It's nothing to do with corporate raiders, it's a question of efficient use of capital. A healthy company has a buffer reserve so that they can deal with unexpected changes in the market, but beyond that has most of its capital invested in things that grow the business: factories, shops, ships, that kind of thing. If a company has a lot of cash and isn't spending it then it means that management can't think of anything to spend it on that gives a higher return than just leaving it in the bank. With interest rates as low as they are at the moment that's quite worrying for a company like Apple, which historically has made most of its profits by being an early mover in new markets and claiming the most profitable 10-20% of them before they become completely commoditised.
It usually is, yes. Apple paid off its loans as a publicity stunt some years ago, because the company had been heavily in debt when Steve Jobs took over and paying them off was a way of proving that now it could pay them. That said, the extra liquidity has given Apple a huge advantage over the past few years. When it comes to buying components for their latest gadget, their current strategy is to pay, up front, for the factory to be built and then have exclusive access to its output for the first year of operation at a rate that is sufficiently discounted to offset their initial cost. Companies that don't have enough cash to put up a billion or two for a new factory have to buy the remaining production output at a higher cost. As long as Apple has the liquid cash and the sales volumes, they can produce things a lot cheaper than their competitors.
Smalltalk-80 (well, Smalltalk-76) was the first truly visual development environment, although an honorary mention goes to some Lisp implementations, especially MacLisp (no connection to the Apple Macintosh, although later versions could kind-of run on a Mac, but only using the 68000 as a coprocessor for handling the display and input peripherals, with the real work being done in an expansion card). NeXT was the company that brought the RAD stuff into something vaguely mainstream though, and VB was Microsoft's attempt to copy the NeXT development tools on Windows. As with many such things (not just from Microsoft), they successfully copied the superficial, but largely missed the point.
Why do spammers all have Google Plus or Twitter icons next to their names now? If Slashdot can identify them, why not provide a mechanism for filtering them out, rather than just highlighting them?
A building can be safe for small numbers of people but unsafe for larger numbers. A single narrow winding staircase might be fine for evacuating two people, but be a problem for 10. This is why hotels, private homes, and houses rented for multiple occupancy all have different rules.
Back in the mid-90's a friend of mine argued that the Mac OS9 kernel was superior to the NeXTSTEP kernel (Mach) because OS9 used cooperative (a.k.a. non-blocking) multitasking and Mach was pre-emptive
It wasn't a totally stupid argument. Cooperative multitasking can achieve higher throughput (on single-processor machines, at least), because you have less cache churn and you can schedule exactly when you want to yield. The down side is that one misbehaving thread can make the entire system unresponsive. Most supercomputing workloads use a cooperative model for this reason: throughput is the most important consideration and all of the code on a given node is trusted.
When OS X was introduced, it ran on 266MHz PowerPC machines. Efficient CPU usage was a lot more important than it is now. I'm typing this on a Mac that only sees the CPU usage go over 20% when I'm doing a big compile job. A little bit of deviation from maximum theoretical throughput is lost in the noise.
JavaScript, as TFS said, has some nice features. It's a pure object-oriented language with first-class closures, prototype-based inheritance and introspection. It's very flexible and really great for rapid prototyping and scripting. The problem is not that JavaScript sucks, it's that JavaScript sucks as an application development language. It has no concept of modularity: everything lives in the global namespace and must be parsed and executed as a linear sequence (modulo web workers). It has no declarative structure: your program imperatively builds the run-time structures. It has weak support for arithmetic: double-precision floating point values are the only numeric type.
Writing complex applications in JavaScript is possible, but so is writing complex applications in assembly. That doesn't make it a good idea.
As an atheist with qualms about organised religion I do object to them taking over the role of the state
In the UK (where the original poster was from) it is quite common for Church halls to be used for secular purposes. They are effectively village halls (often the 'village' in question was subsumed by a town or city some centuries ago) that happen to be owned by the church. They are usually either free or very cheap to use and often the only large indoor space that is affordable for volunteer groups and community organisations. Although they tend to be owned by the church, using them doesn't usually come with any religious strings attached.
so how come i know of no smartphone that offer it?
Because you didn't look? I've never wanted this functionality, but it's been in my last two Nokia smartphones and in my current HTC one (Desire). I seem to recall a lot of people complaining when the iPhone was launched that it didn't include an FM Radio, which was a standard feature in most other smartphones. I'd imagine manufacturers are phasing it out now, because there's very little demand for it.
