1. Install Ubuntu using the Safe Graphics option
2. sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
3. sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential gcc server-xorg-dev pkg-config
4. Run the Nvidia driver file.
Linux on the desktop failed at step 1 there. Firstly I'm not reinstalling the damn OS! Secondly the command line, which we may be happy with, is not a core feature of any desktop OS.
Envy did work, and it worked well, and I recommend it to anyone else who is having trouble. nVidia and ATI should integrate it into their installers.
My installation of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn a few months back went flawlessly and was very simple. Linux has the install sorted, no need to keep on working on that part okay? It was good 5 years ago. People are obsessed with the install process for some reason.
However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.
Installing the graphics card drivers was hell. For 4 months the graphics card was not supported in Linux anyway, so I had to run in VESA mode. However nVidia finally decided to release 8600GT drivers for Linux, and I thought "Hooray!". The install was hell. Due to idealogical beliefs that border on religious extremism you can't just install the drivers. Oh no, you have to recompile the kernel headers and then do wizardry. Not a problem for me, although it took some time because for some reason I don't like spending my free personal time doing sysadmin stuff, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I tried many forms of instructions online, but they were either for a previous version of Ubuntu, or incorrect. After hours of searching, I finally found a tool called Envy. It worked. Many thanks to the author of Envy. I now have desktop effects - some pointless, some useful.
However the system update mechanism now tells me that I have updates available for the kernel headers and other things, and I'm petrified that by installing them all that hard work would be undone. So I'm now ignoring the updates.
Let's not talk about how many configuration options Ubuntu removes from applications like gaim and so on. Want to have a listing with small buddy icons? Well fuck off, we've removed that possibility. Oh, but there's a plugin for editing the.gtk-rc file - yeah, that's user friendly. NOT. This is a stupid retarded and backward attitute. I approve of not installing 25 text editors by default, but don't remove options from the one you do provide.
Until there is a Linux distribution that is simple, yet has the power available for those that want it, Linux will not gain a lot on the desktop. There needs to be a mechanism to install essential third-party drivers that is as painless as Mac OS X and Windows.
And just to be sure, it isn't about catching up to Windows any more, it is about catching up to Mac OS X. It just works, it's simple yet powerful, it's a full Unix, it looks nice, the desktop effects are very useful and accessible, and drivers install easily.
(Next Year the 10% rate is being dropped, but the 22% is dropping to 20%)
of course we have National Insurance (pays for the NHS, etc, in theory) on top of that (figures are a little vague as I've taken the per-week figures and multiplied them by 52):
Between ~£4500 and ~£34000 : 11% Above ~£34000 : 1% Employers have to pay 12.8% over ~£5200 per year on top of that, you could factor that in.
I think that using Rails taught him about OO programming, and then he went back to PHP and used OO programming there. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were huge blocks of duplicate code to do stuff that could have been in an object.
#6 is interesting, because it's more that he doesn't trust Rails to get the SQL right. However it sounds like he would have had a User object in PHP (I don't "do" PHP, thank fuck, so excuse any incorrect structure) and indeed can write in the main part of the code:
$u = new User(); $u->setFirstName("Bob"); $u->setLastName("Marley");... $u->persist();
and he's probably moved all the SQL code into the objects (e.g., persist(), getByUsername(), etc), indeed he mentions using a simplistic pattern to do that (thus not separating the model from the controller, but I digress). I bet the 100,000 line website has SQL splattered all over it, duplicated everywhere, I remember my first Perl website and it was ass in this respect, although reasonably structured otherwise. Now he has a 12,000 line website that probably just duplicated the previous one. No advancement in the website itself, and look at it, it's rather basic. I can't see why it couldn't be implemented in RoR quite quickly myself. I estimate a month or two for a mod_perl version once back up to speed.
I will admit I've had similar issues with heavyweight frameworks in Java, such as JPOX/JDO which clearly has a lot of good technology in it, but lost the vision of what it was meant to be, and thus you'd end up with the same amount of less legible code to do stuff as writing the prepared statements and supporting code yourself. Add to that unexpected behaviour when extracting nested objects via JDO, and you had a stress-fest. Never again! No more setMaxFetchDepth() then getting exceptions trying to access those nested objects past the JDO stage *blubber*.
I was so happy when I switched from the half-assed Subclipse plugin to Subversive (about 3 months ago). The latter is simply far far better, aside from one thing - Subclipse puts a nice dark * on the file icon to show altered files, whereas Subversive just precedes the filename with a > and that's far more difficult to spot.
Most of us develop on something a little faster than a P2-233, so maybe you should consider a computer upgrade.
I've been using Eclipse on the Mac for over two years, so there is certainly nothing new about it, and considering that the article would have been "Install Eclipse into your applications folder, and start it up, and create a projects folder, and then you have your usual eclipse install" I fail to see the point of this story.
