The "hour" that's been mentioned is a rough estimate for the amount of work that would need to be done to handle the visa application. It's not an estimated increase of the amount of time that it will take for passengers to travel through an airport.
There will be a significant increase in bureaucracy required to process all these visa applications, which has a significant cost associated with it.
As a potential visitor, having to deal with a more complicated visa application process is hassle, and not appealing. When the application process is draconian and unnecessarily invasive of the privacy of the applicant it is even less appealing.
Historically, over about the past decade up until the pound took a bath following the Brexit vote, Apple have charged very close to the same amount for their products in the UK as in the USA, once one takes VAT into account. The difference for most products has usually been within a few percentage points. Admittedly for some products the difference has been larger, but for their more expensive items the prices have tended to be close.
Occasionally currency fluctuations have meant that some Apple products have been cheaper in the UK than the USA (once VAT is considered) - that was the case when I bought my MacBook Pro a few years ago.
Apple tends to only very rarely adjust their pricing and will generally ride out currency fluctuations, preferring instead to maintain consistent pricing for their products. The adjustments they have made to GBP pricing were done many months after the pound had devalued. Typically their adjustments are done on much longer timescales (years) but as the pound dropped off a cliff it's not surprising they've made these adjustments faster.
In this particular case, this is an automatic re-pricing of apps so that developers around the world won't be taking a bath on product sales to the UK. Those developers can choose to re-price their product at a newly introduced lower price band to let said products continue to be priced at 79p in the UK should they choose to do so.
No - there is no change in where the burden of taxation/VAT lies. Apple have always incorporated sales tax into app store prices.
This is a correction owing to currency devaluations.
The UK Pound is now worth about 25% less than it was six months ago when compared to the US Dollar, therefore they've corrected the GBP prices of apps to reflect the current exchange rate.
For the UK, and this was in a UK paper, that is pretty normal and consistent with most other publications.
Newspapers will measure large distances in miles, as that's what we use for our roads, but short distances in metres, as they're what we are taught in school.
The card payment systems from Square et al that plug into the headphone socket are all obsolete. They're magnetic strip readers, and payments based off the mag-stripe are going the way of the dodo. Over in the US you guys are a bit behind the curve - mag-stripe payments have been dead in Europe for a good few years now, so none of the mag-stripe based payment solutions launched here. Many of the more forward looking payment processors like Square tackled this issue some time back with readers that would support chip and pin, some do contactless too.
A movie theatre's "2K" projector is approximately the same resolution as a "4K" TV, as they both create a picture that's very roughly 4000 pixels wide.
Your point tho is entirely correct - humans aren't equipped with eyes to tell the difference between a 1080 and 2160 (4K) picture from across a room.
England is part of the UK, and the UK remains a member of the European Union.
EU laws apply.
As for Julian Assange, he's holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is Ecuadorian sovereign territory, so technically whilst he remains inside there he's not on UK (or EU) soil. As he's technically in Ecuador which doesn't have an extradition treaty, he's safe there.
I find the notion that there's "pressure to farm it out cheaply and easily to freelancers" to be ludicrous.
I'm a software developer contractor in the UK. This is a relatively new thing for me - in my 20+ year career I've only been a contractor the past two. The last couple of years have been by far the most lucrative of my career. In every gig I've had I've been paid more than twice as much as the most senior permanent developer.
OK, sure, $1.50 CAD isn't much, but if you're transferring say $20 or less it's still a very significant amount. Not a sensible way to pay your buddy $5 for your share of pizza.
Very true. This is a terminal emulator issue. Plus, as it stands, the Terminal.app has preferences that let you define exactly how all the function keys get interpreted.
In my Terminal the configured behaviour of PgDn is to send the key sequence \033[6~ which for all the terminal apps I'm using gets interpreted correctly as a PgDn (e.g. 'less' will scroll down a page). The config for Shift+PgDn is "Scroll Page Down", which will scroll the window. There's a chance that sometime over the past decade I changed those settings, but I suspect they're the defaults.
You do indeed see Safari updates, however it seems to me that the majority of those updates are security fixes.
The issue here is that Safari is getting slow to adopt new web technologies, and slow at fixing problems with the technologies they have adopted.