You can't expect to have a conversation if you insist on giving words different meanings to those understood by everyone around you. Or, you put it another way: aardvark aubergine eats legal ostriches.
The grandparent asked for an example of someone holding both opinions. You replied by saying that, on a site with over two million registered users, both opinions are expressed, and hand-waved that they were expressed by the same person. Please show an example of two posts by a user expressing both views.
It's not much more valuable. The line between code and data is often quite blurry. For example, a lot of browser exploits have been due to vulnerabilities in libpng or libjpeg, where a malformed image caused some part of the input image to be treated as code. Even if you signed the entire binary, all of its libraries, and all of its config files, you aren't guaranteeing that the code is bug free. It protects you against a specific kind of adversary: one trying to persuade you to install a trojan by pretending to be someone else. This is a pretty rare form of attack. Most trojans don't pretend to be someone else, they pretend to be someone useful or fun. For example, things like screensavers and little phone games, not copies of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop.
If you want to be protected against trojans, then you want to run each application with the minimum privilege that it needs. This is mostly a UI problem: you must define a set of restrictions that can confine applications at the required granularity yet still be comprehensible to a typical user. For a case study in how not to do it, see Android, which fails on both counts.
If you want to be protected against non-malicious, but exploitable software, then you also need compartmentalisation, so that a compromise, for example, in libpng, does not give you the privilege of the entire application (for example, access to all of your documents if it's in an office suite, or access to your Internet banking if it's in a web browser). This is the focus of Robert's current research (I should add a disclaimer here that I am part of the same project), because current architectures don't scale well to the required level of compartmentalisation. If you use the Chrome (and Capsicum) model of one-process-per-sandbox, then you quickly find performance limited by the number of TLB entries. On a recent Intel chip, this is somewhere in the 128-256 entry range, and if you need one process per sandbox with at least one code and one data page mapped at a time then you very quickly find that you're spending all of your time in TLB misses (this is why Chrome weakens its sanboxing if you have more than about 20 tabs open). Fixing this requires some architectural changes: it's not enough to just add TLB entries (aliasing effects hurt you), and even if you could they are constantly-powered TCAMs and so power efficiency means that you want the TLB to be as small as possible.
Alpha Centauri could take several minutes for the AI players to take their turns on a 550MHz P3. And this game was released in February 1999, several months before the 550MHz P3 was launched at a price of $700. On the other hand, back then I was paying per minute for Internet, so I probably wouldn't have wanted to offload then game engine to a big server farm somewhere...
90% of auto-starting flash is adverts. For the few things that are actually useful content, it isn't much extra effort to click. I was amazed at how much my browsing experience improved when I installed a click-to-play plugin for Flash.
OSMAnd~, at least on the device where I've tried it, has no download limits and can show offline wikipedia entries. The unlimited downloads thing was what made me donate.
OSMAnd is a bit of an oddball - if you want precompiled auto-updatable APKs, you need to pay a few dollars for OSMAnd+
If you have F-Droid installed, then they have OSMAnd~, which is OSMAnd compiled by them from the upstream sources. I never bought OSMAnd+, but I sent them a donation once I discovered OSMAnd~ (of more than the cost of OSMAnd+, even before Google takes their cut). It's incredibly useful.
That depends a lot on where in the UK you are. When I was living in Swansea, I was spending about £6K/year on housing (initially renting a 2-bedroom flat, then owning a 2-bedroom house which pushed my cost of living down even more), food, and bills. £15K would have been enough to live quite comfortably. I spent under £10K most years, including buying new laptops, eating out, and so on, and all of the rest of my income went into savings. I'm now in Cambridge, and £15K here would, after tax might just about about cover expenses if I lived in a bedsit, but I'd probably have to live in a shared house, and even then I'd be struggling. In London, it would be impossible.
£15K seems very low for a software engineer though. Even in places with low living costs, I don't think I've seen below £22K, and £30K is a better ballpark for a starting salary.
I was quite shocked to see that on my last trip to the US. The UK is pretty backwards in this respect, and even we effectively abolished signatures some years ago. How many store clerks are actually qualified to validate a signature? Now, if you accept a card payment without it going through the chip-and-pin terminal then you are liable for any fraud. Big supermarkets still allow it sometimes on the basis that it's better to lose £50 on fraudulent card transaction than it is to alienate a customer and lose whatever their profit margin is on £50/week for however many years that person can hold a grudge. I actually had to show my passport when buying chocolate on my last trip (like American beer, American chocolate from smaller producers is often very nice, but for some reason most of the population eats tile grout instead). No idea why they thought this was a good idea - I doubt that the guys behind the counter were qualified to check an EU passport for forgery either...
