Any time a film makes back less than its budget in domestic gross, it's considered a commercial failure by the studios. It's close enough that they'll probably get past the break even point once DVD sales kick in, but it's by no means a success.
This isn't really a surprise to me. I had no connection to the source material, so I had no built-in excitement about the film. The reviews were mixed when it opened, so I skipped it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way, though I may be in the minority here...
Actually, Lotus software has improved greatly over the last decade, at least in terms of features and usability. You could argue that the newer Notes clients are bloated, but the recent point releases have greatly lowered the memory footprint, and since it's based on Eclipse some bloat is unavoidable. On the server side, they have only become more efficient for the past few release cycles - it's a situation where you want to upgrade the server software on old hardware, because it will reduce resource usage.
I'd say the company I have had the most problems with is Symantec. Everything they acquire seems to turn to shit.
I don't know what the replacement should be, but I'd love to see the end of CAPTCHAs. The last time I tried to sign up a gmail account, it took me four tries just to read the bloody CAPTCHA correctly - if we've got to the point where the spammers can parse the CAPTCHA and a human can't, there's no point to them.
I was pleasantly suprised to read a story about the ruling on the Danish public service channel's homepage today. The Danish advokatrådet (council of solicitors) has pointed out that the decision could have consequences for other sites that merely link to illegal files, like Google, and have encouraged the responsible minister to take preventative action. So here's hoping the ruling will end up helping us get some reasonable legislation passed!
I moved to Denmark from Canada after I had finished my bachelor of engineering. From what I've heard the Swedish system is pretty similar to the Danish.
The system here is that 3 years gets you a bachelor (diplomingeniør) and 5 years gets you a masters (civilingeniør). My Canadian degree is a 5-year bachelor. Looking at the curriculum for similar programs to mine at the Danish universities, there's nothing in the masters curriculum that wasn't covered by my bachelor curriculum. But "officially", my degree is equated to the 3-year bachelor.
Now, this really hasn't been a problem, since I can demonstrate my true qualifications to anyone wishing to hire me. But there is a double standard.
Most of the problems you refer to are a result of poor administration or development of the domain, not of the product itself.
Policies can lock down most of the preferences, including client preferences, mail preferences, and locations. This is simply a case of the administrators figuring out what settings should be enforced and updating the policy document. So you may be correct in saying that a non-admin can't configure it, but non-admins aren't actually supposed to.
If you're talking about archiving in a non-mail application, then that is completely up to the application developer. Setting up archiving in a custom application is trivial for a good Notes dev. Encryption doesn't matter because you're either running the code as the authenticated user, or on a server where the actual contents of documents probably isn't going to matter (you'd typically archive entire documents with whatever encrypted fields they have intact).
It's also trivial for a Notes dev to customize the mail template to integrate the signature functionality with whatever application you can think of to make it easier to use. We choose to auto-generate HTML signatures using a template and the user's personal info (title, location, phone no, etc.). The point is moot in the newest version of Notes anyway, where signatures can be specified directly with rich-text. I don't think IBM ever expected end users to be coding their own HTML signatures, that option was there so admins could provide a signature and enable it.
This is no different than any other major software product: if you've got incompetent admins and devs, you'll end up with a mess. My company has about 100 Domino servers distributed globally, with a core team of maybe 5-6 admins, running very nicely.
I think the summary uses a few different definitions of 'process' at the same time.
Intel will not be giving TSMC any information about their manufacturing processes. Instead, Intel will be redesigning their chips so that TSMC can manufacture them on their process.
There are a few reasons for why Intel is doing this: - They have high ambitions for sales of Atom in embedded devices, so they will need more fab capacity than they own themselves - It will facilitate embedding other companies' IP in their Systems-on-a-chip (like Bluetooth/3G/HSDPA stuff for smartphones) - The Atom platform is low-performance, so Intels fab advantage doesn't help them much (they'd rather use their capacity for high-margin parts)
It seems like the argument is that, if we were to immediately stop releasing CO2 into the environment, it would take at least 1000 years for the earth to return to 'normal'. But this is not the same as saying the effects are 'irreversible'. Presumably we could reverse the effects by removing CO2 from the environment and putting it back in the ground in some stable form.
My experiences with VMWare's DirectX support is that it's slow and buggy. Plus, the video driver doesn't support the Vista display model, so it can't even run Vista Aero in a guest.