This has been a relatively recent change, mostly since the WebKit/Blink split. Before then Apple through WebKit (and thus Safari) often led the way with new web technologies, and they were active participants in broader discussions about web standards, and much more open. It's felt as if they've closed off, and become resistant to event attempting to keep up, much less participate.
The WebKit Surfin' Safari blog shows this quite clearly. Long ago the blog used to be regularly updated. In the last year however there's been just three updates, two of those within the last three weeks.
And yet Apple manages to make their iOS updates available to all compatible devices on the day of release, dealing with an order of magnitude more devices than Nexus phones and tablets.
My Nexus 10 had to wait 2 weeks for the 5.0 update to be made available to it, and my Nexus 4 took a month. The story has been the same with every single Android update - I read that an update is available, and then don't see it for weeks or months, no matter how many times I check for updates. In contrast on all my iOS devices never have any wait.
In both cases I get to choose if I want to install the update or not.
I don't buy "OTA releases are staged to avoid overwhelming networks", especially since the sales figures for Nexus devices are relatively small. As for "catch any problems", that is much more believable, but it reeks of poor QA. The implication is they have little confidence in the quality of their product.
The reality is that no matter the justification, it's poor customer service. If you loudly tell the world "Android 5 is out for your device" then you should make sure it's out.
Apple had already for three whole years been asking developers to make the leap to 64-bit at the time they made the Intel transition.
The industry should have been able to cope just fine with OS X being shipped only on 64-bit Intel processors.
Those that hadn't already adapted, well, their 32-bit PowerPC code would have run just fine using the Rosetta code translation layer.
The real issue was though that Apple needed to ship new laptops that were competitive with PCs. They couldn't afford to wait around another 6 months for Core2Duo chips to arrive.
With iOS, Apple announces a new OS update, and makes it available to all, for all compatible devices, simultaneously. Given the hundreds of millions of compatible devices this must be a massive logistical problem, yet everyone that's interested gets the OS update immediately, the downloads tend to work just fine, and everyone tends to be happy.
With Android, Google only makes builds for Nexus devices. One would have thought that given the relatively small numbers of devices sold, and the massive infrastructure Google has in place, that they wouldn't have a big problem in making the OS update available to all, just like Apple do. However instead we're forced to wait around. We click on the "check now" on our devices and get told "no update available" for many many days after news reports have told us that the new OS is out.
Teachers are not easily replaceable, and yet for the work they do their compensation is abysmal.
Their problem is a different one. There's many factors involved as to why people become teachers, and why they stay in the profession. Simply though, they stay because of job security, and the knowledge/fear that changing careers into a different profession would be very hard (and in the short-term at least involve a pay cut).
Put that at the top of a JS program or function and most of the "stupidly broken" parts of JS are disabled when you're in an ECMAScript 5 environment (i.e. any modern browser).
Most of the remaining complains about JS (like function scope, or prototype-based inheritance) are IMHO not problems at all, but rather reflections that people are far more used to class-based inheritance systems and how other languages work.
Yes, the language design isn't perfect. It was clearly rushed. It is by default too tolerant of dodgy syntax. There's loads of bad code out there written by second-rate programmers. Use a decent linter, read Crockford's "JavaScript: The good bits", and you'll find it can be a great language to work with.
In my experience MySQL can indeed handle large transaction volumes, but only with relatively simple queries.
Throw some complex joins in there across multiple tables and the performance plummets. Run multiple concurrent similar queries and you can find yourself getting exponentially worse performance.
PostgreSQL on the other hand may not have quite the same level of raw performance on simple queries as MySQL, but it tends to cope much better with more complex things.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point.
The "hour" that's been mentioned is a rough estimate for the amount of work that would need to be done to handle the visa application. It's not an estimated increase of the amount of time that it will take for passengers to travel through an airport.
There will be a significant increase in bureaucracy required to process all these visa applications, which has a significant cost associated with it.
As a potential visitor, having to deal with a more complicated visa application process is hassle, and not appealing. When the application process is draconian and unnecessarily invasive of the privacy of the applicant it is even less appealing.
iOS devices are not x86 based - they're ARM - so no "basic x86 code" will run on them at all.
