In actuality, what "enterprise" hardware offers you is the ability to get a replacement of exactly the same drive, it's not an issue of quality, it's an issue of consistency, which actually matters in things like SANs
It's not exactly like that. I've had some hands on with the thing.
Essentially one of the ways you can build Metro Apps is HTML5 as UI with a proprietary javascript library which can make sandboxed system calls. These apps obviously need a rendering and javascript engine to run so they use the one from IE.
If you write your metro apps with XAML and C#/VB/C++ you won't use IE to deliver that.
I'm not convinced on Metro myself, but there's a reason.
It also doesn't count because the ostrich egg, like any other bird egg, contains, but is not, the egg which turns into an embryo. The vast majority of that egg is a food dump for the chick.
You never, ever, ever see anyone when talking about population say "Hey, maybe we can achieve the same lifestyle we have now without being so stupidly wasteful and then we can support a whole bunch more billions.
All the population control nutters base their ideas of what the "world" can hold on either some sort of agrarian fiction, or on us being as stupidly wasteful as we are now. The world can support way more people than we currently have, we just need to stop being stupid, we have the technology to build more densely, to build vertical farms inside our cities, and to generally do everything we do in the western world at a rate of efficiency which is several orders of magnitude better than we currently do. That's not even talking about what we'll be able to do in a hundred years or two hundred. Humanity is stupid and wasteful, but we don't have to be, the debate shouldn't be about "How do we stop population growth for one because that's already happening, and for another because it's not the right problem. We can't afford to keep being wastefully inefficient and we can't go back to some sort of back 40 grow your own food agrarianism either because the 6 billion people more than we had when we had that kind of lifestyle aren't going to quietly die in a corner.
I think the OP means that like a lot of things that seem perfect they probably wouldn't be. As a specific example of how that might be the case, what if "what you want to do" is brutally murder people. Doing that without repercussions would be less than ideal for everyone else.
My point is that celebrity is in the eye of the beholder, and from a logical point of view, obsessing over RMS makes about as much sense as obsessing over any other celebrity. Yes he has some ability which puts him near the upper range of celebrities, but his opinions aren't really any more worthwhile than mine, which is to say not very worthwhile at all.
Based on some studies they've done with chimps, it's not just our society, but something deeply ingrained in our DNA, we're just wired that way. See the way Slashdot deals with RMS. There's articles in here about his opinions on things which have nothing at all to do with his areas of expertise or even FOSS. We all want to know about important people, some of us just have different definitions of who is important. Some folks like loud mouthed idiots who look good in a dress or a suit, others like loud mouthed idiots who can program and don't look good in anything.
Natural selection applies in any instance where the probability of reproduction is affected. It's got jack all to do with death or sterilization except insofar as those things affect probability of reproduction. If you have a gigantic nose and that makes it less likely for you to find a mate and procreate, then your giant nose is selected against, even if it has no impact on your own personal survival, because people without gigantic noses will have more kids who also don't have gigantic noses than you and people like you will have gigantic nosed kids.
Obviously factors which cause death or sterilization during reproductive age will have a more prominent affect than other factors because dead people don't have any kids whereas ugly people are just less likely to. Please don't correc people when you are both incorrect and stupid.
No, if Penguin makes authors sign deals which are worse for authors than the ones Amazon does and charges a higher price for the end product then Amazon will go out of business because they're not providing their middle men service at good value.
Even when you buy a book directly from the Kindle, Amazon clearly states the prices of all other versions available in their store. Yes, if for some reason Amazon doesn't sell the dead tree version you might get fleeced, but it is impossible to purchase an e-book from Amazon without being notified of all the relevant pricing. Not saying you won't find people who will pay a higher price for an e-Book for any number of various reasons, but if they're capable of reading they know they're paying more.
The problem with Barnes and Noble is not that they were fundamentally bad, it was that they were amazon but with higher fixed costs. You couldn't go to B&N or Borders and find someone who loved books and knew enough about them to recommend something to you, because those people would have been more expensive than teenagers. You couldn't go to B&N and find the obscure book on the shelf because B&N didn't specialize in anything. In the end, you went to B&N or Borders, and paid them more than Amazon charged. If you were looking for something fairly common you could pick it up in store, otherwise you had to wait for them to order it and come back to pick it up. If I order a book off Amazon it's at my doorstep in less than a week and I live on the other side of the world, if I order an e-book it's on my kindle in a few minutes, and Amazon's "recommends" has actually pointed me at some really good books.
