We use Jasper, just the open source version, and for us it's fine.
The learning curve sucks and the documentation isn't great, but we came to Jasper from Crystal Reports. We were using a version of Crystal server software that was $650 per server, period, in 2003. When we last talked to Crystal in 2009, it was $7500 per server [i]per year[/i]. I'm sure Fortune 1000 companies wouldn't blink at that kind of expense, but when we got the email with the quote from their sales team it went around the IT department as a practical joke. We have an antique server in the corner running the old reports, and everything new is in Jasper.
We did spend some time with Jasper Server, the full version, and it was a decent product but when the first renewal came up the price doubled. We figured they were going to take us down the same ever-escalating prices as Crystal, so we ditched the proprietary portions we were using and wrote our own replacements.
True, but if I'm choosing between two games that are roughly equivalent in most respects but one looks better, the graphics will win me over. And the PS3 and Xbox360 already have a huge library of games on them. The Wii U can take advantage of existing good games from the Wii, but anyone who really wants to use those games probably already has a Wii. That makes the Wii U a hard sell, unless Nintendo releases a lot of great Wii U games very quickly. I hope they do, but that's not easy.
More to the point, Nintendo is in business to make profits, and intuitively having a console that supports more CPU-intensive games or at least requires less effort for game studios to port CPU-intensive games on would boost profits. But my intuition could be wrong, maybe upgrading the CPU would have shot their production budget to hell.
I don't care about FPS or MMORPG either. I like strategy games, one-on-one fighters (Tekken, Street Fighter, etc..), and my kids like platformers and dance games. In any of those, does the Wii give me something the others don't besides cartoon graphics?
I suspect they are simply victims of their own success. Assume that 0.01% of the people who use open source software are assholes that will behave rudely when they have a problem with the code. Initially the project had a user base of a few ten thousands of people, so they get one or two obnoxious support calls per year. Then the project has hundreds of thousands of users, and they get one or two obnoxious support calls per month. Now they have millions of users, and get obnoxious support calls daily.
I think nurb432 has it right - ignore the troublemakers, focus on the business.
Do you really think that your shop and others like it are enough business to make AMD profitable again?
I suspect that if this rumor is true, it's because Intel has already determined how many customers the move will cost them and the net loss amounts to rounding error in their annual budget. You care. I care. A few tens of thousands of other enthusiasts will care. But some of us will simply buy the bundled Intel CPU with the motherboard we want, and the rest will switch to AMD and cost Intel an insignificant portion of their annual business. Meanwhile, the cost savings they get from using motherboard-CPU combos that are together from the factory, even if it's only $0.50 per unit, will rapidly add up to millions of dollars.
I buy AMD products because I think the world benefits by having a competitor to Intel. But I don't think this move will substantially hurt Intel or help AMD.
Microsoft wants a piece of the mobile market, which is growing like crazy. They have no foothold in mobile now, and splitting Windows is what they did before - Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 were fundamentally different from Windows 7, and Windows 7 sold just fine and the sales figures for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 were dismal. Windows Phone 7 even got good reviews.
So their solution is to mix the two and use their existing Windows desktop and laptop users as a stepping stone into the mobile market. Jane is indifferent to computers and is forced to learn to use Windows 8 at work, she goes looking for her next smart phone and picks the Windows 8 phone because she already knows how to use it.
Power users are annoyed by this and will continue to be annoyed until Microsoft improves the multitasking features in their Metro UI to be as good as the ones in the traditional Windows desktop. And as tepples says below, the Windows 8 UI doesn't lend itself well to running inside a virtual machine because it's harder to get the toolbars to appear properly. Again, I'm not defending what Microsoft did, I'm just saying I understand why they did it.
I believe that worldwide mobile device sales has already outpaced desktop and laptop sales. So Microsoft desperately wants to be involved in mobile because that's where the world is heading.
From at least the mid 1990s through the mid 2000s, common applications on Windows routinely slowed the device down and the latest graphics intensive games pushed hardware requirements higher. Today, common Windows applications run just fine on devices that are six years old and the most popular games in the world are things like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Mindcraft, and League of Legends - all with modest resource requirements. There will always be a percentage of the population, say 40% or even 20%, that needs more power from their personal computing device than a mobile phone can provide. They'll keep using desktops and laptops.
