Seems like nothing new to me. Floating point binary math is basically used for the same reason. It gives us and answer that's close enough, without requiring too much computation time. And it causes all sorts of fun since even simple numbers like 0.1 can't be represented exactly in binary floating point. Binary floating point works well for scientific apps, but fails quite badly at financial apps. I think this is basically taking floating point to the next level where the calculations are even more off. Which might work for certain applications, but for other types of applications would be completely catastrophic. What really bothers me is languages and platforms that provide no ability to work with numbers in a decimal representation.
If you want to sociable at work, try talking to your coworkers. Also, I personally lean the way if zero social networking at most workplaces because there seems yo be too many people who can't handle the alternative. The alternative being, use it as much as you want as long as you get your work done. People think if my neighbour uses it for 15 minutes it's OK if I use it for 20. And it keeps adding up from there
The point is, that in 2006, IE had 90% market share. And even in 2008 it had close to 80% (Based on this data). So designing a web application that only worked in IE at the time could have been seen as a not-so-bad business decision, all things considered. Sure you could design something that worked in "all browsers" which at the time was just about nobody else. Why spend all that time testing on a browser that virtually nobody used. Also, remember the feature set wasn't as rich as it is now. If you wanted to do something like an AJAX call, you could do it using an ActiveX control, a Java applet, or possibly flash (I can't recall). But there was no native way to do that in the browser. A lot of internal applications were built with ActiveX, because it gave a very rich feature set, at a time when Javascript was a complete mess.
Yeah, but looking at the usage history it wasn't very widely used in 2006. So, while it still existed, no competent IT person would have recommended it for company wide deployment. If you look at Usage data for Q1 2006, you'll see that IE is up around 90%. This is why IE 6 is still around. Because for a 5 year period after it's release, IE was used by more 85% of users.
I'm not sure I'd qualify IE 6 as 11 years old . Sure it was released in 2001, but until October 2006, it was the only browser offering from Microsoft. So I think that I would almost like to say that it's less than 6 years old. That is, if you were in charge of IT at some company, and you had to standardize on a browser in January 2006, what would you have chosen? Chrome wasn't out.Firefox (1.0) had just been released a bit over a year before that. So a bunch of goverment departments haven't changed browsers in the last 5 years. So what. It's not that surprising.
Well then, it doesn't seem like high school is preparing you that well for university. The best high school math class I ever did was grade 10. Because the teacher said no calculators. I became really good at doing math in my head that year.
This has always been my view of it. Facebook is so much more palatable when viewed through a phone. Facebook without the ads is pretty good. I think they will eventually have to go the Twitter route, where they place ads directly into the feed. There will probably be ways to filter those, but definitely not on the official Facebook app.
Again back to my other point. 200 calories of nuts will take a lot more energy from your body to process then 200 calories of white sugar. It will also fill you up quiet a bit more, and make it easier to not eat more calories for a period of time after eating it. So while they do contain the same number of calories, the nuts will yield less weight gain in the end.
I didn't need a graphing calculator until university, and even then we could have gotten by without it. We had no problems graphing things by hand. If you absolutely have a need for students to do more complicated plotting, then take them to one of the school computer labs.
Which candy bar has 1200 kCal in it? Even the King Size Snickers (2 bars in 1 wrapper) only contained 440 kCal (220 each). I do see your point though. It's way to easy for people to stuff themselves with a lot of calories without even realizing it. The most sensible thing I read when looking at obesity literature is telling people to move back to eating "real" food. This means get rid of all the pre-processed stuff and go back to buying raw ingredients and preparing the food yourself. While both a snickers bar and a home-made muffin may contain the same number of calories (not sure if they do, I'm making and example), my guess is that the home made muffin takes more calories for your body to actually process, thereby cutting down on the actual calories able to be used for other purposes by your body. A cup of sugar contains 774 calories. 2.5 cups of oatmeal contains about the same. So they contain the same amount of calories, from a weight gain perspective, they should do the same. Yet we all know they don't affect your body in the same way.
Nonsense. Ubuntu doesn't have to know the hardware of every single computer sold to work on all types of software. MS doesn't have to know the hardware of every Windows PC to be able to make an OS that runs on them. A phone/tablet in the end is just a small computer. The hardware on the devices does not vary that much from manufacturer to manufacturer. I think Google should do something like MS does with it's "Designed for Windows" program, so that consumers know they are getting a device that can be upgraded easily. Since Android is open, manufacturers would still be able to go against Google's wishes and load Android on the device, but I think that Google should be pushing them the device makers to make it easier for people to keep the software is up-to-date, and they should be working with consumers to make them look for devices that carry the "seal of approval" so that they can be assured proper updates.