You're correct, I forgot about Intel being a big player in the SSD market. A quick search shows that their flash memory fabs run on different node sizes though (50 nm, 34 nm coming) so I guess those fabs are outside of their processor rotation.
Just to clarify: the tick-tock strategy means that one year gets a new architecture, the next year gets a new manufacturing process, and the cycle repeats. This means that there is a new architecture and new manufacturing every 24 months, not 12, and in alternating years.
Really, this is just a matter of having limited manufacturing capacity. Every time they create a new manufacturing process, they have to upgrade a factory to use it. This puts the factory out of service for however long it takes to roll out the new tech, and costs billions of dollars in the process. In other words, even Intel doesn't have the resources to upgrade all of their factories at once.
Instead, they take one or two factories running the oldest tech, and upgrade them. Once they are ready, they start manufacturing the high-end processors. The last-generation tech manufactures lower-end processors. The generation before that manufactures chipsets, graphics chips, etc. The generation before that manufactures DRAM / flash / whatever else is needed. This is just an example, I have no idea what the split is in reality.
So from Intel's perspective, they are always using the newest manufacturing tech for their most important products (high performance, high profit margin). This in turn gives them the capital needed to develop their next manufacturing process, and the cycle continues...
I've been using a 7.2 Mbit HSDPA 3G dongle for about half a year, and I hate the latency. Even for web browsing.
If all of the data was transferred in one go, sure, it'd be fine. But when a typical web page results in tens of requests (for images, AJAX requests, etc.) you can really feel the latency. And it is noticable that there's an extra pause between clicking a link and having the page start to load.
This is why it annoys me that the mobile broadband providers here (Denmark) are arguing against the ongoing fibre roll-out, since their technology will be "just as good" in a couple of years... Sure, you might in theory get to 100 Mbit, but if everyone is trying to use it, it's not going to work. It'd require massive infrastructure investments to upgrade the capacity of the masts, and I don't even know if the technology can work if there's too much activity on the spectrum.
Disk fragmentation is essentially unimportant on SSDs, and in fact, comparing a heavily-fragmented SSD vs. a heavily-fragmented mechanical disk would bias the result towards the SSD much more.
Assuming a reasonably smart file system, fragmentation will only affect performance through increased seek times. So you may actually be getting a big benefit from your SSD when reading that file, depending on how much your BitTorrent client fragments its download files.
It sounds like you can't stand phones. Nothing you say applies only to cell phones.
If you want to concentrate, just switch the phone to a profile that doesn't react to calls, but gives you a beep when a text message comes in. Voila, you have a pager.
I've had this problem on several previous Lenovo laptops as well, where I've ultimately had to install hacked drivers directly from the graphics card manufacturer and play around with different version of the Presentation Director to get it to work properly.
Ultimately, I think the problem is that Lenovo doesn't do proper QA on dual-monitor setups. It probably doesn't help that they seem to switch between different combinations of Intel, ATI, and nVidia technologies every generation.
I moved from Canada to Denmark a few years ago, so I have a good understanding of how the two systems work. The PR system here is not in any way comparable to a minority government in Canada, because the parties are much more effective at working together. Legislation doesn't always come from the governing party, but that's no problem - as long as a sufficient number of parties support it, it's a reflection of public support as well. In effect this keeps the governing party honest without preventing them from governing effectively.
The flaw in your argument is that a tax break will never be given because people are such "good customers". A tax break should have some kind of purpose, be it to help the lower class, encourage the middle class to work more overtime, etc. A tax break should never simply result in a uniform decrease across the board.
If the government has room in the budget for a tax break, it should go where there is the most benefit. If the tenth man has no problem paying the $59, let him keep paying it!
Lotus is a brand, not a product. As far as I know, the product IBM Lotus is releasing for the iPhone is iNotes, the webmail interface to a Lotus Domino mail server. This isn't a Notes client for the iPhone.
Is there any reason to believe that normal Windows drivers won't work on the OLPC? It's not like they had to port Windows to a totally new architecture - it's using an AMD x86 processor.
I agree that Windows on OLPC is a silly idea, but driver support is not an argument to use here.
Slashdot Mirror
Any time a film makes back less than its budget in domestic gross, it's considered a commercial failure by the studios. It's close enough that they'll probably get past the break even point once DVD sales kick in, but it's by no means a success.
