Sadly, this applies to The GIMP as well. I do wish more programs would lazy-load features that are time-consuming.
I can understand why they don't, though... imagine going to the filters menu and then have to wait several seconds while Photoshop/GIMP/whatever iterates over the plugin DLLs/executables/scripts to fill in the menu. Quite annoying - possibly moreso than just waiting those seconds during startup.
Lazy loading doesn't necessarily mean load-on-demand. Why not bring up the main interface, then fire off a bunch of asynchronous jobs to enumerate plugins and such? You could even cache the list of plugins from last run to populate the menu and be right 99% of the time.
I'm running two identical LCD panels here (1600x1200). Looking at the OP's image on my primary DVI-driven panel looks nice. After dragging it across to the VGA-driven one there's noise all over it -- fine horizontal lines flickering up and down. I never realised how bad the signal was before.
Interestingly, moving the image horizontally on the DVI-driven panel results in a lot of flicerking and visible tearing. Doing the same on the VGA-driven panel does not.
There are any number of valuable things that your landlord would be unlikely to accept as payment. Carbon nanotubes, for instance. So, Bitcoin is not (yet? ever?) a viable currency, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
The fact that the system includes the ability to bypass the IP-range-based redirect and see the US version tells me that it's the US version that is more likely to be the censored one. Why bother putting put up a censored version of a page if the censored version is so easily avoided?
From the point of view of someone outside the USA this looks like a move to insulate my content from the Internet censorship movement that is under way in the US congress. Sounds like a positive thing to me.
To me this looks exactly like it is aimed at routing around censorship by or in the USA, and to increase global confidence in Google platforms.
The MegaUpload affair has given the world a very swift kick in the pants. Strategy consultants are recommending that businesses not deal with any US-based service providers, nor rely on hosts using any US-controlled TLDs. Google are now telling us that, hey the FBI might make us take down your megawhatsit.blogspot.com site, but the visitors you actually care about will still see your site at megahwhatsit.blogspot.co.nz.
There's other drawbacks, though; the home equity loan is variable rate, and generally much higher than a fixed-rate mortgage.
Variable rate is more or less the norm in Australia. Fixed rate is generally available for up to the first 3 years (sometimes more), but the rate depends on which way the bank thinks interest rates are moving, and even if rates are falling (putting fixed rate below variable), the longer fixed terms tend to have higher rates because there's increased risk to the lender that they're selling themselves short.
I do this too, because I earn 6.5% p.a. tax free on the cash that I don't spend until the end of the month.
How do I get 6.5% tax free? Mortgage offset account. These things are apparently a lot less common outside Australia, but basically I have a savings account which, rather than paying interest, reduces the balance used to calculate my monthly mortgage interest. Home loan interest rate is 6.5%, so that's what I effectively earn on my savings, and because it's applied as a discount, not paid as interest, it's not taxed.
Actually you have no idea who "won" because the preference of everyone who voted for the 3rd+ place getters was discarded. Without runoff elections or a preferential voting system you have absolutely no idea who is the preferred candidate out of Romney and Santorum. The discarded votes were more than the votes for Romney and Santorum combined.
You're confusing (classic) ASP with ASP.NET. That's about the same as confusing GWBasic with Java.
PHP is quite similar to classic ASP. ASP was really just a simple web API and COM-object container, but almost all code for it was written in VBScript, so it makes sense to consider those together.
ASP exposes request, cookie, response objects, PHP has $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE arrays and some functions for manipulating the response (echo, header). Both have some kind of session storage, and both provide database access (ADO and PDO respectively). Neither provides "framework" type functionality, like HTML widget and form generation and processing, MVC structures, template engine, authentication/identity services, etc.
As far as the actual language and class/function library, PHP has always been much richer than VBScript (which lacks even a native associative array data type). Java and the.NET framework probably equal or surpass PHP in their native utility functions.
Why not charge a support subscription past the EoL date? Microsoft get their revenue, and for large businesses it would probably be cheaper to pay the subscription for years rather than run an upgrade project. Buy new machines with Windows 7, and let the XP ones slowly fade away over the next 5+ years.
