Most taxi companies (at least, in the UK) have an app. The advantage of Uber is that it's one app for everywhere. I live in a small city that has three moderate sized taxi companies that compete, but each has their own app. Going to a larger city, you might need a few dozen apps. Given that the dispatcher is the main value that taxi companies provide, you can understand why they are hesitant to provide open access to their dispatchers.
The distinction started to break down when telephones became cheap. Go to a payphone and you can call a cab that's cheaper than a taxi that you flag on the street (or, if you're in a restaurant or similar, then ask them to call one for you). When mobile phones became cheap, it broke down a bit more - no need to find a payphone, just call from wherever you are. Lots of taxi companies have had apps for a while that will call a cab to your current location.
Structures that require a lot of rebalancing on operations are not always a good idea for disks, as they can require a lot of block writes to occur in the correct sequence to preserve filesystem integrity.
NTFS has a few other nice properties. The OS team kept changing their minds about requirements right up until the first version shipped, so the FS team ended up just creating an efficient store for key-value pairs with large and small values. Everything else is layered on top, by defining special key namespaces. This is why Microsoft has been able to constantly add features to NTFS over its lifespan - very little is set in stone.
Objective-C is a preprocessor, not a real language
Objective-C is as much a preprocessor as C++. As in, an early implementation of the language that is very different from the modern version was implemented as a translator that emitted C (StepStone's Objective-C compiler, the 4Front C++ compiler).
Learning Objective-C takes a couple of days - a week at most. Leaning the frameworks takes a lot longer. Swift has a new core library, but most of the other frameworks are the same, so the experienced programmers still has an edge.
Which is exactly WHY having a group of religious nuts running around 'guarding' the universe by wielding energy swords with no hilts was completely ridiculous in the first place, especially when that very same universe was also populated by people wielding weapons with both physical and energy based ammo that simply would beat the reaction time of any human, force or no force
I wondered why no one ever came up with the idea of a blaster that fired three bolts in a slightly spreading triangle. The lightsaber is a line - it can only block two of them, no matter who fast its wielder is.
Based on what I've seen from his Star Trek movies, his approach to storytelling is too intellectual- he's interested in complex storylines and clever plot twists
J. J. Abrams' Star Trek was Star Wars set in the Star Trek universe. I don't think he'll have a problem adapting to setting it in the Star Wars universe...
You'd expect a whole galaxy full of designers to come up with something better in 25+ years.
Sure. And I'd expect that they'd be able to get them into mass production, shipped, and deployed in... well under 100 years. Probably. If everything goes smoothly.
70% of your market buying your stuff is great. 70% of your market liking the thing they bought from you last year and not deciding to upgrade is a problem. This was also Microsoft's problem with Windows XP - it wasn't great, but it was good enough for most people. When the iPhone came out, it and the other new smartphones with big touchscreens were a big change from what went before. Now, even a cheap smartphone like the Moto G is more than powerful enough for most users, so what's the incentive to upgrade?
It depends a huge amount on what you're listening to. For about 90% of my music, I can't tell the difference between the original CD and 128kb/s MP3. A few things have noticeable artefacts that don't go away no matter how high you put the bitrate. Substitute 128kb/s AAC and that changes to over 95%. At 256kb/s AAC, I can't tell the difference for anything I own, but I've heard some recordings that hit pathological cases in the algorithms used for AAC and sound terrible at any bit rate (usually orchestral pieces with a single voice and only for short samples). With FLAC, you can 100% reconstruct the original, bit for bit, so you won't suffer from any unfortunate coincidence between your choice of music and the CODEC of choice.
The big advantage of a lossless compression though is for recompressing. For a long time I had a DVD player connected to my living room speakers that could play back MP3s, but not AAC. If I wanted to burn a CD-RW or DVD+RW to play on it, I had to recompress, which usually sounded noticeably worse than if I'd gone straight to MP3 from the source material. If I'd ripped everything as FLAC, then that recompression would not have introduced any new artefacts.
I was happy to re-buy DK and DK2 from GOG when they were on special offer for $2 each: for that price, it's worth not having to find the CDs. The fact that they had pre-packaged Mac versions and I didn't have to futz with WINE myself was a bonus.
They created an algorithm that constructed constituency boundaries randomly, but in such a way that obeyed the rules. They constructed 100 such random maps. The average of these had 7-8 Democrat seats, 5-6 Republican seats. The actual results were 9 Republican, 4 Democrat, using maps drawn up by the Republicans (note: TFA didn't say what the results would have been with the previous set of maps, which had been drawn up by the Democrats). This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.
I'm trying to read this site, but it's quite difficult as they pop up an obnoxious banner that doesn't go away when I click the red close box. Their figures are 7,900,000 birds killed for coal, 330,000 for nuclear. So your citation directly refutes your point: coal kills 24 times more birds than nuclear.