The code editor is pretty damn smooth, and I've never noticed lock ups there, the code highlighting is pretty fast. I did notice some slow-down issues over time with Eclipse on a single-core G5 system, but that was pre-Europa, and no self-respecting developer would develop on anything less than a dual-core system these days (although I occasionally use my iBook still, and it performs well enough there).
The biggest issue with Eclipse Europa is its ridiculously slow XML editor, which is the slowest piece of shit ever. This is sad, because the previous XML editor was really quite quick and smooth, and you could get work done in it. I think it's calling an entire document parse and validation step every time you move the cursor, it's that slow. This is on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, by the way.
Look at how people wait in line to be searched before they leave the store.
I would, but I've never seen that happen in the UK. Never. I don't see how such a policy would help either, it clearly would only harrass the innocent law-abiding customers of the store. I'm surprised that they return.
Instead we have different issues to fight that make this case seem rather unimportant... I guess our battles are quite different to yours.
I'm not giving this guy shit, I'm giving them all shit. Indeed I'm mostly giving this guy shit because he gave up, rather that taking it all the way (it's better to not start the situation if you don't eventually take it all the way) - which should have been an easy win given what we have been told. Instead "the police did no wrong". That's a terrible outcome. Can't you see it?
I challenge you to do what he did then. next time you are in a store and they ask to see the contents of your bag, refuse. I take it this is what you do all the time whenever this happens?
Or go into an airport with harmless electronics sewn onto your clothing holding a lump of clay. I'm sure you'd argue that a person has the right to do that because it is harmless, you're not doing anything wrong. It's still a stupid thing to do.
You're so uptight about this guy's rights in this case, but he was totally irresponsible to his family and daughter. He didn't think it through at the beginning, although the cop's reaction is beyond belief, but even so, once he was on that path he needed to see it through. Instead he's lost completely. There is no victory for society in what he has done, only for himself in terms of less stress and not having an arrest record. Robbed by the state? As I said, he should have got that money back as part of the early settlement but he capitulated extremely quickly. What was said in that phone call?
All that society got from this case was that you have rights, but you'd better not enforce them because you'll be fucked in the ass by the cops and government. Maybe it'll be another thing people can add to the list of injustices, and maybe one day they'll come together to fight to get things right again.
And nothing gives you the right to write what you did about me based upon my viewpoint of the situation. You don't know me at all, and to form an opinion to such an extent from a single post is past ridiculous, it's absolutely ludicrous. Especially when my point isn't what you are twisting it to, but I suspect that you'll never see it any other way, that once your mind is made up you will never change it. The worst sort of person to argue with, like arguing with young earth creationists and scientologists. I'm still fucking insulted by the lies about me that you wrote. You have no people skills, you're as stubborn and idealistic as this man, which is why I want you to go into a Circuit City and do what this man did, and experience first hand why he did what he eventually did.
You have proven yourself absolutely to be a pathetic amoral monster. Deal with that before spewing any more of your ignorant idiotic hatred of free people.
I think that is the single most retarded response I have seen related to this story so far. You don't know me or my morals, yet you spew hatred like a religious extremist.
I blame them all. He wasn't asked anything major, nothing that warranted paying $10k for, and ruining his daughter's birthday. That's common sense, if you argue against that then you are truly beyond redemption. Yes, the store manager should be punished for blocking his way, that's another thing entirely, and yes, the policeman did some unbelievable things that beggar belief, but the original fight was "should I show my receipt and the contents of my bag to the store employee?", and there is no way you can argue that is worth all the hassle he has been through. Especially if there are signs saying that they may do this. That's why I argue that he should just have complied, and never shopped there again.
Instead he's paid a lot, put a lot of close people through a lot of stress, and for it all he might have managed to remind the police of the law (with no guarantees), and possibly the store as well. He didn't even fight for a better settlement, he settled for the one assigning no blame to the police, WHY?! Was there no middle ground he could barter for - e.g., not suing, plus costs back (because he would win the case)? He caved in completely, it's worse than fighting further, or not getting into the fight in the first place. He's basically arranged a situation where he agrees that it isn't wrong for the police to ask to see your driving license.
Come and live in a land where people don't have to check your bags before you leave the store because there is still a semblance of society left.
Most likely the ray traced games of tomorrow will be running on ray tracing accelerators, namely graphics cards. Probably the same graphics cards as the next generation or two, running the ray tracing via shaders...
Sure, Intel like to talk about their 80 core x86 chip, but when it comes down to it I'm fairly certain that to get anything better than 'barely acceptable' you'll have a beast of an accelerator from nVidia or AMD. However it may make it easier for Intel to elbow into the game.
Note that you could buy ray tracing accelerators 10 years ago. There was a Cambridge based company that put them in a form factor like a DIMM.
I think his daughter's right to have her birthday ruined by her father's rank bullheadedness ranked higher than his right to not prove he bought the goods and to go about his business.