I don't think I've ever seen that. The purchaser has to count the cash, then the merchant has to, then they (or their till) has to calculate change, then they have to get the change. Meanwhile, someone paying with a card just pops it in, enters their PIN, and waits for the receipt to be printed. Or, for low-value transactions (under £15 in the UK, not sure about elsewhere), just waves the card over the machine and does the contactless payment thing.
And armed robberies are not my problem. I'll let the insurance companies worry about it.
They do. The amount of cash kept on the premises is factored into the cost of insurance. The cost of transporting it to the bank also increases when there is more cash, as does the cost of storing it, and banks often charge transaction fees when dealing with large amounts of cash. These costs are all passed on to the customers, including the ones who pay with credit cards, but apparently it's fine for card-payers to subsidise cash-payers, but not the other way around.
The law was specifically changed to prevent patent trolls using submarine patents. Not very effectively, but still... With a patent, you may not (in the USA) claim any damages that happened between the time when you first became aware of the infringement and the time when you notified the infringing party. This means that you can't do the old trick of seeing someone shipping 100 things a year, wait a few years until they are shipping 10,000,000, and then sue them for all of the backdated instances of infringement. Unfortunately, you can still get an injunction to stop them shipping any more, which is likely to be almost as bad (think how much it would cost Apple to have to stop shipping iPads until a court case is resolved, for example), and you can still claim damages on things after you've filed your complaint (which adds up quickly when a company is shipping millions of units per month).
For copyright, a similar rule applies. For trademarks, it's much stronger: if you don't do anything when you notice the infringement, you are implicitly licensing the trademark, and if you don't do anything for multiple instances of infringement then you lose the trademark entirely.
Read the actual complaint. The US is simply banning gambling companies that operate in Antigua. The original sanction was that the US had to either pay the fine or provide a regulatory framework that allowed foreign companies to pay the relevant taxes. They chose to do neither.
Would you be ok with the US companies choosing to ignore laws in other countries and do as they wish? (like Google for instance?)
A more accurate analogy would be if Google offered to obey the law in China, but instead China decided to block it entirely and only permit Baidu to operate, the WTO then required China to either permit Google to operate if they obeyed the law, and China kept the block.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nothing to do with corporate raiders, it's a question of efficient use of capital. A healthy company has a buffer reserve so that they can deal with unexpected changes in the market, but beyond that has most of its capital invested in things that grow the business: factories, shops, ships, that kind of thing. If a company has a lot of cash and isn't spending it then it means that management can't think of anything to spend it on that gives a higher return than just leaving it in the bank. With interest rates as low as they are at the moment that's quite worrying for a company like Apple, which historically has made most of its profits by being an early mover in new markets and claiming the most profitable 10-20% of them before they become completely commoditised.
It usually is, yes. Apple paid off its loans as a publicity stunt some years ago, because the company had been heavily in debt when Steve Jobs took over and paying them off was a way of proving that now it could pay them. That said, the extra liquidity has given Apple a huge advantage over the past few years. When it comes to buying components for their latest gadget, their current strategy is to pay, up front, for the factory to be built and then have exclusive access to its output for the first year of operation at a rate that is sufficiently discounted to offset their initial cost. Companies that don't have enough cash to put up a billion or two for a new factory have to buy the remaining production output at a higher cost. As long as Apple has the liquid cash and the sales volumes, they can produce things a lot cheaper than their competitors.
Smalltalk-80 (well, Smalltalk-76) was the first truly visual development environment, although an honorary mention goes to some Lisp implementations, especially MacLisp (no connection to the Apple Macintosh, although later versions could kind-of run on a Mac, but only using the 68000 as a coprocessor for handling the display and input peripherals, with the real work being done in an expansion card). NeXT was the company that brought the RAD stuff into something vaguely mainstream though, and VB was Microsoft's attempt to copy the NeXT development tools on Windows. As with many such things (not just from Microsoft), they successfully copied the superficial, but largely missed the point.
Why do spammers all have Google Plus or Twitter icons next to their names now? If Slashdot can identify them, why not provide a mechanism for filtering them out, rather than just highlighting them?
A building can be safe for small numbers of people but unsafe for larger numbers. A single narrow winding staircase might be fine for evacuating two people, but be a problem for 10. This is why hotels, private homes, and houses rented for multiple occupancy all have different rules.
