So many organizations try to do this, and they don't understand why it doesn't work. For people who don't code, it makes sense. Just like in constructing a house. You get a guy who knows what he's doing to draw up the plans, and you get some low paid minions to hammer in the nails. Except that in software there is no equivalent of hammering in the nails. Every person writing code is basically the person that is designing the software. By the time the well trained guy has got the requirements specific enough and relayed that information to the "nail pounder" he could have just coded up the program himself, and probably saved a little bit of time.
Turn off the beater bar (usually a switch for this) when doing non-carpeted floors and you should be able to vacuum up that stuff no problem. If that still doesn't work, most vacuums make the hose easily detachable so you can vacuum up the big bits without a problem.
I guess it depends on your point of view. Most of the little kids I know don't like the loud sound or the intense pressure generated by his hand dryers. Another problem for kids is that they don't work if you aren't tall enough to reach them. Not to mention, you could buy a lot of paper towels for $1350 or $1899. Other electric hand dryers are much cheaper, some under $200.
As somebody with Kids, I can tell you why this doesn't work. Because half the trouble with vacuuming is cleaning up all the stuff that you don't want vacuumed up in the first place. Sure you could just suck up all the Lego bricks in the vacuum, but something going to clog it, and then it won't be picking up anything. That, and the kids will start crying. This is the same problem that I have with dishwashers. By the time you sufficiently rinsed the dishes that you're assured that the dishwasher won't leave any food on the dish which will be there forever after it's baked on by the dry cycle, you might as well have washed the dishes by hand.
Not sure about what runs on windows phone, but as far as my Surface goes, here's the experience. There are many eReader apps as well as an official Kindle app. The reason that MS wants to do this is because they want to make money off the actual sales of books, just like Amazon makes money from the sales of Kindle books. Having more competition in this arena will help keep prices down. If Amazon has the lowest price, buy the book there. If Microsoft has the lowest price, you can buy it there. I see no problem with MS wanting to be another content provider. It fits right in with their XBox music and XBox videos thing that they are already running. Although I wish they would drop XBox from the name of these services. It's confusing to the users.
I guess it really depends on the person. Like I said, many "apps" are really just wrappers around webpages to get around the historically bad browsers that exist on tablet/phone devices. Almost everything that I need a "specific" app for falls into this category. Any non-specific apps such as games don't really matter so much. Not being able to run Minecraft on my Surface is a bit of a disappointment, but there's plenty of other great games to play. Also, many of the popular apps do exist. It's the thousands upon thousands of non-popular apps that you can't find on Surface.
You're right most people won't care if they're on 4.3 or 4.1, but they'll know when they're on 2.3. Also, it's really not so much the actual version but whether or not they're receiving updates for whatever version they are on. A device that only runs Android 4.1 might run all the apps out there, but if it can't be patched after the version that left the factory, there could very well be some big security holes.
I think that had more to do with Blackberry phones not offering anything above and beyond what you could get on an actual Android phone. Not to mention that the entire company of Blackberry/RIM is floundering putting the future of the device and any software updates for it into question. MS on the other hand, while they have had better times, aren't going anywhere soon.
As somebody who lives in Canada, I have to say that 0 Fahrenheit (-17 C) isn't that cold as long as you dress appropriately. You could argue that any temperature isn't cold depending on how you dress, but -17C is pretty arbitrary. -5C would be quite uncomfortable if you decided to go out in shorts and t-shirt. If I had to shoot for a general range that humans encounter, I'd probably put it somewhere around -40C to +50C, which puts us around -40 to 122 Fahrenheit, which is quite outside the range of 0 to 100. -17 is warm enough that you could stay outside all day and not feel cold provided you wore some decent winter clothing. -40 is so cold that you'll get quite code after a short time out even in high quality winter clothing if you aren't moving around enough.
It's not really so simple. With tablets you don't buy an operating system. You buy the whole experience. You can't buy a tablet and then choose an operating system after the fact. I chose the Surface over other tablet options because of 2 main reasons.
1) Ability to plug in an SD card for expandable storage.
2) Reasonable expectation that I'll get OS updates.
The first reason excludes all Apple tablets as well as many Android tablets. The second excludes most Android devices. Sure you may get updates with Android devices, but it's kind of a gamble.