But for everyone else, I suspect the 2025 equivalent of the present day Motorola Atrix will be perfect - a phone when you're moving, docked to a laptop or even slotted into a 27 inch monitor with bluetooth keyboard and mouse when you're at home or office. At that point, that portion of the population won't want to have two different operating systems they switch between depending upon whether their phone is plugged in or not. They'll want just one operating system they use everywhere. I think that's the future of the majority of the consumer market, I think iOS and Android will evolve to fit it, and I think Microsoft is trying to secure their place.
And as for Microsoft pissing people off, what choice do those people have? HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc... can complain, and companies can complain, but most of the businesses with the flexibility ( and intelligence ) to switch to Linux or even Mac for their business desktops have done it already. Everyone else is too inflexible to change, Microsoft has their souls and can burn them with impugnity. They're clearly willing to break a few eggs to get the omelet they want. I hope I'm wrong, I hope I see a mass exodus of business customers - but I'm sure Steve Ballmer has done the math and would rather lose some insignificant percentage of their business clients in return for a 10-20% piece of the mobile market.
A toolbar that only appears when you touch or mouseover that part of the screen, or hit the appropriate hotkey, is a very sensible design choice when you have a small screen. It's not a sensible design choice when you have a big monitor or even a 13 inch laptop display.
But I think it's clear what Microsoft is trying to do - they're trying to make one style of graphical interface everywhere. I'm sure they know it's going to annoy and alienate millions of users, including people that are otherwise Microsoft fans. But they desperately want to get a bigger piece of the mobile operating system market, and this is their metaphorical crowbar to wedge that door open. Everyone that's forced by work to become used to Windows 8 on the desktop and laptop will be more likely to purchase Windows 8 tablet or Windows Phone 8 device instead of an iPhone or Android device.
I'm not saying Microsoft done a great job, or that I want them to succeed. I am just saying I understand why they have done this, and what their long term strategy is. I'm hoping it blows up in their faces and that the opposite thing happens - people who are comfortable with a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system start using Android on desktops instead of Windows on phones, and The Year of the Linux Desktop stops being a joke.
Did I advocate Windows 8 in my post? I'm just expressing an opinion that I think the company will benefit by trying to continue its work on a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system. That doesn't mean Microsoft's survival is a goal.
I have Windows 8 because I need to know how to use it for my job, and because there are a handful of games I possess that run poorly or not at all under Wine. But my other disks boot Debian unstable and Fedora, and the partition I'm running from right now has Ubuntu 12.04. I'm hoping Android morphs into a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system and becomes the dominant personal computing OS of the future.
I didn't spend the entire day learning the new UI. It simply took a day of doing my normal work with the new UI for me to become accustomed to it, and as productive in it as I was in Windows 7. Obviously if it took eight hours of dedicated effort to become proficient in it, it would be a waste of time.
I didn't say, and I don't think jbolden said, that Windows 8 is the end-all-be-all union of mobile operating systems and desktop operating systems. It isn't. When I'm doing serious work on Windows 8, I'm using the old Windows Desktop more or less the exact same way I used it in Windows 7. The only difference is that the start menu is replaced by the start screen, but most of the applications I routinely use are pinned to my taskbar anyway.
But I'm sure someone - maybe Microsoft, maybe not - will come up with a mobile operating system that does lend itself to multi-tasking and multiple application views as well as the traditional Windows desktop. I'm not saying Windows 8 is great, I'm saying the fact that Microsoft is trying to move in this direction is smart, and they would eventually be left behind in the tech industry if they didn't do this.
Agreed. Paul Thurrott - who admittedly is two steps shy of being a raving Microsoft fan - noted that Microsoft says "We bet the company on this" at the drop of a hat - the launch of the Zune products, the launch of the Xbox, the Office Ribbon, etc... such pronouncements are conspicuously absent in the Windows 8 announcements because they really did bet the company on this.
I have Windows 8. As a semi-power-user, the learning curve took me all of a day. I'm sure that's enough to get screams of protest from people who dislike any kind of change. And of course that's the majority of computer users. But it's an acceptable operating system and I can completely understand Microsoft's drive to unify the user experience across phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers ( although for anyone that does not know this already, Microsoft Server 2012 can run without a Microsoft GUI, just PowerShell ). It's a bet on the long term future, and regardless of whether it pays off I think it was a sensible bet.
