Imagine driving on a warm summer night with the wind blowing through your hair and hearing nothing but the sounds of nature.
Imagine crossing the road on a warm summer night, a gentle breeze blowing through your hair and hearing nothing but the sounds of nature... and then: BAM! Hit by an electric car."
There are some small electric cars in London, they're eerily silent.
Just to clarify, I do think that this is a good technology and it is the future, but I am sure that there will be accidents because the cars are silent.
Windows Mobile 2003 and before would lose all user data when the battery ran out. You did realise I was talking about Windows Mobile, yes? Where I was replying to a post that said "...the shitty Windows Smartphone I had 4 years ago did everything the iPhone does today (and more), with the only exceptions..."
I know this from a previous job where we had software that was deployed to these devices. The user interface was primitive, and the devices were a PITA to deal with, and the people that had to use them had loads of problems using them. That's why all modern phones that run on Windows Mobile have their own custom interfaces these days.
And Windows XP doesn't run on ARM architectures, of which there are several SoCs available that are pretty powerful, such as NVIDIA's Tegra 650. These would be ideal for a netbook, far lower power than Atom+945, great for Linux.
I'd like to see someone build a notebook around a high-end NVIDIA Tegra applications processor, running a netbook Linux (e.g., Ubuntu).
This would be a real boost for battery life, but still powerful enough for day to day uses. It can accelerate video decode (1080p) which I see as being a good feature for such a device (unlike the article's author). In addition being a SoC it will reduce costs and motherboard space, which will lead to more room for more battery, or a slimmer profile, and certainly a lower price than the Intel Atom + 945 + ICH7 combination.
I think you meant to write "...with the only exceptions of being usable, losing your data if your battery ran out, being ugly, clunky, slow, all the worst aspects of Windows but in your pocket, etc".
The iPhone's software did blow all the competition out of the water. The smooth animations, the clean looks, the ease of control, and so on.
The point is that there is no netbook out there that gets the right balance. This is possibly because the manufacturers are having to compromise in order to make Windows XP versions.
I'm not going to sling a 'cheap full-size Dell' into my bag everyday though am I? Lugging around 6lbs of poorly designed fragile laptop isn't my idea of fun. 2lbs of cheap netbook is far better.
The Aspire One is £220 in the UK (512MB, 8GB, Linux) which is £188 before tax, which is $346. I think that if they can cut £50 / $90 off the price then it will become really attractive, but that will be next year sometime and will probably require another level of integration from Intel.
I think your friend is the special case. 40 minutes to visit friends is nothing. What we think is silly is driving for an hour or more each way in a commute.
The minimum I can buy is 95 RON (standard unleaded), and super is 98 RON. How does that compare to what you buy in the states?
On the other hand we pay £1.15 per litre and the cars are more expensive initially. We drive fewer miles on average on the other hand, and often choose smaller cars.
People have been known to spend lifetimes reconfiguring all the HP printer settings to use A4 instead of Letter because what should be the number one accessible configuration option (and, of course, set by the locale by default) for any printer out there is actually one of the hardest things to change in Windows, at least with HP printers.
The only valid reason for such restrictive DRM and rights (it's just "rental for the life of your hardware or until you run out of space" - thank god it's not a 360 I guess) is to put people off the idea of digital downloads.
Apple have shown that DRM can be applied in a light manner that works for most people. Stick it on up to 5 computers, deauthorise computers in order to authorise others, back up the media. There is simply no excuse to implement anything less.
Call it a rental. Charge rental prices. Delete it after 30 days. Fine. Call it a sale, charge full price, and then limit how you use it? No. No fracking way.
If you are on the road, regardless of the lane, you have right of way over a vehicle merging in from a sliplane. That means you drive as you would normally, and the car merging in has to get into a space. If there is space then as a courtesy the car with the right of way can change lane. You can also trivially see that if you have the right of way, and start changing your speed it will be more confusing for the driver of the merging car.
Having just bought a really old house that's on the verge of falling down, I'm now trying to find a way to pay to fix it up.
Ya should've thought about that *before* you bought it dude.
And everyone's first house is their home. Treat it as your home. It is not meant to be a profit centre. You can compromise on the home in order to get a house that is a profit centre faster than you would have otherwise of course.
My programming skills are not amazing, to say the least, but I can design and QA. I'd happily learn to code, but lets face it â" getting to a good standard would take me years, by which time I would be bored of the project.
1. What level of "design" are you talking about if you can't program, and thus can't do any technical level of designing?