This has always been my problem with Android (although I'm a relatively happy Android phone user). If Android is really an open operating system. we shouldn't have to rely on the device manufacturers and network carriers to get software updates for it. If Google wants to compete with iPhone/iPad on customer satisfaction, they should make it so that companies selling Android devices sell them unlocked, and that users can easily install other firmware on them. There should also be an "official" Android release from Google that people are free to download and (using the mandated easy to install new firmware support) install on their phone/tablet. Carriers/manufacturers should be free to put whatever crap they want to on the device at the time of sale, but the consumer should have the ability to easily upgrade the software, and uninstall stuff that the carrier puts on there. Apple has been pretty fair about support older phones with new software updates even when they release newer phones. Android should be the same, if not better. Looking at Android right now, it seems the best bet is to get a device "supported" by Cyanogen, as they seem to be the ones churning out the most updates, and trying to get newer releeases of Android on older phones. However, that's still not a great solution since there's many pleas from people bricking/boot-looping their phones on the forums that it's not something I would recommend to the lay-user.
I actually thought tethering was built in on all Android phones. I have an LG Optimus G2x that I upgraded to the TMobile firmware, because they never released a 2.3 upgrade for my carrier (Wind Mobile), and both the original firmware and the T-Mobile gingerbread firmware supported tethering without any fuss.
I guess it depends on your sense of scale. Compared to the holocaust, that's just peanuts. For all the war in the world, and all the coverage of all the wars on news networks and the internet, there sure seems to be a lot less actual dying going on in wars in the last 30 years. The fact that every person who dies in Iraq seems to get his picture in the paper is a far cry from where we were in Vietnam. 1.177 Million military men died in vietnam (all sides considered), and millions of civilians (estimates vary a lot). Iraq only had about 30,000 military deaths on either side, and civilian deaths are under 200,000. And yes, I said only, because it depends on your sense of scale. Vietnam was peanuts compared to WW I.
Nonsense. I was browsing the web and listening to music on my PII-266 with 64 MB of RAM 12 years ago, on Windows. The fact that my phone can't play an MP3 file and do something else at the same time means that either something in the hardware, or something in the software stack is very wrong. These mobile OS's have a long way to go before they are where they need to be. I can't even receive a text message without my games grinding down to 5 seconds per frame for 30 seconds.
It always makes me think of Retweet. No idea why. As I'm reading the comments, I keep thinking Windows Retweet. Maybe if I comment about it, it will catch on, and everyone will start calling it that. The only other thing that RT really triggers in my mind is Real-Time, which doesn't fit at all with Windows in my head, so I just went with the next thing that popped into my head.
Maybe ARM is only good for toys. This morning I was trying to listen to MP3s while reading the news. The thing came to a screeching halt when I happened upon a web page that wasn't a mobile web page. A short news article, which didn't seem to me to be something that should cause so much stress on my device. It's a dual core 1 GHz phone, with 512 MB of RAM. An x86 computer with half the specs could handle the same easily, but for some reason, it's completely impossible for my Android phone to play music and browse the web at the same time.
Really? Because how did the iPhone ever sell? MS has always had a "half-arsed" effort in the cell phone. And yet Apple was able to completely trample them by using their whole arse. The current Windows Phone is pretty good, and it seems like they have actually managed to use 3/4 of an arse in producing it, but it has been unable to gain much traction in the market. I don't see why it's inevitable that an MS tablet would change anything for the iPad. They've had MS tablets for years, and none of them have ever been that popular except in a few very small niche fields.
The problem right now is that there's no way for the computer to distinguish between "do what we want them to do" and "do what we TELL them to do". For many people it is a big problem that running arbitrary binaries can open their computer up to all kinds of viruses/malware/failure. So Apple took away the ability for people to run arbitrary binaries on their iPod/iPad/iPhone products because users of these products for the most part are incapable of deciding what is and what isn't a proper program to tell their computer to execute. If you want to run arbitrary binaries, there's still other platforms. Get a MacBook if you really want to run arbitrary binaries. I'm convinced that the Apple model is better for 99% of the population. After seeing a "trending" rip of off Mario Kart for Android on the Google Marketplace, which required just about every access right they could ask for, including the ability to send text messages, make phone calls, and access your contact list, along with the wonderful user comments about how well the game plays, despite the fact that many were aware that it contained malware, but thell still gave it a pretty good rating overall because it played so well, proves to me that for the most part, people should be on the Apple model of approved only binaries.
