There's one important difference between calling back numbers from a pager and using someone's texting service to impersonate them that I think the judge forgot.
When you call back a paged number, your voice is being heard by the "target" of the sting. If the target is too stupid to realize they're not talking to the person they paged, they're fair game for getting burned by the police.
But when you use someone's text messaging service, there is no indication that you're not "talking" to the person you think you are. In my mind, that takes it up a notch into "entrapment."
That's an interesting theory you have there, but I'd like to know what features it is that consumers want that are only available with a large screen. I did a bit of shopping recently, and none of the sales reps or literature mentioned anything that the large-screen phones could do that the small-screen ones couldn't, at least with Android-based models from the same manufacturer.
I know many people who bought large-screen phones because they watch video and view pictures on their phone far, far more than they use it for calls. However, they've pretty much reached the limit of pocket size. Once the phone won't fit in someone's shirt pocket, they're not interested in it as a phone and seem more likely to opt for a full-scale tablet instead.
I know very few people who make heavy use of smart phones as phones. The heavy phone users still seem to prefer older, smaller devices whose screens are completely useless for displaying photos or browsing the 'net, much less watching a video.
I suspect most people who buy smart phones are like my friends: they need/want a portable internet device more than they want to make phone calls. Technically they have to be able to make phone calls, but it's the "extras" that guide their buying choices because every cell phone can make a call, right down to the $30 clamshell phones.
I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to "plug in" any text input widget you choose with a decently designed device. It would make supporting languages other than English a hell of a lot easier, and it would let people opt for things like stylus/printing interfaces instead of virtual keyboards.
Frankly I'd be shocked if the Qwerty soft keyboards were hard coded -- companies would be locking themselves out of non-English markets, and that's not good global thinking or marketing.
Myself, I hate virtual keyboards of all kinds. I'd much rather use a stylus with handwriting recognition.
Apple's problem is the EPEAT certification is required by government. If you don't meet the requirements, your bid won't even pass the first round of competition.
Period.
It doesn't matter how "cool" or "popular" your devices are -- you lose the bid.
They made their design decisions knowing they wouldn't be EPEAT certified, now it's time to suck up the result: lost business.
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
Until the bottom line is the corporate future instead of the shareholder payout, it won't change, either.
Re:Ok, can the charade and let's get over with it.
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
·
· Score: 1
Those of us who oppose the law feel the same way.
Just stop tabling this bullshit already and let's get on with life. We'll never let you get away with ACTA under any guise without protest.
But that's the way of all "just give up" platforms, isn't it? You always want the other guy to give up.
Personally I still don't understand what need there is to replace X. Instead of replacing X entirely, how about just fixing the few remaining bugs that are affecting people and causing server crashes? It would seem to be a lot less work to do so than to start from scratch with a new bug^H^H^H^code base.
is X old? Sure. But it was well designed for what it was intended to do, and as I'm not one of those people affected by server crashes, I'm perfectly happy with it.
The simple truth is executives will always dig up old ideas and put them forth as "game changers" because they have absolutely NO creativity in them. ALL they're good at is juggling numbers and tweaking spreadsheets. They have NO intuitive grasp of technology, manufacturing, or any of the other resources they manage.
We swung from all-in-house development before Y2K to everyone offshoring to dirt-cheap (crappy) providers and destroying corporate systems and integrity as a result. Now we're swinging back to in-house development, and the same old problems will resurface because no matter how you rejig the spreadsheets, some truths remain fact:
Skilled developers are rare.
It takes skill to develop good software.
Most of the people employed as contractors or employees are not particularly skilled, just "competent".
Complex systems take a long time to develop.
Users will never include all the features on the initial specs, and will demand dramatic changes to appease their "enhancements" (which, of course, they'll have no budget to pay for with.)
It's not unlike the "language of the week" -- the concept that if we just change to technology "X", all the problems we're having will disappear.
There are no silver bullets. Good software takes time, money, and skill and it doesn't matter whether those skillsets come from internal or external people. The bottom line is most of the people you pay to develop software are as useful as tits on a boar.
What I find ironic is that the fellow who refused to make the sale did so because she was speaking his own language. If it's illegal for a Farsi speaker to buy an iPad, how the hell can it be legal for a Farsi speaker to be in a position of controlling the sales of the devices? Surely he's the greater risk for arranging exports to "unfriendly" nations!
