WINE would make absolutely no sense in ChromeOS. The entire point of ChromeOS is that there is no persistent state on the client - you can drop your Chromebook in the sea and nothing of value is lost[1]. To do the same thing with Windows applications, you'd want rdesktop installed and a Windows terminal server (which maybe using WINE, or just a real Windows install).
[1] Actually, from what I saw of their current usage at Google, the same is probably true if you drop the server in the sea, but that's not an intentional effect.
iRex produced an A4 eBook reader, but they only sold a few before the company went bankrupt. I wish someone else would pick the idea up - I'd love to have an A4 eInk device.
Apple's first tablet, the iPod Touch, had a 3.5" screen. So, it's possible for them to create a great (in their opinion) interface on a 3.5" screen and a 10" screen, but not on a 7" screen? That seems a bit strange to me.
For instance, their problem with security wasn't that their software has some security holes, or a lot of security holes.. it was that the fundemental core design didn't take security into account at all.
Mod this right up. If you want to design an open social network then the FIRST thing you do is design a protocol and get security experts to review it. Then you get two (or, ideally, more) teams to implement the protocol independently. Then, once you've identified the flaws in the specification, you have something that may work. Diaspora started with a crappy implementation where the protocol documentation was the code. The fact that their implementation sucked was made much more important by the fact that independent interoperable implementations were basically impossible.
Email didn't become ubiquitous because of PINE or Sendmail. It became ubiquitous because of well-specified protocols that meant that we had a plethora of competing implementations that could evolve much faster than single-vendor solutions like AOL or CompuServe.
No it doesn't. NT does not, and never has, implemented the Single UNIX Specification. An older version of NT, however, was certified as POSIX compliant (for a much older version of POSIX, before POSIX and SUS were unified), however most of its system calls simply returned ENOTIMPLEMENTED, which, while allowed by the standard, is completely useless. OS X, in contrast, actually does implement things like the POSIX realtime extensions that are still pretty hit and miss on Linux, depending on the parts of the API you use.
Define 'userful'. My G4 PowerBook still works, and FreeBSD can even control the backlight nicely now, but it won't run new OS X software. On the other hand, the Windows machine that my mother owns of a newer vintage won't run Windows 7 either. The PowerBook is still more than adequate for a lot of things, but my current laptop is easily ten times faster, so it's spent most of the last year turned off.
On most Apple laptops, it's cheaper to get the stock configuration, throw the RAM in the bin (or, more sensibly, keep it in case you need to send the machine in for a warranty replacement), and replace it entirely with new RAM. When I got my PowerBook, it was only very slightly more expensive to get them to put in a single 512MB stick than two 256MB ones, so I did that and then bought a second 512MB stick a bit later. With the two MBPs I've bought, I've ordered new RAM from Crucial and completely replaced the stock RAM as soon as it arrived (well, after checking that it booted with the stock RAM) and it's worked out cheaper than getting the RAM upgrade. With the MBA, you need to buy the RAM upgrade when you buy the machine, because they save a tiny bit of case space by soldering it to the motherboard.
Undertake when vehicle in front CLEARLY indicating to turn into their path.
I'm also in Cambridge, and part of the problem with this is that it seems that a lot of drivers, when stuck at traffic lights, will only start indicating when they become green. If you're cycling up the bike lane, then you can look along in front of you and see that no cars are indicating. Then you go past them, and then the lights turn green and three of them suddenly decide that they actually wanted to be turning all along. For some reason, they don't seem to think that the time when they're sitting there doing nothing would be a good time to flick the indicator on.
Cyclists should wear helmets because it can save their life if hit by a car, not to stop a bruise when they fall over at traffic lights because their fancy shoes didn't unclip.
There was an article on Slashdot a couple of years ago that was a large study that refuted the idea that helmets increase safety. They made three conclusions:
If you are involved in a collision without a helmet then you are marginally (but not statistically significantly) more likely to die (there's a fairly small range of accident types where a helmet can protect your head and you won't be killed by anything else).
If you are involved in a collision with a helmet then you are significantly more likely to suffer spinal damage and permanent paralysis (bike helmets are badly designed and unless you are hit directly from the top typically just translate the force into a shear across the top of the spine. The amount of force required to do this is significantly less than the force required to crack a skull).
If you wear a helmet then you are significantly more likely to be involved in an accident.
There are several reasons for the last point. Cyclists wearing helmets subconsciously think that they are safer and take more risks. Drivers drive closer to cyclists with helmets because they perceive them as less fragile. Helmets upset the airflow around your head and so reduce your spacial and situational awareness.
