Same thing happened with GMail in Germany, and with the iPhone in Brazil. With each country having their own system for registering trademarks, it becomes problematic to come up with a name that doesn't infringe on anybody else's trademark. There really should be a single, global registry for all trademarks, because, with the internet, every business is a global business.
Exactly. When they first announced it, there was speculation everywhere that it was going to cost $200-$250. Then they released it and it turns out that it was $500 without the keyboard/touch cover, which was the whole thing that actually made it different then every other tablet out there. By the time you get the Surface RT and a touch cover, the price was close to $600, and cost more than an iPad. Had it been close to the speculated $200 price, I would have probably purchased one. But at $600 it wasn't even close to worth it. Even though the price has come down a bit now, it's still $350 for the Surface (apparently out of stock on the MS Store) and comes to $450 with the touch cover. That much, for a machine who's specs are looking woefully dated (esp the screen resolution) in the face of the newer tablets being announced by Apple, Google, and others.
If you have 15-20 icons on your quicklaunch bar, they have to spread most of the way across the screen, taking up valuable space from the task bar. I personally don't like to group my taskbar items, because I find it actually makes it harder to find stuff. So my task/quicklaunch bar gets really crowded, really fast. With no quicklaunch icons, I have a lot more room for the stuff in my task bar.
I haven't had a BSOD in years. The only time I reboot my machine is for updates. Windows used to be unstable, but more recently I find it rock solid. I wonder if all the problems I had in the past with Windows was due to cheap/faulty hardware and bad drivers, and had nothing to do with the OS itself. I don't think I've ever seen any of my Windows 7/8 machines crash at all (certain applications will crash but not the OS). Windows 8, which many people complain about is actually quite nice, if you can just get yourself past the UI. It's a little bit jarring to have that start screen show up, but really I haven't noticed it at all. I just treat it like a really big start menu in Windows 7. Hit start, type name of program, and run it. It's really easy to start commonly run programs because the target is so big. I no longer have to have precise aim like I did with the quicklaunch bar, and I don't have to have screen real estate taken up by the quicklaunch icons (which I generally have about 15-20 of).
I don't really see why anybody would want to use a home ISP connection for business uses. Without an SLA, there's no guarantee that you will get the speed advertised, and there's no guarantee that you will get problems fixed quickly. Sure I could get a static IP from my cable ISP, and run a server off of it, but it's definitely not something I would want to run my business on. When something stops working, it can be days before things are working properly again. You don't want to be spending days talking to minimum wage tech support when the bad weather causes problems in your lines and the last thing they want to do is send out a $100 an hour tech to replace your line.
Yeah, for "taboo" you'd probably be more correct mentioning something like horses. Horse meat is very good (or so I hear) but because of the culture of horses as pets/companions rather than livestock, most Americans would shy away from eating it.
That's the same old thing they do with the pro-choice/pro-life abortion campaigns. If you're not for pro-choice, you are against people having a choice, which is bad. If you are against the pro-life side, you are against life, which can be seen as equally bad. the pro-choice people would have a lot more trouble getting support if they called it pro-fetus-killling.
I'm using this as well. Although they don't officially support it on shared hosting servers, I've had no problems with it on Dreamhost. Works amazing. I think I actually like it more than the old Google Reader. The Android client works quite well, and that was the only thing I had to pay for, apart from my hosting, which I was already paying for anyway. I've only used the web UI a little as I mostly just use it on my phone, but from what I've seen that works quite good as well.
Exactly, either they outlaw specific virtual currencies in which case the user just start up using a new virtual currency, or they try to outlaw all of these virtual currencies with a single law, which would probably end up making things like WiiShop points and other virtual currencies illegal as well.
They'd be better off if they didn't produce any writers. At 300 GB a disc, it would be too expensive to store all that information on hard disks, and if only pressed disks existed, then the only way to keep a reasonable number of movies lying around in this quality would be to buy a legitimate copy. At least for the next 5-10 years when hard drive capacities catch up. On a 4 TB drive, you can store quite a few DVD quality, or even BluRay quality movies. But when they start coming out to 300 GB a piece, you're going to need at least an order of magnitude increase in hard disks before you are going to want to store these movies on your hard drive.