Indeed he was on their property. Suck it up, and never shop there again, it's like ten whole seconds. Other stores seem to cope without checking, so give them your business instead. You could buy a boat load of excellent electronics for $7500... better than shortening your life span because of the stress, and having your wife or whatever threaten to leave you if you went ahead with it.
Yes, the store employees were asstunnels, and the policeman was a prime asstunnel. It shouldn't have got to the policeman stage, it should have got to the show receipt, write letter to circuit city detailing the law and expressing his severe disappointment with their employees stage.
He's 26 years old and he got the arrest removed from his record for $7500.
Over the next 10 years that will more than pay for itself when it comes to applying for jobs and so on. Well, except his name will come up in a thousand Google searches...
Otherwise, I think he picked the wrong battle to fight, and even so, fought it in the wrong way, probably because he doesn't have the experience.
In addition we have only his side of the story, and the comments to his story point out discrepancies.
However ultimately it might have informed a lot of people of their rights. And that their rights are worthless in reality.
It means he has a BA, and is old enough to have gained the free upgrade to MA that Cambridge gives out - the link in the post above yours on Wikipedia is most informative. I write MA (Cantab) after my name because of this. Considering that Oxbridge does generally have an intake of excellent people, that the courses are frequently the best in the country and don't have to start out with absolute basics, and that you have to get 3 years of real life experience after that, the MA is probably deserved (considering discrete MA, MPhil or MSc courses are only a year long, if that).
However he surely must have some additional qualifications to practice law in the US in addition to the [under]graduate law degree he has from Cambridge?
Ah, yes, the Wikipedia page is quite informative. I didn't know that the states had a kinda-equivalent to the UK's National Insurance, in the form of FICA. And I think I prefer UK council tax (~£1300pa per household depending on house valuation) in the UK to local/city income taxes of between 3% and 13%!
I guess the tax burden is far closer between the US and the UK than I had previously thought, although I had never done the maths. The UK's tax-free allowance is a real benefit, 0% up to ~US$12,000...
£35 is £29.80 without VAT, or $60 for 200m/200t/wifi, or £23.83 / $48 for the 200m/200t only. Also because you don't lose minutes on incoming calls, that's effectively 400m/400t when comparing to the US if you get as many calls as you make. And the contract is 18 months long instead of 24.
The lifetime cost of the iPhone is £269 + £35*18 = £900. That's $1532 taking off tax and translating into US dollars. That compares reasonably very well with the lifetime cost of the iPhone in the states. And you don't need to buy a new iPod.
Apart from that the situations are so different it is pretty pointless to compare the plans.
Sorry, average wage is £447 a week in 2006, from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285. That's just over £23k. So I was off by a couple of grand, less considering pay went up 3.5% in the year since.
Cheers for doing the maths. Yeah, not so bad actually if you're on £25k. I was probably thinking of the burden when you earn quite a bit more - but that will be reduced a little from next April as the income tax is coming down to 20% (even if the tiny 10% band is being eradicated).
I've never heard of price constraints in pubs. So when you hand over that £2.80 for a pint of (chilled, cool or warm) beer of about 4.5% ABV, that's the price the pub has set itself. It's mostly tax.
Last I read the UK average wage was around £25k ($50k) a year, and the US average wage was around $40k a year. I'd hazard that was due to poor states dragging the average down?
However once you take tax into account then what you say is true. I don't know what US income tax rates are, and I know US goods have (~8%) sales tax applied over the sticker price unlike here, but with the UK's 22% income tax (not including first £5k earnings) plus 12% National Insurance, and then 17.5% VAT on most goods that you buy... it works out that of the average wage around 40 - 50% is going straight to the government. If it was earlier I'd probably do the maths more concisely.
The free WiFi via TheCloud makes the wifi portion of the iPhone actually useful, as there are thousands of TheCloud WiFi networks around the country. I don't think that there is anything similar for the US iPhone.
Also the unlimited data usage is probably underestimated. Sure, they say 1400 pages a day, but how big is a web page these days (excluding Flash)? 100KB? That's 140MB a day, which would cost a tonne over here with many other deals.
The talk and text limits are rather poor of course. I pay £10 a month for 500 minutes and 100 texts with Three, so when £35 only has 200 minutes and 200 texts and no phone subsidy you have to worry.
That's 32 times as many transistors... whereas today you can get 4 cores on a CPU in under 300mm^2, you'll be getting 128 cores in 2017 (simplistic, you'll get a variety of generic cores, and application specific cores, and per-core improvements will increase their size, so say 32 generic cores and 32 application specific cores).
If it's 16 years, thats 256 times as many transistors. 256 generic cores and 256 application specific cores in 2024? Let's not even imagine the per-core speeds! It's all pretty exciting, and I'm being conservative with the figures here.