I do see a lot of people driving at dusk without lights around here though, and there are lots of studies that show that this significantly increases your chance of being in an accident.
It's very misleading because it only covers EU minimum requirements and not the individual country's laws that meet (and, typically, exceed) that minimum requirement. They claim that the statutory warranty in the UK only covers defects present at time of purchase. That could possibly be considered to be true, if you consider bad design to be a defect. The Sale of Goods Act states that the goods must be suitable for the purpose for which sold and must continue to function if subjected to normal operation for a reasonable period and gives you five years to claim. I know that Apple is aware of this, because as soon as I was elevated to talking to their tier-2 support person they replaced a four-year-old battery for me without quibbles, because it had had fewer than the number of discharge cycles that they say that it will retain 80% of the original charge for and was only retaining 25% - it was not under warranty, but as soon as I mentioned the relevant laws they authorised a replacement. Slightly depressingly, I had much better service from them in this instance than when I've had repairs that were covered by their warranty...
In a pretty anaemic way. One of the reasons I use OSMAnd is that I can download an entire county's maps (as vector data, so they're not huge) and not have to pay roaming when I'm abroad. I also don't need to connect to a remote server (and pay data costs) when I want to find a route. Oh, and the map data is better in all of the places I've visited so far...
I don't think it still is (it's probably 12345), but the idea was that it needed to be something that someone in the highest-stress situation possible (i.e. just about to kill a few million people and the likelihood that millions that he represents are already dead) would have to be able to remember it.
A class is not a framework. A framework typically includes dozens or hundreds of classes. To understand how to use it, you need to know which classes are used together, what sort of workflow the framework was designed for, and how the components fit together. An overview of a class is obviously important, but it is a long way away from being a high-level doc.
You're confusing 2000 with 1993, when the first non-university, non-government access to the Internet became possible. By 1995, Internet access was pretty much universally available, although not universally subscribed. I had a dial-up connection at home from about 1994 in the UK. It was six more years until the cut-off that the grandparent is talking about. Hell, even AOL was offering Internet access to the masses in 1995 - the Internet wasn't some academic-only thing before 2000.
How much bandwidth does a forum use? I paid for a VPS for a few years that cost about $20/month and came with 200GB/month of bandwidth (a limit I never went near) and a tiny charge if you went over. If you are just doing web hosting, it gets a lot cheaper. Running a video sharing site is expensive, but something that's primarily text should be relatively cheap.
Opera Unite was a rehash of a really old idea. One of the first web browsers from CERN integrated a simple HTML authoring tool and a web server, with the idea that everyone would run both a client and a server on their workstation. The thing that really killed the concept was that most people don't leave their desktop / laptop online and connected all of the time. Opera Unite added some caching, which helped fix that. A better model these days would be something like the Freedom Box: a low-power plug-sized computer that can be left on all of the time serving your content but edited directly from your laptop.
In the beginning, sure. But do you remember the original Google ads? They were plain text, unobtrusive, and were linked to the content of the page. If you were reading a review of laptops, then they'd have adverts for the laptops being reviewed, for example. They didn't need to track you, because by reading a page about X they knew that you were interested in X. This is exactly how print adverts (you know, the ones that still make large amount of money) work.
In my personal experience, ads got a lot worse once they started trying to tailor them to me, rather than to what I was reading. I actually clicked on quite a few Google ads - especially on Slashdot - when they were fairly generic site-relevant things. Now they are really good at showing me ads for things I've just bought and therefore have no further interest in purchasing.
I doubt it. I bought Final Cut Express some years ago (student price, very cheap) and it came with printed manuals. These things were about 90% of the volume of the box and, between the two of them, over 1,000 pages long. They also had PDF versions on the install DVD. I referred to the PDFs regularly. I don't think I opened the paper copy more than once. I expect my usage was pretty typical. Of course, it also increases profit, but increasing profit by not wasting paper and energy printing and shipping something that most customers will never read sounds fine to me, just as I have no issue with the shop near me that increases its profit by stocking food I want to buy...
Wikis are great as a communications tool between developers and documentation writers on an open source project. A lot of developers have English as a second language, so really don't want to be writing English documentation. Of the English speakers, many are not very good at writing informative documentation. Get them to stick their notes on a wiki, however, and you have an up-to-date reference for the docs team to work from.