A local bookstore can offer you things that Amazon cannot, specialization, personal service, atmosphere, etc, but B&N and Borders did none of these things, instead they made the same mistake that brick and mortar retailers all over the world have done and tried to compete on price and efficiency with a company with dramatically lower fixed costs, it didn't work for them anymore than it's worked for anyone else.
If you really think managed and native are just buzzwords, you're either one of the best programmers I've encountered or one of the worst. The only way wouldn't see the difference is if you either impeccably clean up everything you create by hand, or your programs leak memory like a sieve.
There's also the fact that the Kindle has no resellers. The iPad price has a margin in it for resellers, if Apple happens to be the reseller, they of course pocket that margin themselves, but they still make a profit even if they don't. Since Amazon has no resellers, they can sell directly for the price they'd usually charge wholesale. Apple also tends to put a premium price on their products because they can get away with charging it. Throw in the fact that the Fire doesn't have a camera or 3G which would reduces their manufacturing cost, as well as Amazon's preexisting relationships with manufacturers, and it's not at all implausible that the Fire could be generated at the very least at break even, even at that price point.
Except that's not what they're doing, they're un-deprecating C++, not deprecating C#.
Microsoft seems finally to have come to the conclusion that anyone with a lick of sense could have told them a decade ago. Some things work really well in managed code, some things don't. A large part of Microsoft's product suite has been migrated to.NET, but for reasons anyone with half a brain could tell you, not everything should be written that way. At the absolute least, you need to write enough code to run.NET(or any managed code) in an non managed language because unlike C++, managed code cannot run itself. In addition to that sort of stuff there's plenty of things which could be written in.NET, but for which doing so wouldn't make any real sense.
At present there are certain things in the Windows OS which are a huge pain to do in C++ since Microsoft has essentially replaced MFC with.NET, so you end up mixing in C# code where it really doesn't make any sense. Microsoft are rectifying this and allowing C++ to be an equal player, they're not getting rid of.NET, they are continuing to build their own software in.NET(where it makes sense), they're just allowing C++ programmers to play too.
LINQ for one is a major feature that Java doesn't have. Lamda expressions are another. Visual Studio 2010, at least if you have one of the higher license grades and get the write plugins is better than Eclipse in most ways(though I admit Mylin is just dead sexy, and Eclipse is a hell of a lot cheaper). Microsoft has also introduced a bunch of really nice frameworks to play with, at least so long as you're working with them on Windows, they're quite a lot easier to work with than JEE6.
As for Java 7, I don't have an objection to its feature set, there's a few syntax things I find ugly, but that's not a huge deal. My issue with it is that after 4 years, we should probably have been seeing the feature set of 8 with this release. I understand why that isn't the case, and I'm far from saying that Java is dead or dying, I'm just saying that for a long while it looked like it was at some risk, and they've got to keep up the momentum to keep it going.
Java was never dead, it was merely on life support. The time gap between Java 6 and Java 7 was in the vicinity of 4 years which is an eternity in programming and gave Microsoft the opportunity to gain a substantial lead on Java. Sun went out of business and nothing whatever could get past the JCP for approval. What with Sun going titsup and Oracle creating plenty of bad blood in the community it was a coin flip if any new version of the Java standard would ever be approved at all. A few months ago, Oracle proved it could get something past the JCP(even if Java 7 is incredibly underwhelming), and in doing so proved that Java wasn't going to die in the short term. That's certain now, but it was by no means certain a few months ago.
That sort of depends on whether this is the base cost of the unit or the cost including installation. Installation of solar panels isn't exactly cheap, and they're only really an option if you happen to have a roof to put them on. There's also questions of what kind of materials are used in the manufacture of these things and a whole bunch of other factors.
If these things are cleaner to produce and cheaper to install, they could be a good deal, even if the base panel itself costs 2.5x more.
Symbian 60 was the worst possible software, that's why Nokia are in this mess. Whether WP7 will eventually be any better who knows, but Nokia have had years to come up with a smart phone that didn't suck. They failed. Their management was disfunctional, they couldn't decide what their future direction was so they ended up a whole bunch of different products all of which sucked, instead of one which was good.
