If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.
Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.
I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.
Given that both this airports insist on you taking laptops out of your bag (how bad a scanner is it?) and shoes off and on my last notable trip through JFK I had to remove all electronic items (2 ipods, PSP, 2 mobile phones, 2 laptops, safe token) an put them through in a series of trays I can just imagine how this will actually work.
They'll ask you to take your clothes off, put the clothes through the scanner to find anything "invisible" and then send them down a ramp at high speed getting them all mixed up with other people's clothes.
My current irritation in US airports is the "boarding card" check AFTER the body scanner. So if (like me) you normally put your ticket in your jacket pocket (which of course has to be scanned separately) then you get scolded even though your boarding pass had to be checked to get you into the security queue in the first place. All this check does is slow everyone down for another 10 seconds per person for absolutely ZERO benefit (they don't check that you are the person on the card, just that you have the boarding card).
1) Microsoft Smartphones are a bit larger in the market than I think you realize, as they have been around for many years now, starting out as PocketPC phones.
They are a massively distant third behind RIM and Symbian, and in terms of new device sales (a core market for new development) they lagged the iPhone in Q4 2007 and are predicted to lag again in Q1 2008.
This is where I mention that one of parnering company's contracts is with Cricket dropping 3.5/4g service in Vegas, and this company has been in the cell business since 1995... Just last week we were going over product availability (cell phones) for the new AWS Vegas market.
Which stuns me therefore that you know so little about the global position of Windows Mobile. If you prefixed your statements by saying "US market" then you'd be slight more accurate, but on a global scale (especially Japan and Europe) you are extremely wide of the mark on the multi-media marketing of phones and on the position of Windows Mobile.
Things are changing though; but Vista has been as much a change from XP under the hood as 98 -> 2000 migration was in my opinion.
Now here of course is the problem with your "opinion" because the migration was not from 98 -> 2000 but from NT 4.0 to 2000, which was certainly a migration of sorts but no where near the big shift you are implying.
So yes there are changes, but in reality this is the first inhouse major rearchitecture that MS have done. Windows NT 3.51, which was the core of the NT line, was a team brought in from outside. Maybe the challenge here isn't the scale of the change but the lack of outside experience in making the change happen.
Instead write your code for an OSS phone or/and port it to Windows Mobile, there are far more Windows Mobile phones than iPhones, so you even get a bigger market.
4th Quarter 2007 and the iPhone was in 3rd place in the US market behind Nokia and RIM. So yes you are right that its currently a larger market, but you'd be better off writing for Symbian or RIM to get an even bigger market and writing in Java to get the biggest market of all.
Other cellphone companies and Microsoft made ONE mistake with their Mobile OSes, they didn't market the media features to the general public
You are aware that Sony Ericsson tied up a few years ago around just this area and that Nokia have been selling these media features as a plus point for several years as well? Now if you are saying that Microsoft haven't done this then you are correct, but as they are a minor part of the smartphone market that really isn't significant.
Apple isn't about technology or even good quality product or innovation anymore,
So Microsoft are about quality, technology and innovation? In the mobile market?
Ok, now for fanboi/fangurls to mark my post down because the truth is scary...
Nope, I think you should be marked down because you don't know anything about the mobile phone market and the fact that it is primarily driven from a consumer products perspective rather than as a technology innovation area. Mobile phones are a commodity item which means that the differentiation has ceased to be around tariffs and has shifted onto devices. This means that the fashion of a device is more important than the features of the device. Having the most features isn't what is required, it is about having the most impact for the features that people want. Nokia were the first to dominate in mobile phones by having the best User Interface, which gave them the most impact for the features (because people could use them easily) this is the competition that Apple are in.
Usability and Fashion are the game in consumer products, not support for a given codec.
The lawyer is James Sullivan... where have I heard that before.. ahh yes Monsters Inc. So now it becomes clear, making kids laugh wasn't enough either, now its back to getting Slashdot to scream on mass by attacking fair use.
Smart ploy Sully, smart ploy, it'll get us out of this energy crisis for sure.
A while back I blogged on using tags and blogs as a standard mechanism for publication. Now the point of this is that while the patent act says published it doesn't specify the publication type it just says that the other people filing could have obtained the information from it and that others will have read it.
To me this is a classic case where the internet has over taken the current laws to give us a much cheaper and simpler way of doing this.