2. All projects like this turn into long term entities if they're half-popular, unless they do a small task well, and stick to doing that small task.
3. Learn to program.
I've seen loads of projects built around an idea start, get some posts and ideas, and then die because the person with the idea simply hasn't got the ability to drive the project on (and other people simply don't care). The best way to get a project going is to program the initial implementation, even if it is basic and proof-of-concept. Then people get the motivation to add on their own bits and bobs.
I suspected that it would be one or two people being overzealous and/or building little empires based around being a cunt, but it did highlight that Apple needs to have clearer developer processes to prevent this happening.
I can understand NetShare being banned, for example, in countries where the carrier does not wish for tethering to be available on their phones. It is sad that what used to be a common feature on phones has now turned into another paid-for feature, but that's the fault of the carriers. NetShare, however, should be allowed to be sold to countries where the carrier is happy for such functionality to exist.
On the other hand I don't see why an application should be banned for duplicating existing functionality. It could just be that it does it better, or it handles things that the native application cannot do, or, in this case, it's just so much better and has significant new functionality. Competition is a good thing.
Has anyone created a Firefox skin that looks like the Chrome interface?
I actually think that Chrome's interface is the real innovation (I use the word lightly, stick tabs at the top of the browser so a full screen browser obey's Fitt's Law isn't really that clever, but it's still very useful). Webkit is nice and all that, but the default home page is annoying for work computers (hey everyone! look at where I spend my time surfing!). It's also a very beta product, and in a year or two it will be pretty awesome. Also V8 is nice for a Javascript library you can incorporate in your own apps.
Firefox + Chrome interface + that Javascript Monkey thing + netbook/UMPC/etc on Linux is where the real win is. Chrome on Linux is a year away at least if this report is correct, so not worth bothering with.
I'm glad this man managed to get some money back indirectly for his invention back in the day, even if he couldn't make anything of it back then (unsurprisingly for the UK, no entity with money will take a risk, but if he had renewed that patent the investing entity would have made millions by now).
So we should be happy that a patent troll presumably got a lot less money for their trolling patent, that a man made money from his hard work a long time ago, and that hopefully some lawyers went home with a lot less money than they had hoped for.
I know what Windows is, it's a pair of walking boots that you get when you are 14. Initially they seem okay, comfortable even, and they're a nice dark brown leather with padded ankles.
It's when you actually start using it that you realise that it's all a lie. You go on a walk... three miles down the road you start to feel them rubbing against your skin.
Eight miles and you have a really painful blister and every step makes you want to scream in pain and frustration, but you have to keep on walking because you're stuck with it.
Around the twelfth mile the blister bursts, and it feels great despite having all this gunk welding your socks to your feet. Relatively your feet still hurt and feel icky, but all you can remember was the great pain you felt earlier, and how much better it is now.
I still refuse to believe that people use cheques on a day to day basis in the 21st century!
They're only used over here for big payments (usually credit card cheques as well (3% fee, 1 year interest free is a typical offer) but I usually shred the cheques whenever they arrive).
Direct Debit gives you peace of mind, and discounted bills. You can stop them at any time, and the transactions are covered by the Direct Debit guarantee. Why wouldn't you use it!
I wouldn't trust a cheque to the postal service, and then incur a fee because it's late! Nor would I spend the time to go to a bank to pay them off - what a waste of time queuing is! Checking your statements takes a couple of minutes, and is just a matter of being responsible to yourself and your money.
Do you really think that any of the paid domain name resolution companies care about trademark law if it isn't in their paying client's favour?
Do you think the average joe in the street who has just lost his domain is going to file a lawsuit to get it back?
No, this guy cannot in any way ask them how much they are willing to pay.
He should reply however:
"Hi, thank you for your email.
As you can see, I use this domain name for my personal email service and website, amongst other activities, and I have done so for three thousand days. The domain matches my surname. It would be quite inconvenient to have to switch to using another service, in time and money, as well as inconvenient to all my contacts.
Therefore I am currently predisposed to not sell my domain name. However if certain aspects (in particular my email address) of my current use of the domain name were able to be continued (for at least a switch-over period) in the case that I was to provide you with the domain name for a sum of money to cover my costs and inconvenience then I would be amenable to further discussion of the matter.
Yours sincerely,
Hector H. Hectorus-Hectorii III"
Then they can come back and do things. Email also has the advantage of being a nice record of actions.
