Why does everyone have to immediately call troll these days? Germany is a good counter-example for the claim that the world follows what happens in the UK. I'd also generally consider Germany to be more of a trend-setter than the UK. And if you believe that, it's a clear example of how one small country does NOT typically set the trend for the world as the stats for Germany don't look like anything we're seeing globally.
In all, calm down. He made some good points if you actually follow the train of thought presented.
As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.
But even then, some require manual configuration to pick a band, others can switch on-the-fly, and others can use both 2.4 and 5 at the same time. So even among devices which do support 5 GHz, there's a range of support.
I'd try to identify the most time consuming and error prone manual operations. I wouldn't kick things off by pushing unit testing. Some people look at testing, documentation, etc as more of a tax than a benefit. If you can come up with some tools and scripts to automate those slow error-prone processes first, you'll get the entire team listening really fast. Figure out what helps your workflow and push it out to the rest of the team.
I think you missed the point in the marketing-speak. They say 1000x _rendering_ performance. We get that they're showing off a solid rendering API. Now, even if we assumed that to be just as fast as a native direct3D game, they don't talk about anything else. You may have noticed the demo video was a fly through, not in game action. What will the performance be of all the UnrealScript code? Presumably that is either being translated into actionscript and compiled that way, or they've written their own UnrealScript compiler that outputs flash bytecode. I honestly don't know much about modern flash apps but I have never heard of a flash app support languages other than actionscript. You can't just set the target of a c++ project to "flash" and hit F5.
So the performance concerns don't come with respect to the 3D rendering so much as everything else, aka the game code. Another example, what about hardware physics? Unreal engine supports a bunch of stuff that may be outside the scope of what Adobe is delivering.
But sooner or later, as UnrealScript proves with its bytecode, flash will be fast enough to handle everyone's game code in a sandbox. I just worry what security threats this creates with respect to exploiting old/shitty graphics drivers..
While the functionality is the same, I don't like the fullscreen aspect. If all I want to do is find the calculator, I don't need a fullscreen search. Based on some limited time with the developer preview, I find it disconcerting to have so much of the screen change for such a simple search. At least it only covers one screen when you're using multiple monitors. It also feels awkward to dismiss the start screen if you don't find what you want. You need to either hit esc three times or start twice. That compares to hitting escape twice or start once on win 7. It'll also be interesting to have some ambiguous issues with which apps to load. Do I want calc in the traditional desktop form or the immersion UI? Same issue with office apps, browsers, etc. It does take away the appeal of using search as an application launcher from the desktop.
On the flip side, I do believe that there will be sensible additions to the search results facilitated by the fullscreen aspect. But I do hope it remains mostly a local search. I wouldn't want to see movie rental suggestions in there, for example. It's a neat app integration scenario like you might get when searching with bing on WP7 but I don't want it on the PC. But certainly I wouldn't mind there being a bing (/whoever) search with app integration available.
But to close on my calc example, I think I'll be getting used to hitting start+r for the run dialog. In the dev preview, that still operates in the same way as win7. I can use that to get to most places in windows. It's a bit more memorization for something like the add/remove programs applet but the common commands will start to stick with a little use. This might also force me to start using more of my extended keyboard buttons, eg binding my 1-5 shortcut keys to something useful.
Microsoft includes updates from the provider. But it is Microsoft that's delivering the update itself. It comes through zune and is downloaded from MS servers.
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I just want to remind everyone that MS hasn't shown off the next office release yet. We don't know what the metro interface will look like. For that matter, we haven't even seen the desktop client yet.
My sister is a special-ed teacher. She is a speech therapist. She has been using an ipad for a year or more now. Apparently there are a lot of really great special-purpose apps which she uses with her students. They're designed specifically for speech therapy work. It makes it a lot easier to work with multiple children. You can have one doing interactive exercises while working with the other directly. I've always been a fan of interactive learning. Anyone comparing this to textbooks is missing the point. This isn't for college students. This is giving kids practice drawing their alphabet or adding 3 and 4. Instant feedback and encouragement can make a big difference for some kids.
While what you say is probably true, I wonder if anyone has done simulations.. how long would it take to evacuate everyone? I wonder what the peak rate of evacuation could be. It'd be fun to read up to be prepared to poke technical holes in the next disaster movie..