I've worked for a few companies while Accenture handled projects over the years, and also "inherited" projects that were originally developed by Accenture.
Without exception, every project of theirs that I've encountered has been poorly engineered, poorly coded, comes with thousands of pages of documentation that tells you nothing about the high level design of the system, and were coded by the cheapest underpaid grunts they could find.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who hires Accenture deserves to get shafted by their overcharging and errors, because all you have to do is trawl the newspapers to see a long, long history of litigation for failure to deliver. Anyone signing a contract with them is either not doing their due diligence, or they're getting a kickback of some kind. I don't believe for a second that anyone who has done their due diligence and investigated the company's history for non-delivery would ever sign them on.
I'd have to disagree. One of the key things an IDE buys you is an automated build. So instead of learning a bazillion compiler options, make, ant, and other tools used to control the build process, you just write the code in the IDE, click on debug, and you're off and tracing through your code.
I think one of the most valuable things an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio gives a new programmer is the ability to step through their code and see what it's actually doing, line by line.
You just can't get that kind of an education from command line tools without a lot more work than it takes to learn the basics of an IDE. You don't need to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and such for an IDE in order to use it.
That's a nice theory, but in reality they gene engineer entire strands of DNA in most cases, not just a few targetted genes. So our current level of GM technology is no better than old fashioned hybridization in terms of targetting specific traits.
Worse, we really don't have a detailed understanding of genetics and their interactions. We know that specific genes affect traits, but we don't know how all the genes that affect those traits interact. We are jumping the gun with our current efforts, and it is not only possible but very likely that we're going to create some truly monstrous mutations in the near future.
Worse, we have no idea what the long term interactions of the GM genetics will be. GMs are not sterile. They are mixing with native crops and infesting the gene pool; Monsanto and others rely on that infestation to sue farmers they claim are "stealing" their technology when their pollen infests neighbouring crops, and blocking farmers from using their own crops as seed stock.
Personally I have far greater faith in the productivity of "land race" genetics produced by self-seeding crop land with last year's seed for 15-20 years sequentially. You end up with a plant that is tailor grown for the specific environment, whereas a GM crop is a shotgun approach that is tailored for a specific trait rather than the general growing conditions of the environment.
As far as I'm concerned, GM crops to date have one purpose and one purpose only: to sell more pesticides and herbicides.
Welfare and disability programs are what North America implements as their "social" programs. Canada fares slightly better than the US in that we have socialized medicine and no lifetime limits to medical benefits, but those who are employed cover that expense through higher taxes than I used to pay in the US.
But on either side of the border, if you're unlucky enough to become disabled (as I have: chronic, severe migraines), the "social safety net" means looking forward to a lifetime of poverty. Sure I get enough to pay for basic expenses, but I only have about $100/month left over to cover "extras" like clothing, furniture, or "toys".
I don't own a TV so I don't have a cable bill, but if I did, that would mean I'd only have about $50/month left over for food and clothes. Yay torrents!
I spent 30 years programming. I made good money, but lived in high priced areas and wasn't able to save a lot. When I was finally unable to work for a living, my savings lasted me two years. I've never owned a home because I had to move every 2-3 years, so tying myself down with property would have been foolish.
Socialism is a great concept, but the reality is that everyone I know who lives in countries that are more "socialist" than Canada also live pretty much at the poverty line. They can look forward to a lifetime of subsistance living. Granted, having a place to live at all is a benefit, but quite frankly, you don't want to live in the neighbourhoods you can afford to live in on social services or disability in Canada. And if you move to a small town thinking to save money, you'll find your benefits cut because the rents aren't so high, so you still end up living in slum conditions.
Competition is good, and it looks like the Chinese are proving very competitive in the space race. I'm sure there will be those who claim they "stole" the technology, but regardless of how they acquired the ideas, it's still the Chinese people and industry who are making it work. And as we all know from the failed launches of other nations, even having access to an internet full of historical designs and ideas doesn't make space technology work.
I'm not even sure they will be a "prosumer" market for this concept.
Let's say you went cheap and got a speaker for each channel for $100 (which would be an absolute steal.) That would still be $6200 worth of speakers. Then you have to add in wiring for 62 speakers at at least $0.25/foot, terminators at at least $5/cable for the cable ends, 62 interconnects for at least $10 each, and amplifiers. With the sheer number of amplifiers required, count on also needing a whole schiteload of standard 115V circuits to feed them power. So we're looking at around $15,000 for bargain basement Wal-Mart-is-jealous pricing.
