An add-on card means one more component to fail, one more component to find drivers for, more stuff inside the case, more power usage, and probably worse performance as well.
This is a checkbox which adds a single static header to each request, it's too simple to delay FF4 in any way.
This is also what programmers worldwide hate the hear from their PM/VP/CxO right before release - sorry, no software feature is "too simple to delay release in any way". This is an all-too-common blind spot when the requestor only thought about the time needed to make the change, but neglected to consider the effects it can have on other parts of the project and the user. It's actually quite worrying to see Firefox doing that - it's poor project management.
Have you actually used Firefox 4 on a Mac? The usual excuses are simply invalid - you open FF4b10 with Google as home page with barely anything on screen - 230MB is now gone! Safari opening Apple's oh-so-blingy home page is only using 100MB. "Max Number of Pages Stored in Memory" simply doesn't apply.
Plus... I know there're about:config entries that can tune this behavior. But I also know I can use Chrome without setting anything and it'll work without slowing things down (and Chrome did have a similar problem in the past! But they fixed that). Or, I can use FF4, tweak a bunch of stuff and it's still bad, and slower. This "this is not technically a memory leak" thing is irrelevant when user experience is concerned. Chrome does the job better and faster without slowing the computer down, they also seem to fix bugs faster. The decision is really easy for the user.
I used FF4 b7 in my Mac for a while - whenever I closed it, I get half my system's memory (2GB) back, visible from Activity Monitor's pie chart. This thing eats more memory than a Windows 7 VM for opening a bunch of YouTube tabs, there's no way I'll go back until they fixed this.
It happens a lot more than you think. Very often when reporters interview someone, take photos, or take in news materials from another party - the materials on their hand aren't sufficient for them to tell a good story. In that case they'd have to improvise by e.g. adding their own interpretations to make the story complete, and by extension they may add in their own materials as well.
What happened at CCTV can be something like this.. reporter got military footage on flying fighter planes, but no explosion or no good explosion. Reporter wants to make a convincing story on how awesome these new J-10 planes are. Reporter adds in Top Gun footage to make it look awesome.
Now I'm not saying CCTV's practice isn't shoddy - it is. But it's nothing new. Anyone having been interviewed by reporters would tell you the same thing - reporters DO add their own stuff in your story, get used to it.
Hey, if someone is morbidly obese, then he obviously has bigger problems to worry about than his car's MPG. One or two average Joes at 200 lbs commuting with this car should be able to get >150mpg quite easily even accounting for their weight, which is still very awesome.
I've been to the Bay Area, Hong Kong various cities in China (e.g. Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc.) before. I'm in Hong Kong right now but I'm going back to the Bay Area next month.
Bay Area: Engineers are rather well respected from what I can see. My sample may be biased though since I've been working with the upper layer of the valley so far (VCs, CxOs, Stanford PhDs, etc.) But hey, if your company just exited for a few million dollars, the local media and TechCrunch cares. You open a party and your friends love you.
Hong Kong: If you're an engineer (even a CTO "engineer"), you're a loser, period. Nobody ever heard of a VC or angel investor here - these things takes time to pay off, all people want is fast money. I can go rant about HK's economic environment until my face turns blue but suffice to say, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship are thinly veiled insult words here meaning you can't make fast and easy money. Some of my friends got funding of >$100M HKD and the media never paid any attention. Someone else just exited for $1B HKD last week and the mainstream media just don't care.
China: Yes there're many high tech firms in Beijing and Shenzhen and engineers do get much higher salaries (5x - 100x, depending on who you're comparing to) compared to the average uneducated worker (China has high literacy level but very low education level). Things is.. that's only for the lucky people who attended the top Chinese universities (e.g. Tsinghua) and succeeded in getting a job and work permit in the high tech cities only. If you aren't one of those 1-in-a-1000 lucky guys... sorry man but your life is gonna suck. Even if you are one of the lucky engineers - the top of the food chain in China is being a government official, not a C-Suite executive, and 100% not an engineer. The real elites in China aren't looking to become an engineer, but rather join the government and make a few really fast million bucks there.
