Good for you. Sadly, node.js isn't a language - it's a framework. And most languages have been through a *lot* more testing before they're shoved in front of a developer than the average framework.
Frameworks aren't really like languages. All computer languages tend to be really, really similar - even outliers like Lisp have more in common with say, C, than most frameworks have with each other. If the framework you know and the framework you're learning both use a comprehensible, intelligent pattern (say, Django or CodeIgniter) you can get over the hump pretty easily. If, on the other hand, you're dealing with a steaming turd shovelled up by a decade of inbred development (say, Zend) you're not likely to be able to start coding in an hour after looking at a manual (presuming such a beast exists).
This isn't a problem with the companies in question - it's a problem with the game. As soon as a company has a presence in more than one country, the company needs to start making decisions about taxation. It's not an option not to make these decisions - one way or another, they have to be made. There is no option for them to simply "not play the game". They must.
And once they start playing, they find themselves in a crazy maze of exceptions, loopholes, provisos and special cases. If you want to cut down tax avoidance (not evasion) then you need to simplify the taxation system to the point where these loopholes don't exist. Of course, that'll never happen, because politicians for the last century have been busily creating loopholes in order to favour their particular patrons, and closing those loopholes would result in screams from said patrons.
The problem the politicians see isn't that these loopholes exist, it's that companies are using them who haven't paid politicians for the privilege.
The linux kernel 12 years ago was v2.0. We're now using 2.6. If companies want to rely on decades-old tech instead of playing ball and getting access to the shiny modern stuff, I don't particularly have a problem with that. Ideally, they'd get trounced in the market anyway, when their product couldn't compete with the open source stuff that used the modern kernel.
is it even possible to focus on a display that is literally on your cornea
Nope. Despite what the summary says, this isn't intended to provide a view to the wearer at all. It's purely cosmetic - people looking at you could see dollar signs in your eyes, and you might be able to use your contacts as sunglasses.
Is bitcoin that virtual currency where users lost heaps of cash a few years ago when its value crashed big time?
No, that was the US dollar. Bitcoin is the one that is with exchanges built out of ex-magic the gathering trading portals, whose users lost heaps of cash due to the exchanges' laughable security.
Conspiracy? I don't think a vote in the House of Reps really counts as a "conspiracy". Nor does it follow that because Europe doesn't want the UN to have control of the internet, the US' reasons for opposing that control aren't based in self-interest.
Probably because us "highly libertarian" users are also all about personal accountability. Besides, posting under a pseudonym doesn't exactly scream violations of privacy or freedom to me.
But it's going to be a diminishing market. The majority of phones seem to be offered on a plan basis in Western countries, so even phones which would be prohibitively expensive up front are available to people who would otherwise get feature phones.
The only people I know with feature phones are people who explicitly do not want a smart phone (generally, but not always, the older generation). For most people, the cost difference between a plan with a feature phone, and a plan with a smart phone is marginal. I guess developing countries might be more interested in feature phones, but then again, I'd imagine they'd be in less of a hurry to continually upgrade than their developed counterparts, resulting in lower turnover for Nokia.
It used to be that feature phones were the default, with smart phones an expensive niche, but now, feature phones are really becoming the niche.
You have an iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, iPad mini... However.
All of which share certain design elements, and, even so, constitute a very narrow spectrum of variation. Most Android manufacturer show more variation in just their products than iOSes entire line-up. Note that this isn't judging whether variation is good or bad - Apple obviously thinks that such consistency is good for their product image - it's just observing the degree of variation.
The thing is that with any computer device, the TRUE measure of variety is what you can do with it, not superficial appearance.
Not really. If that were true, then why would Apple put out an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPad mini? They all have, more or less, the same technical capacity, the only difference is one of form. And form is important. The difference between laptops and desktops is one of form. So is the difference between phones and tablets. We're already seeing the start of a convergence where the technical features of phones, tablets, laptops and desktops start becoming similar, and they only differ based on form.
Moreover, some elements of form are a combination of appearance and technical capacity - stuff like physical keyboards, the Transformer's integrated docklike thingy, larger screens, the use of a stylus, clamshell or slab, etc. The point is that the varied Android ecosystem allows customers choice. It's organic - it provides a wide variety of choices, the good ones find a niche, and the bad ones fail and drop off. iOS is much more static - it provides one choice.