So, as the price goes up economically viable reserves go up.
Yes. Of course, at some point you'll start getting the material from asteroid mines, because at a few million dollars per kg it's actually worth doing that. Generally, the demand slows as the price increases too though. A roof paint that costs a few thousand times the value of the house probably isn't going to be that popular...
Nuclear releases less CO2, but kills more wildlife and releases more radiation
I'd like a source for the 'kills more wildlife'. Even counting just emissions at the plant itself and not the huge amount from coal mining, nuclear power plants emit less radioactive material than coal.
By the time Gmail was no longer an invite-only beta service, everyone had been talking about it for months. The buzz was enormous
Among geeks, sure. Among normal people? Not so much. A year after GMail launched, I still had non-geeks asking me 'what's your hotmail address?' meaning 'what's your personal email address' (as opposed to the work-run one).
Microsoft bought a well reputed linux based webmail service (whose name I can no longer recall) that they painfully migrated Linux>Windows to attempt to jumpstart their entry into webmail.
The service that they bought was called Hotmail and was running FreeBSD, not Linux. They bought it long before Google was a major player in the online space. When they bought it, it was (by quite a large margin) the dominant player in the webmail space (it was also the first mover). They tried once and failed to migrate to Windows. Windows Services for UNIX exists solely because of that PR disaster: they eventually migrated everything to Windows via a POSIX compatibility layer.
So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
The big issue was using a monopoly in the OS market to gain a monopoly in the browser market. Bundling the browser with the OS was one aspect of that. Giving away the browser for 'free' (actually for free for the Mac and UNIX editions, while they lasted) was another. Tying ActiveX to IE and pushing server products that only worked with their browser was another. Forcing OEMs to pay more for Windows if they included Netscape or other browsers was yet another. The shipping of a browser with the OS was a relatively small part of the complaint, just the part that got the most press coverage.
And this was addressed in Europe, by requiring Microsoft to allow OEMs to bundle other browsers and to provide a box on first boot that would allow the user to select their browser of choice. ActiveX is basically dead and it's been a while since Microsoft launched any IE-only services, so this seems to have worked.
When did Google ever start forcing users to sign up just to search?
If you visit the Google search engine, it will set a tracking cookie that is used to serve ads to you, so they are forcing you to sign up to their targeted ad service to use their search. If you want to be able to configure the search settings, then they do this via the tracking cookie. This is not a technical decision: DuckDuckGo, for example, sets a cookie that just has a set of preference flags in it, so any two people with the same preferences will have the same cookie, not a unique identifier, and the web server can handle these preferences without needing any kind of database lookup.
I'm not sure if the EU is aware, but Google is absurdly popular. I'd be shocked if Gmail didn't come up #1 in a search for email
That's certainly true now. But when gmail launched, it wasn't absurdly popular, it was a new contender in an established market, yet it still showed up at the top of the search results.
When I started using Google, its results were not better than AltaVista. The thing that caused me to switch was the fact that AltaVista took 30 seconds to load the search page and another 30 seconds to load each results page on my modem (with calls charged per minute), whereas Google loaded almost instantly. That meant that I'd find the result faster with Google, even if it happened to be lower down.
None of these were magneto-optical, they were all purely magnetic. Sony's minidisc was MO, and a lot of higher-end machines had MO drives (for example, the NeXT Cubes only had removable MO disks, so every user could have their own OS install and files).
And how does the size of a photographs compare to a 1500 page book? Modern mobile phones come with cameras that can take pictures that are 30MB each. That 1TB is enough for 35,000 photos at that size, but it doesn't take too many doublings for it to start to feel cramped. HD video can get through it very quickly and most modern phones can record at at least 1080p now.
I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems
ARM doesn't just mean 'embedded systems'. With the high-end ARM processors having 4 or more superscalar out-of-order cores, running at 1.5-2GHz, they're a very long way away from 'embedded'.
As with C before it, the fast languages are the ones where people have invested a lot of time and effort in the compilers. JavaScript is pretty horrible to compile, but there's no reason why languages like Java or Ruby would be slow, other than effort. The Ruby implementation is pretty slow, but it's also pretty simple. Go and C had the advantage of being able to get fairly good performance from a simple compiler, but if you compare a modern GCC or Clang to an early C compiler you'll see a massive performance improvement. A modern JavaScript implementation employs all of the techniques from Self and Smalltalk, as well as some new tricks (in particular, loading time is far more important for JavaScript in a web browser than any other language). If you look at the WebKit JavaScript implementation, it has four different implementations (a bytecode interpreter, a simple fast JIT, an optimising JIT and a more complex optimising JIT) and promotes code to the later ones as it appears on hot paths.
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Taxi drivers need a app.