Now scale that up to realistic pricing instead of bargain basement, and I'd be shocked if anyone could set up one of these systems for under $50,000.
The market for $50,000 audio systems is very small.
If you covered the entire property of a typical single-family home with solar panels (*all* of it, not just the roof of the house/garage), you still wouldn't be able to take in enough energy to charge a typical eCar in under a week. While solar is fine as a subsidizing power supply for a very efficiently set up home, it is not feasible to charge eCars from solar unless you can literally dedicate acres to solar cells.
It's basic physics and energy that's your enemy, not some "hidden agenda" by the oil companies.
More to the point, it means foreign courts so that the accused can receive the due process their home nations require.
SOPA isn't just about due process; it's about international law and whether any one nation has the right to impose their laws on other nations. And the USG just is not grasping the essential fact that they do not rule the world, no matter how many nukes and how much the US spends on it's military.
Worst of all, she's in denial about the fact that SOPA wasn't talking about site blocking, but removing DNS entries, a far different procedure than blocking, and far more damaging to the internet when combined with the lack of due process.
Download.com serves the world with software. It would seem to me that the RIAA should be suing or charging the authors of the software, not a download site. It's not like a takedown notice where the RIAA claims to own the materials being distributed.
But hey, when you can buy a government, I guess you can try pretty much any asinine ploy you choose.
To be fair, the summary article asks what people's experience has been with NVidia drivers, so take a pill. The article is not just about the kernel developer's experience; it's asking about deployment experiences.
And on that note: I've never had anything but rock-solid performance from NVidia's drivers. However, the only custom kernel building I've had to do for several years is building the wanpipe module for telecommunications.
I always get a laugh when I see people talking about how "business travellers" overpay for executive/first class seats.
We used to fly first class on one of my contracts because last minute tickets (the only way we could book with unpredictable schedules) often found the large number of first/executive class seats selling for up to $100 less than the few remaining coach seats! Who in their right mind would pay more for less?
Slashdot Mirror
There's one important difference between calling back numbers from a pager and using someone's texting service to impersonate them that I think the judge forgot.
When you call back a paged number, your voice is being heard by the "target" of the sting. If the target is too stupid to realize they're not talking to the person they paged, they're fair game for getting burned by the police.
But when you use someone's text messaging service, there is no indication that you're not "talking" to the person you think you are. In my mind, that takes it up a notch into "entrapment."
That's an interesting theory you have there, but I'd like to know what features it is that consumers want that are only available with a large screen. I did a bit of shopping recently, and none of the sales reps or literature mentioned anything that the large-screen phones could do that the small-screen ones couldn't, at least with Android-based models from the same manufacturer.
I know many people who bought large-screen phones because they watch video and view pictures on their phone far, far more than they use it for calls. However, they've pretty much reached the limit of pocket size. Once the phone won't fit in someone's shirt pocket, they're not interested in it as a phone and seem more likely to opt for a full-scale tablet instead.
I know very few people who make heavy use of smart phones as phones. The heavy phone users still seem to prefer older, smaller devices whose screens are completely useless for displaying photos or browsing the 'net, much less watching a video.
I suspect most people who buy smart phones are like my friends: they need/want a portable internet device more than they want to make phone calls. Technically they have to be able to make phone calls, but it's the "extras" that guide their buying choices because every cell phone can make a call, right down to the $30 clamshell phones.
I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to "plug in" any text input widget you choose with a decently designed device. It would make supporting languages other than English a hell of a lot easier, and it would let people opt for things like stylus/printing interfaces instead of virtual keyboards.
Frankly I'd be shocked if the Qwerty soft keyboards were hard coded -- companies would be locking themselves out of non-English markets, and that's not good global thinking or marketing.
Myself, I hate virtual keyboards of all kinds. I'd much rather use a stylus with handwriting recognition.
Apple's problem is the EPEAT certification is required by government. If you don't meet the requirements, your bid won't even pass the first round of competition.
Period.
It doesn't matter how "cool" or "popular" your devices are -- you lose the bid.
They made their design decisions knowing they wouldn't be EPEAT certified, now it's time to suck up the result: lost business.
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
Until the bottom line is the corporate future instead of the shareholder payout, it won't change, either.