Start at the cold hard rock face of development. The Testers, skills required are not as sophisticated (you have to repeatedly break stuff) but it will give you a great insight into just how badly some "professional" developers code.
Testing has the added advantage of being a place where its low paid and turnover is high so its a good place to get started in IT.
I think that most poor use of C++ can be traced to the use of C++. C++ was about the fifth or sixth language I worked with professionally and without a doubt it was the biggest load of crap out I've ever had the misfortune to come across. Things like "friends" which enabled muppets on the project to complete subvert the principles of the project. The brain dead syntax (inherited from C like Java and C#) which values keystrokes over clarity. Unlike PHP or Perl where only the clinically insane would use them on a large scale (30+ developer) project C++ was habitually used on just that sort of development.
Before people moan about "personal" these aren't things that people have paid for with their own cash (they got the cash paid back). The other point is that banning removable storage is a difficult, but sensible, policy when there is confidential or valuable information about. Hopefully these USB sticks will be encrypted and tied to only the departmental machines (i.e. no working at home on confidential information) in order to prevent misuse or sale.
This isn't a personal privacy issue for the users (after all its just a USB key) its a personal privacy issue for the people on whom the department stores information.
Now this is the sort of thing that makes me take my hat off to science. These chaps, who probably still lose their car keys down the couch, have managed to identify objects of a 1mm size at a distance of 22,705,268,200,000,000,000 meters (14108399600000000 miles). Now obviously they are using analysis and not just "seeing" the dust but that truly is a gobsmaking achievement.
Of course now the bible literalists can jump up and say "see we are made from dust" but hell that can only lead to interesting conversations....
If its dating and sex then its fine, hell use it to your advantage by lying about your date of birth thus making sure you are always "perfect" for the gorm who believes in this crap. You can then use your superior education and knowledge to get laid more often...
If its marriage then forget it as you'll end up being convicted of murder.
After reviewing the material listed below I conclude the following A)Two reports by Dr Jacobson where[sic] based in itotal on roughly an hour of work
indicates that Dr Jacobson is not competent to judge the accuracy of information...
the investigative process has been unprofessional
and of course the incompetence claim. The brilliance of this is that in reality Pouwelse hasn't done that much work himself because he just uses the report itself to slam the guy down. This isn't a case of an independent study finding a different result, this is the original report itself undermining its own principle.
Its like a Daily Show episode playing out in court.
Valid answers are the likes of Red Bull and other energy drinks that are banned in some countries because of the amount of stimulants in them. Also acceptable are amounts of coffee that are either measured in gallons or espresso and Turkish coffees.
The basic rule is that a geek drink should contain so much caffeine or other stimulants that your heart stops, thus requiring another mouthful to get it started again.
So lets thing what physical access means in these cases.
1) They have your desktop computer 2) It is on 3) You've entered your crypto keys
Is it me or is this just a little tenuous? In a data centre they'd have to drag the thing off the rack and on your personal machine they'd have to physically take it off you, because waiting for you to shutdown and then walk-away would be too long. So the solution is to shutdown the machine and THEN put your coat on and pack your bag.
I can also get people's Crypto keys by threatening them with a knife or putting a CCTV camera over their workstation. There are "easier" ways to get the keys if you have physical access to the environment that are much simpler and reliable.
I'm sure we've all had that embarrassing occasion of going out with one twin, getting drunk and waking up with the other. It used to be okay to claim you were drunk and couldn't tell them apart, you'd still get a slap but not a knee in the groin... now they can be told apart using simple genetic testing there really is no excuse.
In other news the part of the movie industry targeted with making crap movies aimed at teenage boys was shut down as plot lines had become "medically unsupportable".
Winner: Counter-productive move of the year
on
WikiLeaks Under Fire
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Could the people leaked about on WikiLeaks really be this dumb? Is there anything that will guarantee that this information will be more broadly distributed and read and more likely to come to the attention of the main stream media?
Why don't they just go the whole hog and DDoS the BBC and CNN at the same time to close the loop.
Its an interesting definition of disastrous to say that the biggest selling HD console has been a disaster, and as for the idea that bundling Blu-Ray into the box wasn't a smart move this has been cited from the beginning as a major issue with XBox 360 in that while MS backed the HD-DVD standard they didn't integrate it into the box because of the desire to get the console to market quicker. This led to a market in which one "HD" console has HD level movie content (and similarly large available storage on its gaming disks) and the other has an after point of sale device with no gaming advantage.