That works as long as the people at Apple keep getting it right, and make sure that the single featureset they offer is the optimal for a large portion of their customer base. However, a series of screwups at Apple would kill off iOS; a series of screwups at Google would likely not kill off Android, as the manufacturers can adapt their products.
Anyone can make an APP. And we get variety because of it.
Well, anyone can make an app. They may or may not be allowed to sell it on iOS - but that's really the subject of another thread.
Yes, we should take a lesson from this! Just look at what happened to Venuvian civilization after they started burning all their fossilized Venuvian dinosaurs!
His point wasn't phrased the best. Look at the cars in the carpark. You see huge variety in size, shapes, colours, functions, etc. You don't see a monoculture of same size, same shape, same features. Apple's tight corporate control enforces that sameness; Android's openness allows companies to produce the sort of variety you see in cars.
Car's are only "open" inasmuch as the key patents have expired, and the basic engineering principles are well known. Anyone can make a car, and we get variety because of it. Anyone can make an Android device, and we get variety because of it. Only Apple can make an iDevice, and we get sameness because of it.
It's not a great analogy - it's drawing an apples/oranges comparison between a type of good (cars) and OS publishers (Apple/Google) - but I think that's what he's trying to say.
Numbers are dry and technical. Real words, particularly words that have positive connotations (sweets as being tasty and desirable, big cats as being sleek and powerful) are memorable and evocative. It's a branding exercise more than anything else.
Were they voting for smaller government and lower taxes, or just voting against minorities who steal tax dollars. I don't know, but the reality is that these people voting for a candidate who did not support the federal government building infrastructure that makes the US urban areas strong. So why do they expect the urban people to pay taxes so they can get cheap calls?
Because, despite who they voted for, they didn't get smaller government and lower taxes. What you're saying is that the people who vote for low tax/small government should still have to pay the high taxes imposed by the successful ideology and not benefit from the things the government spends that tax on.
The conservative position consists of two points: low taxes and individuals paying for their own services. You can't impose high taxes, and then accuse them of betraying their ideals when they demand they actually get some services for those taxes you've forced them to pay, contrary to their ideology.
"Dirty bombs" are a true terrorism weapon - they cause far more terror than is actually justified, just like the 9/11 attacks did for air travel. Radiation is all scary and mysterious and dangerous and Chernobyl and Fukushima and OMG we're all gonna die!
That's their purpose, more than actually causing fatalities.
It needs an app that can integrate/replace exchange. And no, Thunderbird+Lightning doesn't come close. Just for starters, it needs to allow people to view others' calendars, easily schedule meetings in other peoples' available time, allow booking of resources like rooms, etc.
Secondly, it needs to work with the massive multifunction printing systems out of the box. I realize this is dependant on printer manufacturers more than the Linux devs, but the end-user doesn't care about who's problem it is - all they know is that printers work on Windows, and don't on Linux.
I use Linux at my workplace; these are the two primary functions it can't fulfil.
Yeah, but that's tangential to my point. The point I was making is that, even if you're nominally required to prove your illness, the system's held in so much contempt that circumventing it's trivial.
Same in Australia. Except that the vast majority of doctors will just go "yeah, whatever" and give you a medical certificate. On one occasion, I've gone into a clinic on a work day, and the first thing the doctor said was "how long do you need off?"
If we were architects, we'd be unveiling skyscrapers built using favela techniques of plugging any old crap together, in the mud, next to a river.
There's a lot of reasons for this. Off the top of my head:
Time scale. How long was it between the time the first brick was laid, and the first skyscraper built? I dunno, but I'm guessing it's in 5000+ year range. Architecture, as a discipline, is the product of one solid step at a time, over a very long time. By contrast, we're developing skyscrapers ~40 years after we discovered how to fire bricks
Complexity. Skyscrapers are complex beasts. They've got to be aware of, and responsive to, everything from geological shifts to internal air pressure, as well as the usual structural components. But they're still orders of magnitude less complex than even a fairly modest app. Sure, they're on a far larger scale, and much more difficult to build, but in terms of design they handle fewer variables.