If they're ditching Sinofsky for genuine personnel reasons, that's fine. If they're thinking of making Windows 9 more like Windows 7, I think they're kneecapping their long term future for near term benefit.
I don't think that's practical. The loan is paid off. The trade in value is maybe $14,000 and I would want something with the same amount of space, similar or better crash safety, a similar price, better fuel economy, and an equivalent or better reputation for reliability. That's hard to find.
I could do better for fuel economy and crash safety by buying a new minivan, but then all of the money I save in fuel would be spent on payments, plus a lot extra.
This might be a case where the manufacturer is abusing the EPA testing and engineered a hybrid system that gets good numbers in the EPA tests but poor results in real life. I'm only speculating, of course.
Thanks for the information. I'm one of those American suburbanites with zero need for a pickup truck, but who wants one anyway. I had the Silverado Hybrid on my fantasy vehicle list, I'll remove it.
I noticed that too. I prefer the Truedelta.com setup, but I believe it has fewer user-contributed mileage results. So you get more detail in the reporting but a smaller sample size.
Not necessarily. My commute is just as long. I owe more than my house is currently worth, and I don't have enough money to account for the difference, so selling my home isn't practical. Five years ago I owed 25% less than the home was worth on my mortgage, but the property value has dropped a lot since then. I like my job, which happens to be 62 miles east of our home. My wife likes her job, which happens to be 15 miles west of our home.
I understand diesel engines are extremely efficient at idle compared to gasoline engines, and the EPA ratings don't properly account for the amount of time a real vehicle spends idling at stop lights, stop signs, and in heavy traffic. I've also read claims that the General Motors "mild hybrid" system that simply shuts off the motor when the vehicle stops moving and then instantly starts it when you lift your foot off the brake pedal similarly provides a big boost to real fuel economy, and is also unfairly undervalued by the EPA tests versus its real world performance.
But this is hearsay, I don't have enough data to back it up. I'm watching fuelly.com and truedelta.com with interest (I have no connection to either sites, I'm not shilling) to see what users of, for example, the 2012 Volkswagen Passat turbodiesel and 2013 Chevy Malibu Eco (which uses the shutoff on stop) report for their real world economy.
Well, for example, General Motors had some pushrod (no overhead camshaft) V6s in use from the late 1990s and 2000s that routinely met or beat their EPA fuel economy ratings. The engines were less powerful than you'd expect from a V6 and pretty noisy for their class, especially under hard acceleration. But my 2001 Impala was rated 21 city/32 highway, and I averaged between 24 and 28 miles per gallon for the 125,000 miles I owned the vehicle and always got 31-32 miles per gallon on long trips. Our Honda CRV small SUV all wheel drive was also right in the middle of the 23 city/ 27 highway ratings, and averaged 24 miles per gallon over 180,000 miles of ownership. So the EPA ratings were not always wrong. In 2007 the EPA changed the ratings to be more conservative ( as Anonymous Coward noted in his response to you below ) and sadly the Honda minivan I bought in 2007, which had no engineering changes from the 2006 model, matches the lower ratings so I'm confident the 2006 numbers were fantasy. I'm not devestated by 16 city/23 highway, but I had hoped for better.
But I would agree that some of the automakers do this all of the time and I imagine most of them do it some of the time. My first inclination would be to distrust the highest ratings, and work down from there. However, I suppose a company could lie at any point - maybe they rate a car at below average fuel economy but in reality the fuel economy is incredibly low.
Nonsense. Python is an excellent language, and its syntax is pretty terse for getting things done. But __init___(self, foo, bar, baz, fuzz) is no more "tell the computer what I mean" than any other modern language.
I agree. I check consumer-contributed fuel economy websites. I don't think they're especially reliable either, but I trust them a little more than official ratings. For examples in the US, try truedelta.com and fuelly.com.
