My worst was three weeks waiting for the office furniture to arrive. We had old PC cases for stools, propped the monitors and keyboards on top of PC cases, and coded hunched over.:)
We had touchscreen systems from HP back when I worked for Nortel supporting their shop floor. These rugged little beasties worked 24x7 without any sort of "calibration", with only one terminal out of a couple hundred failing during the two years I supported the shop floor.
Mind you the "buttons" on the HP's were a lot smaller than the touch areas of a voting booth, so the HP's had to be more accurate.
Bottom line is that the voting machines are using a flawed touchscreen technology. Probably yet another case of over-engineering the solution to use the latest "cool" technology instead of something that was tried and tested.
ARM chips are famous for including special instructions and supporting silicon for things like MPEG4 encoding/decoding, MP3 encode/decode, etc. The "main" CPU core isn't involved in these "streaming" instructions, just the parameter setups for them. Given enough "heavy CPU" workloads implemented as custom silicon, the main CPU on an ARM chip can be relatively idle as all the heavy lifting is done by the stream coprocessors.
I was thinking more along the lines of them arguing about the share ratios of BitTorrent users, and how you haven't even done so much as borrow a copy unless you're seeding back to more than a 1.0 share ratio. Just because your IP got caught in a sweep doesn't mean you were "really" seeding the torrent in question, or it just might be a "dead" torrent without a lot of downloaders so you can't get your share ratio up.
Moving system images around isn't that tough to do, but moving the context of that image and it's data are still challenges that lead to differences between the VM providers. If it were as simple as "provide an image", then there wouldn't be much of a market for the cloud computing providers to compete over.
This is a young industry. It's far too early to try to standardize on stacks beyond those being provided by the players in the cloud industry. Sure one could pick a stack of best-of-breed FOSS solutions for the raw technology, but that's not going to address the real interoperability costs of getting the raw data closer to the users without losing integrity.
The page-a-day analogy is a good one. It really shows how weak the argument/defense is, and I really hope they have something better for their day in court. Otherwise they're just opening up the BitTorrent community to a general attack at the ISP level.
If you have the skills for programming, you can break into the market based on experience rather than a degree. But if you don't have a rich resume of experience built up during the boom, you don't have the leverage for a job during the bust.
That will still be an issue in a few years when you complete the degree. Many places won't even look at a resume that doesn't mention a degree any more. (And it's all automated, so they literally don't see your resume!)
I wonder how significant the market share of the retailer that dropped the Mature games was? Is it a Wal-Mart with market share, or a local chain with only a few outlets?
Plus there is the minor side issue that most video games use guns, not knives to inflict damage. It sounds like the proponent of this tax are yet another example of knee-jerk reactionaries with a hate-on for video games and rap music. Why is it that such nutbars are even heard by government, much less seriously considered?
I admit I'm puzzled at the issue of "lockdown" myself.
For years whenever we needed to lock down a *nix account, the sysadmins would install the software as root and set up the user accounts in capture mode (i.e..login starts the X session, and the X session doesn't have the ability to add/remove programs.)
I can't imagine needing to lock down a session any tighter than that, and I've never seen a Windows desktop that was locked down any tighter, either.
The latest release of Safari is indeed fast on Windows, but it didn't give me the option of re-importing my bookmarks from Firefox, so I didn't play with it too much. I liked what I saw, but not enough to switch browsers. Besides, I rather like AdBlockPlus.
Trademarks have to be defended. Psion should have raised an issue with people using the term "netbook" in media long ago. By now the value of the trademark has been distilled, and it's extremely doubtful that they can start enforcing it as a trademark after years of use as a common term.
The term netbook is synonymous with a class of product, just like Kleenex is. How many people actually ask for a "tissue" instead of a "Kleenex"? The term still can't be used to name competing products, but as a description it's tough to defend. (On the other hand I do think Scotties could get away with refering to their "Kleenex" product rather than referring to it as "tissue." Just because the public thinks of them as Kleenex doesn't mean Scotties could mention Kleenex in their advertising.)