Back in the mid-90's a friend of mine argued that the Mac OS9 kernel was superior to the NeXTSTEP kernel (Mach) because OS9 used cooperative (a.k.a. non-blocking) multitasking and Mach was pre-emptive
It wasn't a totally stupid argument. Cooperative multitasking can achieve higher throughput (on single-processor machines, at least), because you have less cache churn and you can schedule exactly when you want to yield. The down side is that one misbehaving thread can make the entire system unresponsive. Most supercomputing workloads use a cooperative model for this reason: throughput is the most important consideration and all of the code on a given node is trusted.
When OS X was introduced, it ran on 266MHz PowerPC machines. Efficient CPU usage was a lot more important than it is now. I'm typing this on a Mac that only sees the CPU usage go over 20% when I'm doing a big compile job. A little bit of deviation from maximum theoretical throughput is lost in the noise.
Writing complex applications in JavaScript is possible, but so is writing complex applications in assembly. That doesn't make it a good idea.
you will survive without internet, man has done it for thousands of years, its not a need
The majority of people also survived without being able to read and write until a hundred or so years ago. Try doing that now...
As an atheist with qualms about organised religion I do object to them taking over the role of the state
In the UK (where the original poster was from) it is quite common for Church halls to be used for secular purposes. They are effectively village halls (often the 'village' in question was subsumed by a town or city some centuries ago) that happen to be owned by the church. They are usually either free or very cheap to use and often the only large indoor space that is affordable for volunteer groups and community organisations. Although they tend to be owned by the church, using them doesn't usually come with any religious strings attached.
so how come i know of no smartphone that offer it?
Because you didn't look? I've never wanted this functionality, but it's been in my last two Nokia smartphones and in my current HTC one (Desire). I seem to recall a lot of people complaining when the iPhone was launched that it didn't include an FM Radio, which was a standard feature in most other smartphones. I'd imagine manufacturers are phasing it out now, because there's very little demand for it.
It is your problem if everyone else is using the authoritative definition and you are using your own made-up one.
You can put these things on a timer: load the machine before you go in and have it start a few hours later.
You can't expect to have a conversation if you insist on giving words different meanings to those understood by everyone around you. Or, you put it another way: aardvark aubergine eats legal ostriches.
The grandparent asked for an example of someone holding both opinions. You replied by saying that, on a site with over two million registered users, both opinions are expressed, and hand-waved that they were expressed by the same person. Please show an example of two posts by a user expressing both views.
It's not much more valuable. The line between code and data is often quite blurry. For example, a lot of browser exploits have been due to vulnerabilities in libpng or libjpeg, where a malformed image caused some part of the input image to be treated as code. Even if you signed the entire binary, all of its libraries, and all of its config files, you aren't guaranteeing that the code is bug free. It protects you against a specific kind of adversary: one trying to persuade you to install a trojan by pretending to be someone else. This is a pretty rare form of attack. Most trojans don't pretend to be someone else, they pretend to be someone useful or fun. For example, things like screensavers and little phone games, not copies of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop.
If you want to be protected against trojans, then you want to run each application with the minimum privilege that it needs. This is mostly a UI problem: you must define a set of restrictions that can confine applications at the required granularity yet still be comprehensible to a typical user. For a case study in how not to do it, see Android, which fails on both counts.
If you want to be protected against non-malicious, but exploitable software, then you also need compartmentalisation, so that a compromise, for example, in libpng, does not give you the privilege of the entire application (for example, access to all of your documents if it's in an office suite, or access to your Internet banking if it's in a web browser). This is the focus of Robert's current research (I should add a disclaimer here that I am part of the same project), because current architectures don't scale well to the required level of compartmentalisation. If you use the Chrome (and Capsicum) model of one-process-per-sandbox, then you quickly find performance limited by the number of TLB entries. On a recent Intel chip, this is somewhere in the 128-256 entry range, and if you need one process per sandbox with at least one code and one data page mapped at a time then you very quickly find that you're spending all of your time in TLB misses (this is why Chrome weakens its sanboxing if you have more than about 20 tabs open). Fixing this requires some architectural changes: it's not enough to just add TLB entries (aliasing effects hurt you), and even if you could they are constantly-powered TCAMs and so power efficiency means that you want the TLB to be as small as possible.
