In addition to only being logging the use of the government job search site, and associating it to a given user by cookies*, you're already required to show evidence to the Job Centre that you're looking for work, often by applying for vacancies listed by the Job Centre itself in order to keep your eligibility for Job Seekers Allowance, i.e. your unemployment payments.
This way, if you're using a computer to search for jobs, using the official Job Seekers search page, that will demonstrate you're looking for work and save making copies of job adverts you've applied for from the local paper and bringing them in, in order to keep your benefit. Saving paperwork and effort for all involved, and opt-in to boot. The Horror, where will it end?
* nobody better tell the Torygraph about apache webservers that records IP ADDRESSES and time and date of every visitor, OMG.
Please name me a feature that Linux has that Windows doesn't that is useful on the enterprise level.
1 - I can run fully functional VM instances of it in 64MB or 128MB of RAM and 2GB hard-drive on my VSphere cluster doing infrastructure work like DNS cache/DHCP in my custom VLANs. Windows Server Core is pretty light, but not quite THAT light. Frees up RAM for my heavy duty stuff.
2 - I trust it to run as a layer 4 multi-card firewall/router directly exposed to the internet that is far more configurable and powerful than an off-the-shelf solution. I'm not even sure what the equivalent to shorewall would be on windows.
3 - RADV demon for IPv6 running on an aforementioned mini VM. DHCPv6 and internet connection sharing aren't the same.
4 - NGINX web server wipes the floor with IIS for most web-serving duties on pretty much any metric you care to mention; security, robustness, speed, flexibility. And yes, I am also running several IIS servers for.NET 3rd party apps, alas.
5 - No licence worries about whether I've exceeding my allowed server count. Not all businesses can just drop a few extra K for more server licences on demand these days.
Don't get me wrong; I am running a bunch of Windows 2008R2 servers (AD, DFS file servers, dynamic DNS, Terminal Servers, several 3rd party app specific boxes, hyper-v trial for poor man's VDI) and they do their job - serve data to windows and osx desktops/laptops - well most of the time. (except the DFS setup, that's a been a buggy pain in the arse). But our network is a synthesis, using the strengths of both platforms to do what they do best.
BTW - BTRFS will be the equivalent or better to ReFS (which is also only just out in 2012). It's still marked as unstable, but Linux's unstable is still better than the quality of most companies' finished 'enterprise' software. Speaking from bitter experience, there...
take this service that is widely supported and widely used across numerous platforms - a service that in no small part was a driving reason to use GMail/GCal - and throw it away
The exact opposite. The majority of people using gmail use the web interface. Most of the remainder - mobile devices - use the app. A relatively small number use IMAP. A far smaller that even that percentage use activesync - most people don't even know gmail has optional imap support, let alone activesync. Those who use activesync are largely business users, using google apps as a drop in replacement for exchange with outlook - specifically for the main purpose of activesync, that of syncing email, calendar and contacts all in one connection. Activesync isn't actually push email, it just checks much more often than non-IDLE IMAP does, so feels more like push.
Skilled technical users using activesync to get pseudo push email on their iphones in the Mail app? Pretty damn rare. Though obviously vocal...
The appropriate move would have been to deploy the new technology, put it in Android(under Google's umbrella) convince Apple to incorporate it(or at least provide an iPhone "plugin" app that incorporates it into the mail.app, and then slowly phase out the older technology. My wager is that sheeple will continue to be sheeple, begging to be sheered by massive conglomerates.
Ahahhahahahahahahah. IMAP IDLE is from 1997. It's far more of a standard than microsoft's activesync has ever been. Client devices support Activesync because older versions of Exchange didn't even support IMAP, or then did so so poorly that it was non-functional. They HAD to pay up on microsoft's patents. Now, even Exchange setups usually uses IMAP for non-outlook clients.
Apple is the one that refuses to allow well-established and supported standards. That you're calling other people sheeple in this circumstance... Oh, the ironing is delicious.
But you want to carry on using this obscure microsoft patented feature? Cough up the $50 a year to go to the commercial version of gmail, and hey, you won't even get adverts. Ya ungrateful cheapskate. .
There is an open standard for push support for email - IMAP IDLE. GMail implements it, as do most IMAP services, and a lot of IMAP clients. Microsoft's patented ActiveSync, designed for use with exchange/outlook, is also licenced by google both for client devices (android) and their servers, i.e. GMail/google apps, primarily so they can both connect to exchange as client, or serve up activesync for outlook clients. The server side is is now going away on their free personal gmail accounts - presumably because of the licencing fees for a not-often used service on their free version, as outlook also now supports IMAP IDLE.
Apple supports IMAP IDLE on OSX in Mail, but not iOS. It does support ActiveSync, so iOS can connect to Exchange servers. But Apple not supporting IMAP IDLE is the exception, not the rule. They say it's too power hungry for mobile devices, which is partly true - but activesync works very similarly, and is a similar power drain, and they support that.
Apple use their own method for iCloud I believe (which is why it fell foul of patent infringement in Germany, and had to turn off iCloud push support there).
So you have various options. Use the Gmail app, and get push that way (I don't know what method google uses for the App). Forward your google mail to icloud, and use that, if you want to hang onto your gmail address. Use a 3rd party app to implement IMAP IDLE support (for example PushMail on the app store should do it, it's aimed at Sparrow but does support the native Mail app on iOS by the looks of it). Implementing a 3rd party solution on iOS is tricky, as you need it to run in the background since iOS doesn't include IDLE support natively, and that is restricted heavily on iOS, which is why I believe Sparrow never got IDLE support.
But google was one of the very few services to implement activesync in the first place, apart from Exchange itself of course. If you want push email support, the standard is IMAP IDLE basically everywhere. So your complaint is that Google is dropping a patented, proprietary de-facto Microsoft standard for free accounts while keeping the open standard that Apple doesn't support on iOS, is to complain how evil Google is, and migrate to...?
A closed proprietary standard by Apple that only works with their software - iCloud? (Let's hope they keep that one going longer than mobile.me or its predecessors) Another IMAP provider that provides IMAP IDLE support, but not Microsoft's activesync, leaving you in the same boat? A hosted Exchange account? (shudder)
I'd suggest your actual problem is an insistence on using a client OS device that doesn't support open standards, and makes it very hard for 3rd party apps to do so.
does a good job at it, too, as long as you don't mind the tons of callbacks (read: impossible to follow spaghetti code), and the lack of decent debugging tools (unless this changed since last year?), the scarce (and occasionally unmaintained, and frequently buggy) libraries related to much about anything useful.
If you're writing a bunch of nested anonymous callbacks, you're doing it wrong - as you say, it looks ugly as sin and is a bugger to debug. Plus it means you may well be trying to wedge a synchronous workflow onto an asynchronous model. Either use something like async to get your control flow looking much cleaner if you absolutely must do things in specific order, or use events to announce when a section is done, so a pre-set listener can kick off the next section. Javascript is a very event driven language,and embracing as such drastically simplifies code.
I'm not going to deny there are a bunch of unmaintained buggy modules out there, especially as node is evolving so quickly. But then, the same could be said about pretty much any frame work or open-source platform. As long as you stick to the 'mainstream', big modules, they're solid and do the job, and there's plenty of those now - it's a lot more robust environment than it was a year or two ago, and it will no doubt continue to mature.
It's faster than liquid manure off a buttered shovel.
More seriously, node.js - as it's javascript - is ideal for asynchronous, non-blocking apps. When you think about a website, you need to be able to handle request n+1 promptly while you're still working on request n. i.e. while you're waiting for that database query to come back with the data you need to handle request n, you can still handle that entirely different new request without waiting for the first to finish.
The whole design of node.js is to do that, and do it well.