I don't know if this will be a good thing for Nokia, but I'm sick to death of people putting on their rose tinted glasses and pretending that Nokia's smart phone strategy has not been an epic fail.
Smart companies realize that people aren't productive 100% of the time and that there's no way around that. They provide facitilies or scheduling to allow their staff to take a short break and then come back to work fresh. Dumb companies try to make sure their staff are at their desks every possible second and end up with staff who can't focus and get nothing done for hours at a time, really dumb companies try really hard to make staff work all the time and end up with really low staff morale and even lower productivity.
Essentially speaking, smart companies realize their employees aren't robots and dumb companies don't. By taking this into account, smart companies get higher overall productivity and higher staff morale. Tragically very few of those.
In the sense of "this invention looks slightly like that invention, but has some differences and only an expert could tell one way or the other, not so great, particularly in the terms slashdot sees prior art which would pretty much see the wheel as prior art for gears becuase they're both circle shaped. In terms of being able to determine that a paper published at a major university exactly matches this idea, particularly when the pissed off university challenges said patents and sues Intel, they're pretty good.
The patent offices has a lot of issues, it's underfunded(which this helps), and its examiners are not generally top tier experts in the field. Primarily though it has a different view of what should be patentable than most of Slashdot. Slashdot tends to see the patent office through a double set of distorting glasses, one sees patents in general as bad, and the other sees everything that government does as fundamentally inefficient even when it's not. The patent office most certainly has issues and the patent process is certainly flawed(a lot of which this bill seems aimed to fix), but with what they have to work with at present they don't do that terrible a job.
Most commercial ideas involve a vast amount of hugely unprofitable research up front to get to that point. If you have a profitable idea you can apply for a patent on it or seek VC funding, if you're working on something esoteric that may be the foundation for the next big million dollar idea but won't make you a cent, you go to Intel. That's be appropriate even if Intel weren't putting in these provisions, because if you have an idea that can realize actual profit you have other sources of funding and don't need Intel's research grants.
Slashdot Mirror
In actuality, what "enterprise" hardware offers you is the ability to get a replacement of exactly the same drive, it's not an issue of quality, it's an issue of consistency, which actually matters in things like SANs
It's not exactly like that. I've had some hands on with the thing.
Essentially one of the ways you can build Metro Apps is HTML5 as UI with a proprietary javascript library which can make sandboxed system calls. These apps obviously need a rendering and javascript engine to run so they use the one from IE.
If you write your metro apps with XAML and C#/VB/C++ you won't use IE to deliver that.
I'm not convinced on Metro myself, but there's a reason.
It also doesn't count because the ostrich egg, like any other bird egg, contains, but is not, the egg which turns into an embryo. The vast majority of that egg is a food dump for the chick.
You never, ever, ever see anyone when talking about population say "Hey, maybe we can achieve the same lifestyle we have now without being so stupidly wasteful and then we can support a whole bunch more billions.
All the population control nutters base their ideas of what the "world" can hold on either some sort of agrarian fiction, or on us being as stupidly wasteful as we are now. The world can support way more people than we currently have, we just need to stop being stupid, we have the technology to build more densely, to build vertical farms inside our cities, and to generally do everything we do in the western world at a rate of efficiency which is several orders of magnitude better than we currently do. That's not even talking about what we'll be able to do in a hundred years or two hundred. Humanity is stupid and wasteful, but we don't have to be, the debate shouldn't be about "How do we stop population growth for one because that's already happening, and for another because it's not the right problem. We can't afford to keep being wastefully inefficient and we can't go back to some sort of back 40 grow your own food agrarianism either because the 6 billion people more than we had when we had that kind of lifestyle aren't going to quietly die in a corner.
I think the OP means that like a lot of things that seem perfect they probably wouldn't be. As a specific example of how that might be the case, what if "what you want to do" is brutally murder people. Doing that without repercussions would be less than ideal for everyone else.
The second.
My point is that celebrity is in the eye of the beholder, and from a logical point of view, obsessing over RMS makes about as much sense as obsessing over any other celebrity. Yes he has some ability which puts him near the upper range of celebrities, but his opinions aren't really any more worthwhile than mine, which is to say not very worthwhile at all.
That depends on who you define as a celebrity doesn't it.