Of course, applications will grow to utilise this stuff, but more and more tasks are getting to the point of 'fast enough', even despite the bloating efforts of their creators. Even if there is a 10 year hiatus in process improvements after 2024, it'll take some time for the applications to catch up apart from certain uses. If those uses are common enough, there will be hardware available for it instead. Of course if only Intel and IBM have fabs that can make these products, because the fabs cost $20b each...
I'd argue the Ribbon is just a graphical version of Wordstar's Help Pages (i.e., what key combos to perform which function) which were at the top of the screen and you could flick through them, and each help page covered a certain area of related functionality.
Having now used Office 2007 I find the ribbon both nice (no duplicated functionality between menus and toolbars), good (toolbars suck, the ribbon sizes features according to importance/regularity of use), and annoying (relayed out on window resize, I hate that Office menu icon, the entire application doesn't fit the look and feel of the system - people moan about Mac OS X Tiger's inconsistencies, this is a whole different universe of wrong) and a whole new learning step.
On the other hand, NeoOffice on the Mac starts up pretty damn quick these days, and looks good since they started doing the interface in a more native manner. I'll give OpenOffice a shot to see what improvements they have made, but they really do need to work on the look and feel of their application, because it was dog-butt ugly and cluttered the last time I used it.
Interesting analysis but your (rather strong) bias is showing.
By all accounts I'm an Apple fanboy, but reading your post I think you have me down as a Nokia/Symbian fanboy or Apple hater! I guess I tried too hard to be balanced or reasonable. Or pessimistic.
Mature simply means that they've been doing phone UIs for years. Of course that does mean they were set in their ways and concepts, whereas Apple could come straight in an refine the current state of the art into the iPhone's UI, which is smooth and excellent. Mature also means that all the features that people want are available, that's what will take Apple some time. The fact that Apple have such a good OS and a good set of core libraries that they can use from their XServe down to the iPods they'll release soon has made this task far easier of course, and this design elegance will have major benefits in the years ahead.
And as a Brit I use cruft to mean old out of date but still used. Basically not a clean slate. That's what Apple had for their phone interface - start from scratch, and we'll have a decent mobile graphics chip too. That means effects, prettyness and clear design without cruft. Cruft like Windows Mobile "Settings" system that is a major mishmash of different tools to do different things, some third party, different look and feel, etc. I still can't connect to a WPA network with WM2005 though...
The iPhone will keep on selling, but Nokia, Motorola, etc, they're all large, they're established, and they can adapt if they have to. As soon as Apple have an 'iPhone nano' or similar for a decent price there will be pressure on them, but they'll have their similar functionality UIs by then, maybe a bit more clunky for some, maybe a bit more featureful as well. However to think that Apple will have the same kind of dominance in 5 years time that the iPod has now is rather wishful thinking. What will happen is that the stragglers will be killed off as the platforms advance due to competition and everyone will have to come up with their own cool competitive selling points. Expandability (mini-SD), ability to run custom applications, ability to unlock, replaceable battery, cut-and-paste, and so on, many people clearly want these and there's a market for them to exploit.
The iPhone is excellent hardware, but anyone can make excellent hardware. It's excellent design too, but when you've got a slab with a screen on most of one side there's only so many ways you can mess up before getting it right too. The software is the difference, and Nokia et al are not that far behind with the glitz and the features they've had for years. But if that Nokia videoed drops back to a clunky interface (or Windows Mobile 2008 still has the mish-mash Settings system and the primitive home screen) at any point in the real world then it has failed to get the point of what Apple has achieved.
Sometimes I think the discussions on Slashdot are pretty dumb, but that Engadget discussion is a whole order of magnitude more dumb. I guess it's because it involves Apple.
It's not the hardware that makes this an iPhone clone, it's the look and feel of the interface. Hell from that poor quality video they posted even the UI colours seem to be the same.
Also Apple have patents on the UI behaviour up the wazoo.
On the other hand Nokia won't lock their device to particular networks, make it unlockable, and sell it with 2G EDGE only. On the other hand, it isn't out yet. If this is as early as Apple's previews, then Nokia won't have anything on the market for at least 6 months.
What this does show is the market moving on from rather static 2D PDA-style interfaces. Apple are a bit player right now, but Nokia are pretty major. This puts pressure on Microsoft, who have just released their WM2006 product - a classic 2D PDA-like OS, when the competition is moving to slicker, smoother, easier-to-use and intuitive interfaces that are far more function centric than application centric.
Nokia: More mature interface with features and market experience vs. historical cruft to deal with, and Symbian.
Apple: No cruft to deal with, but lack market experience and features, which will be made up by system updates possibly. Very small marketshare currently, US-only. Too restrictive right now.
Microsoft: Let's hope that some of our OEMs develop fancy interfaces on top of our base OS. Very flexible. ActiveSync nightmare.
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Linux on the desktop failed at step 1 there. Firstly I'm not reinstalling the damn OS! Secondly the command line, which we may be happy with, is not a core feature of any desktop OS.