Node isn't the only server platform that works this way - python twisted springs to mind - but node has a built in event loop library that everything uses, whether it's your own code or plugin in modules. It makes it utterly trivial to add event listeners to 3rd party module events in your own code, and mix them in with your own event emitters for your own logic seemlessly. This is also handy when doing behaviour driven development with mocha (for example) - you can just add hooks to events in the code you're running the test suite to check it's working, and mock out inputs and even modules.
The other option is callbacks, which are also universally supported. Call a function from a module (or your own), and pass a callback argument along with it - when the called function completes, it passes back the error and results to the callback. Big whoop. The key thing is that callbacks are non-blocking - so your server will happily be getting on with other things in the meantime. One mistake it's easy to make though is nested callbacks; if you want to do function A, B and C in order, it's easy to fall into the trap of putting B as an anonymous function in the callback of A, and C as an anonymous function in the callback of B - which rapidly leads to a horridly complex bit of nested code. You can either use a helper module like async, which gives you various options for running functions serially without writing a horrid mess; or use your own event emitters to announce when they're done, and have a listener wait for that to trigger the next step.
One of the strengths of node is that you can easily build up your own server from modules. Ruby on Rails is fine if you want everything under one roof, and done the One True Way, but if you want to mix-n-match your own modules - web server, middleware, nosql or key-value store, imap, smtp, etc etc to fit in with your own code, then node is the way to go. This does mean you might need to do a bit more work putting the framework together, but you can use something like Express and its various addons to do most of the boilerplate for you with regards routing logic, static resources and middleware if you're doing a classic web app. JSON and binary buffers are built in to node, so you can easily handle AJAX responses and file streaming with minimum effort.
In fact, everything is a module, and it's trivial to add in your own modules - and variables are local to that module, so you only end up with globals if you specifically ask for them, so avoiding polluting the namespace no matter how many modules you use.
The last really huge strength of node.js is socket.io. Going from the one-way client-to-server ajax model, with a kinda kludgy server-to-client channel (xml long polling) to a true two-way server-client model so your server can directly send information to your client-side code without waiting to be asked for it is really, really powerful for truly responsive web apps - and will fall back to long-polling if using an older client that doesn't support it, so you don't have to hack about. It's arguably the most powerful feature of node - makes real-time apps an absolute walk in the park.
OK, yes, it's javascript. Scoff away. Personally, I don't find it a problem, and being able to write client-side and server-side code in the same language is a plus - though to be honest, you tend to use quite different styles in node.js; client side is based heavily upon your framework (jquery, backbone, knockout, etc) more than 'va
a) it's only a small amount of CO2 compared to the gigatons pumped out by coal stations, transport networks etc. Hell, the trucks probably emit more CO2 a week than what they were carrying.
b) I bet that CO2 comes from the air in the first place - as a side product of oxygen compressors, a useful medical and industrial product. Easy way to get a pure source. In which case, who cares? Carbon leaving the air and going back to it fairly soon afterwards is not the problem, such as burning new wood or crops. Its the carbon that's been locked up since the mesozoic era that's the problem, and too much of it being released will take us back there, climate wise.
Great if you're a dinosaur or fern, not so good if you're a mammal or plant that evolved for a quite different climate 60 million years later. Like us and our food sources.
I've switched to win 8 on my gaming PC because it boots much faster with my uefi board and ssd - about 20 seconds to desktop. That, and the much improved copy progress status dialogue are the main reasons I've not used the 7 install on the same box for a bit now. Metro is irritating, but after getting rid of all the metro apps and putting my game shortcuts and common apps, its bearable. There's still pointless irritations, like not being able to pin certain shortcuts, and not being to launch the desktop version of the default browser at all from metro if it has a metro mode, and of course the stupidly hidden shutdown.
Win 8 desktop mode is a definite speed and usability improvement over 7 - it's just such a goddamn shame they rammed metro down our throats, it needs some serious work to even be as good as a basic start menu replacement.
I specifically bought the witcher 2 at launch, at full price on GOG to support the non DRM approach.
Otherwise I likely would have waited until it was on sale. I liked the first one quite a bit (after the enhanced edition) but wasn't convinced about the sequel. As it turns out, it is rather good and given the amount of free post release additions, I'll definitely do the same again for witcher 3 given the chance.
I go out of my way to avoid heavy DRM, such as always online for single player, or limited activations. When DRM actively reduces the value of your product below that of the free version, you're doing it wrong. Good on CD projekt red for doing the right thing, and the gangbusters sales will hopefully prove to other studios that treating your paying customers like customers instead of wannabe thieves gets results.
It's kind of like how Adobe "allows" their photo shop suite to be pirated
Not any more. The site licenced version of CS6 suite is an absolute bastard to bulk install via automated means legitimately due to the heavy-handed DRM and online activation.
If they didn't care about piracy, they wouldn't make it such a pain in the arse for legit buyers.
Ditto goes for Microsoft - the old 'add the volume licence key to the image and done' method was far superior to the KMS method where you have to add an activation process to a windows server, update the keys to support new versions, and the devices are checking in daily via extra AD records to update their activation. Oh, and you've got to have 5 servers trying to before any of them will activate, or 25 desktops before they will activate.
Which was freaking marvellous rolling out the first lab of 20. We had to fake up some virtual machines just to get us past the limit to get the first bunch activated.
Assuming you've got the AD network, the KMS server activated online, put the fake KMS volume licence key in the clients so they attempt to find the server automatically, sufficient unique clients attempting to connect, then they will start activating - congrats - you've now got a 180-day grace period between activations. Which is fine for desktops that connect to the network every day. Not so hot for spare laptops that go sit in a cupboard in prep for a presentation, and then someone pulls em out and, oops, now your computer is complaining that it's pirated. Or a branch office without a direct wan connection to connect to the AD/KMS server.
So you now have an EXTRA multiple activation key, but the internet activations on that are one-use only, and by hand. Every time you reinstall that machine, you use up a MAK activation that's got a hard limit based upon your site licence. So lets hope most of the machines will talk to the KMS, or you'll run out of MAK activations pretty damn quick.
Then you have the SLIC table upgrades they did for windows 7 from vista, to make faking OEM BIOS activation keys harder, applying the same KMS method to Office 2010 but without proper support for adding the keys initially...
If microsoft don't care about piracy, they've got a funny way of making their legit customers jump through ever increasing online activation hoops for shits and giggles.
Even Apple, King of Expensive Shit, sells their OS upgrades for $20.
Well, they do now that OSX upgrades largely consist of tying it ever tighter to the App Store, iOS and iCloud. Plus a few driver updates to support the new expensive shiny, while end-of-lifing two year old versions of the OS and hardware older than 5 years.
It wasn't that long ago that Apple were charging $129 for Leopard. Plus, you know, the 40% profit margin on hardware helps a bit.
First off this is nothing like the Oracle case. That was a case about reimplementing APIs, and has nothing to do with linking against someone-else's code that provides APIs.
Actually, the Oracle case is pretty relevant. Oracle's argument was that the API itself of java - the structure, sequence and organization of it - was copyrightable, not just the code that implemented the API. Google clean room re-implemented the code that made up the API, but kept much of the structure of the API itself. The court decided that the API wasn't copyrightable, a good decision. Ergo, anything that merely USES an API cannot be a derivative work of the code that implements the API, as the API itself isn't copyrightable - if that wasn't the case, that would open up a really huge can of worms. In effect, the API becomes a firewall between two differently licenced bits of code. Which is of course what nvidia use for their binary blobs, for example.
Anyway, even if we assume the scsi target code in question static links to code beyond the API and does thus become a derivative work, then the upshot would be the code in the kernel... would have to be under the GPL v2. Which it already is. So it's rather a moot point.