Apps was really secondary. Mostly with apps, I looked at whether or not there were enough apps to enjoy the device. I don't care if there's ten thousand, or a million, or a billion, because in reality I won't install more than a few hundred apps (and most likely a lot less). As long as it has a few fun games, the ability to browse web pages, play music, play movies, and the ability to get a little work done from time to time, it basically fits my needs. The browser on the Surface is actually quite good, and negates the need for many apps in the first place. There's no Youtube app, but the website works just fine. There is a Facebook apps, but it doesn't even need to be used unless you want background notifications, because the browser can access all of Facebook's functionality.
Also worth mentioning that there probably aren't that many ski resorts out there that don't use artificial snow. Whether it's to have the hill open in November, or just to make sure the base of the mountain is well covered. Artificial snow also provides a really good, solid base that will allow the resort to stay open longer into the spring as well. Perhaps up in the Alps such measures are not needed, because the snow doesn't melt in the sumer, but most places that I've been to use snow making equipment because just getting enough snow on the hill to handle the amount of traffic (skiing on show will push it to the sides of the hill), and to cover up rocks, requires that artificial snow will be used.
Well,at 43 degrees, it sits right about the same latitude as Toronto, a few degrees north of Salt lake City, a bit south of Vancouver, and a bit south of Turin (the last 3 of which also hosted the Olympics). Latitude really says very little about climate, especially when you are close to the ocean, or other very large bodies of water like the Black Sea. Toronto's weather is actually quite cold, and the only reason they couldn't host the winter Olympics is the lack of mountains. Vancouver, despite being north Toronto, actually has quite warmer weather.
The next one around is in South Korea at 37 degrees latitude, and seems to be close to the ocean, although just about everything is close to the ocean in South Korea, by the standards of someone who lives in Canada. It seems their goal is to host the Winter Olympics in increasingly ridiculous climates, eventually to the point of getting the Winter Olympics in Dubai.
I see this a lot. MS could put out just about any product, and you would see people complaining. Just look at Office. People wonder why they have to pay $X00 every time MS puts out an upgrade (97,2000,2003) when very little has changed. Then they question why MS had to change everything with the ribbon interface in 2007.
I kind of get where my anonymous sibling poster said that they went the wrong way, when really they should have just let the desktop apps run on a regular tablet, and not try to get tablet apps onto a desktop, but really things can't work that way. Using a tablet with desktop apps on my Surface just plain doesn't work, unless I hook up a keyboard and mouse, in which case, I would hardly call that a tablet anymore. They have Office that runs in desktop mode on Windows RT, but it really isn't something that you could use with just a tablet. The whole interface would have to be re-done to make it usable with touch screen only controls.
Personally, I think that Windows could make really good inroads into the tablet market if they provided some kind of compatibility layer to run Android apps. Since they're using ARM on their Surface tablet, IT wouldn't even require actual emulation to get Android apps running on Windows RT. As an owner of the Surface 2, I have to say that the only real problem I have with it is the lack of apps, and providing the ability to run Android apps would make it probably the best tablet out there (even though I'm already convinced it is).
The way I see it, If you set up a separate department that deals with IT projects, they you are pretty much guaranteed to need those employees. When one project is over, there's another project to do. Plus with all the projects being done in the same place, there's a much higher chance of code and other aspects being reused. Even looking at hardware there's big savings. If 2 different departments need to order some new machines, they can probably get a better deal from the manufacturer if they both order the same model.
Not all tablets have IMEIs. Other than that, it's a pretty good solution. The one problem with IMEI blocking is that you can't enforce a worldwide block, so devices can still be shipped out of the country. Also, many of the devices are still useful even without cellular service. Turn off the cellular radio, and you still can use wifi connectivity. You can still listen to music, play your apps, and do a lot of other fun things with it.
The only really big problem that I've encountered is that I can't just jump to the comments I posted by going to my comment history. The only link on the comments goes directly to the entire article, not to the specific comment I posted, making it difficult to tell if someone was replied to my post. Perhaps it can be done, but I can't find the functionality anywhere.
I realize why they outsource, because they believe in the market and think they will get the best deal. However the government needs enough IT work done that they could hire their own army of IT workers. A whole organization who's only mandate is to provide IT services to all the other departments in the government.
There's a lot of laws on the books that are just there to trump up charges on people breaking the law. Regardless of what country you are in. I remember a few years back some people robbed a jewelry store, and were charged with (among other things) "wearing a mask while committing a crime". Laws like this are in place to create longer jail sentences for those involved.
You see this a lot of "business" hardware. We got a PBX that only gives firmware updates as long as you have a support contract. The support contract costs almost as much as the hardware itself. And they haven't even added features in the past 10 years. For instance, auto-attendant messages must be in some 8-bit low frequency wav format that's so archaic that it's almost impossible to create with modern audio software.