Those of us who oppose the law feel the same way.
Just stop tabling this bullshit already and let's get on with life. We'll never let you get away with ACTA under any guise without protest.
But that's the way of all "just give up" platforms, isn't it? You always want the other guy to give up.
Personally I still don't understand what need there is to replace X. Instead of replacing X entirely, how about just fixing the few remaining bugs that are affecting people and causing server crashes? It would seem to be a lot less work to do so than to start from scratch with a new bug^H^H^H^code base.
is X old? Sure. But it was well designed for what it was intended to do, and as I'm not one of those people affected by server crashes, I'm perfectly happy with it.
The simple truth is executives will always dig up old ideas and put them forth as "game changers" because they have absolutely NO creativity in them. ALL they're good at is juggling numbers and tweaking spreadsheets. They have NO intuitive grasp of technology, manufacturing, or any of the other resources they manage.
We swung from all-in-house development before Y2K to everyone offshoring to dirt-cheap (crappy) providers and destroying corporate systems and integrity as a result. Now we're swinging back to in-house development, and the same old problems will resurface because no matter how you rejig the spreadsheets, some truths remain fact:
It's not unlike the "language of the week" -- the concept that if we just change to technology "X", all the problems we're having will disappear.
There are no silver bullets. Good software takes time, money, and skill and it doesn't matter whether those skillsets come from internal or external people. The bottom line is most of the people you pay to develop software are as useful as tits on a boar.
Just frickin' die already! And stop trying to take the rest of the world with you down your death-spiral.
The world owes you NOTHING.
But we can fix the article's author. They just need to:
apt-get install functioning-brain-cell
What I find ironic is that the fellow who refused to make the sale did so because she was speaking his own language. If it's illegal for a Farsi speaker to buy an iPad, how the hell can it be legal for a Farsi speaker to be in a position of controlling the sales of the devices? Surely he's the greater risk for arranging exports to "unfriendly" nations!
I've worked for a few companies while Accenture handled projects over the years, and also "inherited" projects that were originally developed by Accenture.
Without exception, every project of theirs that I've encountered has been poorly engineered, poorly coded, comes with thousands of pages of documentation that tells you nothing about the high level design of the system, and were coded by the cheapest underpaid grunts they could find.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who hires Accenture deserves to get shafted by their overcharging and errors, because all you have to do is trawl the newspapers to see a long, long history of litigation for failure to deliver. Anyone signing a contract with them is either not doing their due diligence, or they're getting a kickback of some kind. I don't believe for a second that anyone who has done their due diligence and investigated the company's history for non-delivery would ever sign them on.
I'd have to disagree. One of the key things an IDE buys you is an automated build. So instead of learning a bazillion compiler options, make, ant, and other tools used to control the build process, you just write the code in the IDE, click on debug, and you're off and tracing through your code.
I think one of the most valuable things an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio gives a new programmer is the ability to step through their code and see what it's actually doing, line by line.
You just can't get that kind of an education from command line tools without a lot more work than it takes to learn the basics of an IDE. You don't need to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and such for an IDE in order to use it.
That's a nice theory, but in reality they gene engineer entire strands of DNA in most cases, not just a few targetted genes. So our current level of GM technology is no better than old fashioned hybridization in terms of targetting specific traits.
Worse, we really don't have a detailed understanding of genetics and their interactions. We know that specific genes affect traits, but we don't know how all the genes that affect those traits interact. We are jumping the gun with our current efforts, and it is not only possible but very likely that we're going to create some truly monstrous mutations in the near future.
Worse, we have no idea what the long term interactions of the GM genetics will be. GMs are not sterile. They are mixing with native crops and infesting the gene pool; Monsanto and others rely on that infestation to sue farmers they claim are "stealing" their technology when their pollen infests neighbouring crops, and blocking farmers from using their own crops as seed stock.
Personally I have far greater faith in the productivity of "land race" genetics produced by self-seeding crop land with last year's seed for 15-20 years sequentially. You end up with a plant that is tailor grown for the specific environment, whereas a GM crop is a shotgun approach that is tailored for a specific trait rather than the general growing conditions of the environment.
As far as I'm concerned, GM crops to date have one purpose and one purpose only: to sell more pesticides and herbicides.
Welfare and disability programs are what North America implements as their "social" programs. Canada fares slightly better than the US in that we have socialized medicine and no lifetime limits to medical benefits, but those who are employed cover that expense through higher taxes than I used to pay in the US.