So, from what I can tell... US's fear on losing its tech edge to Asia is highly overrated. If you really want the top tech companies, engineers and scientists in the world, the people have to love doing it and are financially allowed to keep doing it out of love (not every engineer is a tech company CxO or got hired by Google, you see...). That's simply not happening in China nor Hong Kong. The thing about Chinese engineers being ultra competitive is way overblown - if you're constantly under threat of being evicted from your ultra-expensive (compared to your tiny salary) flat, and your flat sucks - you'd be aggressive too. But it also makes you very short sighted because all you can think of is how to get a nicer house to live in, but not how to make the next Google or figure out how to build rockets cheap. So you're surely not gonna be doing better scientific research, opening a novel tech startup, or doing an open source project. Copying and cutting corners, on the other hand, works short term, but that's doesn't get China any edge ahead of the US.
A C-Suite executive is not legally liable to pay the company's bills (in case the company itself runs out of money) - you're looking at the Board of Directors there. But yes, being close to the power center, or being the power center yourself, does entail legal responsibilities.
The poll results look more like.. "Who can you remember when I ask you for a few names during a random phone call?"
If you just ask me for a few random famous people's name from a phone call, I'd probably answer Obama, Billy Gates too. If I say it's Mark Zuckerburg or even Linus Torvalds, I'd probably have to explain who the fuck Mark Zuckerburg or Linus Torvalds is.
But is losing the account really so important for you that you have to sacrifice your security?
If the account is really so important, and you really can't remember that password or write it down in a TrueCrypt encrypted volume.. ok, then you can just remember a few non-sensical answers for these questions. It's not perfect, but it's better than answering anything that your friends know.
If the account is not that important, then it's totally ok to NOT use that feature at all. Just write random gibberish as the answer and forget about it.
It works for me - I have a Macbook Pro and a Core i5 Hack Pro. The software selection is a bit disappointing though - I have no idea why so many people are playing Angry Bird on a Mac.
I brought a ThinkPad with me all the time when I was in college for easy access to lecture notes, book chapters that're posted in.pdf format, and also external references, and that didn't stop me at getting straight As from Comp. Sci. classes. Same for many of my friends. I've never been fond of the old stack-of-paper approach - paper get lost easily and are hard to organize when you have a large bunch of them, why bother?
For students who can manage it, bringing a laptop to class is progress. We should never stop progress because some loser can't concentrate with a laptop in front of him - that's a nanny policy. Arguably bad for high schools, and a big-NO for universities. What do you think university students are? 3-year-olds?
Ok, you can cram 1000 cores into one CPU chip - but feeding all 1000 CPU cores with enough data for them to process and transferring all the data they spit out is gonna be a big problem. Things like OpenCL work now because the high end GPUs these days have 100GB/s+ bandwidth to the local video memory chips, and you're only pulling out the result back into system memory after the GPU did all the hard work. But doing the same thing on a system level - you're gonna have problems with your usual DDR3 modules, your SSD hard disk (even PCI-E based) and your 10GE network interface.
User friendliness is about being simple, not having more colors or fancy widgets - see Windows Vista as an example.
The way I see it, if Linux were to win in the consumer market, what it needs to do is not more, but less - and do those "less" things 100X better than Apple, Google or Microsoft.
The mess with X is actually being addressed, with project Wayland. The philosophy behind Wayland is exactly simplification - most people don't need that network transparency logic, so re-factor it out and keep the core simple and fast. It's a different architecture than X and so it's gonna take time to get the whole UI software stack to work on that, but Ubuntu is behind it.
Configurations and integration between services in a Linux machine is still a pain in the ass, and sadly, I'm not seeing any project addressing that yet. I used to be an open source dev but now I have a tech company to manage. But that's where I'd really like to see progress on the FOSS front.