I'm starting to think the economy is just an excuse for pay cuts. Last I'd heard Microsoft was still making a very healthy profit.
I've been through the forced reductions myself, but it was while I was contracting for JPMC, and our cuts were based on the post-Y2K "economy." The only ones who should have been hit with the cuts were the mainframe COBOL programmers who no longer had Y2K work to do, but everyone got hit. A couple contractors quit rather than take the pay cut, but they were by far in the minority. (JPMC was a good gig -- worth taking a few bucks cut compared to hellhole client sites.)
I've been waiting for some time now to see a company offering "season sets" or subscriptions to web broadcasts. It's only logical in such a scenario to go straight to the studio for the downloads or streams, rather than going through a "middle man" cable company.
In fact I don't see how the cable companies think they're owed the opportunity to take on web broadcasting. That should be done by the producing studio, not by some arbitrary winner of exclusive rights.
Unfortunately you're all too right -- calling the police is about the only option. Teachers aren't allowed to embarass or "harm" students, corporal punishment is banned, hell you can't even send them to the principle's office because that's "embarassing!"
It hasn't helped Canadian "art" flourish. Quite the opposite -- it's provided funding to drek that no one wants. Commercial art (i.e. TV and radio) needs to be competitive to survive, not propped up by tax dollars. Witness the CBC's abysmal ratings and lack of standout series for the past many years.
An article I read this weekend explained that they're talking about Can-Con for foreign web broadcasters, including some TV channels that internet broadcast from the Phillipines. I don't think I've ever heard a more ludicrous thing -- demanding that foreign stations carry Canadian content!
Rather than bleat about the competition, CBC could do like CTV and start internet broadcasting their series as streaming video. The only CanCon rules I support would be to mandate that Canadian content be internet-enabled so that it can compete. Navel-gazing demands on the content carried by foreign channels is pointless -- there is no way to enforce it and it would be considered as interference by the nations where those channels are based, and rightly so.
I used to be whole-heartedly against sites like TPB because I could afford to buy any DVDs that I wanted. But more and more often I found myself disappointed with the results of the purchase, and more and more often I felt ripped off by yet another over-budgetted "blockbuster" with a lame story.
Eventually I started downloading R5's so I could check out the movie before spending my hard-earned cash on the DVD.
It wasn't too much longer until I realized that Hollywood doesn't produce anything worth buying anymore. The days of movies that I'd watch 3-4 times are gone -- I have trouble sitting through the current crop of drek even once. What's the point of buying something for the collection if it's not worth watching a few times over the course of a couple of years?
TV is in much the same boat. I simply cannot bring myself to believe that it's worth $40-45/month for cable, when I've lived without a TV for three years. Sure I download a lot, but it's old series with episodes that I missed (e.g. I missed seasons 3-4 of Star Trek Deep Space 9 because I was on the road a lot for a couple of years.) What has been catching my interest are "foreign" TV series from the UK and Australia. They still haven't been inundated with "reality" TV as far as I can tell.
The DTV in Regina, SK is broadcast on VHF channel bands. But I'll be sticking with "regular" SD broadcasts for now -- my TV isn't digital-ready and Canada isn't shutting off the analogue signals until some time in 2011.
Spending money on R&D is not the same as "spending frivolously." The whole point of R&D is to experiment with new technologies, some of which pay off, some of which don't.
Kudos to Microsoft for actually investing in their future, rather than sitting on the cash pile. To hell with the whinging "investors" who expect money for free.
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My worst was three weeks waiting for the office furniture to arrive. We had old PC cases for stools, propped the monitors and keyboards on top of PC cases, and coded hunched over. :)
We had touchscreen systems from HP back when I worked for Nortel supporting their shop floor. These rugged little beasties worked 24x7 without any sort of "calibration", with only one terminal out of a couple hundred failing during the two years I supported the shop floor.