As long as the code in RTS' private repository has no back-ported GPL code from the kernel, i.e. they haven't imported 3rd party written GPL covered patches into their own private code, then they can dual licence their private version however they like. Putting a version of their scsi target software into the kernel under the GPL makes no impact whatsoever on their copyright of said code, even if it is subsequently modified in the GPL kernel version by others. They can't of course fork the GPL version with others contributions and take it private without every contributors permission; but that's not what they're doing by the sounds of it.
As long as the code-flow was one-way - i.e. private to GPL, not two-way including GPL into private, they can write performance improvements to their commercially licenced one all day long and not port them to the GPL version in the kernel as much as they like.
And so what, anyway? Linux gets a decent SCSI target (I've used it a few times in production; it does what it says on the tin) it wouldn't otherwise have; and RTS have a commercial product for those wanting a higher performance product for high-end usage, thus allowing them to actually stay in business. Most code in the kernel, and the gnu/linux platform comes from individuals working for or sponsored by companies; those companies make money by various means, and that's what pays for the coders. Hobbyist coders do produce quite a bit of course, but linux wouldn't be where it is without commercial support.
And I've just realised why the API argument is important. If using the API makes code a derivative work, then the commercial version of the SCSI target module using the GPL kernel APIs would also have be GPL licenced. But given the Oracle-google case, that seems a hell of a reach, and certainly APIs were not considered to create derivative works before anyway - that's rather the point of an API, to allow two pieces of code to communicate without getting up in each other's business...
NO country can "close the loopholes" as another suggested because we are not talking about the laws of ONE country, we are talking about the laws of ALL countries as they can bounce a billion dollars through a dozen nation s in less than a second.
Alas yes. What Apple (and google, and many other companies) are using is the 'dutch sandwich' or 'double irish'.
The end goal is to get the money to a 'parent' company in say, bermuda or the cayman islands - the carribbean islands generally have very low tax rates - often zero - and more importantly, special tax status in Europe because of their colonial history.
But you can't transfer money tax free from most european nations to the carribbean any more, because that loophole has been closed in the last few years in most places. So you first transfer it to a 'parent company' in the netherlands, as transfers within the EU are generally allowed and tax free. Then, since the netherlands DOES allow you to transfer it to the carribbean tax free, you transfer it to the 'parent company' in say, Bermuda. So now you have almost all your profits being channeled to the netherlands, and then the carribbean tax free. Corporation taxes are only applied in the final destination, and surprise, they're zero rated. So now you have billions of pounds/euros slowly accumulating in offshore accounts, pretty much tax free and entirely legal. The 'parent companies' in the netherlands and carribbean are merely holding shells with a lawyers office - one building in Grand Cayman has 18,000 US companies registered at it.
Then all you need to do is wait for a tax amnesty*, and you can 'inshore' the money in huge quantities. Or since pretty much everyone is doing it, you transfer the money from one company to another without ever leaving the carribbean. Hell, half the time you don't even have to leave the building. The bank of course is all electronic, and many of them are only available for outside companies. There are entire legions of legal firms and accounting firms and banks all set up to use this 'dutch sandwich' route it's so popular.
* the US has regular tax amnesties, which allow companies to bring money back on-shore legally for a special one-off low tax rate - the government's argument is it's better to collect some tax than no tax if it continues to live in Grand Cayman.
The starting point is often Ireland; since they have low taxes compared to the rest of the EU, they're a good place to put the actual company and what few people you actually employ inside the EU. So what few taxes that are unavoidable they do pay are at a lower rate of about 10%, instead of the 20% or higher elsewhere in the EU.
Luxembourg is popular for other reasons - they have a VAT rate of 15%, but many things are zero or low rated at 3%. In the EU, you only pay VAT once, in the originating country. So if you order something from France or Germany in the UK, you pay local VAT; and because of the EU free trade laws, you don't pay any import duty or UK VAT (if you import from outside the EU, you pay VAT plus any import duties at the border) so that means if you're selling 'things' inside the EU instead of services, you can pay the Luxembourg VAT rate. Amazon, for example, is based in Luxembourg for all their EU operations. They actually pay 3% VAT for ebooks, but charge the same price as other UK based sellers (which have to pay 20% VAT) - Amazon just get to keep the 17% difference. Or use it to undercut prices on a few headline books, to hook people into buying Kindles. They then pull a dutch sandwich on the corporate profits; what little they do pay goes to luxembourg. The UK sees virtually no taxes at all, as the physical warehouses are counted as merely a 'distribution network' - in effect, an extension of the postal system. The actual goods in them belong to the holding company in luxembourg on paper, and that's who you buy from on the website. So It doesn't actually matter if you buy from Amazon UK, or DE, or FR - they're all just local language versions of the
In china, human workers are cheaper than robots. Especially for complex manipulation tasks like layering differing bits together into a 3d puzzle with cabling, it's simply cheaper to hire more people at very low wages and have them work 12 hours a day doing the repetitive work than it is to build robots to do it.
Actually, the biggest problem with the pi was imbalanced import taxes. Importing the parts to make it in the UK would attract tax on all the parts. Importing the finished board to sell - didn't. Given the primary driver was keeping the cost as low as possible, this was a big problem, despite the taxes being pretty small. This is basically the playstation exemption; there are plenty of lobbyists for companies that import finished consumer electronics from china etc, saying we don't want to pay this tax. For the tiny UK electronic manufacturing base? Not so much.
To be fair, Windows 8 under the bonnet is pretty damn good. Boot times, responsiveness, file copying, the task manager are significantly better on windows 8 than 7.
It's just such a crying shame they saddled it with that godawful metro interface riddled throughout. I've been running it now on at least one pc since the original developer preview, but I've now got the RTM only on my gaming rig - metro is just so embedded (I see you haven't got a default app for that filetype - let's go look for a metro one on the windows app store! Ugh.) I still find it stupidly annoying, even after months and months. I *can* use it now, but I really don't want to.
Even if you wedge in a start menu replacement, there's still fragments of metro left over, and it's just irritating, and more so the longer you use it. Such a shame; the rest of windows 8 is a real performance improvement over 7, and they finally fixed bulk file copying to actually *work*. There's no way I could roll it out to the end-users on the work network though. I'd get lynched.
Pretty close at the jargon. Few extra points though.
Cyanongen mod is based upon the android open source project (AOSP) that google keeps up to date with the current android source code. They take that, add a few extra features - like themes, and notification widgets - and compile it for a number of different devices. They're obviously constrained for closed source binary blob drivers though, especially if they're based upon a newer version of android (with a newer kernel version) than officially released for the device. Cameras and nvidia chips tend to be especially bad.
ROM manager is based around recovery mode; i.e. your android phones built in underlying method for flashing official ROMs. As part of rooting the phone (gaining root is gaining full control), this is usually replaced with a custom recovery tool like clockwork mod, with more options - and also lets you flash unofficial, unsigned roms.
So previously with cyanogenmod to update, you'd go to the website, download the latest copy of the rom (on your pc, probably), copy it to the phone internal storage, run rom manager which would then reboot into recovery mode and flash the new rom; or you'd go into recovery mode manually and install the updated rom you'd downloaded. For nightlies, you'd be doing this daily! Which kinda sucks.
One of my devices (nexus 7) I've been running paranoid android, a hybrid tablet rom - it's based upon cyanogenmod, but does extra stuff such as putting in the full tablet interface if you want, and allowing direct res control of individual apps. Anyway, it includes OTA (over the air) updates via goo.im. Basically, it pops up a notifier that there's a new version. You select that, download the new rom as prompted direct to the device (or later, via the goo.im manager if you don't want to update now), then you select to update it via the recovery mode automatically; it goes in, flashes the rom, and off you go, you're updated.