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
Ruddy hell there are some people who really do give the Irish a bad name....
Charlie McCreevy is an ex-Irish MP and a chartered accountant whose biggest role was as Minister for Finance in Ireland.
Currently has no registered special interests of note, but damn he has come up with a stupid proposal. Even something sensible like "until death" would have met the requirements for people living longer whereas 95 years is just about the corporations behind the people.
Does anyone get the sensation that George has spotted that the demographic for Star Wars is massively male and is now looking at flogging more toys to the other 50% of the population? You can imagine it now...
Toy Industry Rep (TIR): We've just got the figures in and its great, we are selling loads of toys to boys
George: What about girls?
TIR: Well Star Wars is a boy thing so its not really targeted at them
George: What about if I created a new animated series that had a female lead?
TIR: Its still really a guy thing...
George: What about if she wears lots of pink and is a ballerina princess with a cute white dog?
TIR: Wouldn't that completely undermine the whole vision of Star Wars?
George: Jar Jar Binks.....?
TIR: Good point. Well George I'll get the focus groups working on it and we'll get back with the female character that most girls would buy the action figure for.
George: Excellent, I'll go out and kill a horse while I'm waiting.
Most video compression approaches use Keyframes which are uncompressed (across frames) in order to make sure the compression doesn't drift to far from the actual content. So doing Multi-core is actually pretty easy on video as you just dedicate a core as working on one key-frame to key-frame section. Given that key frames often occur as much as once a second (or on decent connections once every three seconds or so) then there is a huge amount of work that could be done in parallel and its not very difficult to make the encoders work in that way.
So video compression isn't one of the areas where it isn't an advantage to have multi-cores.
Launched "successfully" only 12 months ago and now its going to crash in a burning mess.
The folks over there in "intelligence" sure have a low threshold for what success means. This must be from the same school of accuracy that brought us "Saddam has WMDs".
Worst scenario here is it hitting Iran... like anyone will believe its an accident.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.
Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.
I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.
Given that both this airports insist on you taking laptops out of your bag (how bad a scanner is it?) and shoes off and on my last notable trip through JFK I had to remove all electronic items (2 ipods, PSP, 2 mobile phones, 2 laptops, safe token) an put them through in a series of trays I can just imagine how this will actually work.
They'll ask you to take your clothes off, put the clothes through the scanner to find anything "invisible" and then send them down a ramp at high speed getting them all mixed up with other people's clothes.
My current irritation in US airports is the "boarding card" check AFTER the body scanner. So if (like me) you normally put your ticket in your jacket pocket (which of course has to be scanned separately) then you get scolded even though your boarding pass had to be checked to get you into the security queue in the first place. All this check does is slow everyone down for another 10 seconds per person for absolutely ZERO benefit (they don't check that you are the person on the card, just that you have the boarding card).
1) Microsoft Smartphones are a bit larger in the market than I think you realize, as they have been around for many years now, starting out as PocketPC phones.
They are a massively distant third behind RIM and Symbian, and in terms of new device sales (a core market for new development) they lagged the iPhone in Q4 2007 and are predicted to lag again in Q1 2008.
This is where I mention that one of parnering company's contracts is with Cricket dropping 3.5/4g service in Vegas, and this company has been in the cell business since 1995... Just last week we were going over product availability (cell phones) for the new AWS Vegas market.
Which stuns me therefore that you know so little about the global position of Windows Mobile. If you prefixed your statements by saying "US market" then you'd be slight more accurate, but on a global scale (especially Japan and Europe) you are extremely wide of the mark on the multi-media marketing of phones and on the position of Windows Mobile.
Things are changing though; but Vista has been as much a change from XP under the hood as 98 -> 2000 migration was in my opinion.
Now here of course is the problem with your "opinion" because the migration was not from 98 -> 2000 but from NT 4.0 to 2000, which was certainly a migration of sorts but no where near the big shift you are implying.
So yes there are changes, but in reality this is the first inhouse major rearchitecture that MS have done. Windows NT 3.51, which was the core of the NT line, was a team brought in from outside. Maybe the challenge here isn't the scale of the change but the lack of outside experience in making the change happen.
Instead write your code for an OSS phone or/and port it to Windows Mobile, there are far more Windows Mobile phones than iPhones, so you even get a bigger market.
4th Quarter 2007 and the iPhone was in 3rd place in the US market behind Nokia and RIM. So yes you are right that its currently a larger market, but you'd be better off writing for Symbian or RIM to get an even bigger market and writing in Java to get the biggest market of all.