Lethality. Architectural failure could kill hundreds of people quite easily. Apart form a few niche areas (vehicle control, medical systems, etc) software failure isn't lethal at all, let alone to hundreds of people.
Quality Control. Partly related to lethality, but also because people are accustomed to software failure, vendors are rarely considered liable to any great degree for faulty software. Therefore there's little incentive to spend time (and therefore, money) in a robust QA process. It's much more profitable to push out featurful-but-buggy software and promise a fix than it is to push a robust-but-limited piece of software.
What if the enterprise doesn't succeed? I'll lose all my money.
Precisely. Which is why nobody would invest if they could just sit on their money while it appreciated.
Doesn't seem like a good plan for pension savings.
Which is why any pension fund diversifies.
Bank lend this money to other people, who want them for example for their house. There is no need for any investment in order for banks to be able to lend money.
You precisely describe an investment, and then say that investments aren't necessary. The bank lending out money for a mortgage is the bank making an investment in the mortgagee. They expect to receive their initial investment back, plus interest. They give some of that interest to the people who put their money in the bank. If the bank never generated any interest, people would never put their savings in them, and the bank would have no money to lend.
Perhaps you missed what I said. Let me repeat, with emphasis:
they cannot get a decent job because they cannot afford an education
Answering phones will never get you enough money to buy a house without a loan, or afford an education before you're too old to make back the money invested on it.
I buy houses all the time without a loan. Better yet, I buy them in small fractional parts that provide compounding returns. I also insure them with a few mouse clicks. It's called REITs
Good luck living in a fractional part of real estate. If you're not rich enough to buy a residence outright (and most people aren't), you're going to need a loan to buy real estate.
Education? Apprenticeships would become more common.
Apprenticeships are based on the idea that apprentices can become a spare pare of hands, and learn by watching the master, while providing some value. Even in that case, apprentices (or their families) usually had to pay the master potentially very expensive apprenticeship fees. In many jobs these days, spare pairs of hands aren't useful, but rather, a hindrance, which would drive the apprenticeship fee even higher.
New business? Sell shares sooner in the start up process.
Investments are a form of loan. Who's going to buy your shares? Failure rates of new businesses are massive, and they can get a guaranteed income by just sitting on their cash.
Cars? Lease and/or rent-to-own.
Which, likewise, is a loan, subject to defaults and other risks that don't exist when just sitting on your money.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. Sadly, node.js isn't a language - it's a framework. And most languages have been through a *lot* more testing before they're shoved in front of a developer than the average framework.
Frameworks aren't really like languages. All computer languages tend to be really, really similar - even outliers like Lisp have more in common with say, C, than most frameworks have with each other. If the framework you know and the framework you're learning both use a comprehensible, intelligent pattern (say, Django or CodeIgniter) you can get over the hump pretty easily. If, on the other hand, you're dealing with a steaming turd shovelled up by a decade of inbred development (say, Zend) you're not likely to be able to start coding in an hour after looking at a manual (presuming such a beast exists).
This isn't a problem with the companies in question - it's a problem with the game. As soon as a company has a presence in more than one country, the company needs to start making decisions about taxation. It's not an option not to make these decisions - one way or another, they have to be made. There is no option for them to simply "not play the game". They must.
And once they start playing, they find themselves in a crazy maze of exceptions, loopholes, provisos and special cases. If you want to cut down tax avoidance (not evasion) then you need to simplify the taxation system to the point where these loopholes don't exist. Of course, that'll never happen, because politicians for the last century have been busily creating loopholes in order to favour their particular patrons, and closing those loopholes would result in screams from said patrons.
The problem the politicians see isn't that these loopholes exist, it's that companies are using them who haven't paid politicians for the privilege.
So do you, Doctor Jones, so do you.