Envy did work, and it worked well, and I recommend it to anyone else who is having trouble. nVidia and ATI should integrate it into their installers.
My installation of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn a few months back went flawlessly and was very simple. Linux has the install sorted, no need to keep on working on that part okay? It was good 5 years ago. People are obsessed with the install process for some reason.
.gtk-rc file - yeah, that's user friendly. NOT. This is a stupid retarded and backward attitute. I approve of not installing 25 text editors by default, but don't remove options from the one you do provide.
However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.
Installing the graphics card drivers was hell. For 4 months the graphics card was not supported in Linux anyway, so I had to run in VESA mode. However nVidia finally decided to release 8600GT drivers for Linux, and I thought "Hooray!". The install was hell. Due to idealogical beliefs that border on religious extremism you can't just install the drivers. Oh no, you have to recompile the kernel headers and then do wizardry. Not a problem for me, although it took some time because for some reason I don't like spending my free personal time doing sysadmin stuff, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I tried many forms of instructions online, but they were either for a previous version of Ubuntu, or incorrect. After hours of searching, I finally found a tool called Envy. It worked. Many thanks to the author of Envy. I now have desktop effects - some pointless, some useful.
However the system update mechanism now tells me that I have updates available for the kernel headers and other things, and I'm petrified that by installing them all that hard work would be undone. So I'm now ignoring the updates.
Let's not talk about how many configuration options Ubuntu removes from applications like gaim and so on. Want to have a listing with small buddy icons? Well fuck off, we've removed that possibility. Oh, but there's a plugin for editing the
Until there is a Linux distribution that is simple, yet has the power available for those that want it, Linux will not gain a lot on the desktop. There needs to be a mechanism to install essential third-party drivers that is as painless as Mac OS X and Windows.
And just to be sure, it isn't about catching up to Windows any more, it is about catching up to Mac OS X. It just works, it's simple yet powerful, it's a full Unix, it looks nice, the desktop effects are very useful and accessible, and drivers install easily.
Britain is suddenly looking good! I'm sure you can do the rough Euro values in your head by multiplying by 1.42.
Income Tax Rates:
£0 - £5225 : 0%
£5225 - £7375 : 10%
£7375 - £39825 : 22%
£39825+ : 40%
(Next Year the 10% rate is being dropped, but the 22% is dropping to 20%)
of course we have National Insurance (pays for the NHS, etc, in theory) on top of that (figures are a little vague as I've taken the per-week figures and multiplied them by 52):
Between ~£4500 and ~£34000 : 11%
Above ~£34000 : 1%
Employers have to pay 12.8% over ~£5200 per year on top of that, you could factor that in.
and VAT is 17.5%.
Excellent, cheers! There's so much configuration stuff in Eclipse it's easy to miss something!
I think that using Rails taught him about OO programming, and then he went back to PHP and used OO programming there. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were huge blocks of duplicate code to do stuff that could have been in an object.
...
#6 is interesting, because it's more that he doesn't trust Rails to get the SQL right. However it sounds like he would have had a User object in PHP (I don't "do" PHP, thank fuck, so excuse any incorrect structure) and indeed can write in the main part of the code:
$u = new User();
$u->setFirstName("Bob");
$u->setLastName("Marley");
$u->persist();
and he's probably moved all the SQL code into the objects (e.g., persist(), getByUsername(), etc), indeed he mentions using a simplistic pattern to do that (thus not separating the model from the controller, but I digress). I bet the 100,000 line website has SQL splattered all over it, duplicated everywhere, I remember my first Perl website and it was ass in this respect, although reasonably structured otherwise. Now he has a 12,000 line website that probably just duplicated the previous one. No advancement in the website itself, and look at it, it's rather basic. I can't see why it couldn't be implemented in RoR quite quickly myself. I estimate a month or two for a mod_perl version once back up to speed.
I will admit I've had similar issues with heavyweight frameworks in Java, such as JPOX/JDO which clearly has a lot of good technology in it, but lost the vision of what it was meant to be, and thus you'd end up with the same amount of less legible code to do stuff as writing the prepared statements and supporting code yourself. Add to that unexpected behaviour when extracting nested objects via JDO, and you had a stress-fest. Never again! No more setMaxFetchDepth() then getting exceptions trying to access those nested objects past the JDO stage *blubber*.
I was so happy when I switched from the half-assed Subclipse plugin to Subversive (about 3 months ago). The latter is simply far far better, aside from one thing - Subclipse puts a nice dark * on the file icon to show altered files, whereas Subversive just precedes the filename with a > and that's far more difficult to spot.
IMO of course.
Most of us develop on something a little faster than a P2-233, so maybe you should consider a computer upgrade.
I've been using Eclipse on the Mac for over two years, so there is certainly nothing new about it, and considering that the article would have been "Install Eclipse into your applications folder, and start it up, and create a projects folder, and then you have your usual eclipse install" I fail to see the point of this story.