The reason they don't, is because they don't want 150 different models of Macs for people to choose from. Look at how many Samsung Galaxy phones/tablets there are. People are much more likely to buy if they understand what product they are actually buying. With the iPhone, you get 2 things to figure out. Black or White, and then storage space 16GB, 32GB, or 64 GB. That's it. Same goes for their laptops, desktops, and a tablets. Simple choices. Don't confuse people. Let people know what they are buying. HP / Lenovo / Dell/Samsung/ HTC and all the others could learn quite a bit from looking at Apple in this perspective.
I used to use only Gilette Mach 3. Then I started to get really annoyed with the price. So I started buying the cheapest thing I could find and try progressively more expensive until I found one that worked well. What I settled on was this model, from Schick. At just over a $1 a razor, it's quite a bit cheaper than Mach 3 blades, which are almost $2.50 a piece. Also I find they last at least as long, if not longer. I usually use a razor for a month at a time, and then switch. Sometimes I'll go longer if I'm feeling particularly frugal.
While I think that there are many lawyers profiting from software patents, I'm not sure that any corporation (except law firms, which are usually not corporations, usually limited liability partnerships) would claim to be "benefiting financially" from the current state of software patents. Perhaps a couple patent troll "corporations", but nobody who is seriously involved in the development of software products can claim that software patents are a good thing. At the end of the day, all the legal services they have to pay for to defend and file their patents are just a really big cost center. It stifles innovation, and it stifles change to have all these patents floating around. I'm not really against software patents in principle, but in practice, they just don't work. It doesn't seem that there is enough expertise in the patent office to ensure that bad ones don't slip through (although the same could probably be said for most patentable things, since all the really simple stuff has been patented, and the only stuff left to patent is quite obtuse stuff, which, although it may already be in use in standard industry, I doubt many patent clerks would be able to determine if something was truly novel, without spending a lifetime in the field). Some major changes would have to be made to the patent system for software patents to work at all. Probably better to just drop them all together until we find a model for patenting software that actually makes sense.
1 baud seems quite slow. Using the different notes to code diffent byte values would allow you to transmit data quite quickly. If you have 8 diffferent notes, then 2 consecutive notes can do 1.6 million different combinations. That's equivalent to 3 bytes. 2 notes could easily be played in 1 second rso 3 baud would be simple. Bring it up to 32 keys and the baud rate could go up quite highroad. You just have to encode it properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like nothing new to me. Floating point binary math is basically used for the same reason. It gives us and answer that's close enough, without requiring too much computation time. And it causes all sorts of fun since even simple numbers like 0.1 can't be represented exactly in binary floating point. Binary floating point works well for scientific apps, but fails quite badly at financial apps. I think this is basically taking floating point to the next level where the calculations are even more off. Which might work for certain applications, but for other types of applications would be completely catastrophic. What really bothers me is languages and platforms that provide no ability to work with numbers in a decimal representation.
If you want to sociable at work, try talking to your coworkers. Also, I personally lean the way if zero social networking at most workplaces because there seems yo be too many people who can't handle the alternative. The alternative being, use it as much as you want as long as you get your work done. People think if my neighbour uses it for 15 minutes it's OK if I use it for 20. And it keeps adding up from there
The point is, that in 2006, IE had 90% market share. And even in 2008 it had close to 80% (Based on this data). So designing a web application that only worked in IE at the time could have been seen as a not-so-bad business decision, all things considered. Sure you could design something that worked in "all browsers" which at the time was just about nobody else. Why spend all that time testing on a browser that virtually nobody used. Also, remember the feature set wasn't as rich as it is now. If you wanted to do something like an AJAX call, you could do it using an ActiveX control, a Java applet, or possibly flash (I can't recall). But there was no native way to do that in the browser. A lot of internal applications were built with ActiveX, because it gave a very rich feature set, at a time when Javascript was a complete mess.
Yeah, but looking at the usage history it wasn't very widely used in 2006. So, while it still existed, no competent IT person would have recommended it for company wide deployment. If you look at Usage data for Q1 2006, you'll see that IE is up around 90%. This is why IE 6 is still around. Because for a 5 year period after it's release, IE was used by more 85% of users.
I'm not sure I'd qualify IE 6 as 11 years old . Sure it was released in 2001, but until October 2006, it was the only browser offering from Microsoft. So I think that I would almost like to say that it's less than 6 years old. That is, if you were in charge of IT at some company, and you had to standardize on a browser in January 2006, what would you have chosen? Chrome wasn't out.Firefox (1.0) had just been released a bit over a year before that. So a bunch of goverment departments haven't changed browsers in the last 5 years. So what. It's not that surprising.
Well then, it doesn't seem like high school is preparing you that well for university. The best high school math class I ever did was grade 10. Because the teacher said no calculators. I became really good at doing math in my head that year.
