Traffic stats for two first days misleading
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
I dare say that neither 3% or even 1% gives a realistic picture of how many people are using Chrome as their main browser. The recent surge of Chrome traffic is obviously just an effect of lots of people excitedly downloading the browser and surfing around with it for a while to try it out during the first few days after release. Enough geeks playing test driving a new toy is apparently enough to skew the statistic like this.
Two days is a terribly small sample for use in any web usage statistic. Give it two months or so and Google is luckly if Chrome has 0.5% of web traffic.
It's not exactly in the middle of nowhere, though. The city of Irkutsk has a population of approx. 600.000, and the Irkutsk oblast (region) is 2,5 million. So the population (and therefore available workforce) is most certainly there.
Besides, Microsoft already has departments in Russia, so the employees for this data center will probably come mainly from those. Also, comp.sci education in Russian universities has a fairly good reputation, so recruiting new people shouldn't be a problem.
A more obvious site would perhaps have been Novosibirsk (1,4 million), home to Novosibirsk State University -- the science captial of the Soviet Union.
However, I suspect Irkutsk was chosen partly because it is located (more or less) in the middle of Russia -- about halfway from St. Petersburg in the west to Vladivostok in the East -- and because labor is cheaper in Siberia than in Moscow or St.Petersburg.
Granted, the night life is far from what we've come to expect in most of Europe or the US, but there are bars, clubs and even a couple of decent restaurants. I had the best sushi of my life in Irkusk a couple of years ago.
Can't quite remember which one, but probably the Koneisto electronic music festival back in 2002 or so (waaay ahead of you, in other words). The barcode was an image in an SMS. As an alternative you could print the ticket from a website at home, as I recall.
If this system is going to be used for monitoring noise levels, then they're probably going to install some kind of decibel-meters, not actual microphones which could be used for listening to people.
So perhaps all this paranoia is quite unwarranted.
I use a lovely Deluxe Paint clone called ProMotion (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion//) for all my bitmapping needs. USD 29.95 for the lite version, which is probably good enough. Definitely worth the money if you do a lot of traditional pixel-gfx.
AFAIK, it only supports up to 256 colors, though, so for converting raytraced images to icons, it might not be the perfect tool.
"Mac OS X dynamically adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on temperature."
They have the OS control the CPU cooling?? WTF? Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable to have the hardware take care of things like that? What if the OS crashes for instance?
A friend of mine had one of those back in the day. One of the stranger things about it was that it had a bunch of preset messages, one of which said "HELLO SEXY UFO!"
I guess it was intended to be used as a UFO-hitchhiking beacon, a la the Electronic Thumb in HGTTG.
I firmly believe that one of the main reasons why foreign films and tv aren't dubbed in Finland is that finns are absolutely TERRIBLE at dubbing. I'm Finnish (bilingually swedish) so the language itself doesn't freak me out (much), but the few films I've happened to see dubbed to Finnish have REALLY made me CRINGE.
AFAIK, Longhorns GUI was supposed to be vector based. And this article on winsupersite.com seems to agree:
"In Longhorn, a new presentation layer code-named Avalon is responsible for the entire user experience, including the display of graphics. Unlike GDI, Avalon is vector-based."
Well, following the same logic as free-software-tax, a free-sex-tax should obviously be paid by anyone giving sex for free, since it puts hookers at a disadvantage.
At least that way there'd by a really good alternative to "Not tonight honey, I've got a headache" : "Not tonight honey, we can't afford the tax!"
Back in the late nineties, when Nokia had just released the first WAP-enabled phone, there was a job posting from Nokia on our CS department's bulletin board where the main requirement was "prior experience with WAP".
My old Gravis Ultrasound MAX soundcard had some kind of surround sound emulation using two speakers.
With headphones (atleast with my Sennheisers) the effect was actually quite OK - you really could tell whether the sound came from behind of in front of you.
Of course it couldn't be compared to real surround sound, but it was a slight improvement over normal stereo.
Since the copyprotected audio is only going to be playable on Sony-licenced players, this would obviously give Sony an advantage in the portable (mp3) player market. I mean, guess who's devices are going to be the only ones able to play these things?