This isn't really a surprise to me. I had no connection to the source material, so I had no built-in excitement about the film. The reviews were mixed when it opened, so I skipped it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way, though I may be in the minority here...
Actually, Lotus software has improved greatly over the last decade, at least in terms of features and usability. You could argue that the newer Notes clients are bloated, but the recent point releases have greatly lowered the memory footprint, and since it's based on Eclipse some bloat is unavoidable. On the server side, they have only become more efficient for the past few release cycles - it's a situation where you want to upgrade the server software on old hardware, because it will reduce resource usage.
I'd say the company I have had the most problems with is Symantec. Everything they acquire seems to turn to shit.
I don't know what the replacement should be, but I'd love to see the end of CAPTCHAs. The last time I tried to sign up a gmail account, it took me four tries just to read the bloody CAPTCHA correctly - if we've got to the point where the spammers can parse the CAPTCHA and a human can't, there's no point to them.
I was pleasantly suprised to read a story about the ruling on the Danish public service channel's homepage today. The Danish advokatrådet (council of solicitors) has pointed out that the decision could have consequences for other sites that merely link to illegal files, like Google, and have encouraged the responsible minister to take preventative action. So here's hoping the ruling will end up helping us get some reasonable legislation passed!
I moved to Denmark from Canada after I had finished my bachelor of engineering. From what I've heard the Swedish system is pretty similar to the Danish.
The system here is that 3 years gets you a bachelor (diplomingeniør) and 5 years gets you a masters (civilingeniør). My Canadian degree is a 5-year bachelor. Looking at the curriculum for similar programs to mine at the Danish universities, there's nothing in the masters curriculum that wasn't covered by my bachelor curriculum. But "officially", my degree is equated to the 3-year bachelor.
Now, this really hasn't been a problem, since I can demonstrate my true qualifications to anyone wishing to hire me. But there is a double standard.
Most of the problems you refer to are a result of poor administration or development of the domain, not of the product itself.
Policies can lock down most of the preferences, including client preferences, mail preferences, and locations. This is simply a case of the administrators figuring out what settings should be enforced and updating the policy document. So you may be correct in saying that a non-admin can't configure it, but non-admins aren't actually supposed to.
If you're talking about archiving in a non-mail application, then that is completely up to the application developer. Setting up archiving in a custom application is trivial for a good Notes dev. Encryption doesn't matter because you're either running the code as the authenticated user, or on a server where the actual contents of documents probably isn't going to matter (you'd typically archive entire documents with whatever encrypted fields they have intact).
It's also trivial for a Notes dev to customize the mail template to integrate the signature functionality with whatever application you can think of to make it easier to use. We choose to auto-generate HTML signatures using a template and the user's personal info (title, location, phone no, etc.). The point is moot in the newest version of Notes anyway, where signatures can be specified directly with rich-text. I don't think IBM ever expected end users to be coding their own HTML signatures, that option was there so admins could provide a signature and enable it.
This is no different than any other major software product: if you've got incompetent admins and devs, you'll end up with a mess. My company has about 100 Domino servers distributed globally, with a core team of maybe 5-6 admins, running very nicely.
I think the summary uses a few different definitions of 'process' at the same time.
Intel will not be giving TSMC any information about their manufacturing processes. Instead, Intel will be redesigning their chips so that TSMC can manufacture them on their process.
There are a few reasons for why Intel is doing this:
- They have high ambitions for sales of Atom in embedded devices, so they will need more fab capacity than they own themselves
- It will facilitate embedding other companies' IP in their Systems-on-a-chip (like Bluetooth/3G/HSDPA stuff for smartphones)
- The Atom platform is low-performance, so Intels fab advantage doesn't help them much (they'd rather use their capacity for high-margin parts)
If you're going to watch ads on the internet, may as well make it worth your while...
http://www.fleggaard.dk/movie.aspx
(click that you're Over 18, then hit the first video thumbnail)
It seems like the argument is that, if we were to immediately stop releasing CO2 into the environment, it would take at least 1000 years for the earth to return to 'normal'. But this is not the same as saying the effects are 'irreversible'. Presumably we could reverse the effects by removing CO2 from the environment and putting it back in the ground in some stable form.
My experiences with VMWare's DirectX support is that it's slow and buggy. Plus, the video driver doesn't support the Vista display model, so it can't even run Vista Aero in a guest.
Kudos, I think this was the first time I've ever LOLed at the disconnection meme. Well played!