Thus they create the obvious solution: Elect really showy Presidents who have no power actual power to distract people from the secret guy hidden away somewhere who makes all the important decisions.
Much more like reality.
Have you seen any episodes of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister? This is exactly how they paint the British government. Politicians come and go, but the civil servants of the various departments remain, and it's they who make the real decisions.
Where "crap" is defined as anything that doesn't work the way it used to, ie err.... new.
There are a number of design decisions in Unity at least (have not tried Gnome 3 yet) which are most certainly crap, where "crap" is defined as something that flies in the face of decades of human-computer-interface research. Here's a few:
1. Ubuntu 11.10 uses a top-of-screen global menu bar like Mac OS/OS X. The (legitimate) rationale behind this type of menu is an effectively infinite vertical size, which makes the menus easy to target with the mouse as per Fitt's Law. But Ubuntu hides these menus when the mouse is not over the menu bar, thus making it completely impossible to target the menu you want as you move the mouse up the screen.
2. Ubuntu 11.04 provides a user setting for focus-follows-mouse, rather than click-to-focus. This is completely incompatible with the global menu system, but there is no corresponding option to turn off those global menus (you have to uninstall a bunch of packages to do that). I.e. the simplified" options panel provides a checkbox that might as well be labeled "break my desktop". They appear to have "fixed" this one in 11.10 by removing the focus-follows-mouse option.
3. The application task bar is replaced by a window "spread" like Mac exposé. This system fails when all the windows of an application look nearly identical e.g. terminal windows, screens full of code, spreadsheets, long text documents. It also replaces a single click operation, accelerated by the fact that you can quickly learn where specific windows are in a taskbar, with a two-click process -- three if you're switching apps, not just windows within an app. What's more, you have to wait for two animations -- the dock slide in (again, can't target the button you want until it's visible) and then the spread effect. (This was also even more broken in 11.04, because the window previews would move around between invocations of the spread function, so you really had no idea which one was which. At least they're learning a little.)
Have seen our supermarkets stocking halloween stuff... go away unwanted American culture
Australia is a multi-cultural society. Why should North American culture be excluded from that? Are you offended when you see Lunar New Year decorations or Bar Mitzvah cards on display?
Halloween isn't even an American feast day (like, say, Thanksgiving), it's a Gaelic tradition from Britain and Ireland that the Americans happen to have taken a particular shine to.
According to the ever-reliable wikipedia, Scandium has "traditionally" been classified with the rare earth metal on account of chemical similarity to the lanthanoid elements, and generally being found in nature alongside said elements.
I'm very happy with the Airport Extreme in terms of stability. I think mine has locked up maybe once in a year, which is much better going than any other consumer wifi/router device I've ever owned. I run it as the main router for my house, and PPPoE endpoint (with an ADSL modem/router in bridge mode), with 5 GHz 802.11n. A separate ultra-cheap AP runs on 2.4 GHz for iPhones and guests without 5 GHz support.
However, like many Apple products, the firmware isn't particularly user-configurable and I've not been able to get any Linux-based configuration utilities working on Ubuntu. If you don't have a Mac or Windows machine handy, changing settings and upgrading firmware would be a pain. It's also lacking PPPv6 support, at least in the version I have, so I can't join my ISP's IPv6 network without tunneling.
Matt Tomasello for: echo 'Usage: cat FILE | skein [ARGS]'
I find this kind of pedantry a bit dull. When I'm hacking around on things at the command line I almost always use that form. If you're building up a pipeline of various parts to get something done, and you need to insert at the beginning, or reorder components, it's much easier if the input to the pipeline is a clean, separate term.
Trivial example: cat FILE | foo is easily edited to head FILE | foo in a way that foo < FILE is not.
Interesting question: with a Gb downlink, how long would it take to use up the miserly monthly throughput quotas that ISPs in some countries are imposing? A 1Gb/sec downlink would exhaust a 100GB quota in about 15 minutes, for example.