THIS
This has always been my view of it. Facebook is so much more palatable when viewed through a phone. Facebook without the ads is pretty good. I think they will eventually have to go the Twitter route, where they place ads directly into the feed. There will probably be ways to filter those, but definitely not on the official Facebook app.
Again back to my other point. 200 calories of nuts will take a lot more energy from your body to process then 200 calories of white sugar. It will also fill you up quiet a bit more, and make it easier to not eat more calories for a period of time after eating it. So while they do contain the same number of calories, the nuts will yield less weight gain in the end.
I didn't need a graphing calculator until university, and even then we could have gotten by without it. We had no problems graphing things by hand. If you absolutely have a need for students to do more complicated plotting, then take them to one of the school computer labs.
Which candy bar has 1200 kCal in it? Even the King Size Snickers (2 bars in 1 wrapper) only contained 440 kCal (220 each). I do see your point though. It's way to easy for people to stuff themselves with a lot of calories without even realizing it. The most sensible thing I read when looking at obesity literature is telling people to move back to eating "real" food. This means get rid of all the pre-processed stuff and go back to buying raw ingredients and preparing the food yourself. While both a snickers bar and a home-made muffin may contain the same number of calories (not sure if they do, I'm making and example), my guess is that the home made muffin takes more calories for your body to actually process, thereby cutting down on the actual calories able to be used for other purposes by your body. A cup of sugar contains 774 calories. 2.5 cups of oatmeal contains about the same. So they contain the same amount of calories, from a weight gain perspective, they should do the same. Yet we all know they don't affect your body in the same way.
Nonsense. Ubuntu doesn't have to know the hardware of every single computer sold to work on all types of software. MS doesn't have to know the hardware of every Windows PC to be able to make an OS that runs on them. A phone/tablet in the end is just a small computer. The hardware on the devices does not vary that much from manufacturer to manufacturer. I think Google should do something like MS does with it's "Designed for Windows" program, so that consumers know they are getting a device that can be upgraded easily. Since Android is open, manufacturers would still be able to go against Google's wishes and load Android on the device, but I think that Google should be pushing them the device makers to make it easier for people to keep the software is up-to-date, and they should be working with consumers to make them look for devices that carry the "seal of approval" so that they can be assured proper updates.
This has always been my problem with Android (although I'm a relatively happy Android phone user). If Android is really an open operating system. we shouldn't have to rely on the device manufacturers and network carriers to get software updates for it. If Google wants to compete with iPhone/iPad on customer satisfaction, they should make it so that companies selling Android devices sell them unlocked, and that users can easily install other firmware on them. There should also be an "official" Android release from Google that people are free to download and (using the mandated easy to install new firmware support) install on their phone/tablet. Carriers/manufacturers should be free to put whatever crap they want to on the device at the time of sale, but the consumer should have the ability to easily upgrade the software, and uninstall stuff that the carrier puts on there. Apple has been pretty fair about support older phones with new software updates even when they release newer phones. Android should be the same, if not better. Looking at Android right now, it seems the best bet is to get a device "supported" by Cyanogen, as they seem to be the ones churning out the most updates, and trying to get newer releeases of Android on older phones. However, that's still not a great solution since there's many pleas from people bricking/boot-looping their phones on the forums that it's not something I would recommend to the lay-user.
I actually thought tethering was built in on all Android phones. I have an LG Optimus G2x that I upgraded to the TMobile firmware, because they never released a 2.3 upgrade for my carrier (Wind Mobile), and both the original firmware and the T-Mobile gingerbread firmware supported tethering without any fuss.
I guess it depends on your sense of scale. Compared to the holocaust, that's just peanuts. For all the war in the world, and all the coverage of all the wars on news networks and the internet, there sure seems to be a lot less actual dying going on in wars in the last 30 years. The fact that every person who dies in Iraq seems to get his picture in the paper is a far cry from where we were in Vietnam. 1.177 Million military men died in vietnam (all sides considered), and millions of civilians (estimates vary a lot). Iraq only had about 30,000 military deaths on either side, and civilian deaths are under 200,000. And yes, I said only, because it depends on your sense of scale. Vietnam was peanuts compared to WW I.
Nonsense. I was browsing the web and listening to music on my PII-266 with 64 MB of RAM 12 years ago, on Windows. The fact that my phone can't play an MP3 file and do something else at the same time means that either something in the hardware, or something in the software stack is very wrong. These mobile OS's have a long way to go before they are where they need to be. I can't even receive a text message without my games grinding down to 5 seconds per frame for 30 seconds.