The code editor is pretty damn smooth, and I've never noticed lock ups there, the code highlighting is pretty fast. I did notice some slow-down issues over time with Eclipse on a single-core G5 system, but that was pre-Europa, and no self-respecting developer would develop on anything less than a dual-core system these days (although I occasionally use my iBook still, and it performs well enough there).
The biggest issue with Eclipse Europa is its ridiculously slow XML editor, which is the slowest piece of shit ever. This is sad, because the previous XML editor was really quite quick and smooth, and you could get work done in it. I think it's calling an entire document parse and validation step every time you move the cursor, it's that slow. This is on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, by the way.
Look at how people wait in line to be searched before they leave the store.
... I guess our battles are quite different to yours.
I would, but I've never seen that happen in the UK. Never. I don't see how such a policy would help either, it clearly would only harrass the innocent law-abiding customers of the store. I'm surprised that they return.
Instead we have different issues to fight that make this case seem rather unimportant
I'm not giving this guy shit, I'm giving them all shit. Indeed I'm mostly giving this guy shit because he gave up, rather that taking it all the way (it's better to not start the situation if you don't eventually take it all the way) - which should have been an easy win given what we have been told. Instead "the police did no wrong". That's a terrible outcome. Can't you see it?
I challenge you to do what he did then. next time you are in a store and they ask to see the contents of your bag, refuse. I take it this is what you do all the time whenever this happens?
Or go into an airport with harmless electronics sewn onto your clothing holding a lump of clay. I'm sure you'd argue that a person has the right to do that because it is harmless, you're not doing anything wrong. It's still a stupid thing to do.
You're so uptight about this guy's rights in this case, but he was totally irresponsible to his family and daughter. He didn't think it through at the beginning, although the cop's reaction is beyond belief, but even so, once he was on that path he needed to see it through. Instead he's lost completely. There is no victory for society in what he has done, only for himself in terms of less stress and not having an arrest record. Robbed by the state? As I said, he should have got that money back as part of the early settlement but he capitulated extremely quickly. What was said in that phone call?
All that society got from this case was that you have rights, but you'd better not enforce them because you'll be fucked in the ass by the cops and government. Maybe it'll be another thing people can add to the list of injustices, and maybe one day they'll come together to fight to get things right again.
And nothing gives you the right to write what you did about me based upon my viewpoint of the situation. You don't know me at all, and to form an opinion to such an extent from a single post is past ridiculous, it's absolutely ludicrous. Especially when my point isn't what you are twisting it to, but I suspect that you'll never see it any other way, that once your mind is made up you will never change it. The worst sort of person to argue with, like arguing with young earth creationists and scientologists. I'm still fucking insulted by the lies about me that you wrote. You have no people skills, you're as stubborn and idealistic as this man, which is why I want you to go into a Circuit City and do what this man did, and experience first hand why he did what he eventually did.
You have proven yourself absolutely to be a pathetic amoral monster. Deal with that before spewing any more of your ignorant idiotic hatred of free people.
I think that is the single most retarded response I have seen related to this story so far. You don't know me or my morals, yet you spew hatred like a religious extremist.
I blame them all. He wasn't asked anything major, nothing that warranted paying $10k for, and ruining his daughter's birthday. That's common sense, if you argue against that then you are truly beyond redemption. Yes, the store manager should be punished for blocking his way, that's another thing entirely, and yes, the policeman did some unbelievable things that beggar belief, but the original fight was "should I show my receipt and the contents of my bag to the store employee?", and there is no way you can argue that is worth all the hassle he has been through. Especially if there are signs saying that they may do this. That's why I argue that he should just have complied, and never shopped there again.
Instead he's paid a lot, put a lot of close people through a lot of stress, and for it all he might have managed to remind the police of the law (with no guarantees), and possibly the store as well. He didn't even fight for a better settlement, he settled for the one assigning no blame to the police, WHY?! Was there no middle ground he could barter for - e.g., not suing, plus costs back (because he would win the case)? He caved in completely, it's worse than fighting further, or not getting into the fight in the first place. He's basically arranged a situation where he agrees that it isn't wrong for the police to ask to see your driving license.
Come and live in a land where people don't have to check your bags before you leave the store because there is still a semblance of society left.
Most likely the ray traced games of tomorrow will be running on ray tracing accelerators, namely graphics cards. Probably the same graphics cards as the next generation or two, running the ray tracing via shaders...
Sure, Intel like to talk about their 80 core x86 chip, but when it comes down to it I'm fairly certain that to get anything better than 'barely acceptable' you'll have a beast of an accelerator from nVidia or AMD. However it may make it easier for Intel to elbow into the game.
Note that you could buy ray tracing accelerators 10 years ago. There was a Cambridge based company that put them in a form factor like a DIMM.