The new cyanogenmod OTA updater looks like it will work much the same; you tell it what updates you want (nightlies, stable), how often to check. You then forgetz about it. When a new version comes up you'll get a notification, you pull the update down directly, do an optional backup and install the rom without having to manually copy it to your phone,
It doesn't sound like much, but it significantly streamlines installing updates to your ROM and saves a fair bit of time poking around in clockwork mod recovery mode. Cyanogenmod by its very nature does a lot of updates for fixes, especially in the early life part of a new rom, i.e. all the jelly bean roms at the moment while bugs, drivers, features etc are sorted out.
Not to mention that he quite happily did minecraft pocket edition for the ipad, an ARM ecosystem that is just as restrictive as the Microsoft app store on windows RT.
No hypocrisy there, no siree.
Consumers went 'ohhh, walled garden, totally restricted to one vendor, apple decides what apps I'm allowed to install, awesome' and bought the things by the utter truckload.
The most common complaint about android is that Google doesn't exercise ENOUGH control over the OEMs to prevent fragmentation
Is it any surprise that Microsoft went 'seriously? A walled garden where we get to cream a big slice of profit on every bit of software is what customers want? Alrighty then!'
I'm not an expert by any stretch, but I did study VLSI chip design at uni, though obviously what we studied was a long way behind the current curve, and that's no doubt only increased since I left; but I can provide an overview of how it used to be done.
You start with a hardware description language. I used verilog and VHDL. Basically, you describe in code what modules and functions you want the chip to do. It's literally very similar to coding, but you're describing and linking together hardware modules, not software. You can often use libraries of pre-designed optimal modules, rather than literally design the logic design of every single thing by hand. (Though this stage can also be done in CAD as a graphical logic design)
That overall 'logic design' is then converted by algorithm into a gate & connections list; i.e. a whole metric ton of NAND logic gates and how they're connected etc. You can also run various automated tests on the design, to look for timing flaws, logic design errors etc - you confirm that your logic design does what you expect.
This is one stage you can then optimise by hand; you can look at at a segment, decide the compiler has come up with a stupidly overcomplicated way, and modify how the gates are connected, reduce the number of gates, swap some out for alternatives.
I believe this last step is not that common though now, as there tend to be fairly well designed 'cells' that perform a particular function, and you just plop those into the design as needed, and don't try to manually optimise them on a per-design basis - you focus on the design of the interconnects of the cells, and how they interact at a higher level.
Anyway, once you've got an abstracted gate design that fits your logic plan, you then feed that into a CAD program that takes those cells and the necessary interconnects, and generates a 2d planar layout of transistors; i.e. it takes the gate layout, and turns that into a whole metric buttload of transistors, and how they're laid out and connected together. Again, this is done at the 'cell' level for big chips, and mostly focuses on how those pre-designed cells can be connected together optimally - also taking account of your fab techniques, i.e. power levels, type of mosfets etc.
So now you have a machine generated layout diagram made up of transistors grouped together to form cells, with a whole ton of interconnect wiring with the paths generated by algorithm.
If you're in a real hurry you can call it a day there, and send it off to the fab. They'll then run it through the stages necessary to break it down into layers, printing order, lithography masks etc etc to turn that transistor and connections diagram into the physical version of same - your diagram and what the physical chip looks like under a microscope should look very similar indeed (all those shiny coloured blocks).
If you're doing anything complicated of course, you first test the chip under simulation. There you can look for physical hotspots, areas of interference, timing constraints etc. You can ramp up the clock speed, reduce the power, see which bits fail first.
Using those tests, and your existing expertise, you can re-arrange the cell blocks (of transistors) into different orders inside a group, manually fine tune the layout of groups of cells in relationship with each other, decide that group will give you much shorter routes if you put them over here instead...
Then you re-test your new layout in simulation, and see how it performs. The more testing, and the more manual changes you make to the automated design, the more obvious it becomes to an expert that your design has been hand tuned. You can of course use machine algorithms to assist in a particular sub-section of the chip, have it generate different layouts to solve a particular spot problem and then choose the best.
This is where expert humans really outperform the algorithms; we can discard obviously sub-optimal solutions from the get go, we can see how changing one small segme
OTOH, its not at all unlikely that the deal Acer has that involves "technical authorization", trademark licensing, etc., for Android
Indeed. As an 'authorized partner', Acer get to put the official google apps in their ROMs; most specifically, google play (which then gets you gmail, google maps, youtube, google music etc etc). Which also lets them They also get pre-release access to new versions of android itself, to give them a leg up on getting the updates out before they hit the public code tree.
There's nothing google could do to stop Acer using AOSP android - or just re-use cyanogenmod, for example - but they can certainly cut them off from being officially assisted and shipping the closed source google play app. Acer would need to say, ship the amazon app store instead.
There is no way Windows is operational within an hour of installing - a couple of days of installing
OK, I use linux, OSX and windows - and have been experimenting with builds of them lately - and that's a load of bull. Installing windows is about the same length of time of ubuntu, i.e. 10-20 minutes to prep the drive, partition and install the OS. In ubuntu, you get some packages included; you then go bobbing through the software centre for the rest, and a handful of ppa s for non- included or outdated software (nodejs and sublime text spring to mind).
On windows, you grab most of it off ninite.com in one installer, and a couple of individual installers of their websites. Office 2013 is actually really quick to stream install, I'm quite impressed - even if office itself is basically the same mishmash pile of mank as usual.
I had konqueror crash in a live CD while I was testing it; a 4.8 version, I think. KDE has a bad reputation for crash bugs, and pretending it doesn't is just the same blinkered behaviour the GNOME devs used to have. I loved KDE - I used it from 2.0 up to 3.5. 4.0 was a disaster of a release, and 4.2 wasn't much better, which was about the time I gave up on KDE altogether.
Iss there anyone that actually likes Unity? Or are Canonical just trying to piss everyone off?
Problem is, lots of people hate GNOME 3 too. And KDE has always been divisive, even though the original licence problems have long been resolved. But then, they broke KDE in the transition to KDE4, and from I've seen recently, it's still buggy as f**k and has been for years.
So that leaves, in no particular order;
1) GNOME 2. Abandoned. Resurrected as cinammon in the mint ubuntu fork, but still niche. And dear god, the launch bar is TEENY. 2) GNOME 3/Gnome-shell. Hated by many, the 'let's take away all the stuff people liked' edition, complete with all the options to change virtually anything removed. 3) Unity. Jeez, GNOME 3 really does suck. Let's do something else altogether! Hmm, how about a sideways touch friendly mounted springy dock, and all the apps need to be modified so their window options get merged into the top bar, until they don't. 4) KDE4. Still buggy as f**k and options up to the eyeballs. And I'm struggling to think of a mainstream distro that really backs it; maybe openSUSE, but they kinda went agnostic with the whole Novell thing, and switched to GNOME. 5) XfCE. OK, fine. It's lightweight, it's simple. But some of us want a GUI shell that does more than just be a holder for a bunch of terminal windows. And doesn't look like it's still the year 2000.
So you have the most popular distro Ubuntu with a homegrown shell that's weird and slow, GNOME seem to have forgotten they actually had a userbase before they went off the deep end, KDE are bobbling around trying to work out how to make it not crash, and the remaining desktops are spraying off into a bunch of niche areas.
I'm currently trying to work out what distro & shell to use on my home quiet/dev rig as I'm sick of bugfixing the hackintosh OSX that's on there at the moment.
Ehh, I haven't needed more than 8GB so far (I do have a 16GB though) on my Nexus 7. If/when it comes to it, I've got my £2 usb OTG adapter cable and my existing 16GB thumbdrive on my keyring should I need more portable space - and I'm sure I can chuck a 32GB or two in my luggage if I'm travelling far.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you never used Lotus Notes then...