I'm sure that a few more replies can hone that text above into something that might actually be watertight against the other company taking you to arbitration because they're cunts in reality (if they are, they might be entirely honest, I don't know)...
Re:My opinion of what Java APIs are worth learning
on
Java, Where To Start?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I wrote "in order" at the end of writing my post, then forgot to change the order.:)
ANT is nice though, even if Maven is meant to be nicer. I set up ANT build scripts in my projects to build the system into a 'build' folder (with Jar/War/Tar/etc targets). That means that on the test server we have a script that does SVN export and runs the ANT build script. None of this compile within Eclipse and copy to server mess.
One thing about the Collections as well, not relevant for a person coming from another language, but for a first time programmer - implement your own library first, so you understand how they work.
If you know the stuff on the list above, then you'll have scraped by a lot of the EE stuff as well, and you'll be capable of picking it up in any job.
My opinion of what Java APIs are worth learning
on
Java, Where To Start?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The language itself won't be a problem if you've done C and C++, nor should OO concepts. So the difficulty is with APIs - what is worth it, and what isn't.
In terms of Java APIs (core or otherwise), I'd learn in roughly this order:
* Collections * Reflection * IO * Servlets & JSPs then Struts, Tiles, Spring, etc * JDBC, then Hibernate * Axis (web services) and Apache HTTPClient
You don't need to learn them off by heart - I've seen people advance very slowly because they're trying to do that. It is enough to know what is what, so that when you have a problem, you know there is a solution, and where it is.
In terms of interfaces, I wouldn't bother with Swing or AWT really, until you need them. SWT ain't too bad (Eclipse uses it, and it's cross platform enough - Windows, Linux, Mac, Pocket PC,...). Maybe you could be fancy and learn Fenggui instead! Then you could learn JOGL and write 3D games and the like.
Oh, and learn how to do Java on the command line first, use ANT to build and compile and deploy, then try Eclipse or NetBeans as an IDE. This way you'll avoid all the niceties that the IDE gives you that inhibits your initial learning.
I wouldn't bother with half of the enterprise wank, like Enterprise Beans and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine driving on a warm summer night with the wind blowing through your hair and hearing nothing but the sounds of nature.
Imagine crossing the road on a warm summer night, a gentle breeze blowing through your hair and hearing nothing but the sounds of nature ... and then: BAM! Hit by an electric car."
There are some small electric cars in London, they're eerily silent.
Just to clarify, I do think that this is a good technology and it is the future, but I am sure that there will be accidents because the cars are silent.
If you've got ~165kg to launch, why would you pay $85m instead of $7m?
Windows Mobile 2003 and before would lose all user data when the battery ran out. You did realise I was talking about Windows Mobile, yes? Where I was replying to a post that said "...the shitty Windows Smartphone I had 4 years ago did everything the iPhone does today (and more), with the only exceptions..."
I know this from a previous job where we had software that was deployed to these devices. The user interface was primitive, and the devices were a PITA to deal with, and the people that had to use them had loads of problems using them. That's why all modern phones that run on Windows Mobile have their own custom interfaces these days.
And Windows XP doesn't run on ARM architectures, of which there are several SoCs available that are pretty powerful, such as NVIDIA's Tegra 650. These would be ideal for a netbook, far lower power than Atom+945, great for Linux.
Just found it for £179 on Amazon!
(That's $279 ex tax for those on the wrong side of the pond)
I'd like to see someone build a notebook around a high-end NVIDIA Tegra applications processor, running a netbook Linux (e.g., Ubuntu).
This would be a real boost for battery life, but still powerful enough for day to day uses. It can accelerate video decode (1080p) which I see as being a good feature for such a device (unlike the article's author). In addition being a SoC it will reduce costs and motherboard space, which will lead to more room for more battery, or a slimmer profile, and certainly a lower price than the Intel Atom + 945 + ICH7 combination.
I think you meant to write "...with the only exceptions of being usable, losing your data if your battery ran out, being ugly, clunky, slow, all the worst aspects of Windows but in your pocket, etc".
The iPhone's software did blow all the competition out of the water. The smooth animations, the clean looks, the ease of control, and so on.
The point is that there is no netbook out there that gets the right balance. This is possibly because the manufacturers are having to compromise in order to make Windows XP versions.
I'm not going to sling a 'cheap full-size Dell' into my bag everyday though am I? Lugging around 6lbs of poorly designed fragile laptop isn't my idea of fun. 2lbs of cheap netbook is far better.