Mind you the "buttons" on the HP's were a lot smaller than the touch areas of a voting booth, so the HP's had to be more accurate.
Bottom line is that the voting machines are using a flawed touchscreen technology. Probably yet another case of over-engineering the solution to use the latest "cool" technology instead of something that was tried and tested.
ARM chips are famous for including special instructions and supporting silicon for things like MPEG4 encoding/decoding, MP3 encode/decode, etc. The "main" CPU core isn't involved in these "streaming" instructions, just the parameter setups for them. Given enough "heavy CPU" workloads implemented as custom silicon, the main CPU on an ARM chip can be relatively idle as all the heavy lifting is done by the stream coprocessors.
I just installed the upgrade on WinXP and not one reboot was required.
There are a lot of "Oracle required" situations that can be serviced by http://www.enterprisedb.com/
They provide an implementation of PL/SQL for PostgreSQL with commercial support.
The pages that come up for "mysql.com" are what I consider to be the "official" version of MySQL.
I didn't even realize the other pages were out there until this article was posted and I started reading the comments.
Not that it matters much -- I'm an http://www.postgresql.org/ fan myself.
I was thinking more along the lines of them arguing about the share ratios of BitTorrent users, and how you haven't even done so much as borrow a copy unless you're seeding back to more than a 1.0 share ratio. Just because your IP got caught in a sweep doesn't mean you were "really" seeding the torrent in question, or it just might be a "dead" torrent without a lot of downloaders so you can't get your share ratio up.
Moving system images around isn't that tough to do, but moving the context of that image and it's data are still challenges that lead to differences between the VM providers. If it were as simple as "provide an image", then there wouldn't be much of a market for the cloud computing providers to compete over.
This is a young industry. It's far too early to try to standardize on stacks beyond those being provided by the players in the cloud industry. Sure one could pick a stack of best-of-breed FOSS solutions for the raw technology, but that's not going to address the real interoperability costs of getting the raw data closer to the users without losing integrity.
The page-a-day analogy is a good one. It really shows how weak the argument/defense is, and I really hope they have something better for their day in court. Otherwise they're just opening up the BitTorrent community to a general attack at the ISP level.
If you have the skills for programming, you can break into the market based on experience rather than a degree. But if you don't have a rich resume of experience built up during the boom, you don't have the leverage for a job during the bust.
That will still be an issue in a few years when you complete the degree. Many places won't even look at a resume that doesn't mention a degree any more. (And it's all automated, so they literally don't see your resume!)
Or else you're posting something you know you shouldn't be.
I wonder how significant the market share of the retailer that dropped the Mature games was? Is it a Wal-Mart with market share, or a local chain with only a few outlets?
Plus there is the minor side issue that most video games use guns, not knives to inflict damage. It sounds like the proponent of this tax are yet another example of knee-jerk reactionaries with a hate-on for video games and rap music. Why is it that such nutbars are even heard by government, much less seriously considered?
Actually I had McAfee on Windows XP detect a trojan for Linux a few years ago while scanning my downloads directory on my Windows/Internet box.
You just don't see that happening very often because there are so few attacks targetting *nix systems.
I admit I'm puzzled at the issue of "lockdown" myself.
For years whenever we needed to lock down a *nix account, the sysadmins would install the software as root and set up the user accounts in capture mode (i.e. .login starts the X session, and the X session doesn't have the ability to add/remove programs.)
I can't imagine needing to lock down a session any tighter than that, and I've never seen a Windows desktop that was locked down any tighter, either.
The latest release of Safari is indeed fast on Windows, but it didn't give me the option of re-importing my bookmarks from Firefox, so I didn't play with it too much. I liked what I saw, but not enough to switch browsers. Besides, I rather like AdBlockPlus.
Trademarks have to be defended. Psion should have raised an issue with people using the term "netbook" in media long ago. By now the value of the trademark has been distilled, and it's extremely doubtful that they can start enforcing it as a trademark after years of use as a common term.