The only place that iOS runs on x86 is in the simulator on OS X and such x86 code is not included in builds for iOS devices.
64-bit ARM is different from 32-bit ARM, and not even remotely like "extended 32-bit x86".
Historically, over about the past decade up until the pound took a bath following the Brexit vote, Apple have charged very close to the same amount for their products in the UK as in the USA, once one takes VAT into account. The difference for most products has usually been within a few percentage points. Admittedly for some products the difference has been larger, but for their more expensive items the prices have tended to be close.
Occasionally currency fluctuations have meant that some Apple products have been cheaper in the UK than the USA (once VAT is considered) - that was the case when I bought my MacBook Pro a few years ago.
Apple tends to only very rarely adjust their pricing and will generally ride out currency fluctuations, preferring instead to maintain consistent pricing for their products. The adjustments they have made to GBP pricing were done many months after the pound had devalued. Typically their adjustments are done on much longer timescales (years) but as the pound dropped off a cliff it's not surprising they've made these adjustments faster.
In this particular case, this is an automatic re-pricing of apps so that developers around the world won't be taking a bath on product sales to the UK. Those developers can choose to re-price their product at a newly introduced lower price band to let said products continue to be priced at 79p in the UK should they choose to do so.
No - there is no change in where the burden of taxation/VAT lies. Apple have always incorporated sales tax into app store prices.
This is a correction owing to currency devaluations.
The UK Pound is now worth about 25% less than it was six months ago when compared to the US Dollar, therefore they've corrected the GBP prices of apps to reflect the current exchange rate.
For the UK, and this was in a UK paper, that is pretty normal and consistent with most other publications.
Newspapers will measure large distances in miles, as that's what we use for our roads, but short distances in metres, as they're what we are taught in school.
Square's mag-stripe card reader is obsolete - it can't read chip & PIN cards, or contactless. They already have a bluetooth connected reader.
The card payment systems from Square et al that plug into the headphone socket are all obsolete. They're magnetic strip readers, and payments based off the mag-stripe are going the way of the dodo. Over in the US you guys are a bit behind the curve - mag-stripe payments have been dead in Europe for a good few years now, so none of the mag-stripe based payment solutions launched here. Many of the more forward looking payment processors like Square tackled this issue some time back with readers that would support chip and pin, some do contactless too.
A movie theatre's "2K" projector is approximately the same resolution as a "4K" TV, as they both create a picture that's very roughly 4000 pixels wide.
Your point tho is entirely correct - humans aren't equipped with eyes to tell the difference between a 1080 and 2160 (4K) picture from across a room.
Beaglebone is also over twice the price of a Raspberry Pi.
Nonsense.
England is part of the UK, and the UK remains a member of the European Union.
EU laws apply.
As for Julian Assange, he's holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is Ecuadorian sovereign territory, so technically whilst he remains inside there he's not on UK (or EU) soil. As he's technically in Ecuador which doesn't have an extradition treaty, he's safe there.
I find the notion that there's "pressure to farm it out cheaply and easily to freelancers" to be ludicrous.
I'm a software developer contractor in the UK. This is a relatively new thing for me - in my 20+ year career I've only been a contractor the past two. The last couple of years have been by far the most lucrative of my career. In every gig I've had I've been paid more than twice as much as the most senior permanent developer.
$1.50 fee?
Ouch!
OK, sure, $1.50 CAD isn't much, but if you're transferring say $20 or less it's still a very significant amount. Not a sensible way to pay your buddy $5 for your share of pizza.
Such transfers are free here in the UK.
You seriously think Apple aren't capable of increasing the rate at which they update the AppleTV?
Whilst historically they've only updated about every 3 years, they have the resources to update every 6 months if they felt like it.
lol - sorry - wrong about that - it used to be a download but isn't any more.
Then it's not a problem as Apple's podcasts app isn't included on iOS. It's a download from the app store.
Very true. This is a terminal emulator issue. Plus, as it stands, the Terminal.app has preferences that let you define exactly how all the function keys get interpreted.
In my Terminal the configured behaviour of PgDn is to send the key sequence \033[6~ which for all the terminal apps I'm using gets interpreted correctly as a PgDn (e.g. 'less' will scroll down a page). The config for Shift+PgDn is "Scroll Page Down", which will scroll the window. There's a chance that sometime over the past decade I changed those settings, but I suspect they're the defaults.
