Taxi fares are also fixed in the UK by the local councils, so there is no gouging or "surge pricing". You can calculate how much your fare is going to be before you even get into the taxi.
Yes, except at times when non-official taxis would be charging higher prices to encourage more people to offer rides, you can't get an official taxi at all, because people making trivial trips are still using them because they're cheap, while those making essential trips have to wait.
Rationing is clearly better than letting prices rise for a while. Or something.
I uninstalled Flash long ago. Very occasionally I find a site that doesn't work at all without Flash, but it's rarely one I care about.
The worst thing are the 'mobile' sites which say 'ah, you're running iOS, so I'm going to give you a sane site that doesn't have any of that Flash crap,' so you know they can make their site run fine without Flash, but you go there with an Android device and it says 'ah, you're running Android, so i'm going to give you the Flash version' even though Flash hasn't run on Android for several versions now.
Linux is not exactly famous for backwards compatibility, stable APIs, and not breaking existing applications.
Backward compatiblity is retarded, and you can just compile the source on a new OS and fix the few things that broke.
Oh, you mean you bought some weird old closed source app that you're now reliant on? Well, you'll be glad to know that you can run an old version of Linux in a VM with no worries about licensing fees or 'activation' or any of that other crap that closed source operating systems lumber you with.
Making DX12 Window 8-only would be pointless, as it would mean no game developer released DX12 games until 2020. It would be DX10/11 all over again, where most games remain DX9 (and 32-bit) for backward compatibility with XP.
It boots fast and has an even smaller footprint than 7.
I turn on my Windows 7 PC, and by the time I've put down my coffee, sat down, and turned on the monitor, it's already at the logon screen. And, with 32GB of RAM, I don't much care about the footprint.
Meanwhile, most people can't even start Notepad the first time they're forced to use Window 8.
Is your Volkswagen TDI all electric? No, then why the fuck do we care about your car?
Because far more capable gasoline cars are available at a lower price, so no sane person would buy one of these unless they expect the price of diesel to make up the difference in the time they own the car.
And, with the price of oil collapsing, this is a really bad time to be releasing a new electric car.
The problem is, when www.somecraphpytmlsite.com doesn't display in the web browser, users blame the browser, not the crap HTML writers.
It's like the good old days of writing device drivers for Windows, where we had to reproduce bugs from the default OS drivers in our custom drivers becasue there were so many crappy apps which only worked because of those bugs, and people would complain to us that CrappyWord Xtreme didn't work after they installed our driver which didn't have those bugs.
We should have tossed the whole thing long ago, and told people to fix their crap. Backward compatiblity sounds good, but it kills you in the long run.
A Linux RAM disk (tmpfs) just stores files in the page cache, so there's really no difference. OK, it can also write out those files to the swap partition if you run out of RAM, but you usually shouldn't be using a RAM disk unless you have plenty of RAM.
And that's a big improvement over some old-style RAM disks where you told it you wanted 500MB and it grabbed those 500MB and didn't let anyone else use it.
True, they might be smarter and try to cache the next level from the latest save file. But there's an obvious difference between the hard drive light glowing red because it has to load everything from disk, and barely flickering because it's all or almost all in RAM.
Honestly I never got the issues people have with RealTek.
Crappy wi-fi drivers, for a start. If I don't disable pretty much every performance and power-management wi-fi option on my laptop, they disconnect every 30 minutes or so.
About the only thing this will improve is game load times (which I guess is a market, but not the biggest on earth, especially given the price of this).
I have 32GB of RAM in my gaming PC, so the second time I start a game, it's all in RAM. Still takes an age to get through the damn videos--increasingly, unskippable freaking videos--every game wants to play these days, and then from there to the menu.
I don't even know what games are doing between the point where they stop playing videos and actually get to the menu. The files are cached in RAM, and the CPU isn't doing much. Just crappy code, I guess, and an SSD won't help much with that.
I have Lollipop on my Nexus tablet, and while some apps are noticeably smoother, presumably because of the new precompiled runtime, the OS as a whole is noticeably slower because some common activities requre multiple touches to open multiple windows where before they were just one.
Even if the upgrade is available for a device, there's no clear reason to want it. It still lacks the one thing that I actually want in Android: meaningful control over app permissions.
Better is to have a versioned filesystem - each time a file is changed (by any application!) the delta is saved and the filesystem keeps the old data hidden away.
It's fortunate that disks are infinitely large, so the malware can't just overwrite the files multiple times until the filesystem deletes the plaintext versions.