Hyundai is at least doing the honorable thing and reimbursing all customers who bought the affected vehicles for the difference between the new EPA ratings and the original ones, for the life of the vehicle. That's pretty good - but I'm sure tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't have purchased those products in the first place if they had known the real fuel economy ratings (not that they're especially bad products, but if an extra 2 mpg put you into a Hyundai versus a competing vehicle, then Hyundai benefitted a lot from their lie). So even though Hyundai may be doing the right thing for its customers, their deception - even if it was unintentional - unfairly gave them a sales advantage against the competition.
Well, the three most popular package management systems for Linux, as far as I know, are.deb packages for Debian-based versions (usually managed with Advanced Package Tool -APT, or some GUI front end on APT),.rpm packages for Red Hat package-based versions (usually managed with Yellow Dog Update, Umodified - YUM, or some GUI front end on YUM), or Portage for Gentoo and Gentoo derivatives.
But while they work damn well for end users in practice, they are work intensive for package maintaners. There have been several attempts to innovate in package management for Linux by keeping the end user experience just as easy but make the developer burden lower.
I'm aware of Conary ( http://docs.rpath.com/conary/Conaryopedia/index.html ) which is used by Foresight Linux (a relatively unknown distribution) and rPath Linux, and which uses revision control system concepts like changesets to reduce upgrade download sizes just like git does, and which also tries to have better naming conventions for package sources, source build number, package build number, and branch so that the developer has less work than with.deb or.rpm building the package. I say tries to be better because I'm not familiar enough with any of the package systems to know for sure if Conary really is superior. But in any event it's seven years old or so and has relatively little public adoption.
For even more obscure package control, there's the Nix package manager and NixOS ( which as you can guess is a Linux distribution that uses Nix ). http://nixos.org/ I think Nix is a serious attempt at building a.deb and.rpm replacement, just like Conary, but as far as I can tell it's got even less adoption and interest.
In any event, the idea that we've already reached ideal package managers in maintream Linux is absurd. Obviously what we have now is better than manual dependency management with tar.gz archives of source and binary packages, but I'm sure better designs exist or could be built. The question is whether Conary or Nix or anything else really are those better designs, and whether the better designs are so much superior that it's worthwhile to switch.
I've thought about this, but you have the risk of data loss:
1. If you use only public and private keys with no key recovery mechanism, some users will lose their private key. It only needs to happen once for them to abandon the entire social network.
2. If you encrypt the private key using a password and store that with user backups, then you either need to enforce very strong password rules or risk privacy being lost due to weak passwords for encrypting the private key.
3. If you force strong password rules for private key distributed backups, then you're back to the original problem - some users will lose their private key on their own server and forget their strong password to decrypt their private key from a friend's server, and be out of luck.
It's possible I've missed an obvious solution, but I don't think so. I think a peer-to-peer public key encryption network will only work with relatively technical members. Regular people will have too many problems.
While we're dreaming about fantasy features, I'd like to add a requirement that the peer to peer network is written in C, Objective C, or something similarly efficient so that casual computer users can run their personal node off of the junk PC or old smart phone. Diaspora, for example, is built in Ruby which means anyone hosting their own Diaspora node without a half decent personal server - and that's most of the population - will have scaling issues much faster than with something well written in a more resource efficient but dramatically less productive language.
As Anonymous Coward said, you just about said everything that needs to be said.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
There are free online learning courses at coursera.org and codeacademy.com and MIT Open Courseware for learning. If you're not ready to write an application for Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift, take a few free courses to learn the concepts.
Something I finally started to learn in my early 30s is that for most people most of the time, if you get really good at something difficult, it will become entertaining for you. Learning how to write my first programs sucked. Even working on code in a lot of my 20s sucked. But in my late 20s and now 30s I had kids and if I didn't get pretty damn good at my job, I couldn't command the salary I needed to pay the bills. I started busting my ass to go from low-mediocre to something better, and suddenly I was having a lot of fun. I can't judge my skills now, I'd like to think I'm competent but I may be barely past low-mediocre. Regardless, I can do a lot more than I could before at a lot faster pace, and I get to tackle interesting problems instead of relatively routine things. Those changes make the job fun in a way I never imagined even as a teenager dreaming of writing video games.
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We use Jasper, just the open source version, and for us it's fine.