Finally.. I think the FOSS community may be setting their target too low with Windows, and the "I don't care about consumer market/we already own the server space" crowd are simply ignoring reality. Apple and Google are beating the shit out of Microsoft's products lately - Windows and Office are pretty much still there because of inertia. Having to compare Linux to Windows, is already implying Linux is in a very bad shape in the consumer market. On a higher level, none of the current high profile players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon - who's on the server side!!, even Facebook) or products (e.g. iOS, Android, Chrome,...) are truly independent players like Mozilla Foundation or the Linux kernel community. So, it's really not a time to be content with Linux share on the server side and bash M$, Apple, etc. as proprietary... FOSS still has a long way to go and improve.
If you've registered a URL schema to the OS, and the OS calls up your app when it sees that URL schema... how's that different from any other OS (w/ the associated software suite), like Windows and Linux?
The OS could help by telling your app things like "this URL comes from an Internet URL on Safari".. but it's by no means the OS's fault. It's just doing what it's supposed to do, an intermediary.
Yet, there're many unwritten rules on Slashdot that have nothing to do with your comment's quality:
If you post near the top, you're more likely to get modded up even if your comment is only mediocre or group think. You can actually quite accurately predict a post's mod points by measuring its position on the thread and its relevance - mod are lazy.
Any rebuttal to your comment, even a very half-assed one, and especially the personal attack kind (!), is likely to get you, the parent poster, modded down. Happened to me many times, the mods are basically encouraging flamewars.
Long, original posts take a long time to get moderation points - even though it can eventually get a 5 Informative from patient mods. Long, unoriginal post get the same points very easily because the poster copied it from the article or Wikipedia. So, original insights are being discouraged from this system unless you're someone famous like Steve Woz.
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An add-on card means one more component to fail, one more component to find drivers for, more stuff inside the case, more power usage, and probably worse performance as well.
No thanks. I'd take the replacement in April.
This is a checkbox which adds a single static header to each request, it's too simple to delay FF4 in any way.
This is also what programmers worldwide hate the hear from their PM/VP/CxO right before release - sorry, no software feature is "too simple to delay release in any way". This is an all-too-common blind spot when the requestor only thought about the time needed to make the change, but neglected to consider the effects it can have on other parts of the project and the user. It's actually quite worrying to see Firefox doing that - it's poor project management.
Have you actually used Firefox 4 on a Mac? The usual excuses are simply invalid - you open FF4b10 with Google as home page with barely anything on screen - 230MB is now gone! Safari opening Apple's oh-so-blingy home page is only using 100MB. "Max Number of Pages Stored in Memory" simply doesn't apply.
Plus... I know there're about:config entries that can tune this behavior. But I also know I can use Chrome without setting anything and it'll work without slowing things down (and Chrome did have a similar problem in the past! But they fixed that). Or, I can use FF4, tweak a bunch of stuff and it's still bad, and slower. This "this is not technically a memory leak" thing is irrelevant when user experience is concerned. Chrome does the job better and faster without slowing the computer down, they also seem to fix bugs faster. The decision is really easy for the user.
I used FF4 b7 in my Mac for a while - whenever I closed it, I get half my system's memory (2GB) back, visible from Activity Monitor's pie chart. This thing eats more memory than a Windows 7 VM for opening a bunch of YouTube tabs, there's no way I'll go back until they fixed this.
It happens a lot more than you think. Very often when reporters interview someone, take photos, or take in news materials from another party - the materials on their hand aren't sufficient for them to tell a good story. In that case they'd have to improvise by e.g. adding their own interpretations to make the story complete, and by extension they may add in their own materials as well.
What happened at CCTV can be something like this.. reporter got military footage on flying fighter planes, but no explosion or no good explosion. Reporter wants to make a convincing story on how awesome these new J-10 planes are. Reporter adds in Top Gun footage to make it look awesome.