The quotas are there as a roundabout way of dealing with the back-haul and peering bandwidth contention*. No ISP could afford a dedicated 1 Gbps full path to the Internet per subscriber, and if they had it, it would go unused for a large fraction of the time. If the consumer end bandwidth goes up, the ISPs will have to get more backhaul and peering bandwidth to keep a decent contention ratio, or the system will grind to a halt at peak time and subscribers will get mad. Thus, quotas can and will go up. This assumes, of course, a system where there is free-market competition, e.g. multiple providers leasing access to a common fiber network.
*Yes, the quota system is a bit silly, because it takes little account of when the bandwidth was used, and at what rate. Someone pulling down a 5 GB movie at full speed during peak time is more of an imposition on the network than someone who leeches it slowly overnight. However, it's a simple metric that the buying public can understand. "You can download X movies per month" is much easier for users to comprehend, and to monitor, than 95th-percentile billing.
It's probably the future for a few types of games, and will be popular with a segment of the market, but I'd say at the extreme low and high end it won't be popular.
Hand-held, mobile gaming isn't going to have the bandwidth, nor the always-online capability (I want to play Angry Birds on the subway).
At the other end, so long as home hardware (console and PC) can render better content faster than the network can stream good-quality video there will be a market for high-def gaming.
Then there's the extremely latency-sensitive games, which I can't see ever working. Traditional game engines can deal with network latency by calculating collisions and other things client-side, but they can't handle the interface lag that you're going to get with this type of system. Building out infrastructure to get good latency to all markets would be terribly expensive.
If a trademark owner has to pay again each year to prevent their registered trademark from being used in each TLD, that sounds like a "protection racket" to me. And when they keep adding new TLDs, the cost and effort keeps rising each year. I don't know what the solution is, but the current system definitely resembles "paying for protection".
The solution is arbitrary, non-exclusive, TLDs.
If there is a (potentially) infinite number of TLDs then these land-grabs and protection rackets become impossible. Just like how, the.com namespace right now, you cannot defensively buy every variation of insult couple with your brand. You might grab mybrand-sucks.com, and boycott-mybrand.com, but you miss mybrands-mother-was-a-hamster.com and all the rest. You wait and reactively fight these kinds of things with court injunctions when they become troublesome.
Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.
No, it won't.
The NBN will simply provide layer-2 pipes to ISPs. The ISPs will issue IP addresses, handle routing and all that jazz. If an ISP wants to set up a fully encrypted back-haul (say using L2TP/IPSec VPN) then they're free to do so.
If the government want to control the data moving over the NBN they'll do it by legislation, just like they would do with the current model (ISP-over-Telstra-copper), not by deep packet inspection or DNS blocking.
My guess it will be that outside the Capital Cities it will be 100Mbps shared between all connections... which will probably end up being slower that the current system of Telstra enabling an ADSL2+ Exchange with an 8MBps backhaul, and then selling dozens of 20Mbps connections to the houses connected to it.
Also... thousands of "remote" users currently on ADSL or ADSL2+ will be relegated to NBN Wireless
This is all complete nonsense. The initial spec for the NBN is 2.5 Gbps downstream per GPON (not more than 64 homes) scaling to 40 Gbps, nothing like "100 Mbps shared between all connections". This fiber will then connect your house back to one of 22 points of interconnect, where ISPs will have connectivity (or rent it from a backbone provider). If the ISPs choose to under-provision their non-capital PoPs, that's really no change from today, but there's no reason to believe an ISP would cripple themselves with a 100 Mbps back-haul.
Telstra will also be able to maintain their copper network in places not serviced by NBN fiber. Indeed, they are obliged to continue phone service to these customers for at least 10 years under Universal Service Obligation. so why not run ADSL over those wires too?
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CouchDB has native map-reduce indexing of arbitrary fields of the stored data. Doesn't appear to be anything new here in that regard.
Sadly, this applies to The GIMP as well. I do wish more programs would lazy-load features that are time-consuming.