So, I won't be able to play the CD in my car (presumably) or on my PC, and I won't be able to play the FILES in Winamp or the portable player of my choice. So I'll be paying 20 PLUS whatever it costs to replace my car and portable players with Sony models, and be forced to use some crappy Sony software on my PC.
Pity. WLAN would really make perfect sense in a device like this.
And I still can't quite figure out how you're supposed to hold that thing in your hand when using the stylus, considering the horistonal form factor. Looks lika a wrist-killer. Unless you put in down on a table, which sort of ruins the whole point of a mobile device, of course.
I've discovered that by writing something manually, i.e. with a pen, instead of on a computer, I tend to remember what I've written much better.
Hence, I always prepare for exams by taking notes of what I read. If I have lecure notes, I might even copy those by hand, since I might well have forgotten their contents since I wrote them a couple of months ago.
I think the main reason for this is that it's more laborious to write manually - more of a pain in the ass.
A good analogy would be, for instance, driving somewhere yourself instead of taking a bus: you'd probably remember the journey better.
Slashdot Mirror
I dare say that neither 3% or even 1% gives a realistic picture of how many people are using Chrome as their main browser. The recent surge of Chrome traffic is obviously just an effect of lots of people excitedly downloading the browser and surfing around with it for a while to try it out during the first few days after release. Enough geeks playing test driving a new toy is apparently enough to skew the statistic like this.
Two days is a terribly small sample for use in any web usage statistic. Give it two months or so and Google is luckly if Chrome has 0.5% of web traffic.
It's not exactly in the middle of nowhere, though. The city of Irkutsk has a population of approx. 600.000, and the Irkutsk oblast (region) is 2,5 million. So the population (and therefore available workforce) is most certainly there.
Besides, Microsoft already has departments in Russia, so the employees for this data center will probably come mainly from those. Also, comp.sci education in Russian universities has a fairly good reputation, so recruiting new people shouldn't be a problem.
A more obvious site would perhaps have been Novosibirsk (1,4 million), home to Novosibirsk State University -- the science captial of the Soviet Union.
However, I suspect Irkutsk was chosen partly because it is located (more or less) in the middle of Russia -- about halfway from St. Petersburg in the west to Vladivostok in the East -- and because labor is cheaper in Siberia than in Moscow or St.Petersburg.
Granted, the night life is far from what we've come to expect in most of Europe or the US, but there are bars, clubs and even a couple of decent restaurants. I had the best sushi of my life in Irkusk a couple of years ago.
Can't quite remember which one, but probably the Koneisto electronic music festival back in 2002 or so (waaay ahead of you, in other words). The barcode was an image in an SMS. As an alternative you could print the ticket from a website at home, as I recall.
Where did you get that idea from?
...
.net domains:
According to RFC 920 -- Domain Requirements (1984):
"The initial top level domain names are:
COM = Commercial, any commercial related domains meeting the second level requirements..."
According to RFC1591 -- Domain Name System Structure and Delegation (1994) :
"COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is companies..."
Also, regarding
"NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers..."
If this system is going to be used for monitoring noise levels, then they're probably going to install some kind of decibel-meters, not actual microphones which could be used for listening to people.
So perhaps all this paranoia is quite unwarranted.
I use a lovely Deluxe Paint clone called ProMotion (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion//) for all my bitmapping needs. USD 29.95 for the lite version, which is probably good enough. Definitely worth the money if you do a lot of traditional pixel-gfx.
AFAIK, it only supports up to 256 colors, though, so for converting raytraced images to icons, it might not be the perfect tool.
The Otto-ATMs in Finland have been running Windows NT 4 for years. AFAIK, the UI itself is a Java-applet running in Internet Explorer.
And yes, I've seen the IE on them crash, leaving the standard NT4 desktop, error dialog, and a command prompt window.
Scary.
AFAIK, the W800 doesn't have a standard headphone jack either - you have to use the SonyEricssons headphones that come bundled with the phone.