I wouldn't go quite that far. I would say the two tools aren't really comparable anyway. Which one you use really depends on what you're using for your backend development. If you want.Net, you (pretty much) have to use IIS. If you use PHP, Python, Ruby, or other langauges, you most likely are going to be using Apache/Nginx.
Actually, it's 2023. And another important correction. Mickey Mouse cannot enter the public domain, because Disney has trademarked the character. Certain recordings can enter the public domain. but that doesn't mean people will be able to make new cartoons showing Mickey Mouse. Having century old recordings of Mickey go into the public domain will have zero effect on Disney's bottom line, since they do not sell these old cartoons anyway.
I disagree. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Most of the stuff that's pirated falls within the definition of "entertainment", and even stuff like software that doesn't fall into entertainment, like operating systems and office suites, there exist free alternatives which work just fine for personal, non-commercial use. So there aren't really many cases where you "have to" pirate something. If you don't like what the big corporations are doing with copyrights, simply refrain from using their copyrighted products at all. You don't have to play any games, you don't have to watch any movies, you don't have to read any books. There's plenty of free stuff, and plenty of non-free stuff that's released in non-encumbered formats at reasonable price such that you can be reasonable well entertained without having to pirate anything. Pirating just gives the big corporations more fuel for the fire.
As far as calculators go, I really don't care if they sell the same product year after year, but they really should be able to bring the price down. When you know that the hardware is worth $20 at most, and the software has reached maturity a decade ago, there's no reason to charge $200 for the calculator. I wonder why nobody has decided to make an open alternative to the current calculators. It would be cheap enough that schools could provide their own "certified" units for exams, to ensure there's no cheating going on, and students would be easily able to afford their own for personal use. School certified exam units could even have certain functionality enabled/disabled depending on what they are trying to test.
Yeah, but I can understand people wanting to have "their car" with them when they travel. Since every car has different controls laid out in a different fashion, it's nice to have something you're comfortable with, especially on long trips. Sure the steering wheel and pedals are in mostly the same place, but that's about the only thing that remains consistent between cars. Signal lights are pretty standard, but I think that's as far as it goes.
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THIS
So many organizations try to do this, and they don't understand why it doesn't work. For people who don't code, it makes sense. Just like in constructing a house. You get a guy who knows what he's doing to draw up the plans, and you get some low paid minions to hammer in the nails. Except that in software there is no equivalent of hammering in the nails. Every person writing code is basically the person that is designing the software. By the time the well trained guy has got the requirements specific enough and relayed that information to the "nail pounder" he could have just coded up the program himself, and probably saved a little bit of time.
Turn off the beater bar (usually a switch for this) when doing non-carpeted floors and you should be able to vacuum up that stuff no problem. If that still doesn't work, most vacuums make the hose easily detachable so you can vacuum up the big bits without a problem.
I guess it depends on your point of view. Most of the little kids I know don't like the loud sound or the intense pressure generated by his hand dryers. Another problem for kids is that they don't work if you aren't tall enough to reach them. Not to mention, you could buy a lot of paper towels for $1350 or $1899. Other electric hand dryers are much cheaper, some under $200.
As somebody with Kids, I can tell you why this doesn't work. Because half the trouble with vacuuming is cleaning up all the stuff that you don't want vacuumed up in the first place. Sure you could just suck up all the Lego bricks in the vacuum, but something going to clog it, and then it won't be picking up anything. That, and the kids will start crying. This is the same problem that I have with dishwashers. By the time you sufficiently rinsed the dishes that you're assured that the dishwasher won't leave any food on the dish which will be there forever after it's baked on by the dry cycle, you might as well have washed the dishes by hand.
Who says it has to be Windows only? They could release apps for Android and iOS to let you read the books you purchase off their book store.
Not sure about what runs on windows phone, but as far as my Surface goes, here's the experience. There are many eReader apps as well as an official Kindle app. The reason that MS wants to do this is because they want to make money off the actual sales of books, just like Amazon makes money from the sales of Kindle books. Having more competition in this arena will help keep prices down. If Amazon has the lowest price, buy the book there. If Microsoft has the lowest price, you can buy it there. I see no problem with MS wanting to be another content provider. It fits right in with their XBox music and XBox videos thing that they are already running. Although I wish they would drop XBox from the name of these services. It's confusing to the users.