Speaking of I/O, there's the problem of the actual HDMI/Displayport connection. Many 4k TVs only have a 30 Hz refresh rate at full resolution. Basically, the bandwidth of existing cables isn't enough to handle a 4k movie at a higher refresh rate. They're going to have to come up with a whole to cable standard just to deal with the increased resolution.
Even streaming BluRay quality movies is difficult on most home connections. Sure, Netflix has "HD" content, but it's nowhere near the quality level of BluRay. And even if they did have the same quality, I don't want to be transferring 25 GB over my connection every time I want to watch a movie. At least not with the caps most ISPs enforce. There's going to have to be some kind of new media format if they ever want to start selling 4K TVs. The only alternative is to have people plug portable hard drives into kiosks in order to rent a movie. Like redbox, but bring your own disk. This would work better for renting, but wouldn't work so well for buying. multiple 300 GB movies would fill up even large capacity hard disks pretty fast.
This happens in a lot of places, not just Australia. In Canada, Microsoft often charges more for licenses. However, if you try to order stuff through Amazon.com, they will say that they don't ship the item to Canada. Even though they will ship just about everything else, as long as you pay the shipping charges.
I've always wanted to see something like this happen. Get a robot to make a bunch of paintings, but tell everyone they were painted by a person. Art world goes crazy saying how great and original they are, then release the news that they are really just done by computers, and ask the art world to explain their initial reaction. That, or have something like the next big popstar just be a computer generated model. Have other people write the songs (they do anyway), and have the voice provided by someone with lots of talent, yet unattractive. Graphics aren't good enough yet, but perhaps they could get there in the next 10-20 years. Put the news out at some big concert.
I can't believe that ad networks haven't figured this stuff out yet. Instead of serving up ads using a domain name, just serve them up by pointing to an IP address. Sure you could start blocking whole addresses, but then you risk blocking a useful service as well, especially if you plan on blocking Google's ads. Or you could proxy them through a script on the actual website so you can't tell the difference between the actual content from the webpage and the ads shown on the web page. It would be pretty easy for the ad network to provide a script in the common web programming languages that could proxy the ads to the user. I guess that there's still not enough people blocking ads for this to be worth their time. I'm sure it's coming though.
It's obviously quite highly subsidized. At $35 for the Chromecast and 3 months of free Netflix (even with an existing account), the cost to existing Netflix subscribers is about $11. They are planning on making money from renting/selling movies on Google Play store, and probably more money through affiliate programs sending new customers to Netflix and other programs that will probably be on there in the future like Hulu and Amazon Prime. If everybody just buys them and installs another OS on them, they won't make much money. With the phones, tablets, and chromebooks, they are selling them above cost price, so they don't have to make up the difference by people renting movies and such.
If nobody has managed to make a plastic (or any material other than heavy metals) gun using industrial processes, then I seriously doubt that you could ever get more than a few shots out of something you could print at home. Sure it's fun to do "just because you can" but I don't think that it's actually feasible to make a gun that's going to last hundreds of shots out of something like plastic.
I had a diabetic friend who used to prick his finger on the side of his finger. Pricks on the tips were bothersome, especially when you're typing a lot. on the side, you can get just as much blood, or at least enough for bloodsugar testing, and it's a lot easier on your fingers.
I still don't see how it would "save lives". I don't think anybody has ever died from a badly done needle. Perhaps you can die from needing some live saving IV and them not being able to find the vein, but I'm pretty sure they'd just go for another target, like in the feet, if they were having lots problems in the hand or arms. The biggest problem I forsee from robots, is that it makes medical care more expensive. Which is becoming a big problem. Robots won't make it cheaper, since there won't be a situation where they would allow it without a qualified doctor or nurse present anyway. Also, the doctors and nurses will be out of practice when the machine inevitably breaks down, meaning they'd do an even worse job than they do now. They'd be better off developing some kind of realistic anatomical hand so that nurses and doctors can get more practice.