Based on some studies they've done with chimps, it's not just our society, but something deeply ingrained in our DNA, we're just wired that way. See the way Slashdot deals with RMS. There's articles in here about his opinions on things which have nothing at all to do with his areas of expertise or even FOSS. We all want to know about important people, some of us just have different definitions of who is important. Some folks like loud mouthed idiots who look good in a dress or a suit, others like loud mouthed idiots who can program and don't look good in anything.
Natural selection applies in any instance where the probability of reproduction is affected. It's got jack all to do with death or sterilization except insofar as those things affect probability of reproduction. If you have a gigantic nose and that makes it less likely for you to find a mate and procreate, then your giant nose is selected against, even if it has no impact on your own personal survival, because people without gigantic noses will have more kids who also don't have gigantic noses than you and people like you will have gigantic nosed kids.
Obviously factors which cause death or sterilization during reproductive age will have a more prominent affect than other factors because dead people don't have any kids whereas ugly people are just less likely to. Please don't correc people when you are both incorrect and stupid.
No, if Penguin makes authors sign deals which are worse for authors than the ones Amazon does and charges a higher price for the end product then Amazon will go out of business because they're not providing their middle men service at good value.
Technically Marijuana is illegal mostly because hemp was a competitor to the new(at the time) synthetic fibres from Dupont.
Even when you buy a book directly from the Kindle, Amazon clearly states the prices of all other versions available in their store. Yes, if for some reason Amazon doesn't sell the dead tree version you might get fleeced, but it is impossible to purchase an e-book from Amazon without being notified of all the relevant pricing. Not saying you won't find people who will pay a higher price for an e-Book for any number of various reasons, but if they're capable of reading they know they're paying more.
Or expect Amazon to hire editors.
The problem with Barnes and Noble is not that they were fundamentally bad, it was that they were amazon but with higher fixed costs. You couldn't go to B&N or Borders and find someone who loved books and knew enough about them to recommend something to you, because those people would have been more expensive than teenagers. You couldn't go to B&N and find the obscure book on the shelf because B&N didn't specialize in anything. In the end, you went to B&N or Borders, and paid them more than Amazon charged. If you were looking for something fairly common you could pick it up in store, otherwise you had to wait for them to order it and come back to pick it up. If I order a book off Amazon it's at my doorstep in less than a week and I live on the other side of the world, if I order an e-book it's on my kindle in a few minutes, and Amazon's "recommends" has actually pointed me at some really good books.
A local bookstore can offer you things that Amazon cannot, specialization, personal service, atmosphere, etc, but B&N and Borders did none of these things, instead they made the same mistake that brick and mortar retailers all over the world have done and tried to compete on price and efficiency with a company with dramatically lower fixed costs, it didn't work for them anymore than it's worked for anyone else.
News to me, I've never seen a Kindle except for direct order from Amazon.
If you really think managed and native are just buzzwords, you're either one of the best programmers I've encountered or one of the worst. The only way wouldn't see the difference is if you either impeccably clean up everything you create by hand, or your programs leak memory like a sieve.
There's also the fact that the Kindle has no resellers. The iPad price has a margin in it for resellers, if Apple happens to be the reseller, they of course pocket that margin themselves, but they still make a profit even if they don't. Since Amazon has no resellers, they can sell directly for the price they'd usually charge wholesale. Apple also tends to put a premium price on their products because they can get away with charging it. Throw in the fact that the Fire doesn't have a camera or 3G which would reduces their manufacturing cost, as well as Amazon's preexisting relationships with manufacturers, and it's not at all implausible that the Fire could be generated at the very least at break even, even at that price point.
Except that's not what they're doing, they're un-deprecating C++, not deprecating C#.
Microsoft seems finally to have come to the conclusion that anyone with a lick of sense could have told them a decade ago. Some things work really well in managed code, some things don't. A large part of Microsoft's product suite has been migrated to .NET, but for reasons anyone with half a brain could tell you, not everything should be written that way. At the absolute least, you need to write enough code to run .NET(or any managed code) in an non managed language because unlike C++, managed code cannot run itself. In addition to that sort of stuff there's plenty of things which could be written in .NET, but for which doing so wouldn't make any real sense.