The Aspire One is £220 in the UK (512MB, 8GB, Linux) which is £188 before tax, which is $346. I think that if they can cut £50 / $90 off the price then it will become really attractive, but that will be next year sometime and will probably require another level of integration from Intel.
I think your friend is the special case. 40 minutes to visit friends is nothing. What we think is silly is driving for an hour or more each way in a commute.
The minimum I can buy is 95 RON (standard unleaded), and super is 98 RON. How does that compare to what you buy in the states?
On the other hand we pay £1.15 per litre and the cars are more expensive initially. We drive fewer miles on average on the other hand, and often choose smaller cars.
People have been known to spend lifetimes reconfiguring all the HP printer settings to use A4 instead of Letter because what should be the number one accessible configuration option (and, of course, set by the locale by default) for any printer out there is actually one of the hardest things to change in Windows, at least with HP printers.
This is absolutely ridiculous!
The only valid reason for such restrictive DRM and rights (it's just "rental for the life of your hardware or until you run out of space" - thank god it's not a 360 I guess) is to put people off the idea of digital downloads.
Apple have shown that DRM can be applied in a light manner that works for most people. Stick it on up to 5 computers, deauthorise computers in order to authorise others, back up the media. There is simply no excuse to implement anything less.
Call it a rental. Charge rental prices. Delete it after 30 days. Fine.
Call it a sale, charge full price, and then limit how you use it? No. No fracking way.
You've got to leave room on the card for at least 500MB of advertising media and bloatware players.
If you are on the road, regardless of the lane, you have right of way over a vehicle merging in from a sliplane. That means you drive as you would normally, and the car merging in has to get into a space. If there is space then as a courtesy the car with the right of way can change lane. You can also trivially see that if you have the right of way, and start changing your speed it will be more confusing for the driver of the merging car.
Having just bought a really old house that's on the verge of falling down, I'm now trying to find a way to pay to fix it up.
Ya should've thought about that *before* you bought it dude.
And everyone's first house is their home. Treat it as your home. It is not meant to be a profit centre. You can compromise on the home in order to get a house that is a profit centre faster than you would have otherwise of course.
My programming skills are not amazing, to say the least, but I can design and QA. I'd happily learn to code, but lets face it â" getting to a good standard would take me years, by which time I would be bored of the project.
1. What level of "design" are you talking about if you can't program, and thus can't do any technical level of designing?
2. All projects like this turn into long term entities if they're half-popular, unless they do a small task well, and stick to doing that small task.
3. Learn to program.
I've seen loads of projects built around an idea start, get some posts and ideas, and then die because the person with the idea simply hasn't got the ability to drive the project on (and other people simply don't care). The best way to get a project going is to program the initial implementation, even if it is basic and proof-of-concept. Then people get the motivation to add on their own bits and bobs.
Doesn't Opera still have a window title bar above the tabs? Thus doesn't Opera, in full screen mode, not obey Fitt's Law?
Thus, did you completely miss the point?
I suspected that it would be one or two people being overzealous and/or building little empires based around being a cunt, but it did highlight that Apple needs to have clearer developer processes to prevent this happening.
I can understand NetShare being banned, for example, in countries where the carrier does not wish for tethering to be available on their phones. It is sad that what used to be a common feature on phones has now turned into another paid-for feature, but that's the fault of the carriers. NetShare, however, should be allowed to be sold to countries where the carrier is happy for such functionality to exist.
On the other hand I don't see why an application should be banned for duplicating existing functionality. It could just be that it does it better, or it handles things that the native application cannot do, or, in this case, it's just so much better and has significant new functionality. Competition is a good thing.
To be fair Chrome as an internal project is 39 months old.
You don't seriously think that Google somehow managed to write a web browser in under a year do you?
Has anyone created a Firefox skin that looks like the Chrome interface?
I actually think that Chrome's interface is the real innovation (I use the word lightly, stick tabs at the top of the browser so a full screen browser obey's Fitt's Law isn't really that clever, but it's still very useful). Webkit is nice and all that, but the default home page is annoying for work computers (hey everyone! look at where I spend my time surfing!). It's also a very beta product, and in a year or two it will be pretty awesome. Also V8 is nice for a Javascript library you can incorporate in your own apps.
Firefox + Chrome interface + that Javascript Monkey thing + netbook/UMPC/etc on Linux is where the real win is. Chrome on Linux is a year away at least if this report is correct, so not worth bothering with.
That is all this story is about.