That's not limited to India. In the UK and, from what I've heard, the USA, essays are expected to be of a certain length. If you succinctly make all of the relevant points in half as much space, you get fewer marks than if you pad it.
Slashdot Mirror
[1] Actually, from what I saw of their current usage at Google, the same is probably true if you drop the server in the sea, but that's not an intentional effect.
Your colour perception is incorrectly calibrated!
iRex produced an A4 eBook reader, but they only sold a few before the company went bankrupt. I wish someone else would pick the idea up - I'd love to have an A4 eInk device.
Apple's first tablet, the iPod Touch, had a 3.5" screen. So, it's possible for them to create a great (in their opinion) interface on a 3.5" screen and a 10" screen, but not on a 7" screen? That seems a bit strange to me.
For instance, their problem with security wasn't that their software has some security holes, or a lot of security holes.. it was that the fundemental core design didn't take security into account at all.
Mod this right up. If you want to design an open social network then the FIRST thing you do is design a protocol and get security experts to review it. Then you get two (or, ideally, more) teams to implement the protocol independently. Then, once you've identified the flaws in the specification, you have something that may work. Diaspora started with a crappy implementation where the protocol documentation was the code. The fact that their implementation sucked was made much more important by the fact that independent interoperable implementations were basically impossible.
Email didn't become ubiquitous because of PINE or Sendmail. It became ubiquitous because of well-specified protocols that meant that we had a plethora of competing implementations that could evolve much faster than single-vendor solutions like AOL or CompuServe.
No it doesn't. NT does not, and never has, implemented the Single UNIX Specification. An older version of NT, however, was certified as POSIX compliant (for a much older version of POSIX, before POSIX and SUS were unified), however most of its system calls simply returned ENOTIMPLEMENTED, which, while allowed by the standard, is completely useless. OS X, in contrast, actually does implement things like the POSIX realtime extensions that are still pretty hit and miss on Linux, depending on the parts of the API you use.
Define 'userful'. My G4 PowerBook still works, and FreeBSD can even control the backlight nicely now, but it won't run new OS X software. On the other hand, the Windows machine that my mother owns of a newer vintage won't run Windows 7 either. The PowerBook is still more than adequate for a lot of things, but my current laptop is easily ten times faster, so it's spent most of the last year turned off.
On most Apple laptops, it's cheaper to get the stock configuration, throw the RAM in the bin (or, more sensibly, keep it in case you need to send the machine in for a warranty replacement), and replace it entirely with new RAM. When I got my PowerBook, it was only very slightly more expensive to get them to put in a single 512MB stick than two 256MB ones, so I did that and then bought a second 512MB stick a bit later. With the two MBPs I've bought, I've ordered new RAM from Crucial and completely replaced the stock RAM as soon as it arrived (well, after checking that it booted with the stock RAM) and it's worked out cheaper than getting the RAM upgrade. With the MBA, you need to buy the RAM upgrade when you buy the machine, because they save a tiny bit of case space by soldering it to the motherboard.
I don't wear a helmet when cycling because the last serious study I saw on the effects showed that doing so meant that, statistically:
Weighing all of these, wearing a helmet didn't seem like such a good idea.
Undertake when vehicle in front CLEARLY indicating to turn into their path.
I'm also in Cambridge, and part of the problem with this is that it seems that a lot of drivers, when stuck at traffic lights, will only start indicating when they become green. If you're cycling up the bike lane, then you can look along in front of you and see that no cars are indicating. Then you go past them, and then the lights turn green and three of them suddenly decide that they actually wanted to be turning all along. For some reason, they don't seem to think that the time when they're sitting there doing nothing would be a good time to flick the indicator on.
Cyclists should wear helmets because it can save their life if hit by a car, not to stop a bruise when they fall over at traffic lights because their fancy shoes didn't unclip.
There was an article on Slashdot a couple of years ago that was a large study that refuted the idea that helmets increase safety. They made three conclusions:
There are several reasons for the last point. Cyclists wearing helmets subconsciously think that they are safer and take more risks. Drivers drive closer to cyclists with helmets because they perceive them as less fragile. Helmets upset the airflow around your head and so reduce your spacial and situational awareness.
I do see a lot of people driving at dusk without lights around here though, and there are lots of studies that show that this significantly increases your chance of being in an accident.