In addition to only being logging the use of the government job search site, and associating it to a given user by cookies*, you're already required to show evidence to the Job Centre that you're looking for work, often by applying for vacancies listed by the Job Centre itself in order to keep your eligibility for Job Seekers Allowance, i.e. your unemployment payments.
This way, if you're using a computer to search for jobs, using the official Job Seekers search page, that will demonstrate you're looking for work and save making copies of job adverts you've applied for from the local paper and bringing them in, in order to keep your benefit. Saving paperwork and effort for all involved, and opt-in to boot. The Horror, where will it end?
* nobody better tell the Torygraph about apache webservers that records IP ADDRESSES and time and date of every visitor, OMG.
Please name me a feature that Linux has that Windows doesn't that is useful on the enterprise level.
1 - I can run fully functional VM instances of it in 64MB or 128MB of RAM and 2GB hard-drive on my VSphere cluster doing infrastructure work like DNS cache/DHCP in my custom VLANs. Windows Server Core is pretty light, but not quite THAT light. Frees up RAM for my heavy duty stuff.
2 - I trust it to run as a layer 4 multi-card firewall/router directly exposed to the internet that is far more configurable and powerful than an off-the-shelf solution. I'm not even sure what the equivalent to shorewall would be on windows.
3 - RADV demon for IPv6 running on an aforementioned mini VM. DHCPv6 and internet connection sharing aren't the same.
4 - NGINX web server wipes the floor with IIS for most web-serving duties on pretty much any metric you care to mention; security, robustness, speed, flexibility. And yes, I am also running several IIS servers for .NET 3rd party apps, alas.
5 - No licence worries about whether I've exceeding my allowed server count. Not all businesses can just drop a few extra K for more server licences on demand these days.
Don't get me wrong; I am running a bunch of Windows 2008R2 servers (AD, DFS file servers, dynamic DNS, Terminal Servers, several 3rd party app specific boxes, hyper-v trial for poor man's VDI) and they do their job - serve data to windows and osx desktops/laptops - well most of the time. (except the DFS setup, that's a been a buggy pain in the arse). But our network is a synthesis, using the strengths of both platforms to do what they do best.
BTW - BTRFS will be the equivalent or better to ReFS (which is also only just out in 2012). It's still marked as unstable, but Linux's unstable is still better than the quality of most companies' finished 'enterprise' software. Speaking from bitter experience, there...
take this service that is widely supported and widely used across numerous platforms - a service that in no small part was a driving reason to use GMail/GCal - and throw it away
The exact opposite. The majority of people using gmail use the web interface. Most of the remainder - mobile devices - use the app. A relatively small number use IMAP. A far smaller that even that percentage use activesync - most people don't even know gmail has optional imap support, let alone activesync. Those who use activesync are largely business users, using google apps as a drop in replacement for exchange with outlook - specifically for the main purpose of activesync, that of syncing email, calendar and contacts all in one connection. Activesync isn't actually push email, it just checks much more often than non-IDLE IMAP does, so feels more like push.
Skilled technical users using activesync to get pseudo push email on their iphones in the Mail app? Pretty damn rare. Though obviously vocal...
The appropriate move would have been to deploy the new technology, put it in Android(under Google's umbrella) convince Apple to incorporate it(or at least provide an iPhone "plugin" app that incorporates it into the mail.app, and then slowly phase out the older technology. My wager is that sheeple will continue to be sheeple, begging to be sheered by massive conglomerates.
Ahahhahahahahahahah. IMAP IDLE is from 1997. It's far more of a standard than microsoft's activesync has ever been. Client devices support Activesync because older versions of Exchange didn't even support IMAP, or then did so so poorly that it was non-functional. They HAD to pay up on microsoft's patents. Now, even Exchange setups usually uses IMAP for non-outlook clients.
Apple is the one that refuses to allow well-established and supported standards. That you're calling other people sheeple in this circumstance... Oh, the ironing is delicious.
But you want to carry on using this obscure microsoft patented feature? Cough up the $50 a year to go to the commercial version of gmail, and hey, you won't even get adverts. Ya ungrateful cheapskate.
.
There is an open standard for push support for email - IMAP IDLE. GMail implements it, as do most IMAP services, and a lot of IMAP clients. Microsoft's patented ActiveSync, designed for use with exchange/outlook, is also licenced by google both for client devices (android) and their servers, i.e. GMail/google apps, primarily so they can both connect to exchange as client, or serve up activesync for outlook clients. The server side is is now going away on their free personal gmail accounts - presumably because of the licencing fees for a not-often used service on their free version, as outlook also now supports IMAP IDLE.
Apple supports IMAP IDLE on OSX in Mail, but not iOS. It does support ActiveSync, so iOS can connect to Exchange servers. But Apple not supporting IMAP IDLE is the exception, not the rule. They say it's too power hungry for mobile devices, which is partly true - but activesync works very similarly, and is a similar power drain, and they support that.
Apple use their own method for iCloud I believe (which is why it fell foul of patent infringement in Germany, and had to turn off iCloud push support there).
So you have various options. Use the Gmail app, and get push that way (I don't know what method google uses for the App). Forward your google mail to icloud, and use that, if you want to hang onto your gmail address. Use a 3rd party app to implement IMAP IDLE support (for example PushMail on the app store should do it, it's aimed at Sparrow but does support the native Mail app on iOS by the looks of it). Implementing a 3rd party solution on iOS is tricky, as you need it to run in the background since iOS doesn't include IDLE support natively, and that is restricted heavily on iOS, which is why I believe Sparrow never got IDLE support.
But google was one of the very few services to implement activesync in the first place, apart from Exchange itself of course. If you want push email support, the standard is IMAP IDLE basically everywhere. So your complaint is that Google is dropping a patented, proprietary de-facto Microsoft standard for free accounts while keeping the open standard that Apple doesn't support on iOS, is to complain how evil Google is, and migrate to...?
A closed proprietary standard by Apple that only works with their software - iCloud? (Let's hope they keep that one going longer than mobile.me or its predecessors)
Another IMAP provider that provides IMAP IDLE support, but not Microsoft's activesync, leaving you in the same boat?
A hosted Exchange account? (shudder)
I'd suggest your actual problem is an insistence on using a client OS device that doesn't support open standards, and makes it very hard for 3rd party apps to do so.
does a good job at it, too, as long as you don't mind the tons of callbacks (read: impossible to follow spaghetti code), and the lack of decent debugging tools (unless this changed since last year?), the scarce (and occasionally unmaintained, and frequently buggy) libraries related to much about anything useful.
If you're writing a bunch of nested anonymous callbacks, you're doing it wrong - as you say, it looks ugly as sin and is a bugger to debug. Plus it means you may well be trying to wedge a synchronous workflow onto an asynchronous model. Either use something like async to get your control flow looking much cleaner if you absolutely must do things in specific order, or use events to announce when a section is done, so a pre-set listener can kick off the next section. Javascript is a very event driven language,and embracing as such drastically simplifies code.
I'm not going to deny there are a bunch of unmaintained buggy modules out there, especially as node is evolving so quickly. But then, the same could be said about pretty much any frame work or open-source platform. As long as you stick to the 'mainstream', big modules, they're solid and do the job, and there's plenty of those now - it's a lot more robust environment than it was a year or two ago, and it will no doubt continue to mature.
It's faster than liquid manure off a buttered shovel.
More seriously, node.js - as it's javascript - is ideal for asynchronous, non-blocking apps. When you think about a website, you need to be able to handle request n+1 promptly while you're still working on request n. i.e. while you're waiting for that database query to come back with the data you need to handle request n, you can still handle that entirely different new request without waiting for the first to finish.
The whole design of node.js is to do that, and do it well.