It always makes me think of Retweet. No idea why. As I'm reading the comments, I keep thinking Windows Retweet. Maybe if I comment about it, it will catch on, and everyone will start calling it that. The only other thing that RT really triggers in my mind is Real-Time, which doesn't fit at all with Windows in my head, so I just went with the next thing that popped into my head.
Maybe ARM is only good for toys. This morning I was trying to listen to MP3s while reading the news. The thing came to a screeching halt when I happened upon a web page that wasn't a mobile web page. A short news article, which didn't seem to me to be something that should cause so much stress on my device. It's a dual core 1 GHz phone, with 512 MB of RAM. An x86 computer with half the specs could handle the same easily, but for some reason, it's completely impossible for my Android phone to play music and browse the web at the same time.
Really? Because how did the iPhone ever sell? MS has always had a "half-arsed" effort in the cell phone. And yet Apple was able to completely trample them by using their whole arse. The current Windows Phone is pretty good, and it seems like they have actually managed to use 3/4 of an arse in producing it, but it has been unable to gain much traction in the market. I don't see why it's inevitable that an MS tablet would change anything for the iPad. They've had MS tablets for years, and none of them have ever been that popular except in a few very small niche fields.
Obligatory XKCD.
The problem right now is that there's no way for the computer to distinguish between "do what we want them to do" and "do what we TELL them to do". For many people it is a big problem that running arbitrary binaries can open their computer up to all kinds of viruses/malware/failure. So Apple took away the ability for people to run arbitrary binaries on their iPod/iPad/iPhone products because users of these products for the most part are incapable of deciding what is and what isn't a proper program to tell their computer to execute. If you want to run arbitrary binaries, there's still other platforms. Get a MacBook if you really want to run arbitrary binaries. I'm convinced that the Apple model is better for 99% of the population. After seeing a "trending" rip of off Mario Kart for Android on the Google Marketplace, which required just about every access right they could ask for, including the ability to send text messages, make phone calls, and access your contact list, along with the wonderful user comments about how well the game plays, despite the fact that many were aware that it contained malware, but thell still gave it a pretty good rating overall because it played so well, proves to me that for the most part, people should be on the Apple model of approved only binaries.
The reason they don't, is because they don't want 150 different models of Macs for people to choose from. Look at how many Samsung Galaxy phones/tablets there are. People are much more likely to buy if they understand what product they are actually buying. With the iPhone, you get 2 things to figure out. Black or White, and then storage space 16GB, 32GB, or 64 GB. That's it. Same goes for their laptops, desktops, and a tablets. Simple choices. Don't confuse people. Let people know what they are buying. HP / Lenovo / Dell /Samsung/ HTC and all the others could learn quite a bit from looking at Apple in this perspective.
I used to use only Gilette Mach 3. Then I started to get really annoyed with the price. So I started buying the cheapest thing I could find and try progressively more expensive until I found one that worked well. What I settled on was this model, from Schick. At just over a $1 a razor, it's quite a bit cheaper than Mach 3 blades, which are almost $2.50 a piece. Also I find they last at least as long, if not longer. I usually use a razor for a month at a time, and then switch. Sometimes I'll go longer if I'm feeling particularly frugal.
300 dpi isn't event that good for a laser printer. Even cheap laser printers can do 600 and often 1200 dpi.
While I think that there are many lawyers profiting from software patents, I'm not sure that any corporation (except law firms, which are usually not corporations, usually limited liability partnerships) would claim to be "benefiting financially" from the current state of software patents. Perhaps a couple patent troll "corporations", but nobody who is seriously involved in the development of software products can claim that software patents are a good thing. At the end of the day, all the legal services they have to pay for to defend and file their patents are just a really big cost center. It stifles innovation, and it stifles change to have all these patents floating around. I'm not really against software patents in principle, but in practice, they just don't work. It doesn't seem that there is enough expertise in the patent office to ensure that bad ones don't slip through (although the same could probably be said for most patentable things, since all the really simple stuff has been patented, and the only stuff left to patent is quite obtuse stuff, which, although it may already be in use in standard industry, I doubt many patent clerks would be able to determine if something was truly novel, without spending a lifetime in the field). Some major changes would have to be made to the patent system for software patents to work at all. Probably better to just drop them all together until we find a model for patenting software that actually makes sense.
1 baud seems quite slow. Using the different notes to code diffent byte values would allow you to transmit data quite quickly. If you have 8 diffferent notes, then 2 consecutive notes can do 1.6 million different combinations. That's equivalent to 3 bytes. 2 notes could easily be played in 1 second rso 3 baud would be simple. Bring it up to 32 keys and the baud rate could go up quite highroad. You just have to encode it properly.