figures them feel free to disclose them, or discuss your own personal figures, or discuss how much code can be shared), for 30% more market share.
However, as I pointed out elsewhere here (or was it somewhere else) I do think that Cell was a technology that was too early for its own good, that the rewards of programming it aren't high enough for the effort required. The 360 really is a better console design.
The media companies seem to think consumers are made out of money, but the value proposition for a HD movie is only a couple of quid more than the standard DVD.
And I think paying more than £5 for a DVD is silly, myself, unless it's a top notch DVD. On the other hand I'll happily wait three years after a film comes out before watching it (same with computer games) unless again, it's top notch.
There is no argument for £20+ movies. Are they trying to charge the purchaser for their viewing of the film, their family, their friends? Because that's the only way to get any value out of a purchase, for friends to set up "movie collectives" and lend the media around.
I strongly suspect that most people are mistaking their "upscaling DVD player" as a HD DVD player in this survey.
HD DVD is well and truly dead, and has been since early last year, as another respondent says.
Sadly the BluRay discs are twice the price they should be.
Yeah, I'm buying BluRays occasionally in the Amazon 3 for 2 deal, but you don't get the latest and greatest there.
Btw, 9.00 GBP = 14.7605 USD so hardly a bargain given that £9 includes VAT already.
You haven't factored in that many people like to own physical copies of the media they buy (although the next generation looks like it won't have the same need to own what they've paid for), and that it's hard to match a 40mbps BluRay movie with a 8mbps HD download - and that's if you live in an area that gets decent enough broadband service for that to be viable. I imagine that there will be enough people, even in 5 years time, who won't want to download HD movies, to keep physical media attractive. And for that, I say hurrah.
900MHz what? Z80?
5 seconds to open terminal? Are you running your HD in basic ATA PIO mode?
Or maybe the 16GB SSD in your Celeron powered netbook is very slow ... what Linux distro are you using?
Ubuntu 8.10 on a VIA C7 at 1.2GHz (1GB RAM, 120GB HD) loads Gnome Terminal in a couple of seconds. That's a crappy CPU, slow HD. Firefox loads in a third of the time you're talking about.
Yes, I followed up with another post once I got through the submitter's whining. It does seem rather inflexible on T-Mobile's part to not even allow someone to pay up front in order to skip the credit check.
The issue isn't the credit check though, it's with providing the SSN. Now if T-Mobile's customer systems are keyed on SSN, then there is a major problem - and I think this might be the case. Don't you have laws about SSN usage within private companies?
Or yes, pre-paying the entire plan should be an option (even if you have to wait a week for the payment to be properly cleared). Sadly the in-store person won't have the power, nor will her direct manager. I guess that this option is so rarely requested that it hasn't been created as an option in the sales systems. However it does give the phone company money up-front which is preferable to getting it spread out over a couple of years.
As someone in the UK, our credit checks are done on name and address, not a state-supplied identity number (not yet anyway). I don't see why your government ID number should be given out to non-government entities, especially if that number can be easily used for fraud. Can't T-Mobile run a credit check on name + address?
So the gist of this story is that the submitter doesn't understand finance?
A Palm Pre, or any other smartphone, costs a boat load and is subsidised by the carrier, but you need a contract to pay back the cost of the phone. In effect you are getting a $400 - $800 loan, depending on the device, the phone, and the contract/amount it is subsidised.
Now normal loans (not just "car loans" which are just one type of typically unsecured loan) usually have a credit check because it would be stupid to lend money to someone with a credit history that is all arrears and defaults. The poster probably doesn't realise that many, many people actually live life in debt, arrears and defaulting, and that a simple credit check can remove a lot of risk for the phone companies.
The obvious solution in this case is to allow someone to buy the Palm Pre at full price, and then supply them with a rolling contract (without subsidy cost factored in).
I use "Read It Later" for this behaviour.
I couldn't imagine having so many tabs open. I struggle with more than twenty, I like to keep things tight and under control.
* without a reload upon posting a comment.
Sadly the act of posting a comment inline using Ajax should be smooth and seamless, yet it's slower than actually loading a "post a comment" page, and reloading the discussion afterwards. Far far slower. I don't think Slashdot's servers can handle the massive amount of Ajax requests that it
Never mind how messed up everything is, odd rendering errors, that "comment level" slider that appears in different places (and in which the bars don't fit). The developers clearly don't know CSS, and they don't understand data structures and algorithms hence the poor performance modifying threaded discussions.
Clicking on "Options" just now has made the fan on my computer turn on, and Firefox hung for about 10 seconds. It's appalling.