The learning curve sucks and the documentation isn't great, but we came to Jasper from Crystal Reports. We were using a version of Crystal server software that was $650 per server, period, in 2003. When we last talked to Crystal in 2009, it was $7500 per server [i]per year[/i]. I'm sure Fortune 1000 companies wouldn't blink at that kind of expense, but when we got the email with the quote from their sales team it went around the IT department as a practical joke. We have an antique server in the corner running the old reports, and everything new is in Jasper.
We did spend some time with Jasper Server, the full version, and it was a decent product but when the first renewal came up the price doubled. We figured they were going to take us down the same ever-escalating prices as Crystal, so we ditched the proprietary portions we were using and wrote our own replacements.
True, but if I'm choosing between two games that are roughly equivalent in most respects but one looks better, the graphics will win me over. And the PS3 and Xbox360 already have a huge library of games on them. The Wii U can take advantage of existing good games from the Wii, but anyone who really wants to use those games probably already has a Wii. That makes the Wii U a hard sell, unless Nintendo releases a lot of great Wii U games very quickly. I hope they do, but that's not easy.
More to the point, Nintendo is in business to make profits, and intuitively having a console that supports more CPU-intensive games or at least requires less effort for game studios to port CPU-intensive games on would boost profits. But my intuition could be wrong, maybe upgrading the CPU would have shot their production budget to hell.
Where does Wii excel that the others fail?
I don't care about FPS or MMORPG either. I like strategy games, one-on-one fighters (Tekken, Street Fighter, etc..), and my kids like platformers and dance games. In any of those, does the Wii give me something the others don't besides cartoon graphics?
I suspect they are simply victims of their own success. Assume that 0.01% of the people who use open source software are assholes that will behave rudely when they have a problem with the code. Initially the project had a user base of a few ten thousands of people, so they get one or two obnoxious support calls per year. Then the project has hundreds of thousands of users, and they get one or two obnoxious support calls per month. Now they have millions of users, and get obnoxious support calls daily.
I think nurb432 has it right - ignore the troublemakers, focus on the business.
Do you really think that your shop and others like it are enough business to make AMD profitable again?
I suspect that if this rumor is true, it's because Intel has already determined how many customers the move will cost them and the net loss amounts to rounding error in their annual budget. You care. I care. A few tens of thousands of other enthusiasts will care. But some of us will simply buy the bundled Intel CPU with the motherboard we want, and the rest will switch to AMD and cost Intel an insignificant portion of their annual business. Meanwhile, the cost savings they get from using motherboard-CPU combos that are together from the factory, even if it's only $0.50 per unit, will rapidly add up to millions of dollars.
I buy AMD products because I think the world benefits by having a competitor to Intel. But I don't think this move will substantially hurt Intel or help AMD.
Microsoft wants a piece of the mobile market, which is growing like crazy. They have no foothold in mobile now, and splitting Windows is what they did before - Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 were fundamentally different from Windows 7, and Windows 7 sold just fine and the sales figures for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 were dismal. Windows Phone 7 even got good reviews.
So their solution is to mix the two and use their existing Windows desktop and laptop users as a stepping stone into the mobile market. Jane is indifferent to computers and is forced to learn to use Windows 8 at work, she goes looking for her next smart phone and picks the Windows 8 phone because she already knows how to use it.
Power users are annoyed by this and will continue to be annoyed until Microsoft improves the multitasking features in their Metro UI to be as good as the ones in the traditional Windows desktop. And as tepples says below, the Windows 8 UI doesn't lend itself well to running inside a virtual machine because it's harder to get the toolbars to appear properly. Again, I'm not defending what Microsoft did, I'm just saying I understand why they did it.
I agree on that - Windows 8 sucks in a virtual machine. That's their biggest user interface oversight.
I believe that worldwide mobile device sales has already outpaced desktop and laptop sales. So Microsoft desperately wants to be involved in mobile because that's where the world is heading.
From at least the mid 1990s through the mid 2000s, common applications on Windows routinely slowed the device down and the latest graphics intensive games pushed hardware requirements higher. Today, common Windows applications run just fine on devices that are six years old and the most popular games in the world are things like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Mindcraft, and League of Legends - all with modest resource requirements. There will always be a percentage of the population, say 40% or even 20%, that needs more power from their personal computing device than a mobile phone can provide. They'll keep using desktops and laptops.