It's very misleading because it only covers EU minimum requirements and not the individual country's laws that meet (and, typically, exceed) that minimum requirement. They claim that the statutory warranty in the UK only covers defects present at time of purchase. That could possibly be considered to be true, if you consider bad design to be a defect. The Sale of Goods Act states that the goods must be suitable for the purpose for which sold and must continue to function if subjected to normal operation for a reasonable period and gives you five years to claim. I know that Apple is aware of this, because as soon as I was elevated to talking to their tier-2 support person they replaced a four-year-old battery for me without quibbles, because it had had fewer than the number of discharge cycles that they say that it will retain 80% of the original charge for and was only retaining 25% - it was not under warranty, but as soon as I mentioned the relevant laws they authorised a replacement. Slightly depressingly, I had much better service from them in this instance than when I've had repairs that were covered by their warranty...
In a pretty anaemic way. One of the reasons I use OSMAnd is that I can download an entire county's maps (as vector data, so they're not huge) and not have to pay roaming when I'm abroad. I also don't need to connect to a remote server (and pay data costs) when I want to find a route. Oh, and the map data is better in all of the places I've visited so far...
I don't think it still is (it's probably 12345), but the idea was that it needed to be something that someone in the highest-stress situation possible (i.e. just about to kill a few million people and the likelihood that millions that he represents are already dead) would have to be able to remember it.
Professor? We're talking about school, not university.
The new corporate overlords thought that one lie ('news') per tag line was as many as their lawyers were comfortable with.
A class is not a framework. A framework typically includes dozens or hundreds of classes. To understand how to use it, you need to know which classes are used together, what sort of workflow the framework was designed for, and how the components fit together. An overview of a class is obviously important, but it is a long way away from being a high-level doc.
You're confusing 2000 with 1993, when the first non-university, non-government access to the Internet became possible. By 1995, Internet access was pretty much universally available, although not universally subscribed. I had a dial-up connection at home from about 1994 in the UK. It was six more years until the cut-off that the grandparent is talking about. Hell, even AOL was offering Internet access to the masses in 1995 - the Internet wasn't some academic-only thing before 2000.
How much bandwidth does a forum use? I paid for a VPS for a few years that cost about $20/month and came with 200GB/month of bandwidth (a limit I never went near) and a tiny charge if you went over. If you are just doing web hosting, it gets a lot cheaper. Running a video sharing site is expensive, but something that's primarily text should be relatively cheap.
Same types of people that decide that entire races are fair game to be slaves
Oh, no one in power thinks that anymore. They're very egalitarian about who is allowed to be a slave these days.
Opera Unite was a rehash of a really old idea. One of the first web browsers from CERN integrated a simple HTML authoring tool and a web server, with the idea that everyone would run both a client and a server on their workstation. The thing that really killed the concept was that most people don't leave their desktop / laptop online and connected all of the time. Opera Unite added some caching, which helped fix that. A better model these days would be something like the Freedom Box: a low-power plug-sized computer that can be left on all of the time serving your content but edited directly from your laptop.
In the beginning, sure. But do you remember the original Google ads? They were plain text, unobtrusive, and were linked to the content of the page. If you were reading a review of laptops, then they'd have adverts for the laptops being reviewed, for example. They didn't need to track you, because by reading a page about X they knew that you were interested in X. This is exactly how print adverts (you know, the ones that still make large amount of money) work.
In my personal experience, ads got a lot worse once they started trying to tailor them to me, rather than to what I was reading. I actually clicked on quite a few Google ads - especially on Slashdot - when they were fairly generic site-relevant things. Now they are really good at showing me ads for things I've just bought and therefore have no further interest in purchasing.
I doubt it. I bought Final Cut Express some years ago (student price, very cheap) and it came with printed manuals. These things were about 90% of the volume of the box and, between the two of them, over 1,000 pages long. They also had PDF versions on the install DVD. I referred to the PDFs regularly. I don't think I opened the paper copy more than once. I expect my usage was pretty typical. Of course, it also increases profit, but increasing profit by not wasting paper and energy printing and shipping something that most customers will never read sounds fine to me, just as I have no issue with the shop near me that increases its profit by stocking food I want to buy...
Wikis are great as a communications tool between developers and documentation writers on an open source project. A lot of developers have English as a second language, so really don't want to be writing English documentation. Of the English speakers, many are not very good at writing informative documentation. Get them to stick their notes on a wiki, however, and you have an up-to-date reference for the docs team to work from.
That's not limited to India. In the UK and, from what I've heard, the USA, essays are expected to be of a certain length. If you succinctly make all of the relevant points in half as much space, you get fewer marks than if you pad it.