If I'm not mistaken, you can actually config Outlook 2003 to minimize to the tray without any reg hacks.
As I understand (although I might have misunderstood) a pivot table is kind of the Excel equivalent of a 'view' in an SQL database.
Search for this Slashdot thread with Google China (http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=zh-CN), give as keyword for instance "Does Google Censor Chinese News?"= %22Does+Google+Censor+Chinese+News%3F%22&btnG=Goog le%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&lr=)
The result? It's not there! (http://www.google.com/search?hl=zh-CN&ie=UTF-8&q
OMGLOL!
Wait a minute??
"Mac OS X dynamically adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on temperature."
They have the OS control the CPU cooling?? WTF? Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable to have the hardware take care of things like that? What if the OS crashes for instance?
A friend of mine had one of those back in the day. One of the stranger things about it was that it had a bunch of preset messages, one of which said "HELLO SEXY UFO!"
I guess it was intended to be used as a UFO-hitchhiking beacon, a la the Electronic Thumb in HGTTG.
I firmly believe that one of the main reasons why foreign films and tv aren't dubbed in Finland is that finns are absolutely TERRIBLE at dubbing. I'm Finnish (bilingually swedish) so the language itself doesn't freak me out (much), but the few films I've happened to see dubbed to Finnish have REALLY made me CRINGE.
Exactly what I was thinking.
AFAIK, Longhorns GUI was supposed to be vector based. And this article on winsupersite.com seems to agree:
"In Longhorn, a new presentation layer code-named Avalon is responsible for the entire user experience, including the display of graphics. Unlike GDI, Avalon is vector-based."
PNG skins? Eh? Wasn't Longhorn's GUI supposed to be vector? XAML (Microsoft's SVG "clone") and all that, remember?
Well, following the same logic as free-software-tax, a free-sex-tax should obviously be paid by anyone giving sex for free, since it puts hookers at a disadvantage.
At least that way there'd by a really good alternative to "Not tonight honey, I've got a headache" : "Not tonight honey, we can't afford the tax!"
Cascading Style Sheets,
Content Scrambling System,
and now this!
Is it REALLY that hard to think of a name that DOESN'T abbreviate to CSS?
Back in the late nineties, when Nokia had just released the first WAP-enabled phone, there was a job posting from Nokia on our CS department's bulletin board where the main requirement was "prior experience with WAP".
Very. F*cking. Likely.
My old Gravis Ultrasound MAX soundcard had some kind of surround sound emulation using two speakers.
With headphones (atleast with my Sennheisers) the effect was actually quite OK - you really could tell whether the sound came from behind of in front of you.
Of course it couldn't be compared to real surround sound, but it was a slight improvement over normal stereo.
Since the copyprotected audio is only going to be playable on Sony-licenced players, this would obviously give Sony an advantage in the portable (mp3) player market. I mean, guess who's devices are going to be the only ones able to play these things?
So, I won't be able to play the CD in my car (presumably) or on my PC, and I won't be able to play the FILES in Winamp or the portable player of my choice. So I'll be paying 20 PLUS whatever it costs to replace my car and portable players with Sony models, and be forced to use some crappy Sony software on my PC.
Sounds great.
Pity. WLAN would really make perfect sense in a device like this.
And I still can't quite figure out how you're supposed to hold that thing in your hand when using the stylus, considering the horistonal form factor.
Looks lika a wrist-killer. Unless you put in down on a table, which sort of ruins the whole point of a mobile device, of course.
...a beowulf cluster of these! ...
sorry.
At last I can fulfill my lifelong dream - to burn all my porn onto corn!
I've discovered that by writing something manually, i.e. with a pen, instead of on a computer, I tend to remember what I've written much better.
Hence, I always prepare for exams by taking notes of what I read. If I have lecure notes, I might even copy those by hand, since I might well have forgotten their contents since I wrote them a couple of months ago.
I think the main reason for this is that it's more laborious to write manually - more of a pain in the ass.
A good analogy would be, for instance, driving somewhere yourself instead of taking a bus: you'd probably remember the journey better.