For the same amount of hassle you could instruct them in the necessary steps to avoid getting infected in the first place.
So, telling them 'no, you can't install Flash to view that Christmas card Auntie Mary sent you' is going to be easy, but telling them not to click yes when 'Foobook app wants to write to/etc/hosts' isn't?
So you're going to use an annoying UAC-like pop-up that will rapidly be ignored by 99.9% of the population because it appears so often as to be nearly useless?
UAC is useless, because all it tells you is 'Do you want to allow Hello Kitty screensaver to: write to hard disk'. That's it. May be perfectly legitimate, may not. You have absolutely no way of telling what it's actually doing, so clicking 'no' is pointless.
Whereas if the Facebook app starts asking to write to protected parts of the disk when you're not saving anything, you know something is wrong.
What if I want to save photos posted by a friend to my device?
Then you can click a box saying 'yes, I really want to let this app save this file to this location'. Does the Facebook app even let you save other people's pictures?
Alternatively, you can have a 'downloads' directory for the Facebook app, and map it into a 'photos' virtual directory so every app with access to the photos can see those downloaded from Facebook, but Facebook can't overwrite photos from any other app.
Yes, people might have to learn not to save random files in random places, or put them all on their desktop.
For a start, an app like Facebook should only have read-only access to your photos. That still provides the opportunity to steal your naked pics and upload them all over the web, but not to delete them.
Of course, if the malware is already using exploits to install, it may also be able to use exploits to escape any such protection.
But this is now a huge problem, which needs to be fixed. The days when you could trust even supposedly legitimate software not to do bad shit with your shit are over. No software should have access to anything it doesn't need access to.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the "free market" mechanism for dealing with corporate intrusions that are unknown to the consumer
Competitors.
Phone companies can only get away with crap like this because the government gave them a monopoly on parts of the EM spectrum.
But, hey, feel free to blame the EVIL FREE MARKET if it gets you hot in your pants.
Taxi fares are also fixed in the UK by the local councils, so there is no gouging or "surge pricing". You can calculate how much your fare is going to be before you even get into the taxi.
Yes, except at times when non-official taxis would be charging higher prices to encourage more people to offer rides, you can't get an official taxi at all, because people making trivial trips are still using them because they're cheap, while those making essential trips have to wait.
Rationing is clearly better than letting prices rise for a while. Or something.
I uninstalled Flash long ago. Very occasionally I find a site that doesn't work at all without Flash, but it's rarely one I care about.
The worst thing are the 'mobile' sites which say 'ah, you're running iOS, so I'm going to give you a sane site that doesn't have any of that Flash crap,' so you know they can make their site run fine without Flash, but you go there with an Android device and it says 'ah, you're running Android, so i'm going to give you the Flash version' even though Flash hasn't run on Android for several versions now.
I heard the new SystemD Office word processor will be awesome.
Hopefully the Republican Congress will now find some balls and defund the EPA.
Linux is not exactly famous for backwards compatibility, stable APIs, and not breaking existing applications.
Backward compatiblity is retarded, and you can just compile the source on a new OS and fix the few things that broke.
Oh, you mean you bought some weird old closed source app that you're now reliant on? Well, you'll be glad to know that you can run an old version of Linux in a VM with no worries about licensing fees or 'activation' or any of that other crap that closed source operating systems lumber you with.
Making DX12 Window 8-only would be pointless, as it would mean no game developer released DX12 games until 2020. It would be DX10/11 all over again, where most games remain DX9 (and 32-bit) for backward compatibility with XP.
It boots fast and has an even smaller footprint than 7.
I turn on my Windows 7 PC, and by the time I've put down my coffee, sat down, and turned on the monitor, it's already at the logon screen. And, with 32GB of RAM, I don't much care about the footprint.
Meanwhile, most people can't even start Notepad the first time they're forced to use Window 8.
I don't do or email anything that would "cause enormous public embarrassment" to the company if it got out.
Stephen Harper seems to believe he can simply decree something true and have it stick. In that sense, he's pretty scary.
So just like Obama, then? Except tthe Canadian Supreme Court keep reminding him how limited his powers are.
Is your Volkswagen TDI all electric? No, then why the fuck do we care about your car?
Because far more capable gasoline cars are available at a lower price, so no sane person would buy one of these unless they expect the price of diesel to make up the difference in the time they own the car.
And, with the price of oil collapsing, this is a really bad time to be releasing a new electric car.