Just as much as every FPS ever is just a rip-off of Wolfenstein
The linux kernel 12 years ago was v2.0. We're now using 2.6. If companies want to rely on decades-old tech instead of playing ball and getting access to the shiny modern stuff, I don't particularly have a problem with that. Ideally, they'd get trounced in the market anyway, when their product couldn't compete with the open source stuff that used the modern kernel.
is it even possible to focus on a display that is literally on your cornea
Nope. Despite what the summary says, this isn't intended to provide a view to the wearer at all. It's purely cosmetic - people looking at you could see dollar signs in your eyes, and you might be able to use your contacts as sunglasses.
Is bitcoin that virtual currency where users lost heaps of cash a few years ago when its value crashed big time?
No, that was the US dollar. Bitcoin is the one that is with exchanges built out of ex-magic the gathering trading portals, whose users lost heaps of cash due to the exchanges' laughable security.
Conspiracy? I don't think a vote in the House of Reps really counts as a "conspiracy". Nor does it follow that because Europe doesn't want the UN to have control of the internet, the US' reasons for opposing that control aren't based in self-interest.
Probably because us "highly libertarian" users are also all about personal accountability. Besides, posting under a pseudonym doesn't exactly scream violations of privacy or freedom to me.
But it's going to be a diminishing market. The majority of phones seem to be offered on a plan basis in Western countries, so even phones which would be prohibitively expensive up front are available to people who would otherwise get feature phones.
The only people I know with feature phones are people who explicitly do not want a smart phone (generally, but not always, the older generation). For most people, the cost difference between a plan with a feature phone, and a plan with a smart phone is marginal. I guess developing countries might be more interested in feature phones, but then again, I'd imagine they'd be in less of a hurry to continually upgrade than their developed counterparts, resulting in lower turnover for Nokia.
It used to be that feature phones were the default, with smart phones an expensive niche, but now, feature phones are really becoming the niche.
You have an iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, iPad mini... However.
All of which share certain design elements, and, even so, constitute a very narrow spectrum of variation. Most Android manufacturer show more variation in just their products than iOSes entire line-up. Note that this isn't judging whether variation is good or bad - Apple obviously thinks that such consistency is good for their product image - it's just observing the degree of variation.
The thing is that with any computer device, the TRUE measure of variety is what you can do with it, not superficial appearance.
Not really. If that were true, then why would Apple put out an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPad mini? They all have, more or less, the same technical capacity, the only difference is one of form. And form is important. The difference between laptops and desktops is one of form. So is the difference between phones and tablets. We're already seeing the start of a convergence where the technical features of phones, tablets, laptops and desktops start becoming similar, and they only differ based on form.
Moreover, some elements of form are a combination of appearance and technical capacity - stuff like physical keyboards, the Transformer's integrated docklike thingy, larger screens, the use of a stylus, clamshell or slab, etc. The point is that the varied Android ecosystem allows customers choice. It's organic - it provides a wide variety of choices, the good ones find a niche, and the bad ones fail and drop off. iOS is much more static - it provides one choice.
That works as long as the people at Apple keep getting it right, and make sure that the single featureset they offer is the optimal for a large portion of their customer base. However, a series of screwups at Apple would kill off iOS; a series of screwups at Google would likely not kill off Android, as the manufacturers can adapt their products.
Anyone can make an APP. And we get variety because of it.
Well, anyone can make an app. They may or may not be allowed to sell it on iOS - but that's really the subject of another thread.
Yes, we should take a lesson from this! Just look at what happened to Venuvian civilization after they started burning all their fossilized Venuvian dinosaurs!
His point wasn't phrased the best. Look at the cars in the carpark. You see huge variety in size, shapes, colours, functions, etc. You don't see a monoculture of same size, same shape, same features. Apple's tight corporate control enforces that sameness; Android's openness allows companies to produce the sort of variety you see in cars.
Car's are only "open" inasmuch as the key patents have expired, and the basic engineering principles are well known. Anyone can make a car, and we get variety because of it. Anyone can make an Android device, and we get variety because of it. Only Apple can make an iDevice, and we get sameness because of it.
It's not a great analogy - it's drawing an apples/oranges comparison between a type of good (cars) and OS publishers (Apple/Google) - but I think that's what he's trying to say.
Numbers are dry and technical. Real words, particularly words that have positive connotations (sweets as being tasty and desirable, big cats as being sleek and powerful) are memorable and evocative. It's a branding exercise more than anything else.