But for everyone else, I suspect the 2025 equivalent of the present day Motorola Atrix will be perfect - a phone when you're moving, docked to a laptop or even slotted into a 27 inch monitor with bluetooth keyboard and mouse when you're at home or office. At that point, that portion of the population won't want to have two different operating systems they switch between depending upon whether their phone is plugged in or not. They'll want just one operating system they use everywhere. I think that's the future of the majority of the consumer market, I think iOS and Android will evolve to fit it, and I think Microsoft is trying to secure their place.
And as for Microsoft pissing people off, what choice do those people have? HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc... can complain, and companies can complain, but most of the businesses with the flexibility ( and intelligence ) to switch to Linux or even Mac for their business desktops have done it already. Everyone else is too inflexible to change, Microsoft has their souls and can burn them with impugnity. They're clearly willing to break a few eggs to get the omelet they want. I hope I'm wrong, I hope I see a mass exodus of business customers - but I'm sure Steve Ballmer has done the math and would rather lose some insignificant percentage of their business clients in return for a 10-20% piece of the mobile market.
If they make the only 100-bit computer on the market, then by definition it's bog standard for the type. Right?
A toolbar that only appears when you touch or mouseover that part of the screen, or hit the appropriate hotkey, is a very sensible design choice when you have a small screen. It's not a sensible design choice when you have a big monitor or even a 13 inch laptop display.
But I think it's clear what Microsoft is trying to do - they're trying to make one style of graphical interface everywhere. I'm sure they know it's going to annoy and alienate millions of users, including people that are otherwise Microsoft fans. But they desperately want to get a bigger piece of the mobile operating system market, and this is their metaphorical crowbar to wedge that door open. Everyone that's forced by work to become used to Windows 8 on the desktop and laptop will be more likely to purchase Windows 8 tablet or Windows Phone 8 device instead of an iPhone or Android device.
I'm not saying Microsoft done a great job, or that I want them to succeed. I am just saying I understand why they have done this, and what their long term strategy is. I'm hoping it blows up in their faces and that the opposite thing happens - people who are comfortable with a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system start using Android on desktops instead of Windows on phones, and The Year of the Linux Desktop stops being a joke.
Did I advocate Windows 8 in my post? I'm just expressing an opinion that I think the company will benefit by trying to continue its work on a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system. That doesn't mean Microsoft's survival is a goal.
I have Windows 8 because I need to know how to use it for my job, and because there are a handful of games I possess that run poorly or not at all under Wine. But my other disks boot Debian unstable and Fedora, and the partition I'm running from right now has Ubuntu 12.04. I'm hoping Android morphs into a hybrid mobile and desktop operating system and becomes the dominant personal computing OS of the future.
I didn't spend the entire day learning the new UI. It simply took a day of doing my normal work with the new UI for me to become accustomed to it, and as productive in it as I was in Windows 7. Obviously if it took eight hours of dedicated effort to become proficient in it, it would be a waste of time.
I didn't say, and I don't think jbolden said, that Windows 8 is the end-all-be-all union of mobile operating systems and desktop operating systems. It isn't. When I'm doing serious work on Windows 8, I'm using the old Windows Desktop more or less the exact same way I used it in Windows 7. The only difference is that the start menu is replaced by the start screen, but most of the applications I routinely use are pinned to my taskbar anyway.
But I'm sure someone - maybe Microsoft, maybe not - will come up with a mobile operating system that does lend itself to multi-tasking and multiple application views as well as the traditional Windows desktop. I'm not saying Windows 8 is great, I'm saying the fact that Microsoft is trying to move in this direction is smart, and they would eventually be left behind in the tech industry if they didn't do this.
Agreed. Paul Thurrott - who admittedly is two steps shy of being a raving Microsoft fan - noted that Microsoft says "We bet the company on this" at the drop of a hat - the launch of the Zune products, the launch of the Xbox, the Office Ribbon, etc... such pronouncements are conspicuously absent in the Windows 8 announcements because they really did bet the company on this.