Most taxi companies (at least, in the UK) have an app. The advantage of Uber is that it's one app for everywhere. I live in a small city that has three moderate sized taxi companies that compete, but each has their own app. Going to a larger city, you might need a few dozen apps. Given that the dispatcher is the main value that taxi companies provide, you can understand why they are hesitant to provide open access to their dispatchers.
The distinction started to break down when telephones became cheap. Go to a payphone and you can call a cab that's cheaper than a taxi that you flag on the street (or, if you're in a restaurant or similar, then ask them to call one for you). When mobile phones became cheap, it broke down a bit more - no need to find a payphone, just call from wherever you are. Lots of taxi companies have had apps for a while that will call a cab to your current location.
Structures that require a lot of rebalancing on operations are not always a good idea for disks, as they can require a lot of block writes to occur in the correct sequence to preserve filesystem integrity.
NTFS has a few other nice properties. The OS team kept changing their minds about requirements right up until the first version shipped, so the FS team ended up just creating an efficient store for key-value pairs with large and small values. Everything else is layered on top, by defining special key namespaces. This is why Microsoft has been able to constantly add features to NTFS over its lifespan - very little is set in stone.
Objective-C is a preprocessor, not a real language
Objective-C is as much a preprocessor as C++. As in, an early implementation of the language that is very different from the modern version was implemented as a translator that emitted C (StepStone's Objective-C compiler, the 4Front C++ compiler).
Learning Objective-C takes a couple of days - a week at most. Leaning the frameworks takes a lot longer. Swift has a new core library, but most of the other frameworks are the same, so the experienced programmers still has an edge.
Which is exactly WHY having a group of religious nuts running around 'guarding' the universe by wielding energy swords with no hilts was completely ridiculous in the first place, especially when that very same universe was also populated by people wielding weapons with both physical and energy based ammo that simply would beat the reaction time of any human, force or no force
I wondered why no one ever came up with the idea of a blaster that fired three bolts in a slightly spreading triangle. The lightsaber is a line - it can only block two of them, no matter who fast its wielder is.
Based on what I've seen from his Star Trek movies, his approach to storytelling is too intellectual- he's interested in complex storylines and clever plot twists
J. J. Abrams' Star Trek was Star Wars set in the Star Trek universe. I don't think he'll have a problem adapting to setting it in the Star Wars universe...
You'd expect a whole galaxy full of designers to come up with something better in 25+ years.
Sure. And I'd expect that they'd be able to get them into mass production, shipped, and deployed in... well under 100 years. Probably. If everything goes smoothly.
70% of your market buying your stuff is great. 70% of your market liking the thing they bought from you last year and not deciding to upgrade is a problem. This was also Microsoft's problem with Windows XP - it wasn't great, but it was good enough for most people. When the iPhone came out, it and the other new smartphones with big touchscreens were a big change from what went before. Now, even a cheap smartphone like the Moto G is more than powerful enough for most users, so what's the incentive to upgrade?
It depends a huge amount on what you're listening to. For about 90% of my music, I can't tell the difference between the original CD and 128kb/s MP3. A few things have noticeable artefacts that don't go away no matter how high you put the bitrate. Substitute 128kb/s AAC and that changes to over 95%. At 256kb/s AAC, I can't tell the difference for anything I own, but I've heard some recordings that hit pathological cases in the algorithms used for AAC and sound terrible at any bit rate (usually orchestral pieces with a single voice and only for short samples). With FLAC, you can 100% reconstruct the original, bit for bit, so you won't suffer from any unfortunate coincidence between your choice of music and the CODEC of choice.
The big advantage of a lossless compression though is for recompressing. For a long time I had a DVD player connected to my living room speakers that could play back MP3s, but not AAC. If I wanted to burn a CD-RW or DVD+RW to play on it, I had to recompress, which usually sounded noticeably worse than if I'd gone straight to MP3 from the source material. If I'd ripped everything as FLAC, then that recompression would not have introduced any new artefacts.
I was happy to re-buy DK and DK2 from GOG when they were on special offer for $2 each: for that price, it's worth not having to find the CDs. The fact that they had pre-packaged Mac versions and I didn't have to futz with WINE myself was a bonus.
They created an algorithm that constructed constituency boundaries randomly, but in such a way that obeyed the rules. They constructed 100 such random maps. The average of these had 7-8 Democrat seats, 5-6 Republican seats. The actual results were 9 Republican, 4 Democrat, using maps drawn up by the Republicans (note: TFA didn't say what the results would have been with the previous set of maps, which had been drawn up by the Democrats). This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.
I'm trying to read this site, but it's quite difficult as they pop up an obnoxious banner that doesn't go away when I click the red close box. Their figures are 7,900,000 birds killed for coal, 330,000 for nuclear. So your citation directly refutes your point: coal kills 24 times more birds than nuclear.