I got a $100 dock for my ipad. It's an okayish $800 alarm clock now. But since the app can't run with the screen off and such, I have to leave the screen and dock on the whole night. If either go to sleep, the alarm doesn't go off. So I have my regular alarm clock as my "it's REALLY time to get up" set about half an hour after my ipad is due to start my wakeup playlist.
Yup, I remember seeing this in a reddit "what network id have you used to screw with your neighbors" thread. When something hits around +1000, a word-for-word copy becomes pretty easy to spot.
No, it doesn't. It really needs to be something that actually identifies you as an officer, eg a fake id. I can wear a shirt that says FBI on it and that's fine. If I tried to use the shirt to get into a secured area, that would be different as I'd be using it for identification.
Sounds like a good strategy.. have a honeypot wifi network with the name corresponding to your last name or address.. Let people waste their time trying to crack it when really it's just your old linksys sitting around. Of course, it's also a waste of power and effort when no one actually cares to see my traffic.
That's just to help the signal. It still shares bandwidth amongst all users. With this, each user can theoretically get full-spectrum downstream. Also different in that it broadcasts from multiple access points which is hardly trivial.
The article says their implementation should be sensitive enough to deal with movement, even driving. Not sure if that claim will hold up but at least they're thinking about it.
I hate how these statistics are worded to vilify these users. First, it's the top 5% vs the average of the other 95%. Hell, they don't even filter out the bottom 5% to balance that out who likely use close to zero data. By removing the top 5% from the average, the average is going to be reduced dramatically, unlike the median would be. 2nd, the services they claim as being the data hogs are the same services that are most heavily advertised. And when defined this way, even if top users find more efficient ways to get their content, eg pandora starts to cache up to 2 hours of songs in advance whenever connected to wifi, there will always be a top 5%. Without setting actual hard limits, eg 50x the median user's usage of the previous month, it's impossible to know where you stand without much greater transparency. It's also frustrating that off-peak usage and edge/hspa/lte are costed the same. 1GB on edge is obviously more destructive to the network than 1GB on LTE.
Overall, it's a system that is somewhat fair but doesn't offer the user the tools or opportunity to optimize their usage. It's in everyone's best interest to maximize available bandwidth. The networks need to make the users partners rather than enemies. For example, have an unlimited plan with peak-usage throttling and offer rebates, free music/apps/whatever bonuses to good network citizens. If there was an actual thank you and reward for downloading/pre-caching my music rather than streaming it, I'd certainly prefer that option. But if they only punish, I'm going to give them the middle-finger and abuse 'their' network.
A change in terms offers you the chance to get out of your contract. But that's fine for them as they want to transition everyone off unlimited plans anyways.. That said, they probably also had no guarantee of data speed/service provided in the contract. Limiting speed is possibly within their right without modifying any contract terms.. Those service agreements don't exactly work to the consumer's advantage.
To be fair, even the politicians took time off to watch the game that day:)
Also, canadian politics tend to be a lot more sane than american politics. If canada had budget issues like what's happening in the US right now, it would result in a vote of no-confidence. A new election would be called immediately. Maybe the new government wouldn't be able to solve the issue either and we'd go again to the polls.. but the point is, the system actually has a way of dealing with these stalemates rather than waiting years for the term to run out. What we lose in government stability we gain in protection from idiocy.
Cell tower triangulation is pretty poor when done with on your phone. You'll only be able to pin your location within a few blocks. In an urban area, a few wifi hotspots will pin you within 100m fairly easily. Especially since wifi doesn't travel very far, just finding a known wifi signal is enough to know you're within about 100m of it. Especially handy indoors, eg a mall or at home, where you'll have those known locations.
Remember the big issue where the iphone cached known locations? That was a really nice performance boost. If you're at home, you're already connected to a known wifi point (your cell phone reports its location to google/ms/apple) and are pretty much guaranteed instant location lookup. If you open up the maps app, it'll pin you as being at home in a fraction of the time it would actually take to figure out by doing a network round-trip to measure signal strenghts, look up cell phone tower locations, etc. Getting an actual GPS signal is really only possible when you're outside with a pretty decent view of the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone have to immediately call troll these days? Germany is a good counter-example for the claim that the world follows what happens in the UK. I'd also generally consider Germany to be more of a trend-setter than the UK. And if you believe that, it's a clear example of how one small country does NOT typically set the trend for the world as the stats for Germany don't look like anything we're seeing globally.