But how it's compiled isn't part of the language, it's part of the tool-chain. PHP is an interpreted language, unless you work at Facebook, where they have this compiler that turns PHP into C, after which, you can easily compile it to a native executable. Which was kind of my point. When you say you want to use C, Assembly, Fortran or Ada for those applications, what you're really saying is you want a language where the existing tool chain supports compiling down to machine code. You're actually choosing based on the tool-chain, and not on the actual properties of the language itself.
I would almost agree, that any language is as good as any other. With a few exceptions, like "whitespace" which isn't meant to be a practical language anyway. What really sets languages apart is the tooling that's built up around them. The debuggers, the IDE, the profilers, etc. Also, the consistency and extent of the standard API plays a huge role in how useful a language is. I would rather use Brainfuck with an amazing tools and a rich API than use Java, Python, or Ruby with bad tools and an inconstent and incomplete API.
They need to support it as a native numeric type, so it's not so difficult to use. If it was a native type with proper mathematical operators you wouldn't need questions on Stackoverflow about how to add two values together.
Proper date and time handling is one of the reasons I really prefer.Net to Java. The support for dates is just deplorable in Java. One shouldn't have to use an external dependancy, like JodaTime to handle basic date operations. If they could also add a "Decimal" data type, that is, a base-10 decimal primitive datatype, I think Java would be a much more useful language for day to day programming. Almost all the programming I do I would rather use a Decimal data type rather than a float data type, but very few languages support it as a native data type..Net is one of the few environments where they got this right.
Yeah, but botnets are often controlled with common protocols like HTTP and IRC, because they are simple, and the code already exists, so they don't have to write their own protocols from scratch. So it may not really be that easy to determine if traffic is botnet contol codes or just a regular browser requesting a web page.
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Same thing happened with GMail in Germany, and with the iPhone in Brazil. With each country having their own system for registering trademarks, it becomes problematic to come up with a name that doesn't infringe on anybody else's trademark. There really should be a single, global registry for all trademarks, because, with the internet, every business is a global business.
Exactly. When they first announced it, there was speculation everywhere that it was going to cost $200-$250. Then they released it and it turns out that it was $500 without the keyboard/touch cover, which was the whole thing that actually made it different then every other tablet out there. By the time you get the Surface RT and a touch cover, the price was close to $600, and cost more than an iPad. Had it been close to the speculated $200 price, I would have probably purchased one. But at $600 it wasn't even close to worth it. Even though the price has come down a bit now, it's still $350 for the Surface (apparently out of stock on the MS Store) and comes to $450 with the touch cover. That much, for a machine who's specs are looking woefully dated (esp the screen resolution) in the face of the newer tablets being announced by Apple, Google, and others.
If you have 15-20 icons on your quicklaunch bar, they have to spread most of the way across the screen, taking up valuable space from the task bar. I personally don't like to group my taskbar items, because I find it actually makes it harder to find stuff. So my task/quicklaunch bar gets really crowded, really fast. With no quicklaunch icons, I have a lot more room for the stuff in my task bar.
I haven't had a BSOD in years. The only time I reboot my machine is for updates. Windows used to be unstable, but more recently I find it rock solid. I wonder if all the problems I had in the past with Windows was due to cheap/faulty hardware and bad drivers, and had nothing to do with the OS itself. I don't think I've ever seen any of my Windows 7/8 machines crash at all (certain applications will crash but not the OS). Windows 8, which many people complain about is actually quite nice, if you can just get yourself past the UI. It's a little bit jarring to have that start screen show up, but really I haven't noticed it at all. I just treat it like a really big start menu in Windows 7. Hit start, type name of program, and run it. It's really easy to start commonly run programs because the target is so big. I no longer have to have precise aim like I did with the quicklaunch bar, and I don't have to have screen real estate taken up by the quicklaunch icons (which I generally have about 15-20 of).