Were they voting for smaller government and lower taxes, or just voting against minorities who steal tax dollars. I don't know, but the reality is that these people voting for a candidate who did not support the federal government building infrastructure that makes the US urban areas strong. So why do they expect the urban people to pay taxes so they can get cheap calls?
Because, despite who they voted for, they didn't get smaller government and lower taxes. What you're saying is that the people who vote for low tax/small government should still have to pay the high taxes imposed by the successful ideology and not benefit from the things the government spends that tax on.
The conservative position consists of two points: low taxes and individuals paying for their own services. You can't impose high taxes, and then accuse them of betraying their ideals when they demand they actually get some services for those taxes you've forced them to pay, contrary to their ideology.
They're only hypocritical if they're allowed to exempt themselves from taxes imposed by the party they didn't vote for.
"Dirty bombs" are a true terrorism weapon - they cause far more terror than is actually justified, just like the 9/11 attacks did for air travel. Radiation is all scary and mysterious and dangerous and Chernobyl and Fukushima and OMG we're all gonna die!
That's their purpose, more than actually causing fatalities.
It needs an app that can integrate/replace exchange. And no, Thunderbird+Lightning doesn't come close. Just for starters, it needs to allow people to view others' calendars, easily schedule meetings in other peoples' available time, allow booking of resources like rooms, etc.
Secondly, it needs to work with the massive multifunction printing systems out of the box. I realize this is dependant on printer manufacturers more than the Linux devs, but the end-user doesn't care about who's problem it is - all they know is that printers work on Windows, and don't on Linux.
I use Linux at my workplace; these are the two primary functions it can't fulfil.
Leave everything in beta for years, and use that to excuse all bugs.
Yes, that and the fact that they weren't charging for it.
Yeah, but that's tangential to my point. The point I was making is that, even if you're nominally required to prove your illness, the system's held in so much contempt that circumventing it's trivial.
Same in Australia. Except that the vast majority of doctors will just go "yeah, whatever" and give you a medical certificate. On one occasion, I've gone into a clinic on a work day, and the first thing the doctor said was "how long do you need off?"
If we were architects, we'd be unveiling skyscrapers built using favela techniques of plugging any old crap together, in the mud, next to a river.
There's a lot of reasons for this. Off the top of my head:
What if the enterprise doesn't succeed? I'll lose all my money.
Precisely. Which is why nobody would invest if they could just sit on their money while it appreciated.
Doesn't seem like a good plan for pension savings.
Which is why any pension fund diversifies.
Bank lend this money to other people, who want them for example for their house. There is no need for any investment in order for banks to be able to lend money.
You precisely describe an investment, and then say that investments aren't necessary. The bank lending out money for a mortgage is the bank making an investment in the mortgagee. They expect to receive their initial investment back, plus interest. They give some of that interest to the people who put their money in the bank. If the bank never generated any interest, people would never put their savings in them, and the bank would have no money to lend.
Perhaps you missed what I said. Let me repeat, with emphasis:
they cannot get a decent job because they cannot afford an education
Answering phones will never get you enough money to buy a house without a loan, or afford an education before you're too old to make back the money invested on it.
I buy houses all the time without a loan. Better yet, I buy them in small fractional parts that provide compounding returns. I also insure them with a few mouse clicks. It's called REITs
Good luck living in a fractional part of real estate. If you're not rich enough to buy a residence outright (and most people aren't), you're going to need a loan to buy real estate.
Education? Apprenticeships would become more common.
Apprenticeships are based on the idea that apprentices can become a spare pare of hands, and learn by watching the master, while providing some value. Even in that case, apprentices (or their families) usually had to pay the master potentially very expensive apprenticeship fees. In many jobs these days, spare pairs of hands aren't useful, but rather, a hindrance, which would drive the apprenticeship fee even higher.
New business? Sell shares sooner in the start up process.
Investments are a form of loan. Who's going to buy your shares? Failure rates of new businesses are massive, and they can get a guaranteed income by just sitting on their cash.
Cars? Lease and/or rent-to-own.
Which, likewise, is a loan, subject to defaults and other risks that don't exist when just sitting on your money.