Other cellphone companies and Microsoft made ONE mistake with their Mobile OSes, they didn't market the media features to the general public
You are aware that Sony Ericsson tied up a few years ago around just this area and that Nokia have been selling these media features as a plus point for several years as well? Now if you are saying that Microsoft haven't done this then you are correct, but as they are a minor part of the smartphone market that really isn't significant.
Apple isn't about technology or even good quality product or innovation anymore,
So Microsoft are about quality, technology and innovation? In the mobile market?
Ok, now for fanboi/fangurls to mark my post down because the truth is scary...
Nope, I think you should be marked down because you don't know anything about the mobile phone market and the fact that it is primarily driven from a consumer products perspective rather than as a technology innovation area. Mobile phones are a commodity item which means that the differentiation has ceased to be around tariffs and has shifted onto devices. This means that the fashion of a device is more important than the features of the device. Having the most features isn't what is required, it is about having the most impact for the features that people want. Nokia were the first to dominate in mobile phones by having the best User Interface, which gave them the most impact for the features (because people could use them easily) this is the competition that Apple are in.
Usability and Fashion are the game in consumer products, not support for a given codec.
Performance enhancing means Viagra.... no wonder kids aren't doing science.
The lawyer is James Sullivan... where have I heard that before.. ahh yes Monsters Inc. So now it becomes clear, making kids laugh wasn't enough either, now its back to getting Slashdot to scream on mass by attacking fair use.
Smart ploy Sully, smart ploy, it'll get us out of this energy crisis for sure.
A while back I blogged on using tags and blogs as a standard mechanism for publication. Now the point of this is that while the patent act says published it doesn't specify the publication type it just says that the other people filing could have obtained the information from it and that others will have read it.
To me this is a classic case where the internet has over taken the current laws to give us a much cheaper and simpler way of doing this.
Start at the cold hard rock face of development. The Testers, skills required are not as sophisticated (you have to repeatedly break stuff) but it will give you a great insight into just how badly some "professional" developers code.
Testing has the added advantage of being a place where its low paid and turnover is high so its a good place to get started in IT.
I think that most poor use of C++ can be traced to the use of C++. C++ was about the fifth or sixth language I worked with professionally and without a doubt it was the biggest load of crap out I've ever had the misfortune to come across. Things like "friends" which enabled muppets on the project to complete subvert the principles of the project. The brain dead syntax (inherited from C like Java and C#) which values keystrokes over clarity. Unlike PHP or Perl where only the clinically insane would use them on a large scale (30+ developer) project C++ was habitually used on just that sort of development.
C++ education should be short and sharp....
If you want speed do C or assembler.
If you want OO do Eiffel or Smalltalk
If you want a job do C# or Java
Don't do C++.
Before people moan about "personal" these aren't things that people have paid for with their own cash (they got the cash paid back). The other point is that banning removable storage is a difficult, but sensible, policy when there is confidential or valuable information about. Hopefully these USB sticks will be encrypted and tied to only the departmental machines (i.e. no working at home on confidential information) in order to prevent misuse or sale.
This isn't a personal privacy issue for the users (after all its just a USB key) its a personal privacy issue for the people on whom the department stores information.
Now this is the sort of thing that makes me take my hat off to science. These chaps, who probably still lose their car keys down the couch, have managed to identify objects of a 1mm size at a distance of 22,705,268,200,000,000,000 meters (14108399600000000 miles). Now obviously they are using analysis and not just "seeing" the dust but that truly is a gobsmaking achievement.
Of course now the bible literalists can jump up and say "see we are made from dust" but hell that can only lead to interesting conversations....
If its dating and sex then its fine, hell use it to your advantage by lying about your date of birth thus making sure you are always "perfect" for the gorm who believes in this crap. You can then use your superior education and knowledge to get laid more often...
If its marriage then forget it as you'll end up being convicted of murder.
Everyone needs Jesus
Yup just like every fish needs a bicycle.
After reviewing the material listed below I conclude the following
A)Two reports by Dr Jacobson where[sic] based in itotal on roughly an hour of work
indicates that Dr Jacobson is not competent to judge the accuracy of information...
the investigative process has been unprofessional
and of course the incompetence claim. The brilliance of this is that in reality Pouwelse hasn't done that much work himself because he just uses the report itself to slam the guy down. This isn't a case of an independent study finding a different result, this is the original report itself undermining its own principle.