I can understand why they don't, though... imagine going to the filters menu and then have to wait several seconds while Photoshop/GIMP/whatever iterates over the plugin DLLs/executables/scripts to fill in the menu. Quite annoying - possibly moreso than just waiting those seconds during startup.
Lazy loading doesn't necessarily mean load-on-demand. Why not bring up the main interface, then fire off a bunch of asynchronous jobs to enumerate plugins and such? You could even cache the list of plugins from last run to populate the menu and be right 99% of the time.
I'm running two identical LCD panels here (1600x1200). Looking at the OP's image on my primary DVI-driven panel looks nice. After dragging it across to the VGA-driven one there's noise all over it -- fine horizontal lines flickering up and down. I never realised how bad the signal was before.
Interestingly, moving the image horizontally on the DVI-driven panel results in a lot of flicerking and visible tearing. Doing the same on the VGA-driven panel does not.
I beat on it all day for SEO, backlink analysis, video editing
Two guesses what business AC is in :-)
There are any number of valuable things that your landlord would be unlikely to accept as payment. Carbon nanotubes, for instance. So, Bitcoin is not (yet? ever?) a viable currency, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
The fact that the system includes the ability to bypass the IP-range-based redirect and see the US version tells me that it's the US version that is more likely to be the censored one. Why bother putting put up a censored version of a page if the censored version is so easily avoided?
From the point of view of someone outside the USA this looks like a move to insulate my content from the Internet censorship movement that is under way in the US congress. Sounds like a positive thing to me.
To me this looks exactly like it is aimed at routing around censorship by or in the USA, and to increase global confidence in Google platforms.
The MegaUpload affair has given the world a very swift kick in the pants. Strategy consultants are recommending that businesses not deal with any US-based service providers, nor rely on hosts using any US-controlled TLDs. Google are now telling us that, hey the FBI might make us take down your megawhatsit.blogspot.com site, but the visitors you actually care about will still see your site at megahwhatsit.blogspot.co.nz.
There's other drawbacks, though; the home equity loan is variable rate, and generally much higher than a fixed-rate mortgage.
Variable rate is more or less the norm in Australia. Fixed rate is generally available for up to the first 3 years (sometimes more), but the rate depends on which way the bank thinks interest rates are moving, and even if rates are falling (putting fixed rate below variable), the longer fixed terms tend to have higher rates because there's increased risk to the lender that they're selling themselves short.
I do this too, because I earn 6.5% p.a. tax free on the cash that I don't spend until the end of the month.
How do I get 6.5% tax free? Mortgage offset account. These things are apparently a lot less common outside Australia, but basically I have a savings account which, rather than paying interest, reduces the balance used to calculate my monthly mortgage interest. Home loan interest rate is 6.5%, so that's what I effectively earn on my savings, and because it's applied as a discount, not paid as interest, it's not taxed.
Actually you have no idea who "won" because the preference of everyone who voted for the 3rd+ place getters was discarded. Without runoff elections or a preferential voting system you have absolutely no idea who is the preferred candidate out of Romney and Santorum. The discarded votes were more than the votes for Romney and Santorum combined.
You're confusing (classic) ASP with ASP.NET. That's about the same as confusing GWBasic with Java.
PHP is quite similar to classic ASP. ASP was really just a simple web API and COM-object container, but almost all code for it was written in VBScript, so it makes sense to consider those together.
ASP exposes request, cookie, response objects, PHP has $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE arrays and some functions for manipulating the response (echo, header). Both have some kind of session storage, and both provide database access (ADO and PDO respectively). Neither provides "framework" type functionality, like HTML widget and form generation and processing, MVC structures, template engine, authentication/identity services, etc.
As far as the actual language and class/function library, PHP has always been much richer than VBScript (which lacks even a native associative array data type). Java and the .NET framework probably equal or surpass PHP in their native utility functions.
Why not charge a support subscription past the EoL date? Microsoft get their revenue, and for large businesses it would probably be cheaper to pay the subscription for years rather than run an upgrade project. Buy new machines with Windows 7, and let the XP ones slowly fade away over the next 5+ years.