In all, calm down. He made some good points if you actually follow the train of thought presented.
As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.
But even then, some require manual configuration to pick a band, others can switch on-the-fly, and others can use both 2.4 and 5 at the same time. So even among devices which do support 5 GHz, there's a range of support.
Oh how I'd love to see a summary rated -5 RTFA..
I'd try to identify the most time consuming and error prone manual operations. I wouldn't kick things off by pushing unit testing. Some people look at testing, documentation, etc as more of a tax than a benefit. If you can come up with some tools and scripts to automate those slow error-prone processes first, you'll get the entire team listening really fast. Figure out what helps your workflow and push it out to the rest of the team.
I think you missed the point in the marketing-speak. They say 1000x _rendering_ performance. We get that they're showing off a solid rendering API. Now, even if we assumed that to be just as fast as a native direct3D game, they don't talk about anything else. You may have noticed the demo video was a fly through, not in game action. What will the performance be of all the UnrealScript code? Presumably that is either being translated into actionscript and compiled that way, or they've written their own UnrealScript compiler that outputs flash bytecode. I honestly don't know much about modern flash apps but I have never heard of a flash app support languages other than actionscript. You can't just set the target of a c++ project to "flash" and hit F5.
So the performance concerns don't come with respect to the 3D rendering so much as everything else, aka the game code. Another example, what about hardware physics? Unreal engine supports a bunch of stuff that may be outside the scope of what Adobe is delivering.
But sooner or later, as UnrealScript proves with its bytecode, flash will be fast enough to handle everyone's game code in a sandbox. I just worry what security threats this creates with respect to exploiting old/shitty graphics drivers..
While the functionality is the same, I don't like the fullscreen aspect. If all I want to do is find the calculator, I don't need a fullscreen search. Based on some limited time with the developer preview, I find it disconcerting to have so much of the screen change for such a simple search. At least it only covers one screen when you're using multiple monitors. It also feels awkward to dismiss the start screen if you don't find what you want. You need to either hit esc three times or start twice. That compares to hitting escape twice or start once on win 7. It'll also be interesting to have some ambiguous issues with which apps to load. Do I want calc in the traditional desktop form or the immersion UI? Same issue with office apps, browsers, etc. It does take away the appeal of using search as an application launcher from the desktop.
On the flip side, I do believe that there will be sensible additions to the search results facilitated by the fullscreen aspect. But I do hope it remains mostly a local search. I wouldn't want to see movie rental suggestions in there, for example. It's a neat app integration scenario like you might get when searching with bing on WP7 but I don't want it on the PC. But certainly I wouldn't mind there being a bing (/whoever) search with app integration available.
But to close on my calc example, I think I'll be getting used to hitting start+r for the run dialog. In the dev preview, that still operates in the same way as win7. I can use that to get to most places in windows. It's a bit more memorization for something like the add/remove programs applet but the common commands will start to stick with a little use. This might also force me to start using more of my extended keyboard buttons, eg binding my 1-5 shortcut keys to something useful.
Microsoft includes updates from the provider. But it is Microsoft that's delivering the update itself. It comes through zune and is downloaded from MS servers.
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I just want to remind everyone that MS hasn't shown off the next office release yet. We don't know what the metro interface will look like. For that matter, we haven't even seen the desktop client yet.
They'll probably just flip the bit to dev-unlock their machines.
My sister is a special-ed teacher. She is a speech therapist. She has been using an ipad for a year or more now. Apparently there are a lot of really great special-purpose apps which she uses with her students. They're designed specifically for speech therapy work. It makes it a lot easier to work with multiple children. You can have one doing interactive exercises while working with the other directly. I've always been a fan of interactive learning. Anyone comparing this to textbooks is missing the point. This isn't for college students. This is giving kids practice drawing their alphabet or adding 3 and 4. Instant feedback and encouragement can make a big difference for some kids.
While what you say is probably true, I wonder if anyone has done simulations.. how long would it take to evacuate everyone? I wonder what the peak rate of evacuation could be. It'd be fun to read up to be prepared to poke technical holes in the next disaster movie..