I have Windows 8. As a semi-power-user, the learning curve took me all of a day. I'm sure that's enough to get screams of protest from people who dislike any kind of change. And of course that's the majority of computer users. But it's an acceptable operating system and I can completely understand Microsoft's drive to unify the user experience across phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers ( although for anyone that does not know this already, Microsoft Server 2012 can run without a Microsoft GUI, just PowerShell ). It's a bet on the long term future, and regardless of whether it pays off I think it was a sensible bet.
If they're ditching Sinofsky for genuine personnel reasons, that's fine. If they're thinking of making Windows 9 more like Windows 7, I think they're kneecapping their long term future for near term benefit.
I don't think that's practical. The loan is paid off. The trade in value is maybe $14,000 and I would want something with the same amount of space, similar or better crash safety, a similar price, better fuel economy, and an equivalent or better reputation for reliability. That's hard to find.
I could do better for fuel economy and crash safety by buying a new minivan, but then all of the money I save in fuel would be spent on payments, plus a lot extra.
This might be a case where the manufacturer is abusing the EPA testing and engineered a hybrid system that gets good numbers in the EPA tests but poor results in real life. I'm only speculating, of course.
Thanks for the information. I'm one of those American suburbanites with zero need for a pickup truck, but who wants one anyway. I had the Silverado Hybrid on my fantasy vehicle list, I'll remove it.
I noticed that too. I prefer the Truedelta.com setup, but I believe it has fewer user-contributed mileage results. So you get more detail in the reporting but a smaller sample size.
Not necessarily. My commute is just as long. I owe more than my house is currently worth, and I don't have enough money to account for the difference, so selling my home isn't practical. Five years ago I owed 25% less than the home was worth on my mortgage, but the property value has dropped a lot since then. I like my job, which happens to be 62 miles east of our home. My wife likes her job, which happens to be 15 miles west of our home.
I understand diesel engines are extremely efficient at idle compared to gasoline engines, and the EPA ratings don't properly account for the amount of time a real vehicle spends idling at stop lights, stop signs, and in heavy traffic. I've also read claims that the General Motors "mild hybrid" system that simply shuts off the motor when the vehicle stops moving and then instantly starts it when you lift your foot off the brake pedal similarly provides a big boost to real fuel economy, and is also unfairly undervalued by the EPA tests versus its real world performance.
But this is hearsay, I don't have enough data to back it up. I'm watching fuelly.com and truedelta.com with interest (I have no connection to either sites, I'm not shilling) to see what users of, for example, the 2012 Volkswagen Passat turbodiesel and 2013 Chevy Malibu Eco (which uses the shutoff on stop) report for their real world economy.
Well, for example, General Motors had some pushrod (no overhead camshaft) V6s in use from the late 1990s and 2000s that routinely met or beat their EPA fuel economy ratings. The engines were less powerful than you'd expect from a V6 and pretty noisy for their class, especially under hard acceleration. But my 2001 Impala was rated 21 city/32 highway, and I averaged between 24 and 28 miles per gallon for the 125,000 miles I owned the vehicle and always got 31-32 miles per gallon on long trips. Our Honda CRV small SUV all wheel drive was also right in the middle of the 23 city/ 27 highway ratings, and averaged 24 miles per gallon over 180,000 miles of ownership. So the EPA ratings were not always wrong. In 2007 the EPA changed the ratings to be more conservative ( as Anonymous Coward noted in his response to you below ) and sadly the Honda minivan I bought in 2007, which had no engineering changes from the 2006 model, matches the lower ratings so I'm confident the 2006 numbers were fantasy. I'm not devestated by 16 city/23 highway, but I had hoped for better.
But I would agree that some of the automakers do this all of the time and I imagine most of them do it some of the time. My first inclination would be to distrust the highest ratings, and work down from there. However, I suppose a company could lie at any point - maybe they rate a car at below average fuel economy but in reality the fuel economy is incredibly low.
Nonsense. Python is an excellent language, and its syntax is pretty terse for getting things done. But __init___(self, foo, bar, baz, fuzz) is no more "tell the computer what I mean" than any other modern language.
I agree. I check consumer-contributed fuel economy websites. I don't think they're especially reliable either, but I trust them a little more than official ratings. For examples in the US, try truedelta.com and fuelly.com.