Now I'm not saying CCTV's practice isn't shoddy - it is. But it's nothing new. Anyone having been interviewed by reporters would tell you the same thing - reporters DO add their own stuff in your story, get used to it.
Hey, if someone is morbidly obese, then he obviously has bigger problems to worry about than his car's MPG. One or two average Joes at 200 lbs commuting with this car should be able to get >150mpg quite easily even accounting for their weight, which is still very awesome.
I've been to the Bay Area, Hong Kong various cities in China (e.g. Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc.) before. I'm in Hong Kong right now but I'm going back to the Bay Area next month.
Bay Area: Engineers are rather well respected from what I can see. My sample may be biased though since I've been working with the upper layer of the valley so far (VCs, CxOs, Stanford PhDs, etc.) But hey, if your company just exited for a few million dollars, the local media and TechCrunch cares. You open a party and your friends love you.
Hong Kong: If you're an engineer (even a CTO "engineer"), you're a loser, period. Nobody ever heard of a VC or angel investor here - these things takes time to pay off, all people want is fast money. I can go rant about HK's economic environment until my face turns blue but suffice to say, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship are thinly veiled insult words here meaning you can't make fast and easy money. Some of my friends got funding of >$100M HKD and the media never paid any attention. Someone else just exited for $1B HKD last week and the mainstream media just don't care.
China: Yes there're many high tech firms in Beijing and Shenzhen and engineers do get much higher salaries (5x - 100x, depending on who you're comparing to) compared to the average uneducated worker (China has high literacy level but very low education level). Things is.. that's only for the lucky people who attended the top Chinese universities (e.g. Tsinghua) and succeeded in getting a job and work permit in the high tech cities only. If you aren't one of those 1-in-a-1000 lucky guys... sorry man but your life is gonna suck. Even if you are one of the lucky engineers - the top of the food chain in China is being a government official, not a C-Suite executive, and 100% not an engineer. The real elites in China aren't looking to become an engineer, but rather join the government and make a few really fast million bucks there.
So, from what I can tell... US's fear on losing its tech edge to Asia is highly overrated. If you really want the top tech companies, engineers and scientists in the world, the people have to love doing it and are financially allowed to keep doing it out of love (not every engineer is a tech company CxO or got hired by Google, you see...). That's simply not happening in China nor Hong Kong. The thing about Chinese engineers being ultra competitive is way overblown - if you're constantly under threat of being evicted from your ultra-expensive (compared to your tiny salary) flat, and your flat sucks - you'd be aggressive too. But it also makes you very short sighted because all you can think of is how to get a nicer house to live in, but not how to make the next Google or figure out how to build rockets cheap. So you're surely not gonna be doing better scientific research, opening a novel tech startup, or doing an open source project. Copying and cutting corners, on the other hand, works short term, but that's doesn't get China any edge ahead of the US.
A C-Suite executive is not legally liable to pay the company's bills (in case the company itself runs out of money) - you're looking at the Board of Directors there. But yes, being close to the power center, or being the power center yourself, does entail legal responsibilities.
The poll results look more like.. "Who can you remember when I ask you for a few names during a random phone call?"
If you just ask me for a few random famous people's name from a phone call, I'd probably answer Obama, Billy Gates too. If I say it's Mark Zuckerburg or even Linus Torvalds, I'd probably have to explain who the fuck Mark Zuckerburg or Linus Torvalds is.
But is losing the account really so important for you that you have to sacrifice your security?
If the account is really so important, and you really can't remember that password or write it down in a TrueCrypt encrypted volume.. ok, then you can just remember a few non-sensical answers for these questions. It's not perfect, but it's better than answering anything that your friends know.
If the account is not that important, then it's totally ok to NOT use that feature at all. Just write random gibberish as the answer and forget about it.
Well, if we can extort money from God with our lawyers, then you're right.