Its like a Daily Show episode playing out in court.
Coca-Cola? Hand in your geek card now.
Valid answers are the likes of Red Bull and other energy drinks that are banned in some countries because of the amount of stimulants in them. Also acceptable are amounts of coffee that are either measured in gallons or espresso and Turkish coffees.
The basic rule is that a geek drink should contain so much caffeine or other stimulants that your heart stops, thus requiring another mouthful to get it started again.
Coke? Hell even Arts Majors drink that.
So lets thing what physical access means in these cases.
1) They have your desktop computer
2) It is on
3) You've entered your crypto keys
Is it me or is this just a little tenuous? In a data centre they'd have to drag the thing off the rack and on your personal machine they'd have to physically take it off you, because waiting for you to shutdown and then walk-away would be too long. So the solution is to shutdown the machine and THEN put your coat on and pack your bag.
I can also get people's Crypto keys by threatening them with a knife or putting a CCTV camera over their workstation. There are "easier" ways to get the keys if you have physical access to the environment that are much simpler and reliable.
I'm sure we've all had that embarrassing occasion of going out with one twin, getting drunk and waking up with the other. It used to be okay to claim you were drunk and couldn't tell them apart, you'd still get a slap but not a knee in the groin... now they can be told apart using simple genetic testing there really is no excuse.
In other news the part of the movie industry targeted with making crap movies aimed at teenage boys was shut down as plot lines had become "medically unsupportable".
Could the people leaked about on WikiLeaks really be this dumb? Is there anything that will guarantee that this information will be more broadly distributed and read and more likely to come to the attention of the main stream media?
Why don't they just go the whole hog and DDoS the BBC and CNN at the same time to close the loop.
Its an interesting definition of disastrous to say that the biggest selling HD console has been a disaster, and as for the idea that bundling Blu-Ray into the box wasn't a smart move this has been cited from the beginning as a major issue with XBox 360 in that while MS backed the HD-DVD standard they didn't integrate it into the box because of the desire to get the console to market quicker. This led to a market in which one "HD" console has HD level movie content (and similarly large available storage on its gaming disks) and the other has an after point of sale device with no gaming advantage.
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
Ruddy hell there are some people who really do give the Irish a bad name....
Charlie McCreevy is an ex-Irish MP and a chartered accountant whose biggest role was as Minister for Finance in Ireland.
Currently has no registered special interests of note, but damn he has come up with a stupid proposal. Even something sensible like "until death" would have met the requirements for people living longer whereas 95 years is just about the corporations behind the people.
Does anyone get the sensation that George has spotted that the demographic for Star Wars is massively male and is now looking at flogging more toys to the other 50% of the population? You can imagine it now...
Toy Industry Rep (TIR): We've just got the figures in and its great, we are selling loads of toys to boys
George: What about girls?
TIR: Well Star Wars is a boy thing so its not really targeted at them
George: What about if I created a new animated series that had a female lead?
TIR: Its still really a guy thing...
George: What about if she wears lots of pink and is a ballerina princess with a cute white dog?
TIR: Wouldn't that completely undermine the whole vision of Star Wars?
George: Jar Jar Binks.....?
TIR: Good point. Well George I'll get the focus groups working on it and we'll get back with the female character that most girls would buy the action figure for.
George: Excellent, I'll go out and kill a horse while I'm waiting.
Most video compression approaches use Keyframes which are uncompressed (across frames) in order to make sure the compression doesn't drift to far from the actual content. So doing Multi-core is actually pretty easy on video as you just dedicate a core as working on one key-frame to key-frame section. Given that key frames often occur as much as once a second (or on decent connections once every three seconds or so) then there is a huge amount of work that could be done in parallel and its not very difficult to make the encoders work in that way.
So video compression isn't one of the areas where it isn't an advantage to have multi-cores.
Launched "successfully" only 12 months ago and now its going to crash in a burning mess.
The folks over there in "intelligence" sure have a low threshold for what success means. This must be from the same school of accuracy that brought us "Saddam has WMDs".
Worst scenario here is it hitting Iran... like anyone will believe its an accident.
This isn't aid, its a subsidy to grow the Windows market. Aid would be focused on the end-goal of the people, not on the end-goal of the company.
This is a blatant case of a monopoly subsidising to establish itself in emerging markets.
The NYT has a page that is still up