Node isn't the only server platform that works this way - python twisted springs to mind - but node has a built in event loop library that everything uses, whether it's your own code or plugin in modules. It makes it utterly trivial to add event listeners to 3rd party module events in your own code, and mix them in with your own event emitters for your own logic seemlessly. This is also handy when doing behaviour driven development with mocha (for example) - you can just add hooks to events in the code you're running the test suite to check it's working, and mock out inputs and even modules.
The other option is callbacks, which are also universally supported. Call a function from a module (or your own), and pass a callback argument along with it - when the called function completes, it passes back the error and results to the callback. Big whoop. The key thing is that callbacks are non-blocking - so your server will happily be getting on with other things in the meantime. One mistake it's easy to make though is nested callbacks; if you want to do function A, B and C in order, it's easy to fall into the trap of putting B as an anonymous function in the callback of A, and C as an anonymous function in the callback of B - which rapidly leads to a horridly complex bit of nested code. You can either use a helper module like async, which gives you various options for running functions serially without writing a horrid mess; or use your own event emitters to announce when they're done, and have a listener wait for that to trigger the next step.
One of the strengths of node is that you can easily build up your own server from modules. Ruby on Rails is fine if you want everything under one roof, and done the One True Way, but if you want to mix-n-match your own modules - web server, middleware, nosql or key-value store, imap, smtp, etc etc to fit in with your own code, then node is the way to go. This does mean you might need to do a bit more work putting the framework together, but you can use something like Express and its various addons to do most of the boilerplate for you with regards routing logic, static resources and middleware if you're doing a classic web app. JSON and binary buffers are built in to node, so you can easily handle AJAX responses and file streaming with minimum effort.
In fact, everything is a module, and it's trivial to add in your own modules - and variables are local to that module, so you only end up with globals if you specifically ask for them, so avoiding polluting the namespace no matter how many modules you use.
The last really huge strength of node.js is socket.io. Going from the one-way client-to-server ajax model, with a kinda kludgy server-to-client channel (xml long polling) to a true two-way server-client model so your server can directly send information to your client-side code without waiting to be asked for it is really, really powerful for truly responsive web apps - and will fall back to long-polling if using an older client that doesn't support it, so you don't have to hack about. It's arguably the most powerful feature of node - makes real-time apps an absolute walk in the park.
OK, yes, it's javascript. Scoff away. Personally, I don't find it a problem, and being able to write client-side and server-side code in the same language is a plus - though to be honest, you tend to use quite different styles in node.js; client side is based heavily upon your framework (jquery, backbone, knockout, etc) more than 'va
a) it's only a small amount of CO2 compared to the gigatons pumped out by coal stations, transport networks etc. Hell, the trucks probably emit more CO2 a week than what they were carrying.
b) I bet that CO2 comes from the air in the first place - as a side product of oxygen compressors, a useful medical and industrial product. Easy way to get a pure source. In which case, who cares? Carbon leaving the air and going back to it fairly soon afterwards is not the problem, such as burning new wood or crops. Its the carbon that's been locked up since the mesozoic era that's the problem, and too much of it being released will take us back there, climate wise.
Great if you're a dinosaur or fern, not so good if you're a mammal or plant that evolved for a quite different climate 60 million years later. Like us and our food sources.
I've switched to win 8 on my gaming PC because it boots much faster with my uefi board and ssd - about 20 seconds to desktop. That, and the much improved copy progress status dialogue are the main reasons I've not used the 7 install on the same box for a bit now. Metro is irritating, but after getting rid of all the metro apps and putting my game shortcuts and common apps, its bearable. There's still pointless irritations, like not being able to pin certain shortcuts, and not being to launch the desktop version of the default browser at all from metro if it has a metro mode, and of course the stupidly hidden shutdown.
Win 8 desktop mode is a definite speed and usability improvement over 7 - it's just such a goddamn shame they rammed metro down our throats, it needs some serious work to even be as good as a basic start menu replacement.
I specifically bought the witcher 2 at launch, at full price on GOG to support the non DRM approach.
Otherwise I likely would have waited until it was on sale. I liked the first one quite a bit (after the enhanced edition) but wasn't convinced about the sequel. As it turns out, it is rather good and given the amount of free post release additions, I'll definitely do the same again for witcher 3 given the chance.
I go out of my way to avoid heavy DRM, such as always online for single player, or limited activations. When DRM actively reduces the value of your product below that of the free version, you're doing it wrong. Good on CD projekt red for doing the right thing, and the gangbusters sales will hopefully prove to other studios that treating your paying customers like customers instead of wannabe thieves gets results.
It's kind of like how Adobe "allows" their photo shop suite to be pirated
Not any more. The site licenced version of CS6 suite is an absolute bastard to bulk install via automated means legitimately due to the heavy-handed DRM and online activation.
If they didn't care about piracy, they wouldn't make it such a pain in the arse for legit buyers.
Ditto goes for Microsoft - the old 'add the volume licence key to the image and done' method was far superior to the KMS method where you have to add an activation process to a windows server, update the keys to support new versions, and the devices are checking in daily via extra AD records to update their activation. Oh, and you've got to have 5 servers trying to before any of them will activate, or 25 desktops before they will activate.
Which was freaking marvellous rolling out the first lab of 20. We had to fake up some virtual machines just to get us past the limit to get the first bunch activated.
Assuming you've got the AD network, the KMS server activated online, put the fake KMS volume licence key in the clients so they attempt to find the server automatically, sufficient unique clients attempting to connect, then they will start activating - congrats - you've now got a 180-day grace period between activations. Which is fine for desktops that connect to the network every day. Not so hot for spare laptops that go sit in a cupboard in prep for a presentation, and then someone pulls em out and, oops, now your computer is complaining that it's pirated. Or a branch office without a direct wan connection to connect to the AD/KMS server.
So you now have an EXTRA multiple activation key, but the internet activations on that are one-use only, and by hand. Every time you reinstall that machine, you use up a MAK activation that's got a hard limit based upon your site licence. So lets hope most of the machines will talk to the KMS, or you'll run out of MAK activations pretty damn quick.
Then you have the SLIC table upgrades they did for windows 7 from vista, to make faking OEM BIOS activation keys harder, applying the same KMS method to Office 2010 but without proper support for adding the keys initially...
If microsoft don't care about piracy, they've got a funny way of making their legit customers jump through ever increasing online activation hoops for shits and giggles.
Even Apple, King of Expensive Shit, sells their OS upgrades for $20.
Well, they do now that OSX upgrades largely consist of tying it ever tighter to the App Store, iOS and iCloud. Plus a few driver updates to support the new expensive shiny, while end-of-lifing two year old versions of the OS and hardware older than 5 years.
It wasn't that long ago that Apple were charging $129 for Leopard. Plus, you know, the 40% profit margin on hardware helps a bit.
First off this is nothing like the Oracle case. That was a case about reimplementing APIs, and has nothing to do with linking against someone-else's code that provides APIs.
Actually, the Oracle case is pretty relevant. Oracle's argument was that the API itself of java - the structure, sequence and organization of it - was copyrightable, not just the code that implemented the API. Google clean room re-implemented the code that made up the API, but kept much of the structure of the API itself. The court decided that the API wasn't copyrightable, a good decision. Ergo, anything that merely USES an API cannot be a derivative work of the code that implements the API, as the API itself isn't copyrightable - if that wasn't the case, that would open up a really huge can of worms. In effect, the API becomes a firewall between two differently licenced bits of code. Which is of course what nvidia use for their binary blobs, for example.
Anyway, even if we assume the scsi target code in question static links to code beyond the API and does thus become a derivative work, then the upshot would be the code in the kernel... would have to be under the GPL v2. Which it already is. So it's rather a moot point.