Hyundai is at least doing the honorable thing and reimbursing all customers who bought the affected vehicles for the difference between the new EPA ratings and the original ones, for the life of the vehicle. That's pretty good - but I'm sure tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't have purchased those products in the first place if they had known the real fuel economy ratings (not that they're especially bad products, but if an extra 2 mpg put you into a Hyundai versus a competing vehicle, then Hyundai benefitted a lot from their lie). So even though Hyundai may be doing the right thing for its customers, their deception - even if it was unintentional - unfairly gave them a sales advantage against the competition.
Well, the three most popular package management systems for Linux, as far as I know, are .deb packages for Debian-based versions (usually managed with Advanced Package Tool -APT, or some GUI front end on APT), .rpm packages for Red Hat package-based versions (usually managed with Yellow Dog Update, Umodified - YUM, or some GUI front end on YUM), or Portage for Gentoo and Gentoo derivatives.
.deb or .rpm building the package. I say tries to be better because I'm not familiar enough with any of the package systems to know for sure if Conary really is superior. But in any event it's seven years old or so and has relatively little public adoption.
.deb and .rpm replacement, just like Conary, but as far as I can tell it's got even less adoption and interest.
But while they work damn well for end users in practice, they are work intensive for package maintaners. There have been several attempts to innovate in package management for Linux by keeping the end user experience just as easy but make the developer burden lower.
I'm aware of Conary ( http://docs.rpath.com/conary/Conaryopedia/index.html ) which is used by Foresight Linux (a relatively unknown distribution) and rPath Linux, and which uses revision control system concepts like changesets to reduce upgrade download sizes just like git does, and which also tries to have better naming conventions for package sources, source build number, package build number, and branch so that the developer has less work than with
For even more obscure package control, there's the Nix package manager and NixOS ( which as you can guess is a Linux distribution that uses Nix ). http://nixos.org/ I think Nix is a serious attempt at building a
In any event, the idea that we've already reached ideal package managers in maintream Linux is absurd. Obviously what we have now is better than manual dependency management with tar.gz archives of source and binary packages, but I'm sure better designs exist or could be built. The question is whether Conary or Nix or anything else really are those better designs, and whether the better designs are so much superior that it's worthwhile to switch.
I've thought about this, but you have the risk of data loss:
1. If you use only public and private keys with no key recovery mechanism, some users will lose their private key. It only needs to happen once for them to abandon the entire social network.
2. If you encrypt the private key using a password and store that with user backups, then you either need to enforce very strong password rules or risk privacy being lost due to weak passwords for encrypting the private key.
3. If you force strong password rules for private key distributed backups, then you're back to the original problem - some users will lose their private key on their own server and forget their strong password to decrypt their private key from a friend's server, and be out of luck.
It's possible I've missed an obvious solution, but I don't think so. I think a peer-to-peer public key encryption network will only work with relatively technical members. Regular people will have too many problems.
While we're dreaming about fantasy features, I'd like to add a requirement that the peer to peer network is written in C, Objective C, or something similarly efficient so that casual computer users can run their personal node off of the junk PC or old smart phone. Diaspora, for example, is built in Ruby which means anyone hosting their own Diaspora node without a half decent personal server - and that's most of the population - will have scaling issues much faster than with something well written in a more resource efficient but dramatically less productive language.
As Anonymous Coward said, you just about said everything that needs to be said.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
There are free online learning courses at coursera.org and codeacademy.com and MIT Open Courseware for learning. If you're not ready to write an application for Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift, take a few free courses to learn the concepts.
Something I finally started to learn in my early 30s is that for most people most of the time, if you get really good at something difficult, it will become entertaining for you. Learning how to write my first programs sucked. Even working on code in a lot of my 20s sucked. But in my late 20s and now 30s I had kids and if I didn't get pretty damn good at my job, I couldn't command the salary I needed to pay the bills. I started busting my ass to go from low-mediocre to something better, and suddenly I was having a lot of fun. I can't judge my skills now, I'd like to think I'm competent but I may be barely past low-mediocre. Regardless, I can do a lot more than I could before at a lot faster pace, and I get to tackle interesting problems instead of relatively routine things. Those changes make the job fun in a way I never imagined even as a teenager dreaming of writing video games.