I don't really see why anybody would want to use a home ISP connection for business uses. Without an SLA, there's no guarantee that you will get the speed advertised, and there's no guarantee that you will get problems fixed quickly. Sure I could get a static IP from my cable ISP, and run a server off of it, but it's definitely not something I would want to run my business on. When something stops working, it can be days before things are working properly again. You don't want to be spending days talking to minimum wage tech support when the bad weather causes problems in your lines and the last thing they want to do is send out a $100 an hour tech to replace your line.
Yeah, for "taboo" you'd probably be more correct mentioning something like horses. Horse meat is very good (or so I hear) but because of the culture of horses as pets/companions rather than livestock, most Americans would shy away from eating it.
That's the same old thing they do with the pro-choice/pro-life abortion campaigns. If you're not for pro-choice, you are against people having a choice, which is bad. If you are against the pro-life side, you are against life, which can be seen as equally bad. the pro-choice people would have a lot more trouble getting support if they called it pro-fetus-killling.
I'm using this as well. Although they don't officially support it on shared hosting servers, I've had no problems with it on Dreamhost. Works amazing. I think I actually like it more than the old Google Reader. The Android client works quite well, and that was the only thing I had to pay for, apart from my hosting, which I was already paying for anyway. I've only used the web UI a little as I mostly just use it on my phone, but from what I've seen that works quite good as well.
Exactly, either they outlaw specific virtual currencies in which case the user just start up using a new virtual currency, or they try to outlaw all of these virtual currencies with a single law, which would probably end up making things like WiiShop points and other virtual currencies illegal as well.
They'd be better off if they didn't produce any writers. At 300 GB a disc, it would be too expensive to store all that information on hard disks, and if only pressed disks existed, then the only way to keep a reasonable number of movies lying around in this quality would be to buy a legitimate copy. At least for the next 5-10 years when hard drive capacities catch up. On a 4 TB drive, you can store quite a few DVD quality, or even BluRay quality movies. But when they start coming out to 300 GB a piece, you're going to need at least an order of magnitude increase in hard disks before you are going to want to store these movies on your hard drive.
Speaking of I/O, there's the problem of the actual HDMI/Displayport connection. Many 4k TVs only have a 30 Hz refresh rate at full resolution. Basically, the bandwidth of existing cables isn't enough to handle a 4k movie at a higher refresh rate. They're going to have to come up with a whole to cable standard just to deal with the increased resolution.
Even streaming BluRay quality movies is difficult on most home connections. Sure, Netflix has "HD" content, but it's nowhere near the quality level of BluRay. And even if they did have the same quality, I don't want to be transferring 25 GB over my connection every time I want to watch a movie. At least not with the caps most ISPs enforce. There's going to have to be some kind of new media format if they ever want to start selling 4K TVs. The only alternative is to have people plug portable hard drives into kiosks in order to rent a movie. Like redbox, but bring your own disk. This would work better for renting, but wouldn't work so well for buying. multiple 300 GB movies would fill up even large capacity hard disks pretty fast.
This happens in a lot of places, not just Australia. In Canada, Microsoft often charges more for licenses. However, if you try to order stuff through Amazon.com, they will say that they don't ship the item to Canada. Even though they will ship just about everything else, as long as you pay the shipping charges.
I've always wanted to see something like this happen. Get a robot to make a bunch of paintings, but tell everyone they were painted by a person. Art world goes crazy saying how great and original they are, then release the news that they are really just done by computers, and ask the art world to explain their initial reaction. That, or have something like the next big popstar just be a computer generated model. Have other people write the songs (they do anyway), and have the voice provided by someone with lots of talent, yet unattractive. Graphics aren't good enough yet, but perhaps they could get there in the next 10-20 years. Put the news out at some big concert.