So, as the price goes up economically viable reserves go up.
Yes. Of course, at some point you'll start getting the material from asteroid mines, because at a few million dollars per kg it's actually worth doing that. Generally, the demand slows as the price increases too though. A roof paint that costs a few thousand times the value of the house probably isn't going to be that popular...
Nuclear releases less CO2, but kills more wildlife and releases more radiation
I'd like a source for the 'kills more wildlife'. Even counting just emissions at the plant itself and not the huge amount from coal mining, nuclear power plants emit less radioactive material than coal.
By the time Gmail was no longer an invite-only beta service, everyone had been talking about it for months. The buzz was enormous
Among geeks, sure. Among normal people? Not so much. A year after GMail launched, I still had non-geeks asking me 'what's your hotmail address?' meaning 'what's your personal email address' (as opposed to the work-run one).
Microsoft bought a well reputed linux based webmail service (whose name I can no longer recall) that they painfully migrated Linux>Windows to attempt to jumpstart their entry into webmail.
The service that they bought was called Hotmail and was running FreeBSD, not Linux. They bought it long before Google was a major player in the online space. When they bought it, it was (by quite a large margin) the dominant player in the webmail space (it was also the first mover). They tried once and failed to migrate to Windows. Windows Services for UNIX exists solely because of that PR disaster: they eventually migrated everything to Windows via a POSIX compatibility layer.
So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
The big issue was using a monopoly in the OS market to gain a monopoly in the browser market. Bundling the browser with the OS was one aspect of that. Giving away the browser for 'free' (actually for free for the Mac and UNIX editions, while they lasted) was another. Tying ActiveX to IE and pushing server products that only worked with their browser was another. Forcing OEMs to pay more for Windows if they included Netscape or other browsers was yet another. The shipping of a browser with the OS was a relatively small part of the complaint, just the part that got the most press coverage.
And this was addressed in Europe, by requiring Microsoft to allow OEMs to bundle other browsers and to provide a box on first boot that would allow the user to select their browser of choice. ActiveX is basically dead and it's been a while since Microsoft launched any IE-only services, so this seems to have worked.
When did Google ever start forcing users to sign up just to search?
If you visit the Google search engine, it will set a tracking cookie that is used to serve ads to you, so they are forcing you to sign up to their targeted ad service to use their search. If you want to be able to configure the search settings, then they do this via the tracking cookie. This is not a technical decision: DuckDuckGo, for example, sets a cookie that just has a set of preference flags in it, so any two people with the same preferences will have the same cookie, not a unique identifier, and the web server can handle these preferences without needing any kind of database lookup.
I'm not sure if the EU is aware, but Google is absurdly popular. I'd be shocked if Gmail didn't come up #1 in a search for email
That's certainly true now. But when gmail launched, it wasn't absurdly popular, it was a new contender in an established market, yet it still showed up at the top of the search results.
When I started using Google, its results were not better than AltaVista. The thing that caused me to switch was the fact that AltaVista took 30 seconds to load the search page and another 30 seconds to load each results page on my modem (with calls charged per minute), whereas Google loaded almost instantly. That meant that I'd find the result faster with Google, even if it happened to be lower down.
None of these were magneto-optical, they were all purely magnetic. Sony's minidisc was MO, and a lot of higher-end machines had MO drives (for example, the NeXT Cubes only had removable MO disks, so every user could have their own OS install and files).
And how does the size of a photographs compare to a 1500 page book? Modern mobile phones come with cameras that can take pictures that are 30MB each. That 1TB is enough for 35,000 photos at that size, but it doesn't take too many doublings for it to start to feel cramped. HD video can get through it very quickly and most modern phones can record at at least 1080p now.
If someone is trying to shoot me, I'd rather they were a bad shot. Competence isn't always a good thing...
I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems
ARM doesn't just mean 'embedded systems'. With the high-end ARM processors having 4 or more superscalar out-of-order cores, running at 1.5-2GHz, they're a very long way away from 'embedded'.
As with C before it, the fast languages are the ones where people have invested a lot of time and effort in the compilers. JavaScript is pretty horrible to compile, but there's no reason why languages like Java or Ruby would be slow, other than effort. The Ruby implementation is pretty slow, but it's also pretty simple. Go and C had the advantage of being able to get fairly good performance from a simple compiler, but if you compare a modern GCC or Clang to an early C compiler you'll see a massive performance improvement. A modern JavaScript implementation employs all of the techniques from Self and Smalltalk, as well as some new tricks (in particular, loading time is far more important for JavaScript in a web browser than any other language). If you look at the WebKit JavaScript implementation, it has four different implementations (a bytecode interpreter, a simple fast JIT, an optimising JIT and a more complex optimising JIT) and promotes code to the later ones as it appears on hot paths.