Alpha Centauri could take several minutes for the AI players to take their turns on a 550MHz P3. And this game was released in February 1999, several months before the 550MHz P3 was launched at a price of $700. On the other hand, back then I was paying per minute for Internet, so I probably wouldn't have wanted to offload then game engine to a big server farm somewhere...
90% of auto-starting flash is adverts. For the few things that are actually useful content, it isn't much extra effort to click. I was amazed at how much my browsing experience improved when I installed a click-to-play plugin for Flash.
If you don't think that's impressive, then you clearly never ran COREL Draw.
OSMAnd~, at least on the device where I've tried it, has no download limits and can show offline wikipedia entries. The unlimited downloads thing was what made me donate.
OSMAnd is a bit of an oddball - if you want precompiled auto-updatable APKs, you need to pay a few dollars for OSMAnd+
If you have F-Droid installed, then they have OSMAnd~, which is OSMAnd compiled by them from the upstream sources. I never bought OSMAnd+, but I sent them a donation once I discovered OSMAnd~ (of more than the cost of OSMAnd+, even before Google takes their cut). It's incredibly useful.
That depends a lot on where in the UK you are. When I was living in Swansea, I was spending about £6K/year on housing (initially renting a 2-bedroom flat, then owning a 2-bedroom house which pushed my cost of living down even more), food, and bills. £15K would have been enough to live quite comfortably. I spent under £10K most years, including buying new laptops, eating out, and so on, and all of the rest of my income went into savings. I'm now in Cambridge, and £15K here would, after tax might just about about cover expenses if I lived in a bedsit, but I'd probably have to live in a shared house, and even then I'd be struggling. In London, it would be impossible.
£15K seems very low for a software engineer though. Even in places with low living costs, I don't think I've seen below £22K, and £30K is a better ballpark for a starting salary.
I was quite shocked to see that on my last trip to the US. The UK is pretty backwards in this respect, and even we effectively abolished signatures some years ago. How many store clerks are actually qualified to validate a signature? Now, if you accept a card payment without it going through the chip-and-pin terminal then you are liable for any fraud. Big supermarkets still allow it sometimes on the basis that it's better to lose £50 on fraudulent card transaction than it is to alienate a customer and lose whatever their profit margin is on £50/week for however many years that person can hold a grudge. I actually had to show my passport when buying chocolate on my last trip (like American beer, American chocolate from smaller producers is often very nice, but for some reason most of the population eats tile grout instead). No idea why they thought this was a good idea - I doubt that the guys behind the counter were qualified to check an EU passport for forgery either...
99% of the time cash is faster than cc.
I don't think I've ever seen that. The purchaser has to count the cash, then the merchant has to, then they (or their till) has to calculate change, then they have to get the change. Meanwhile, someone paying with a card just pops it in, enters their PIN, and waits for the receipt to be printed. Or, for low-value transactions (under £15 in the UK, not sure about elsewhere), just waves the card over the machine and does the contactless payment thing.
And armed robberies are not my problem. I'll let the insurance companies worry about it.
They do. The amount of cash kept on the premises is factored into the cost of insurance. The cost of transporting it to the bank also increases when there is more cash, as does the cost of storing it, and banks often charge transaction fees when dealing with large amounts of cash. These costs are all passed on to the customers, including the ones who pay with credit cards, but apparently it's fine for card-payers to subsidise cash-payers, but not the other way around.
The law was specifically changed to prevent patent trolls using submarine patents. Not very effectively, but still... With a patent, you may not (in the USA) claim any damages that happened between the time when you first became aware of the infringement and the time when you notified the infringing party. This means that you can't do the old trick of seeing someone shipping 100 things a year, wait a few years until they are shipping 10,000,000, and then sue them for all of the backdated instances of infringement. Unfortunately, you can still get an injunction to stop them shipping any more, which is likely to be almost as bad (think how much it would cost Apple to have to stop shipping iPads until a court case is resolved, for example), and you can still claim damages on things after you've filed your complaint (which adds up quickly when a company is shipping millions of units per month).
For copyright, a similar rule applies. For trademarks, it's much stronger: if you don't do anything when you notice the infringement, you are implicitly licensing the trademark, and if you don't do anything for multiple instances of infringement then you lose the trademark entirely.
Would you be ok with the US companies choosing to ignore laws in other countries and do as they wish? (like Google for instance?)
A more accurate analogy would be if Google offered to obey the law in China, but instead China decided to block it entirely and only permit Baidu to operate, the WTO then required China to either permit Google to operate if they obeyed the law, and China kept the block.