I think his daughter's right to have her birthday ruined by her father's rank bullheadedness ranked higher than his right to not prove he bought the goods and to go about his business.
Indeed he was on their property. Suck it up, and never shop there again, it's like ten whole seconds. Other stores seem to cope without checking, so give them your business instead. You could buy a boat load of excellent electronics for $7500... better than shortening your life span because of the stress, and having your wife or whatever threaten to leave you if you went ahead with it.
Yes, the store employees were asstunnels, and the policeman was a prime asstunnel. It shouldn't have got to the policeman stage, it should have got to the show receipt, write letter to circuit city detailing the law and expressing his severe disappointment with their employees stage.
He's 26 years old and he got the arrest removed from his record for $7500.
...
Over the next 10 years that will more than pay for itself when it comes to applying for jobs and so on. Well, except his name will come up in a thousand Google searches
Otherwise, I think he picked the wrong battle to fight, and even so, fought it in the wrong way, probably because he doesn't have the experience.
In addition we have only his side of the story, and the comments to his story point out discrepancies.
However ultimately it might have informed a lot of people of their rights. And that their rights are worthless in reality.
It means he has a BA, and is old enough to have gained the free upgrade to MA that Cambridge gives out - the link in the post above yours on Wikipedia is most informative. I write MA (Cantab) after my name because of this. Considering that Oxbridge does generally have an intake of excellent people, that the courses are frequently the best in the country and don't have to start out with absolute basics, and that you have to get 3 years of real life experience after that, the MA is probably deserved (considering discrete MA, MPhil or MSc courses are only a year long, if that).
However he surely must have some additional qualifications to practice law in the US in addition to the [under]graduate law degree he has from Cambridge?
Ah, yes, the Wikipedia page is quite informative. I didn't know that the states had a kinda-equivalent to the UK's National Insurance, in the form of FICA. And I think I prefer UK council tax (~£1300pa per household depending on house valuation) in the UK to local/city income taxes of between 3% and 13%!
I guess the tax burden is far closer between the US and the UK than I had previously thought, although I had never done the maths. The UK's tax-free allowance is a real benefit, 0% up to ~US$12,000...
Don't forget VAT!
£35 is £29.80 without VAT, or $60 for 200m/200t/wifi, or £23.83 / $48 for the 200m/200t only. Also because you don't lose minutes on incoming calls, that's effectively 400m/400t when comparing to the US if you get as many calls as you make. And the contract is 18 months long instead of 24.
The lifetime cost of the iPhone is £269 + £35*18 = £900. That's $1532 taking off tax and translating into US dollars. That compares reasonably very well with the lifetime cost of the iPhone in the states. And you don't need to buy a new iPod.
Apart from that the situations are so different it is pretty pointless to compare the plans.
Sorry, average wage is £447 a week in 2006, from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285. That's just over £23k. So I was off by a couple of grand, less considering pay went up 3.5% in the year since.
Cheers for doing the maths. Yeah, not so bad actually if you're on £25k. I was probably thinking of the burden when you earn quite a bit more - but that will be reduced a little from next April as the income tax is coming down to 20% (even if the tiny 10% band is being eradicated).
US income tax is flat rate from $0 earned?
How old are you? 80?
I've never heard of price constraints in pubs. So when you hand over that £2.80 for a pint of (chilled, cool or warm) beer of about 4.5% ABV, that's the price the pub has set itself. It's mostly tax.
Last I read the UK average wage was around £25k ($50k) a year, and the US average wage was around $40k a year. I'd hazard that was due to poor states dragging the average down?
... it works out that of the average wage around 40 - 50% is going straight to the government. If it was earlier I'd probably do the maths more concisely.
However once you take tax into account then what you say is true. I don't know what US income tax rates are, and I know US goods have (~8%) sales tax applied over the sticker price unlike here, but with the UK's 22% income tax (not including first £5k earnings) plus 12% National Insurance, and then 17.5% VAT on most goods that you buy
The free WiFi via TheCloud makes the wifi portion of the iPhone actually useful, as there are thousands of TheCloud WiFi networks around the country. I don't think that there is anything similar for the US iPhone.
Also the unlimited data usage is probably underestimated. Sure, they say 1400 pages a day, but how big is a web page these days (excluding Flash)? 100KB? That's 140MB a day, which would cost a tonne over here with many other deals.
The talk and text limits are rather poor of course. I pay £10 a month for 500 minutes and 100 texts with Three, so when £35 only has 200 minutes and 200 texts and no phone subsidy you have to worry.
That's 32 times as many transistors... whereas today you can get 4 cores on a CPU in under 300mm^2, you'll be getting 128 cores in 2017 (simplistic, you'll get a variety of generic cores, and application specific cores, and per-core improvements will increase their size, so say 32 generic cores and 32 application specific cores).
If it's 16 years, thats 256 times as many transistors. 256 generic cores and 256 application specific cores in 2024? Let's not even imagine the per-core speeds! It's all pretty exciting, and I'm being conservative with the figures here.