I guess it really depends on the person. Like I said, many "apps" are really just wrappers around webpages to get around the historically bad browsers that exist on tablet/phone devices. Almost everything that I need a "specific" app for falls into this category. Any non-specific apps such as games don't really matter so much. Not being able to run Minecraft on my Surface is a bit of a disappointment, but there's plenty of other great games to play. Also, many of the popular apps do exist. It's the thousands upon thousands of non-popular apps that you can't find on Surface.
You're right most people won't care if they're on 4.3 or 4.1, but they'll know when they're on 2.3. Also, it's really not so much the actual version but whether or not they're receiving updates for whatever version they are on. A device that only runs Android 4.1 might run all the apps out there, but if it can't be patched after the version that left the factory, there could very well be some big security holes.
I think that had more to do with Blackberry phones not offering anything above and beyond what you could get on an actual Android phone. Not to mention that the entire company of Blackberry/RIM is floundering putting the future of the device and any software updates for it into question. MS on the other hand, while they have had better times, aren't going anywhere soon.
As somebody who lives in Canada, I have to say that 0 Fahrenheit (-17 C) isn't that cold as long as you dress appropriately. You could argue that any temperature isn't cold depending on how you dress, but -17C is pretty arbitrary. -5C would be quite uncomfortable if you decided to go out in shorts and t-shirt. If I had to shoot for a general range that humans encounter, I'd probably put it somewhere around -40C to +50C, which puts us around -40 to 122 Fahrenheit, which is quite outside the range of 0 to 100. -17 is warm enough that you could stay outside all day and not feel cold provided you wore some decent winter clothing. -40 is so cold that you'll get quite code after a short time out even in high quality winter clothing if you aren't moving around enough.
It's not really so simple. With tablets you don't buy an operating system. You buy the whole experience. You can't buy a tablet and then choose an operating system after the fact. I chose the Surface over other tablet options because of 2 main reasons.
1) Ability to plug in an SD card for expandable storage.
2) Reasonable expectation that I'll get OS updates.
The first reason excludes all Apple tablets as well as many Android tablets. The second excludes most Android devices. Sure you may get updates with Android devices, but it's kind of a gamble.
Apps was really secondary. Mostly with apps, I looked at whether or not there were enough apps to enjoy the device. I don't care if there's ten thousand, or a million, or a billion, because in reality I won't install more than a few hundred apps (and most likely a lot less). As long as it has a few fun games, the ability to browse web pages, play music, play movies, and the ability to get a little work done from time to time, it basically fits my needs. The browser on the Surface is actually quite good, and negates the need for many apps in the first place. There's no Youtube app, but the website works just fine. There is a Facebook apps, but it doesn't even need to be used unless you want background notifications, because the browser can access all of Facebook's functionality.
Also worth mentioning that there probably aren't that many ski resorts out there that don't use artificial snow. Whether it's to have the hill open in November, or just to make sure the base of the mountain is well covered. Artificial snow also provides a really good, solid base that will allow the resort to stay open longer into the spring as well. Perhaps up in the Alps such measures are not needed, because the snow doesn't melt in the sumer, but most places that I've been to use snow making equipment because just getting enough snow on the hill to handle the amount of traffic (skiing on show will push it to the sides of the hill), and to cover up rocks, requires that artificial snow will be used.
Well,at 43 degrees, it sits right about the same latitude as Toronto, a few degrees north of Salt lake City, a bit south of Vancouver, and a bit south of Turin (the last 3 of which also hosted the Olympics). Latitude really says very little about climate, especially when you are close to the ocean, or other very large bodies of water like the Black Sea. Toronto's weather is actually quite cold, and the only reason they couldn't host the winter Olympics is the lack of mountains. Vancouver, despite being north Toronto, actually has quite warmer weather.
The next one around is in South Korea at 37 degrees latitude, and seems to be close to the ocean, although just about everything is close to the ocean in South Korea, by the standards of someone who lives in Canada. It seems their goal is to host the Winter Olympics in increasingly ridiculous climates, eventually to the point of getting the Winter Olympics in Dubai.
I see this a lot. MS could put out just about any product, and you would see people complaining. Just look at Office. People wonder why they have to pay $X00 every time MS puts out an upgrade (97,2000,2003) when very little has changed. Then they question why MS had to change everything with the ribbon interface in 2007.
I kind of get where my anonymous sibling poster said that they went the wrong way, when really they should have just let the desktop apps run on a regular tablet, and not try to get tablet apps onto a desktop, but really things can't work that way. Using a tablet with desktop apps on my Surface just plain doesn't work, unless I hook up a keyboard and mouse, in which case, I would hardly call that a tablet anymore. They have Office that runs in desktop mode on Windows RT, but it really isn't something that you could use with just a tablet. The whole interface would have to be re-done to make it usable with touch screen only controls.