Happy hunting :)
I got a $100 dock for my ipad. It's an okayish $800 alarm clock now. But since the app can't run with the screen off and such, I have to leave the screen and dock on the whole night. If either go to sleep, the alarm doesn't go off. So I have my regular alarm clock as my "it's REALLY time to get up" set about half an hour after my ipad is due to start my wakeup playlist.
Totally worth the money..
Yea, +1.. We'll miss you Cmdr!
Yup, I remember seeing this in a reddit "what network id have you used to screw with your neighbors" thread. When something hits around +1000, a word-for-word copy becomes pretty easy to spot.
No, it doesn't. It really needs to be something that actually identifies you as an officer, eg a fake id. I can wear a shirt that says FBI on it and that's fine. If I tried to use the shirt to get into a secured area, that would be different as I'd be using it for identification.
Sounds like a good strategy.. have a honeypot wifi network with the name corresponding to your last name or address.. Let people waste their time trying to crack it when really it's just your old linksys sitting around. Of course, it's also a waste of power and effort when no one actually cares to see my traffic.
Perfect excuse for an SSD.
That's just to help the signal. It still shares bandwidth amongst all users. With this, each user can theoretically get full-spectrum downstream. Also different in that it broadcasts from multiple access points which is hardly trivial.
The article says their implementation should be sensitive enough to deal with movement, even driving. Not sure if that claim will hold up but at least they're thinking about it.
I hate how these statistics are worded to vilify these users. First, it's the top 5% vs the average of the other 95%. Hell, they don't even filter out the bottom 5% to balance that out who likely use close to zero data. By removing the top 5% from the average, the average is going to be reduced dramatically, unlike the median would be. 2nd, the services they claim as being the data hogs are the same services that are most heavily advertised. And when defined this way, even if top users find more efficient ways to get their content, eg pandora starts to cache up to 2 hours of songs in advance whenever connected to wifi, there will always be a top 5%. Without setting actual hard limits, eg 50x the median user's usage of the previous month, it's impossible to know where you stand without much greater transparency. It's also frustrating that off-peak usage and edge/hspa/lte are costed the same. 1GB on edge is obviously more destructive to the network than 1GB on LTE.
Overall, it's a system that is somewhat fair but doesn't offer the user the tools or opportunity to optimize their usage. It's in everyone's best interest to maximize available bandwidth. The networks need to make the users partners rather than enemies. For example, have an unlimited plan with peak-usage throttling and offer rebates, free music/apps/whatever bonuses to good network citizens. If there was an actual thank you and reward for downloading/pre-caching my music rather than streaming it, I'd certainly prefer that option. But if they only punish, I'm going to give them the middle-finger and abuse 'their' network.
A change in terms offers you the chance to get out of your contract. But that's fine for them as they want to transition everyone off unlimited plans anyways.. That said, they probably also had no guarantee of data speed/service provided in the contract. Limiting speed is possibly within their right without modifying any contract terms.. Those service agreements don't exactly work to the consumer's advantage.
To be fair, even the politicians took time off to watch the game that day :)
Also, canadian politics tend to be a lot more sane than american politics. If canada had budget issues like what's happening in the US right now, it would result in a vote of no-confidence. A new election would be called immediately. Maybe the new government wouldn't be able to solve the issue either and we'd go again to the polls.. but the point is, the system actually has a way of dealing with these stalemates rather than waiting years for the term to run out. What we lose in government stability we gain in protection from idiocy.
Cell tower triangulation is pretty poor when done with on your phone. You'll only be able to pin your location within a few blocks. In an urban area, a few wifi hotspots will pin you within 100m fairly easily. Especially since wifi doesn't travel very far, just finding a known wifi signal is enough to know you're within about 100m of it. Especially handy indoors, eg a mall or at home, where you'll have those known locations.
Remember the big issue where the iphone cached known locations? That was a really nice performance boost. If you're at home, you're already connected to a known wifi point (your cell phone reports its location to google/ms/apple) and are pretty much guaranteed instant location lookup. If you open up the maps app, it'll pin you as being at home in a fraction of the time it would actually take to figure out by doing a network round-trip to measure signal strenghts, look up cell phone tower locations, etc. Getting an actual GPS signal is really only possible when you're outside with a pretty decent view of the sky.