You can always put non-sensical answers to those security questions. Like, saying your birth place is an Intel 8088.
It works for me - I have a Macbook Pro and a Core i5 Hack Pro. The software selection is a bit disappointing though - I have no idea why so many people are playing Angry Bird on a Mac.
But not all of the American ones. Just divide $0.5B by your paycheck - not a lot of programmers. Not enough to sustain a Google-sized team for a year.
I see. So any foreigner coming to invest 10 million in your country is a conspiracy. That's like, what? 0.001% of your country's GDP?
I brought a ThinkPad with me all the time when I was in college for easy access to lecture notes, book chapters that're posted in .pdf format, and also external references, and that didn't stop me at getting straight As from Comp. Sci. classes. Same for many of my friends. I've never been fond of the old stack-of-paper approach - paper get lost easily and are hard to organize when you have a large bunch of them, why bother?
For students who can manage it, bringing a laptop to class is progress. We should never stop progress because some loser can't concentrate with a laptop in front of him - that's a nanny policy. Arguably bad for high schools, and a big-NO for universities. What do you think university students are? 3-year-olds?
But how about even faster growing functions like factorial and the up arrows? When are we going to see an advert like this..
"Whazzarop is a super technological breakthrough potentially enabling up arrows increase in computing performance."
You wouldn't run out of IPv6 addresses even if we uniquely identify every cell in every person's body on this planet. 2^128 is a really big number.
Ok, you can cram 1000 cores into one CPU chip - but feeding all 1000 CPU cores with enough data for them to process and transferring all the data they spit out is gonna be a big problem. Things like OpenCL work now because the high end GPUs these days have 100GB/s+ bandwidth to the local video memory chips, and you're only pulling out the result back into system memory after the GPU did all the hard work. But doing the same thing on a system level - you're gonna have problems with your usual DDR3 modules, your SSD hard disk (even PCI-E based) and your 10GE network interface.
Oops, you ninja-d me by just one minute :P
PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla... you can literally change the world with technology, and get reasonably rich doing that.
User friendliness is about being simple, not having more colors or fancy widgets - see Windows Vista as an example.
...) are truly independent players like Mozilla Foundation or the Linux kernel community. So, it's really not a time to be content with Linux share on the server side and bash M$, Apple, etc. as proprietary... FOSS still has a long way to go and improve.
The way I see it, if Linux were to win in the consumer market, what it needs to do is not more, but less - and do those "less" things 100X better than Apple, Google or Microsoft.
The mess with X is actually being addressed, with project Wayland. The philosophy behind Wayland is exactly simplification - most people don't need that network transparency logic, so re-factor it out and keep the core simple and fast. It's a different architecture than X and so it's gonna take time to get the whole UI software stack to work on that, but Ubuntu is behind it.
Configurations and integration between services in a Linux machine is still a pain in the ass, and sadly, I'm not seeing any project addressing that yet. I used to be an open source dev but now I have a tech company to manage. But that's where I'd really like to see progress on the FOSS front.
Finally.. I think the FOSS community may be setting their target too low with Windows, and the "I don't care about consumer market/we already own the server space" crowd are simply ignoring reality. Apple and Google are beating the shit out of Microsoft's products lately - Windows and Office are pretty much still there because of inertia. Having to compare Linux to Windows, is already implying Linux is in a very bad shape in the consumer market. On a higher level, none of the current high profile players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon - who's on the server side!!, even Facebook) or products (e.g. iOS, Android, Chrome,
Microsoft issued a pretty nasty response the last time this was posted in the public. That could have... helped.
ANY app can be opened this way.
If you've registered a URL schema to the OS, and the OS calls up your app when it sees that URL schema... how's that different from any other OS (w/ the associated software suite), like Windows and Linux?
The OS could help by telling your app things like "this URL comes from an Internet URL on Safari".. but it's by no means the OS's fault. It's just doing what it's supposed to do, an intermediary.