As long as the code in RTS' private repository has no back-ported GPL code from the kernel, i.e. they haven't imported 3rd party written GPL covered patches into
their own private code, then they can dual licence their private version however they like. Putting a version of their scsi target software into the kernel under the GPL makes no impact whatsoever on their copyright of said code, even if it is subsequently modified in the GPL kernel version by others. They can't of course fork the GPL version with others contributions and take it private without every contributors permission; but that's not what they're doing by the sounds of it.
As long as the code-flow was one-way - i.e. private to GPL, not two-way including GPL into private, they can write performance improvements to their commercially licenced one all day long and not port them to the GPL version in the kernel as much as they like.
And so what, anyway? Linux gets a decent SCSI target (I've used it a few times in production; it does what it says on the tin) it wouldn't otherwise have; and RTS have a commercial product for those wanting a higher performance product for high-end usage, thus allowing them to actually stay in business. Most code in the kernel, and the gnu/linux platform comes from individuals working for or sponsored by companies; those companies make money by various means, and that's what pays for the coders. Hobbyist coders do produce quite a bit of course, but linux wouldn't be where it is without commercial support.
And I've just realised why the API argument is important. If using the API makes code a derivative work, then the commercial version of the SCSI target module using the GPL kernel APIs would also have be GPL licenced. But given the Oracle-google case, that seems a hell of a reach, and certainly APIs were not considered to create derivative works before anyway - that's rather the point of an API, to allow two pieces of code to communicate without getting up in each other's business...
NO country can "close the loopholes" as another suggested because we are not talking about the laws of ONE country, we are talking about the laws of ALL countries as they can bounce a billion dollars through a dozen nation s in less than a second.
Alas yes. What Apple (and google, and many other companies) are using is the 'dutch sandwich' or 'double irish'.
The end goal is to get the money to a 'parent' company in say, bermuda or the cayman islands - the carribbean islands generally have very low tax rates - often zero - and more importantly, special tax status in Europe because of their colonial history.
But you can't transfer money tax free from most european nations to the carribbean any more, because that loophole has been closed in the last few years in most places. So you first transfer it to a 'parent company' in the netherlands, as transfers within the EU are generally allowed and tax free. Then, since the netherlands DOES allow you to transfer it to the carribbean tax free, you transfer it to the 'parent company' in say, Bermuda. So now you have almost all your profits being channeled to the netherlands, and then the carribbean tax free. Corporation taxes are only applied in the final destination, and surprise, they're zero rated. So now you have billions of pounds/euros slowly accumulating in offshore accounts, pretty much tax free and entirely legal. The 'parent companies' in the netherlands and carribbean are merely holding shells with a lawyers office - one building in Grand Cayman has 18,000 US companies registered at it.
Then all you need to do is wait for a tax amnesty*, and you can 'inshore' the money in huge quantities. Or since pretty much everyone is doing it, you transfer the money from one company to another without ever leaving the carribbean. Hell, half the time you don't even have to leave the building. The bank of course is all electronic, and many of them are only available for outside companies. There are entire legions of legal firms and accounting firms and banks all set up to use this 'dutch sandwich' route it's so popular.
* the US has regular tax amnesties, which allow companies to bring money back on-shore legally for a special one-off low tax rate - the government's argument is it's better to collect some tax than no tax if it continues to live in Grand Cayman.
The starting point is often Ireland; since they have low taxes compared to the rest of the EU, they're a good place to put the actual company and what few people you actually employ inside the EU. So what few taxes that are unavoidable they do pay are at a lower rate of about 10%, instead of the 20% or higher elsewhere in the EU.
Luxembourg is popular for other reasons - they have a VAT rate of 15%, but many things are zero or low rated at 3%. In the EU, you only pay VAT once, in the originating country. So if you order something from France or Germany in the UK, you pay local VAT; and because of the EU free trade laws, you don't pay any import duty or UK VAT (if you import from outside the EU, you pay VAT plus any import duties at the border) so that means if you're selling 'things' inside the EU instead of services, you can pay the Luxembourg VAT rate. Amazon, for example, is based in Luxembourg for all their EU operations. They actually pay 3% VAT for ebooks, but charge the same price as other UK based sellers (which have to pay 20% VAT) - Amazon just get to keep the 17% difference. Or use it to undercut prices on a few headline books, to hook people into buying Kindles. They then pull a dutch sandwich on the corporate profits; what little they do pay goes to luxembourg. The UK sees virtually no taxes at all, as the physical warehouses are counted as merely a 'distribution network' - in effect, an extension of the postal system. The actual goods in them belong to the holding company in luxembourg on paper, and that's who you buy from on the website. So It doesn't actually matter if you buy from Amazon UK, or DE, or FR - they're all just local language versions of the
In china, human workers are cheaper than robots. Especially for complex manipulation tasks like layering differing bits together into a 3d puzzle with cabling, it's simply cheaper to hire more people at very low wages and have them work 12 hours a day doing the repetitive work than it is to build robots to do it.
Actually, the biggest problem with the pi was imbalanced import taxes. Importing the parts to make it in the UK would attract tax on all the parts. Importing the finished board to sell - didn't. Given the primary driver was keeping the cost as low as possible, this was a big problem, despite the taxes being pretty small. This is basically the playstation exemption; there are plenty of lobbyists for companies that import finished consumer electronics from china etc, saying we don't want to pay this tax. For the tiny UK electronic manufacturing base? Not so much.
To be fair, Windows 8 under the bonnet is pretty damn good. Boot times, responsiveness, file copying, the task manager are significantly better on windows 8 than 7.
It's just such a crying shame they saddled it with that godawful metro interface riddled throughout. I've been running it now on at least one pc since the original developer preview, but I've now got the RTM only on my gaming rig - metro is just so embedded (I see you haven't got a default app for that filetype - let's go look for a metro one on the windows app store! Ugh.) I still find it stupidly annoying, even after months and months. I *can* use it now, but I really don't want to.
Even if you wedge in a start menu replacement, there's still fragments of metro left over, and it's just irritating, and more so the longer you use it. Such a shame; the rest of windows 8 is a real performance improvement over 7, and they finally fixed bulk file copying to actually *work*. There's no way I could roll it out to the end-users on the work network though. I'd get lynched.
Pretty close at the jargon. Few extra points though.
Cyanongen mod is based upon the android open source project (AOSP) that google keeps up to date with the current android source code. They take that, add a few extra features - like themes, and notification widgets - and compile it for a number of different devices. They're obviously constrained for closed source binary blob drivers though, especially if they're based upon a newer version of android (with a newer kernel version) than officially released for the device. Cameras and nvidia chips tend to be especially bad.
ROM manager is based around recovery mode; i.e. your android phones built in underlying method for flashing official ROMs. As part of rooting the phone (gaining root is gaining full control), this is usually replaced with a custom recovery tool like clockwork mod, with more options - and also lets you flash unofficial, unsigned roms.
So previously with cyanogenmod to update, you'd go to the website, download the latest copy of the rom (on your pc, probably), copy it to the phone internal storage, run rom manager which would then reboot into recovery mode and flash the new rom; or you'd go into recovery mode manually and install the updated rom you'd downloaded. For nightlies, you'd be doing this daily! Which kinda sucks.
One of my devices (nexus 7) I've been running paranoid android, a hybrid tablet rom - it's based upon cyanogenmod, but does extra stuff such as putting in the full tablet interface if you want, and allowing direct res control of individual apps. Anyway, it includes OTA (over the air) updates via goo.im. Basically, it pops up a notifier that there's a new version. You select that, download the new rom as prompted direct to the device (or later, via the goo.im manager if you don't want to update now), then you select to update it via the recovery mode automatically; it goes in, flashes the rom, and off you go, you're updated.