You do indeed see Safari updates, however it seems to me that the majority of those updates are security fixes.
The issue here is that Safari is getting slow to adopt new web technologies, and slow at fixing problems with the technologies they have adopted.
This has been a relatively recent change, mostly since the WebKit/Blink split. Before then Apple through WebKit (and thus Safari) often led the way with new web technologies, and they were active participants in broader discussions about web standards, and much more open. It's felt as if they've closed off, and become resistant to event attempting to keep up, much less participate.
The WebKit Surfin' Safari blog shows this quite clearly. Long ago the blog used to be regularly updated. In the last year however there's been just three updates, two of those within the last three weeks.
Whilst she may be Yahoo's CEO, back in 2011 she was working at Google.
And yet Apple manages to make their iOS updates available to all compatible devices on the day of release, dealing with an order of magnitude more devices than Nexus phones and tablets.
My Nexus 10 had to wait 2 weeks for the 5.0 update to be made available to it, and my Nexus 4 took a month. The story has been the same with every single Android update - I read that an update is available, and then don't see it for weeks or months, no matter how many times I check for updates. In contrast on all my iOS devices never have any wait.
In both cases I get to choose if I want to install the update or not.
I don't buy "OTA releases are staged to avoid overwhelming networks", especially since the sales figures for Nexus devices are relatively small. As for "catch any problems", that is much more believable, but it reeks of poor QA. The implication is they have little confidence in the quality of their product.
The reality is that no matter the justification, it's poor customer service. If you loudly tell the world "Android 5 is out for your device" then you should make sure it's out.
Apple had already for three whole years been asking developers to make the leap to 64-bit at the time they made the Intel transition.
The industry should have been able to cope just fine with OS X being shipped only on 64-bit Intel processors.
Those that hadn't already adapted, well, their 32-bit PowerPC code would have run just fine using the Rosetta code translation layer.
The real issue was though that Apple needed to ship new laptops that were competitive with PCs. They couldn't afford to wait around another 6 months for Core2Duo chips to arrive.
I don't get these staged updates.
With iOS, Apple announces a new OS update, and makes it available to all, for all compatible devices, simultaneously. Given the hundreds of millions of compatible devices this must be a massive logistical problem, yet everyone that's interested gets the OS update immediately, the downloads tend to work just fine, and everyone tends to be happy.
With Android, Google only makes builds for Nexus devices. One would have thought that given the relatively small numbers of devices sold, and the massive infrastructure Google has in place, that they wouldn't have a big problem in making the OS update available to all, just like Apple do. However instead we're forced to wait around. We click on the "check now" on our devices and get told "no update available" for many many days after news reports have told us that the new OS is out.
It's very frustrating.
WebGL was fully enabled in iOS 8 - it's accessible now inside web pages in Safari, and in other apps that use an OS provided web view.
Teachers are not easily replaceable, and yet for the work they do their compensation is abysmal.
Their problem is a different one. There's many factors involved as to why people become teachers, and why they stay in the profession. Simply though, they stay because of job security, and the knowledge/fear that changing careers into a different profession would be very hard (and in the short-term at least involve a pay cut).
Two words:
"use strict";
Put that at the top of a JS program or function and most of the "stupidly broken" parts of JS are disabled when you're in an ECMAScript 5 environment (i.e. any modern browser).
Most of the remaining complains about JS (like function scope, or prototype-based inheritance) are IMHO not problems at all, but rather reflections that people are far more used to class-based inheritance systems and how other languages work.
Yes, the language design isn't perfect. It was clearly rushed. It is by default too tolerant of dodgy syntax. There's loads of bad code out there written by second-rate programmers. Use a decent linter, read Crockford's "JavaScript: The good bits", and you'll find it can be a great language to work with.
In my experience MySQL can indeed handle large transaction volumes, but only with relatively simple queries.
Throw some complex joins in there across multiple tables and the performance plummets. Run multiple concurrent similar queries and you can find yourself getting exponentially worse performance.
PostgreSQL on the other hand may not have quite the same level of raw performance on simple queries as MySQL, but it tends to cope much better with more complex things.