You're correct, I forgot about Intel being a big player in the SSD market. A quick search shows that their flash memory fabs run on different node sizes though (50 nm, 34 nm coming) so I guess those fabs are outside of their processor rotation.
Just to clarify: the tick-tock strategy means that one year gets a new architecture, the next year gets a new manufacturing process, and the cycle repeats. This means that there is a new architecture and new manufacturing every 24 months, not 12, and in alternating years.
Really, this is just a matter of having limited manufacturing capacity. Every time they create a new manufacturing process, they have to upgrade a factory to use it. This puts the factory out of service for however long it takes to roll out the new tech, and costs billions of dollars in the process. In other words, even Intel doesn't have the resources to upgrade all of their factories at once.
Instead, they take one or two factories running the oldest tech, and upgrade them. Once they are ready, they start manufacturing the high-end processors. The last-generation tech manufactures lower-end processors. The generation before that manufactures chipsets, graphics chips, etc. The generation before that manufactures DRAM / flash / whatever else is needed. This is just an example, I have no idea what the split is in reality.
So from Intel's perspective, they are always using the newest manufacturing tech for their most important products (high performance, high profit margin). This in turn gives them the capital needed to develop their next manufacturing process, and the cycle continues...
I've been using a 7.2 Mbit HSDPA 3G dongle for about half a year, and I hate the latency. Even for web browsing.
If all of the data was transferred in one go, sure, it'd be fine. But when a typical web page results in tens of requests (for images, AJAX requests, etc.) you can really feel the latency. And it is noticable that there's an extra pause between clicking a link and having the page start to load.
This is why it annoys me that the mobile broadband providers here (Denmark) are arguing against the ongoing fibre roll-out, since their technology will be "just as good" in a couple of years... Sure, you might in theory get to 100 Mbit, but if everyone is trying to use it, it's not going to work. It'd require massive infrastructure investments to upgrade the capacity of the masts, and I don't even know if the technology can work if there's too much activity on the spectrum.
Disk fragmentation is essentially unimportant on SSDs, and in fact, comparing a heavily-fragmented SSD vs. a heavily-fragmented mechanical disk would bias the result towards the SSD much more.
Assuming a reasonably smart file system, fragmentation will only affect performance through increased seek times. So you may actually be getting a big benefit from your SSD when reading that file, depending on how much your BitTorrent client fragments its download files.
It sounds like you can't stand phones. Nothing you say applies only to cell phones.
If you want to concentrate, just switch the phone to a profile that doesn't react to calls, but gives you a beep when a text message comes in. Voila, you have a pager.
I've had this problem on several previous Lenovo laptops as well, where I've ultimately had to install hacked drivers directly from the graphics card manufacturer and play around with different version of the Presentation Director to get it to work properly.
Ultimately, I think the problem is that Lenovo doesn't do proper QA on dual-monitor setups. It probably doesn't help that they seem to switch between different combinations of Intel, ATI, and nVidia technologies every generation.
List of countries using proportional representation courtesy of Wikipedia. Are all of these governments "shaky"?
I moved from Canada to Denmark a few years ago, so I have a good understanding of how the two systems work. The PR system here is not in any way comparable to a minority government in Canada, because the parties are much more effective at working together. Legislation doesn't always come from the governing party, but that's no problem - as long as a sufficient number of parties support it, it's a reflection of public support as well. In effect this keeps the governing party honest without preventing them from governing effectively.
One of the things that makes xkcd funny is the alt-text... I missed having that here.
The flaw in your argument is that a tax break will never be given because people are such "good customers". A tax break should have some kind of purpose, be it to help the lower class, encourage the middle class to work more overtime, etc. A tax break should never simply result in a uniform decrease across the board.
If the government has room in the budget for a tax break, it should go where there is the most benefit. If the tenth man has no problem paying the $59, let him keep paying it!
Lotus is a brand, not a product. As far as I know, the product IBM Lotus is releasing for the iPhone is iNotes, the webmail interface to a Lotus Domino mail server. This isn't a Notes client for the iPhone.
Is there any reason to believe that normal Windows drivers won't work on the OLPC? It's not like they had to port Windows to a totally new architecture - it's using an AMD x86 processor.
I agree that Windows on OLPC is a silly idea, but driver support is not an argument to use here.
So, who foots the bill for this? The retailer, the credit card comany / debit card issuer, or the customer?