At present there are certain things in the Windows OS which are a huge pain to do in C++ since Microsoft has essentially replaced MFC with .NET, so you end up mixing in C# code where it really doesn't make any sense. Microsoft are rectifying this and allowing C++ to be an equal player, they're not getting rid of .NET, they are continuing to build their own software in .NET(where it makes sense), they're just allowing C++ programmers to play too.
LINQ for one is a major feature that Java doesn't have. Lamda expressions are another. Visual Studio 2010, at least if you have one of the higher license grades and get the write plugins is better than Eclipse in most ways(though I admit Mylin is just dead sexy, and Eclipse is a hell of a lot cheaper). Microsoft has also introduced a bunch of really nice frameworks to play with, at least so long as you're working with them on Windows, they're quite a lot easier to work with than JEE6.
As for Java 7, I don't have an objection to its feature set, there's a few syntax things I find ugly, but that's not a huge deal. My issue with it is that after 4 years, we should probably have been seeing the feature set of 8 with this release. I understand why that isn't the case, and I'm far from saying that Java is dead or dying, I'm just saying that for a long while it looked like it was at some risk, and they've got to keep up the momentum to keep it going.
Java was never dead, it was merely on life support. The time gap between Java 6 and Java 7 was in the vicinity of 4 years which is an eternity in programming and gave Microsoft the opportunity to gain a substantial lead on Java. Sun went out of business and nothing whatever could get past the JCP for approval. What with Sun going titsup and Oracle creating plenty of bad blood in the community it was a coin flip if any new version of the Java standard would ever be approved at all. A few months ago, Oracle proved it could get something past the JCP(even if Java 7 is incredibly underwhelming), and in doing so proved that Java wasn't going to die in the short term. That's certain now, but it was by no means certain a few months ago.
That sort of depends on whether this is the base cost of the unit or the cost including installation. Installation of solar panels isn't exactly cheap, and they're only really an option if you happen to have a roof to put them on. There's also questions of what kind of materials are used in the manufacture of these things and a whole bunch of other factors.
If these things are cleaner to produce and cheaper to install, they could be a good deal, even if the base panel itself costs 2.5x more.
Symbian 60 was the worst possible software, that's why Nokia are in this mess. Whether WP7 will eventually be any better who knows, but Nokia have had years to come up with a smart phone that didn't suck. They failed. Their management was disfunctional, they couldn't decide what their future direction was so they ended up a whole bunch of different products all of which sucked, instead of one which was good.
I don't know if this will be a good thing for Nokia, but I'm sick to death of people putting on their rose tinted glasses and pretending that Nokia's smart phone strategy has not been an epic fail.
Smart companies realize that people aren't productive 100% of the time and that there's no way around that. They provide facitilies or scheduling to allow their staff to take a short break and then come back to work fresh. Dumb companies try to make sure their staff are at their desks every possible second and end up with staff who can't focus and get nothing done for hours at a time, really dumb companies try really hard to make staff work all the time and end up with really low staff morale and even lower productivity.
Essentially speaking, smart companies realize their employees aren't robots and dumb companies don't. By taking this into account, smart companies get higher overall productivity and higher staff morale. Tragically very few of those.
In the sense of "this invention looks slightly like that invention, but has some differences and only an expert could tell one way or the other, not so great, particularly in the terms slashdot sees prior art which would pretty much see the wheel as prior art for gears becuase they're both circle shaped. In terms of being able to determine that a paper published at a major university exactly matches this idea, particularly when the pissed off university challenges said patents and sues Intel, they're pretty good.
The patent offices has a lot of issues, it's underfunded(which this helps), and its examiners are not generally top tier experts in the field. Primarily though it has a different view of what should be patentable than most of Slashdot. Slashdot tends to see the patent office through a double set of distorting glasses, one sees patents in general as bad, and the other sees everything that government does as fundamentally inefficient even when it's not. The patent office most certainly has issues and the patent process is certainly flawed(a lot of which this bill seems aimed to fix), but with what they have to work with at present they don't do that terrible a job.
Most commercial ideas involve a vast amount of hugely unprofitable research up front to get to that point. If you have a profitable idea you can apply for a patent on it or seek VC funding, if you're working on something esoteric that may be the foundation for the next big million dollar idea but won't make you a cent, you go to Intel. That's be appropriate even if Intel weren't putting in these provisions, because if you have an idea that can realize actual profit you have other sources of funding and don't need Intel's research grants.