Of course, applications will grow to utilise this stuff, but more and more tasks are getting to the point of 'fast enough', even despite the bloating efforts of their creators. Even if there is a 10 year hiatus in process improvements after 2024, it'll take some time for the applications to catch up apart from certain uses. If those uses are common enough, there will be hardware available for it instead. Of course if only Intel and IBM have fabs that can make these products, because the fabs cost $20b each...
I'd argue the Ribbon is just a graphical version of Wordstar's Help Pages (i.e., what key combos to perform which function) which were at the top of the screen and you could flick through them, and each help page covered a certain area of related functionality.
Having now used Office 2007 I find the ribbon both nice (no duplicated functionality between menus and toolbars), good (toolbars suck, the ribbon sizes features according to importance/regularity of use), and annoying (relayed out on window resize, I hate that Office menu icon, the entire application doesn't fit the look and feel of the system - people moan about Mac OS X Tiger's inconsistencies, this is a whole different universe of wrong) and a whole new learning step.
On the other hand, NeoOffice on the Mac starts up pretty damn quick these days, and looks good since they started doing the interface in a more native manner. I'll give OpenOffice a shot to see what improvements they have made, but they really do need to work on the look and feel of their application, because it was dog-butt ugly and cluttered the last time I used it.
By all accounts I'm an Apple fanboy, but reading your post I think you have me down as a Nokia/Symbian fanboy or Apple hater! I guess I tried too hard to be balanced or reasonable. Or pessimistic.
Mature simply means that they've been doing phone UIs for years. Of course that does mean they were set in their ways and concepts, whereas Apple could come straight in an refine the current state of the art into the iPhone's UI, which is smooth and excellent. Mature also means that all the features that people want are available, that's what will take Apple some time. The fact that Apple have such a good OS and a good set of core libraries that they can use from their XServe down to the iPods they'll release soon has made this task far easier of course, and this design elegance will have major benefits in the years ahead.
And as a Brit I use cruft to mean old out of date but still used. Basically not a clean slate. That's what Apple had for their phone interface - start from scratch, and we'll have a decent mobile graphics chip too. That means effects, prettyness and clear design without cruft. Cruft like Windows Mobile "Settings" system that is a major mishmash of different tools to do different things, some third party, different look and feel, etc. I still can't connect to a WPA network with WM2005 though...
The iPhone will keep on selling, but Nokia, Motorola, etc, they're all large, they're established, and they can adapt if they have to. As soon as Apple have an 'iPhone nano' or similar for a decent price there will be pressure on them, but they'll have their similar functionality UIs by then, maybe a bit more clunky for some, maybe a bit more featureful as well. However to think that Apple will have the same kind of dominance in 5 years time that the iPod has now is rather wishful thinking. What will happen is that the stragglers will be killed off as the platforms advance due to competition and everyone will have to come up with their own cool competitive selling points. Expandability (mini-SD), ability to run custom applications, ability to unlock, replaceable battery, cut-and-paste, and so on, many people clearly want these and there's a market for them to exploit.
The iPhone is excellent hardware, but anyone can make excellent hardware. It's excellent design too, but when you've got a slab with a screen on most of one side there's only so many ways you can mess up before getting it right too. The software is the difference, and Nokia et al are not that far behind with the glitz and the features they've had for years. But if that Nokia videoed drops back to a clunky interface (or Windows Mobile 2008 still has the mish-mash Settings system and the primitive home screen) at any point in the real world then it has failed to get the point of what Apple has achieved.
Sometimes I think the discussions on Slashdot are pretty dumb, but that Engadget discussion is a whole order of magnitude more dumb. I guess it's because it involves Apple.
It's not the hardware that makes this an iPhone clone, it's the look and feel of the interface. Hell from that poor quality video they posted even the UI colours seem to be the same.
Also Apple have patents on the UI behaviour up the wazoo.
On the other hand Nokia won't lock their device to particular networks, make it unlockable, and sell it with 2G EDGE only. On the other hand, it isn't out yet. If this is as early as Apple's previews, then Nokia won't have anything on the market for at least 6 months.
What this does show is the market moving on from rather static 2D PDA-style interfaces. Apple are a bit player right now, but Nokia are pretty major. This puts pressure on Microsoft, who have just released their WM2006 product - a classic 2D PDA-like OS, when the competition is moving to slicker, smoother, easier-to-use and intuitive interfaces that are far more function centric than application centric.
Nokia: More mature interface with features and market experience vs. historical cruft to deal with, and Symbian.
Apple: No cruft to deal with, but lack market experience and features, which will be made up by system updates possibly. Very small marketshare currently, US-only. Too restrictive right now.
Microsoft: Let's hope that some of our OEMs develop fancy interfaces on top of our base OS. Very flexible. ActiveSync nightmare.