But on either side of the border, if you're unlucky enough to become disabled (as I have: chronic, severe migraines), the "social safety net" means looking forward to a lifetime of poverty. Sure I get enough to pay for basic expenses, but I only have about $100/month left over to cover "extras" like clothing, furniture, or "toys".
I don't own a TV so I don't have a cable bill, but if I did, that would mean I'd only have about $50/month left over for food and clothes. Yay torrents!
I spent 30 years programming. I made good money, but lived in high priced areas and wasn't able to save a lot. When I was finally unable to work for a living, my savings lasted me two years. I've never owned a home because I had to move every 2-3 years, so tying myself down with property would have been foolish.
Socialism is a great concept, but the reality is that everyone I know who lives in countries that are more "socialist" than Canada also live pretty much at the poverty line. They can look forward to a lifetime of subsistance living. Granted, having a place to live at all is a benefit, but quite frankly, you don't want to live in the neighbourhoods you can afford to live in on social services or disability in Canada. And if you move to a small town thinking to save money, you'll find your benefits cut because the rents aren't so high, so you still end up living in slum conditions.
if you can call it "living."
Competition is good, and it looks like the Chinese are proving very competitive in the space race. I'm sure there will be those who claim they "stole" the technology, but regardless of how they acquired the ideas, it's still the Chinese people and industry who are making it work. And as we all know from the failed launches of other nations, even having access to an internet full of historical designs and ideas doesn't make space technology work.
Only solid efforts and tenacity do that.
I'm not even sure they will be a "prosumer" market for this concept.
Let's say you went cheap and got a speaker for each channel for $100 (which would be an absolute steal.) That would still be $6200 worth of speakers. Then you have to add in wiring for 62 speakers at at least $0.25/foot, terminators at at least $5/cable for the cable ends, 62 interconnects for at least $10 each, and amplifiers. With the sheer number of amplifiers required, count on also needing a whole schiteload of standard 115V circuits to feed them power. So we're looking at around $15,000 for bargain basement Wal-Mart-is-jealous pricing.
Now scale that up to realistic pricing instead of bargain basement, and I'd be shocked if anyone could set up one of these systems for under $50,000.
The market for $50,000 audio systems is very small.
If you covered the entire property of a typical single-family home with solar panels (*all* of it, not just the roof of the house/garage), you still wouldn't be able to take in enough energy to charge a typical eCar in under a week. While solar is fine as a subsidizing power supply for a very efficiently set up home, it is not feasible to charge eCars from solar unless you can literally dedicate acres to solar cells.
It's basic physics and energy that's your enemy, not some "hidden agenda" by the oil companies.
More to the point, it means foreign courts so that the accused can receive the due process their home nations require.
SOPA isn't just about due process; it's about international law and whether any one nation has the right to impose their laws on other nations. And the USG just is not grasping the essential fact that they do not rule the world, no matter how many nukes and how much the US spends on it's military.
Worst of all, she's in denial about the fact that SOPA wasn't talking about site blocking, but removing DNS entries, a far different procedure than blocking, and far more damaging to the internet when combined with the lack of due process.
Download.com serves the world with software. It would seem to me that the RIAA should be suing or charging the authors of the software, not a download site. It's not like a takedown notice where the RIAA claims to own the materials being distributed.
But hey, when you can buy a government, I guess you can try pretty much any asinine ploy you choose.
They used a toy database that's meant for prototyping and small systems requirements.
Only a complete and utter moron would deploy a multi-user system using Access.
You're allowed to format shift, but you won't be allowed to decrypt to format shift.
Freakin' morons!!!
To be fair, the summary article asks what people's experience has been with NVidia drivers, so take a pill. The article is not just about the kernel developer's experience; it's asking about deployment experiences.
And on that note: I've never had anything but rock-solid performance from NVidia's drivers. However, the only custom kernel building I've had to do for several years is building the wanpipe module for telecommunications.
Yes, but they're going back to their favourite iteration of the UI: Windows 98. :P
I always get a laugh when I see people talking about how "business travellers" overpay for executive/first class seats.
We used to fly first class on one of my contracts because last minute tickets (the only way we could book with unpredictable schedules) often found the large number of first/executive class seats selling for up to $100 less than the few remaining coach seats! Who in their right mind would pay more for less?