The new cyanogenmod OTA updater looks like it will work much the same; you tell it what updates you want (nightlies, stable), how often to check. You then forgetz about it. When a new version comes up you'll get a notification, you pull the update down directly, do an optional backup and install the rom without having to manually copy it to your phone,
It doesn't sound like much, but it significantly streamlines installing updates to your ROM and saves a fair bit of time poking around in clockwork mod recovery mode. Cyanogenmod by its very nature does a lot of updates for fixes, especially in the early life part of a new rom, i.e. all the jelly bean roms at the moment while bugs, drivers, features etc are sorted out.
Not to mention that he quite happily did minecraft pocket edition for the ipad, an ARM ecosystem that is just as restrictive as the Microsoft app store on windows RT.
No hypocrisy there, no siree.
Consumers went 'ohhh, walled garden, totally restricted to one vendor, apple decides what apps I'm allowed to install, awesome' and bought the things by the utter truckload.
The most common complaint about android is that Google doesn't exercise ENOUGH control over the OEMs to prevent fragmentation
Is it any surprise that Microsoft went 'seriously? A walled garden where we get to cream a big slice of profit on every bit of software is what customers want? Alrighty then!'
I'm not an expert by any stretch, but I did study VLSI chip design at uni, though obviously what we studied was a long way behind the current curve, and that's no doubt only increased since I left; but I can provide an overview of how it used to be done.
You start with a hardware description language. I used verilog and VHDL. Basically, you describe in code what modules and functions you want the chip to do. It's literally very similar to coding, but you're describing and linking together hardware modules, not software. You can often use libraries of pre-designed optimal modules, rather than literally design the logic design of every single thing by hand. (Though this stage can also be done in CAD as a graphical logic design)
That overall 'logic design' is then converted by algorithm into a gate & connections list; i.e. a whole metric ton of NAND logic gates and how they're connected etc.
You can also run various automated tests on the design, to look for timing flaws, logic design errors etc - you confirm that your logic design does what you expect.
This is one stage you can then optimise by hand; you can look at at a segment, decide the compiler has come up with a stupidly overcomplicated way, and modify how the gates are connected, reduce the number of gates, swap some out for alternatives.
I believe this last step is not that common though now, as there tend to be fairly well designed 'cells' that perform a particular function, and you just plop those into the design as needed, and don't try to manually optimise them on a per-design basis - you focus on the design of the interconnects of the cells, and how they interact at a higher level.
Anyway, once you've got an abstracted gate design that fits your logic plan, you then feed that into a CAD program that takes those cells and the necessary interconnects, and generates a 2d planar layout of transistors; i.e. it takes the gate layout, and turns that into a whole metric buttload of transistors, and how they're laid out and connected together. Again, this is done at the 'cell' level for big chips, and mostly focuses on how those pre-designed cells can be connected together optimally - also taking account of your fab techniques, i.e. power levels, type of mosfets etc.
So now you have a machine generated layout diagram made up of transistors grouped together to form cells, with a whole ton of interconnect wiring with the paths generated by algorithm.
If you're in a real hurry you can call it a day there, and send it off to the fab. They'll then run it through the stages necessary to break it down into layers, printing order, lithography masks etc etc to turn that transistor and connections diagram into the physical version of same - your diagram and what the physical chip looks like under a microscope should look very similar indeed (all those shiny coloured blocks).
If you're doing anything complicated of course, you first test the chip under simulation. There you can look for physical hotspots, areas of interference, timing constraints etc. You can ramp up the clock speed, reduce the power, see which bits fail first.
Using those tests, and your existing expertise, you can re-arrange the cell blocks (of transistors) into different orders inside a group, manually fine tune the layout of groups of cells in relationship with each other, decide that group will give you much shorter routes if you put them over here instead...
Then you re-test your new layout in simulation, and see how it performs. The more testing, and the more manual changes you make to the automated design, the more obvious it becomes to an expert that your design has been hand tuned. You can of course use machine algorithms to assist in a particular sub-section of the chip, have it generate different layouts to solve a particular spot problem and then choose the best.
This is where expert humans really outperform the algorithms; we can discard obviously sub-optimal solutions from the get go, we can see how changing one small segme
OTOH, its not at all unlikely that the deal Acer has that involves "technical authorization", trademark licensing, etc., for Android
Indeed. As an 'authorized partner', Acer get to put the official google apps in their ROMs; most specifically, google play (which then gets you gmail, google maps, youtube, google music etc etc). Which also lets them They also get pre-release access to new versions of android itself, to give them a leg up on getting the updates out before they hit the public code tree.
There's nothing google could do to stop Acer using AOSP android - or just re-use cyanogenmod, for example - but they can certainly cut them off from being officially assisted and shipping the closed source google play app. Acer would need to say, ship the amazon app store instead.
There is no way Windows is operational within an hour of installing - a couple of days of installing
OK, I use linux, OSX and windows - and have been experimenting with builds of them lately - and that's a load of bull. Installing windows is about the same length of time of ubuntu, i.e. 10-20 minutes to prep the drive, partition and install the OS. In ubuntu, you get some packages included; you then go bobbing through the software centre for the rest, and a handful of ppa s for non- included or outdated software (nodejs and sublime text spring to mind).
On windows, you grab most of it off ninite.com in one installer, and a couple of individual installers of their websites. Office 2013 is actually really quick to stream install, I'm quite impressed - even if office itself is basically the same mishmash pile of mank as usual.
I had konqueror crash in a live CD while I was testing it; a 4.8 version, I think. KDE has a bad reputation for crash bugs, and pretending it doesn't is just the same blinkered behaviour the GNOME devs used to have. I loved KDE - I used it from 2.0 up to 3.5. 4.0 was a disaster of a release, and 4.2 wasn't much better, which was about the time I gave up on KDE altogether.
Iss there anyone that actually likes Unity? Or are Canonical just trying to piss everyone off?
Problem is, lots of people hate GNOME 3 too. And KDE has always been divisive, even though the original licence problems have long been resolved. But then, they broke KDE in the transition to KDE4, and from I've seen recently, it's still buggy as f**k and has been for years.
So that leaves, in no particular order;
1) GNOME 2. Abandoned. Resurrected as cinammon in the mint ubuntu fork, but still niche. And dear god, the launch bar is TEENY. /Gnome-shell. Hated by many, the 'let's take away all the stuff people liked' edition, complete with all the options to change virtually anything removed.
2) GNOME 3
3) Unity. Jeez, GNOME 3 really does suck. Let's do something else altogether! Hmm, how about a sideways touch friendly mounted springy dock, and all the apps need to be modified so their window options get merged into the top bar, until they don't.
4) KDE4. Still buggy as f**k and options up to the eyeballs. And I'm struggling to think of a mainstream distro that really backs it; maybe openSUSE, but they kinda went agnostic with the whole Novell thing, and switched to GNOME.
5) XfCE. OK, fine. It's lightweight, it's simple. But some of us want a GUI shell that does more than just be a holder for a bunch of terminal windows. And doesn't look like it's still the year 2000.
So you have the most popular distro Ubuntu with a homegrown shell that's weird and slow, GNOME seem to have forgotten they actually had a userbase before they went off the deep end, KDE are bobbling around trying to work out how to make it not crash, and the remaining desktops are spraying off into a bunch of niche areas.
I'm currently trying to work out what distro & shell to use on my home quiet/dev rig as I'm sick of bugfixing the hackintosh OSX that's on there at the moment.
And right now, they ALL suck.
Ehh, I haven't needed more than 8GB so far (I do have a 16GB though) on my Nexus 7. If/when it comes to it, I've got my £2 usb OTG adapter cable and my existing 16GB thumbdrive on my keyring should I need more portable space - and I'm sure I can chuck a 32GB or two in my luggage if I'm travelling far.