Personally, I think that Windows could make really good inroads into the tablet market if they provided some kind of compatibility layer to run Android apps. Since they're using ARM on their Surface tablet, IT wouldn't even require actual emulation to get Android apps running on Windows RT. As an owner of the Surface 2, I have to say that the only real problem I have with it is the lack of apps, and providing the ability to run Android apps would make it probably the best tablet out there (even though I'm already convinced it is).
The way I see it, If you set up a separate department that deals with IT projects, they you are pretty much guaranteed to need those employees. When one project is over, there's another project to do. Plus with all the projects being done in the same place, there's a much higher chance of code and other aspects being reused. Even looking at hardware there's big savings. If 2 different departments need to order some new machines, they can probably get a better deal from the manufacturer if they both order the same model.
Not all tablets have IMEIs. Other than that, it's a pretty good solution. The one problem with IMEI blocking is that you can't enforce a worldwide block, so devices can still be shipped out of the country. Also, many of the devices are still useful even without cellular service. Turn off the cellular radio, and you still can use wifi connectivity. You can still listen to music, play your apps, and do a lot of other fun things with it.
The only really big problem that I've encountered is that I can't just jump to the comments I posted by going to my comment history. The only link on the comments goes directly to the entire article, not to the specific comment I posted, making it difficult to tell if someone was replied to my post. Perhaps it can be done, but I can't find the functionality anywhere.
I realize why they outsource, because they believe in the market and think they will get the best deal. However the government needs enough IT work done that they could hire their own army of IT workers. A whole organization who's only mandate is to provide IT services to all the other departments in the government.
There's a lot of laws on the books that are just there to trump up charges on people breaking the law. Regardless of what country you are in. I remember a few years back some people robbed a jewelry store, and were charged with (among other things) "wearing a mask while committing a crime". Laws like this are in place to create longer jail sentences for those involved.
You see this a lot of "business" hardware. We got a PBX that only gives firmware updates as long as you have a support contract. The support contract costs almost as much as the hardware itself. And they haven't even added features in the past 10 years. For instance, auto-attendant messages must be in some 8-bit low frequency wav format that's so archaic that it's almost impossible to create with modern audio software.
I wouldn't go quite that far. I would say the two tools aren't really comparable anyway. Which one you use really depends on what you're using for your backend development. If you want .Net, you (pretty much) have to use IIS. If you use PHP, Python, Ruby, or other langauges, you most likely are going to be using Apache/Nginx.
Actually, it's 2023. And another important correction. Mickey Mouse cannot enter the public domain, because Disney has trademarked the character. Certain recordings can enter the public domain. but that doesn't mean people will be able to make new cartoons showing Mickey Mouse. Having century old recordings of Mickey go into the public domain will have zero effect on Disney's bottom line, since they do not sell these old cartoons anyway.
I disagree. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Most of the stuff that's pirated falls within the definition of "entertainment", and even stuff like software that doesn't fall into entertainment, like operating systems and office suites, there exist free alternatives which work just fine for personal, non-commercial use. So there aren't really many cases where you "have to" pirate something. If you don't like what the big corporations are doing with copyrights, simply refrain from using their copyrighted products at all. You don't have to play any games, you don't have to watch any movies, you don't have to read any books. There's plenty of free stuff, and plenty of non-free stuff that's released in non-encumbered formats at reasonable price such that you can be reasonable well entertained without having to pirate anything. Pirating just gives the big corporations more fuel for the fire.
As far as calculators go, I really don't care if they sell the same product year after year, but they really should be able to bring the price down. When you know that the hardware is worth $20 at most, and the software has reached maturity a decade ago, there's no reason to charge $200 for the calculator. I wonder why nobody has decided to make an open alternative to the current calculators. It would be cheap enough that schools could provide their own "certified" units for exams, to ensure there's no cheating going on, and students would be easily able to afford their own for personal use. School certified exam units could even have certain functionality enabled/disabled depending on what they are trying to test.
Yeah, but I can understand people wanting to have "their car" with them when they travel. Since every car has different controls laid out in a different fashion, it's nice to have something you're comfortable with, especially on long trips. Sure the steering wheel and pedals are in mostly the same place, but that's about the only thing that remains consistent between cars. Signal lights are pretty standard, but I think that's as far as it goes.