The term netbook is synonymous with a class of product, just like Kleenex is. How many people actually ask for a "tissue" instead of a "Kleenex"? The term still can't be used to name competing products, but as a description it's tough to defend. (On the other hand I do think Scotties could get away with refering to their "Kleenex" product rather than referring to it as "tissue." Just because the public thinks of them as Kleenex doesn't mean Scotties could mention Kleenex in their advertising.)
I'm starting to think the economy is just an excuse for pay cuts. Last I'd heard Microsoft was still making a very healthy profit.
I've been through the forced reductions myself, but it was while I was contracting for JPMC, and our cuts were based on the post-Y2K "economy." The only ones who should have been hit with the cuts were the mainframe COBOL programmers who no longer had Y2K work to do, but everyone got hit. A couple contractors quit rather than take the pay cut, but they were by far in the minority. (JPMC was a good gig -- worth taking a few bucks cut compared to hellhole client sites.)
I've been waiting for some time now to see a company offering "season sets" or subscriptions to web broadcasts. It's only logical in such a scenario to go straight to the studio for the downloads or streams, rather than going through a "middle man" cable company.
In fact I don't see how the cable companies think they're owed the opportunity to take on web broadcasting. That should be done by the producing studio, not by some arbitrary winner of exclusive rights.
Unfortunately you're all too right -- calling the police is about the only option. Teachers aren't allowed to embarass or "harm" students, corporal punishment is banned, hell you can't even send them to the principle's office because that's "embarassing!"
It hasn't helped Canadian "art" flourish. Quite the opposite -- it's provided funding to drek that no one wants. Commercial art (i.e. TV and radio) needs to be competitive to survive, not propped up by tax dollars. Witness the CBC's abysmal ratings and lack of standout series for the past many years.
An article I read this weekend explained that they're talking about Can-Con for foreign web broadcasters, including some TV channels that internet broadcast from the Phillipines. I don't think I've ever heard a more ludicrous thing -- demanding that foreign stations carry Canadian content!
Rather than bleat about the competition, CBC could do like CTV and start internet broadcasting their series as streaming video. The only CanCon rules I support would be to mandate that Canadian content be internet-enabled so that it can compete. Navel-gazing demands on the content carried by foreign channels is pointless -- there is no way to enforce it and it would be considered as interference by the nations where those channels are based, and rightly so.
I used to be whole-heartedly against sites like TPB because I could afford to buy any DVDs that I wanted. But more and more often I found myself disappointed with the results of the purchase, and more and more often I felt ripped off by yet another over-budgetted "blockbuster" with a lame story.
Eventually I started downloading R5's so I could check out the movie before spending my hard-earned cash on the DVD.
It wasn't too much longer until I realized that Hollywood doesn't produce anything worth buying anymore. The days of movies that I'd watch 3-4 times are gone -- I have trouble sitting through the current crop of drek even once. What's the point of buying something for the collection if it's not worth watching a few times over the course of a couple of years?
TV is in much the same boat. I simply cannot bring myself to believe that it's worth $40-45/month for cable, when I've lived without a TV for three years. Sure I download a lot, but it's old series with episodes that I missed (e.g. I missed seasons 3-4 of Star Trek Deep Space 9 because I was on the road a lot for a couple of years.) What has been catching my interest are "foreign" TV series from the UK and Australia. They still haven't been inundated with "reality" TV as far as I can tell.
What an annoyingly addictive demo! I might actually have to buy a copy... :)
The DTV in Regina, SK is broadcast on VHF channel bands. But I'll be sticking with "regular" SD broadcasts for now -- my TV isn't digital-ready and Canada isn't shutting off the analogue signals until some time in 2011.
Spending money on R&D is not the same as "spending frivolously." The whole point of R&D is to experiment with new technologies, some of which pay off, some of which don't.
Kudos to Microsoft for actually investing in their future, rather than sitting on the cash pile. To hell with the whinging "investors" who expect money for free.