I can't believe that ad networks haven't figured this stuff out yet. Instead of serving up ads using a domain name, just serve them up by pointing to an IP address. Sure you could start blocking whole addresses, but then you risk blocking a useful service as well, especially if you plan on blocking Google's ads. Or you could proxy them through a script on the actual website so you can't tell the difference between the actual content from the webpage and the ads shown on the web page. It would be pretty easy for the ad network to provide a script in the common web programming languages that could proxy the ads to the user. I guess that there's still not enough people blocking ads for this to be worth their time. I'm sure it's coming though.
It's obviously quite highly subsidized. At $35 for the Chromecast and 3 months of free Netflix (even with an existing account), the cost to existing Netflix subscribers is about $11. They are planning on making money from renting/selling movies on Google Play store, and probably more money through affiliate programs sending new customers to Netflix and other programs that will probably be on there in the future like Hulu and Amazon Prime. If everybody just buys them and installs another OS on them, they won't make much money. With the phones, tablets, and chromebooks, they are selling them above cost price, so they don't have to make up the difference by people renting movies and such.
Also, the sequel, Homeland, and other books by Cory Doctorw, including Pirate Cinema, For The Win, and Makers (maybe not highschool appropriate).
If nobody has managed to make a plastic (or any material other than heavy metals) gun using industrial processes, then I seriously doubt that you could ever get more than a few shots out of something you could print at home. Sure it's fun to do "just because you can" but I don't think that it's actually feasible to make a gun that's going to last hundreds of shots out of something like plastic.
I had a diabetic friend who used to prick his finger on the side of his finger. Pricks on the tips were bothersome, especially when you're typing a lot. on the side, you can get just as much blood, or at least enough for bloodsugar testing, and it's a lot easier on your fingers.
I still don't see how it would "save lives". I don't think anybody has ever died from a badly done needle. Perhaps you can die from needing some live saving IV and them not being able to find the vein, but I'm pretty sure they'd just go for another target, like in the feet, if they were having lots problems in the hand or arms. The biggest problem I forsee from robots, is that it makes medical care more expensive. Which is becoming a big problem. Robots won't make it cheaper, since there won't be a situation where they would allow it without a qualified doctor or nurse present anyway. Also, the doctors and nurses will be out of practice when the machine inevitably breaks down, meaning they'd do an even worse job than they do now. They'd be better off developing some kind of realistic anatomical hand so that nurses and doctors can get more practice.
But how it's compiled isn't part of the language, it's part of the tool-chain. PHP is an interpreted language, unless you work at Facebook, where they have this compiler that turns PHP into C, after which, you can easily compile it to a native executable. Which was kind of my point. When you say you want to use C, Assembly, Fortran or Ada for those applications, what you're really saying is you want a language where the existing tool chain supports compiling down to machine code. You're actually choosing based on the tool-chain, and not on the actual properties of the language itself.
I would almost agree, that any language is as good as any other. With a few exceptions, like "whitespace" which isn't meant to be a practical language anyway. What really sets languages apart is the tooling that's built up around them. The debuggers, the IDE, the profilers, etc. Also, the consistency and extent of the standard API plays a huge role in how useful a language is. I would rather use Brainfuck with an amazing tools and a rich API than use Java, Python, or Ruby with bad tools and an inconstent and incomplete API.
They need to support it as a native numeric type, so it's not so difficult to use. If it was a native type with proper mathematical operators you wouldn't need questions on Stackoverflow about how to add two values together.
Proper date and time handling is one of the reasons I really prefer .Net to Java. The support for dates is just deplorable in Java. One shouldn't have to use an external dependancy, like JodaTime to handle basic date operations. If they could also add a "Decimal" data type, that is, a base-10 decimal primitive datatype, I think Java would be a much more useful language for day to day programming. Almost all the programming I do I would rather use a Decimal data type rather than a float data type, but very few languages support it as a native data type. .Net is one of the few environments where they got this right.
Yeah, but botnets are often controlled with common protocols like HTTP and IRC, because they are simple, and the code already exists, so they don't have to write their own protocols from scratch. So it may not really be that easy to determine if traffic is botnet contol codes or just a regular browser requesting a web page.