There's a much, much easier way to reduce mobile bandwidth usage.
Block ads.
Block tracking Javascript.
Block all the crap, other than the actual content you're actually trying to download.
The problem is, when www.somecraphpytmlsite.com doesn't display in the web browser, users blame the browser, not the crap HTML writers.
It's like the good old days of writing device drivers for Windows, where we had to reproduce bugs from the default OS drivers in our custom drivers becasue there were so many crappy apps which only worked because of those bugs, and people would complain to us that CrappyWord Xtreme didn't work after they installed our driver which didn't have those bugs.
We should have tossed the whole thing long ago, and told people to fix their crap. Backward compatiblity sounds good, but it kills you in the long run.
A Linux RAM disk (tmpfs) just stores files in the page cache, so there's really no difference. OK, it can also write out those files to the swap partition if you run out of RAM, but you usually shouldn't be using a RAM disk unless you have plenty of RAM.
And that's a big improvement over some old-style RAM disks where you told it you wanted 500MB and it grabbed those 500MB and didn't let anyone else use it.
True, they might be smarter and try to cache the next level from the latest save file. But there's an obvious difference between the hard drive light glowing red because it has to load everything from disk, and barely flickering because it's all or almost all in RAM.
Honestly I never got the issues people have with RealTek.
Crappy wi-fi drivers, for a start. If I don't disable pretty much every performance and power-management wi-fi option on my laptop, they disconnect every 30 minutes or so.
About the only thing this will improve is game load times (which I guess is a market, but not the biggest on earth, especially given the price of this).
I have 32GB of RAM in my gaming PC, so the second time I start a game, it's all in RAM. Still takes an age to get through the damn videos--increasingly, unskippable freaking videos--every game wants to play these days, and then from there to the menu.
I don't even know what games are doing between the point where they stop playing videos and actually get to the menu. The files are cached in RAM, and the CPU isn't doing much. Just crappy code, I guess, and an SSD won't help much with that.
WordPress phone?
Yes. The operating system is written in PHP for security.
That is so far from true it's not funny.
It's true for my Nexus 7. But a friend complains about crashes and poor performance on his Nexus 5, so clearly it's not true for everyone.
I have Lollipop on my Nexus tablet, and while some apps are noticeably smoother, presumably because of the new precompiled runtime, the OS as a whole is noticeably slower because some common activities requre multiple touches to open multiple windows where before they were just one.
Even if the upgrade is available for a device, there's no clear reason to want it. It still lacks the one thing that I actually want in Android: meaningful control over app permissions.
Better is to have a versioned filesystem - each time a file is changed (by any application!) the delta is saved and the filesystem keeps the old data hidden away.
It's fortunate that disks are infinitely large, so the malware can't just overwrite the files multiple times until the filesystem deletes the plaintext versions.
For the same amount of hassle you could instruct them in the necessary steps to avoid getting infected in the first place.
So, telling them 'no, you can't install Flash to view that Christmas card Auntie Mary sent you' is going to be easy, but telling them not to click yes when 'Foobook app wants to write to /etc/hosts' isn't?
So you're going to use an annoying UAC-like pop-up that will rapidly be ignored by 99.9% of the population because it appears so often as to be nearly useless?
UAC is useless, because all it tells you is 'Do you want to allow Hello Kitty screensaver to: write to hard disk'. That's it. May be perfectly legitimate, may not. You have absolutely no way of telling what it's actually doing, so clicking 'no' is pointless.
Whereas if the Facebook app starts asking to write to protected parts of the disk when you're not saving anything, you know something is wrong.
What if I want to save photos posted by a friend to my device?
Then you can click a box saying 'yes, I really want to let this app save this file to this location'. Does the Facebook app even let you save other people's pictures?
Alternatively, you can have a 'downloads' directory for the Facebook app, and map it into a 'photos' virtual directory so every app with access to the photos can see those downloaded from Facebook, but Facebook can't overwrite photos from any other app.
Yes, people might have to learn not to save random files in random places, or put them all on their desktop.
For a start, an app like Facebook should only have read-only access to your photos. That still provides the opportunity to steal your naked pics and upload them all over the web, but not to delete them.
Of course, if the malware is already using exploits to install, it may also be able to use exploits to escape any such protection.
But this is now a huge problem, which needs to be fixed. The days when you could trust even supposedly legitimate software not to do bad shit with your shit are over. No software should have access to anything it doesn't need access to.