Thus they create the obvious solution: Elect really showy Presidents who have no power actual power to distract people from the secret guy hidden away somewhere who makes all the important decisions.
Much more like reality.
Have you seen any episodes of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister? This is exactly how they paint the British government. Politicians come and go, but the civil servants of the various departments remain, and it's they who make the real decisions.
Where "crap" is defined as anything that doesn't work the way it used to, ie err.... new.
There are a number of design decisions in Unity at least (have not tried Gnome 3 yet) which are most certainly crap, where "crap" is defined as something that flies in the face of decades of human-computer-interface research. Here's a few:
1. Ubuntu 11.10 uses a top-of-screen global menu bar like Mac OS/OS X. The (legitimate) rationale behind this type of menu is an effectively infinite vertical size, which makes the menus easy to target with the mouse as per Fitt's Law. But Ubuntu hides these menus when the mouse is not over the menu bar, thus making it completely impossible to target the menu you want as you move the mouse up the screen.
2. Ubuntu 11.04 provides a user setting for focus-follows-mouse, rather than click-to-focus. This is completely incompatible with the global menu system, but there is no corresponding option to turn off those global menus (you have to uninstall a bunch of packages to do that). I.e. the simplified" options panel provides a checkbox that might as well be labeled "break my desktop". They appear to have "fixed" this one in 11.10 by removing the focus-follows-mouse option.
3. The application task bar is replaced by a window "spread" like Mac exposé. This system fails when all the windows of an application look nearly identical e.g. terminal windows, screens full of code, spreadsheets, long text documents. It also replaces a single click operation, accelerated by the fact that you can quickly learn where specific windows are in a taskbar, with a two-click process -- three if you're switching apps, not just windows within an app. What's more, you have to wait for two animations -- the dock slide in (again, can't target the button you want until it's visible) and then the spread effect. (This was also even more broken in 11.04, because the window previews would move around between invocations of the spread function, so you really had no idea which one was which. At least they're learning a little.)
Have seen our supermarkets stocking halloween stuff... go away unwanted American culture
Australia is a multi-cultural society. Why should North American culture be excluded from that? Are you offended when you see Lunar New Year decorations or Bar Mitzvah cards on display?
Halloween isn't even an American feast day (like, say, Thanksgiving), it's a Gaelic tradition from Britain and Ireland that the Americans happen to have taken a particular shine to.
According to the ever-reliable wikipedia, Scandium has "traditionally" been classified with the rare earth metal on account of chemical similarity to the lanthanoid elements, and generally being found in nature alongside said elements.
I'm very happy with the Airport Extreme in terms of stability. I think mine has locked up maybe once in a year, which is much better going than any other consumer wifi/router device I've ever owned. I run it as the main router for my house, and PPPoE endpoint (with an ADSL modem/router in bridge mode), with 5 GHz 802.11n. A separate ultra-cheap AP runs on 2.4 GHz for iPhones and guests without 5 GHz support.
However, like many Apple products, the firmware isn't particularly user-configurable and I've not been able to get any Linux-based configuration utilities working on Ubuntu. If you don't have a Mac or Windows machine handy, changing settings and upgrading firmware would be a pain. It's also lacking PPPv6 support, at least in the version I have, so I can't join my ISP's IPv6 network without tunneling.
Matt Tomasello for:
echo 'Usage: cat FILE | skein [ARGS]'
I find this kind of pedantry a bit dull. When I'm hacking around on things at the command line I almost always use that form. If you're building up a pipeline of various parts to get something done, and you need to insert at the beginning, or reorder components, it's much easier if the input to the pipeline is a clean, separate term.
Trivial example:
cat FILE | foo is easily edited to head FILE | foo in a way that foo < FILE is not.
This is supposed to be sarcasm, right? Fractional reserve banking actually creates money. It doesn't create an artificial scarcity.
Interesting question: with a Gb downlink, how long would it take to use up the miserly monthly throughput quotas that ISPs in some countries are imposing? A 1Gb/sec downlink would exhaust a 100GB quota in about 15 minutes, for example.