I'm glad this man managed to get some money back indirectly for his invention back in the day, even if he couldn't make anything of it back then (unsurprisingly for the UK, no entity with money will take a risk, but if he had renewed that patent the investing entity would have made millions by now).
So we should be happy that a patent troll presumably got a lot less money for their trolling patent, that a man made money from his hard work a long time ago, and that hopefully some lawyers went home with a lot less money than they had hoped for.
I know what Windows is, it's a pair of walking boots that you get when you are 14. Initially they seem okay, comfortable even, and they're a nice dark brown leather with padded ankles.
It's when you actually start using it that you realise that it's all a lie. You go on a walk ... three miles down the road you start to feel them rubbing against your skin.
Eight miles and you have a really painful blister and every step makes you want to scream in pain and frustration, but you have to keep on walking because you're stuck with it.
Around the twelfth mile the blister bursts, and it feels great despite having all this gunk welding your socks to your feet. Relatively your feet still hurt and feel icky, but all you can remember was the great pain you felt earlier, and how much better it is now.
I still refuse to believe that people use cheques on a day to day basis in the 21st century!
They're only used over here for big payments (usually credit card cheques as well (3% fee, 1 year interest free is a typical offer) but I usually shred the cheques whenever they arrive).
Direct Debit gives you peace of mind, and discounted bills. You can stop them at any time, and the transactions are covered by the Direct Debit guarantee. Why wouldn't you use it!
I wouldn't trust a cheque to the postal service, and then incur a fee because it's late! Nor would I spend the time to go to a bank to pay them off - what a waste of time queuing is! Checking your statements takes a couple of minutes, and is just a matter of being responsible to yourself and your money.
Do you really think that any of the paid domain name resolution companies care about trademark law if it isn't in their paying client's favour?
Do you think the average joe in the street who has just lost his domain is going to file a lawsuit to get it back?
No, this guy cannot in any way ask them how much they are willing to pay.
He should reply however:
"Hi, thank you for your email.
As you can see, I use this domain name for my personal email service and website, amongst other activities, and I have done so for three thousand days. The domain matches my surname. It would be quite inconvenient to have to switch to using another service, in time and money, as well as inconvenient to all my contacts.
Therefore I am currently predisposed to not sell my domain name. However if certain aspects (in particular my email address) of my current use of the domain name were able to be continued (for at least a switch-over period) in the case that I was to provide you with the domain name for a sum of money to cover my costs and inconvenience then I would be amenable to further discussion of the matter.
Yours sincerely,
Hector H. Hectorus-Hectorii III"
Then they can come back and do things. Email also has the advantage of being a nice record of actions.
I'm sure that a few more replies can hone that text above into something that might actually be watertight against the other company taking you to arbitration because they're cunts in reality (if they are, they might be entirely honest, I don't know)...
Yeah, I wrote "in order" at the end of writing my post, then forgot to change the order. :)
ANT is nice though, even if Maven is meant to be nicer. I set up ANT build scripts in my projects to build the system into a 'build' folder (with Jar/War/Tar/etc targets). That means that on the test server we have a script that does SVN export and runs the ANT build script. None of this compile within Eclipse and copy to server mess.
One thing about the Collections as well, not relevant for a person coming from another language, but for a first time programmer - implement your own library first, so you understand how they work.
If you know the stuff on the list above, then you'll have scraped by a lot of the EE stuff as well, and you'll be capable of picking it up in any job.
The language itself won't be a problem if you've done C and C++, nor should OO concepts. So the difficulty is with APIs - what is worth it, and what isn't.
In terms of Java APIs (core or otherwise), I'd learn in roughly this order:
* Collections
* Reflection
* IO
* Servlets & JSPs then Struts, Tiles, Spring, etc
* JDBC, then Hibernate
* Axis (web services) and Apache HTTPClient
You don't need to learn them off by heart - I've seen people advance very slowly because they're trying to do that. It is enough to know what is what, so that when you have a problem, you know there is a solution, and where it is.
In terms of interfaces, I wouldn't bother with Swing or AWT really, until you need them. SWT ain't too bad (Eclipse uses it, and it's cross platform enough - Windows, Linux, Mac, Pocket PC, ...). Maybe you could be fancy and learn Fenggui instead! Then you could learn JOGL and write 3D games and the like.
Oh, and learn how to do Java on the command line first, use ANT to build and compile and deploy, then try Eclipse or NetBeans as an IDE. This way you'll avoid all the niceties that the IDE gives you that inhibits your initial learning.
I wouldn't bother with half of the enterprise wank, like Enterprise Beans and all that.