The quotas are there as a roundabout way of dealing with the back-haul and peering bandwidth contention*. No ISP could afford a dedicated 1 Gbps full path to the Internet per subscriber, and if they had it, it would go unused for a large fraction of the time. If the consumer end bandwidth goes up, the ISPs will have to get more backhaul and peering bandwidth to keep a decent contention ratio, or the system will grind to a halt at peak time and subscribers will get mad. Thus, quotas can and will go up. This assumes, of course, a system where there is free-market competition, e.g. multiple providers leasing access to a common fiber network.
*Yes, the quota system is a bit silly, because it takes little account of when the bandwidth was used, and at what rate. Someone pulling down a 5 GB movie at full speed during peak time is more of an imposition on the network than someone who leeches it slowly overnight. However, it's a simple metric that the buying public can understand. "You can download X movies per month" is much easier for users to comprehend, and to monitor, than 95th-percentile billing.
The Internet used to be pirate radio, a speakeasy, and the underground press rolled together.
Now it's television.
It's probably the future for a few types of games, and will be popular with a segment of the market, but I'd say at the extreme low and high end it won't be popular.
Hand-held, mobile gaming isn't going to have the bandwidth, nor the always-online capability (I want to play Angry Birds on the subway).
At the other end, so long as home hardware (console and PC) can render better content faster than the network can stream good-quality video there will be a market for high-def gaming.
Then there's the extremely latency-sensitive games, which I can't see ever working. Traditional game engines can deal with network latency by calculating collisions and other things client-side, but they can't handle the interface lag that you're going to get with this type of system. Building out infrastructure to get good latency to all markets would be terribly expensive.
If a trademark owner has to pay again each year to prevent their registered trademark from being used in each TLD, that sounds like a "protection racket" to me. And when they keep adding new TLDs, the cost and effort keeps rising each year. I don't know what the solution is, but the current system definitely resembles "paying for protection".
The solution is arbitrary, non-exclusive, TLDs.
If there is a (potentially) infinite number of TLDs then these land-grabs and protection rackets become impossible. Just like how, the .com namespace right now, you cannot defensively buy every variation of insult couple with your brand. You might grab mybrand-sucks.com, and boycott-mybrand.com, but you miss mybrands-mother-was-a-hamster.com and all the rest. You wait and reactively fight these kinds of things with court injunctions when they become troublesome.
Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.
No, it won't.
The NBN will simply provide layer-2 pipes to ISPs. The ISPs will issue IP addresses, handle routing and all that jazz. If an ISP wants to set up a fully encrypted back-haul (say using L2TP/IPSec VPN) then they're free to do so.
If the government want to control the data moving over the NBN they'll do it by legislation, just like they would do with the current model (ISP-over-Telstra-copper), not by deep packet inspection or DNS blocking.
My guess it will be that outside the Capital Cities it will be 100Mbps shared between all connections... which will probably end up being slower that the current system of Telstra enabling an ADSL2+ Exchange with an 8MBps backhaul, and then selling dozens of 20Mbps connections to the houses connected to it.
Also... thousands of "remote" users currently on ADSL or ADSL2+ will be relegated to NBN Wireless
This is all complete nonsense. The initial spec for the NBN is 2.5 Gbps downstream per GPON (not more than 64 homes) scaling to 40 Gbps, nothing like "100 Mbps shared between all connections". This fiber will then connect your house back to one of 22 points of interconnect, where ISPs will have connectivity (or rent it from a backbone provider). If the ISPs choose to under-provision their non-capital PoPs, that's really no change from today, but there's no reason to believe an ISP would cripple themselves with a 100 Mbps back-haul.
Telstra will also be able to maintain their copper network in places not serviced by NBN fiber. Indeed, they are obliged to continue phone service to these customers for at least 10 years under Universal Service Obligation. so why not run ADSL over those wires too?
References:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1511009
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/broadband/national_broadband_network/nbn_policy_statements