I wish I had mod points for this, because it's a very good analogy. National central banks can (and on occasion do) print 'free money' as a measure to stimulate their economies. It's exactly the same as duplicating data.
The reason they try not to do it unless it's absolutely necessary is that it leads to high inflation, which devalues the cash in your pocket.
The same thing is happening with information, the difference being that duplication of information is not tightly controlled by central banks - it's rampant. The effect is that information rapidly becomes worthless.
It's simple (hell, the IDE will autocomplete it for you) and makes your code easier to maintain.
Sure, if there's a lot of parameters, then naming them is a bit helpful. But I can do that in C by placing the parameters in a struct with named fields and then passing the struct in as a parameter.
That doesn't help you at all when you have to call a method (that you didn't write) with the signature doSomething(int, int, double) and the documentation is poor.
I haven't done a huge amount of work in Xcode 4 yet (just minor changes to a project that started life in Xcode 3), but my initial impression is that this is Apple's way of trying to goad me into buying one of their cinema displays. Or at the very least, a new laptop with a higher-res screen.
You'll find the radically different syntax a blessing rather than a curse if you plan on flitting between languages on a regular basis. If you work with two almost identical but subtly different languages, the small differences with catch you out more often than you'd like. When you work with Objective-C and Java at the same time, the differences are substantial, so you end up putting more effort into learning them.
Apple's Interface Builder is very much a double-edged sword though. Because it's designed as the way to create interfaces on iOS, the.xib XML files that it creates are inscrutable. They're a step up from the old.nib files, which were binary, but they're still not made for human consumption.
This means that you can't fall back to the text editor to make changes when Interface Builder refuses to do what you want it to do. Thankfully, IB is good enough that this is a fairly rare occurrence (other graphical editors might not be so good). Worse, it makes diagnosing and fixing bugs that crop up during regression testing much more difficult, because it's hard to tell exactly what's changed when viewing a diff between versions.
The graphical environment that comes with the ADT plugin is crap by comparison (hey, when your dev environment is built on Eclipse, my expectations are low). But the fundamental idea behind it is different. Android layout XML files are meant to be written and read by humans, and the graphical editor is just an optional extra that can help you learn how to write the XML. And a diff between two different versions of an Android layout XML file will be illuminating, not baffling.
I've only had the briefest introduction to Visual Studio, so I won't comment on it. It reminded me of using Visual Basic 6 in high school though.
NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise
It doesn't cost nothing. It costs less, much less, but not nothing. Servers and bandwidth aren't free.
Advertising... from whose perspective? Amazon advertises the Kindle on TV, and that certainly isn't free. For individual books, having your book appear in a store alongside 600,000 other books isn't advertising. You need to do much more than that in order to promote your book.
As usual, where iTunes is involved, things get convoluted.
On a Mac, the media player is called 'iTunes', the music (etc.) store is called the 'iTunes Store'. iPhone apps can be bought through the iTunes Store.
On an iPhone, the media player is called 'iPod' (the same name as another line of physical products), the music (etc.) store is called 'iTunes' (the same name as the media player on OS X), and iPhone apps are bought through a separate app called the 'App Store'.
If Apple is really concerned about customer confusion, they should sort this mess out first, because it sure as hell confuses me.
Democracy in Iraq was surely a big part of the motivation for the several countries with ongoing fights for democracy right now. 'n hoping for the best inEgypt and Libya - may they get a real democracy, not a theocracy with 1 election - but for god or ill Iraq played a part in this.
Rubbish. If Iraq played a part, it was a very small part indeed. The motivation had much more to do with unemployment, food prices and corruption, with the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi providing the spark (no pun intended). The situation in Iraq is exactly what these countries will be trying their hardest to avoid in the coming months and years. They can do that, as long as the revolutions are seen as home-grown and not due to outside influence (which is why we have to be very careful about intervention in Libya), after which they are much more likely to sustain lasting democracies than Iraq.
How can I make cheese-eating surrender monkey jokes now?
You couldn't really make them before without sounding like a twat.
The problem with trying to find examples of science fiction "based on solid science", is that a vanishingly small percentage of what we consider to be science fiction actually involves scientific principles. I haven't seen all the films in the list so I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that none of them involve the testing of hypotheses through scientific method.
A better term would be 'technological fiction', if we're going to be pedantic about it.
If 2001 involved any science, it must have been during the part that was erased when the screensaver came on during the mastering process.
Splice came close to fitting the definition, but maybe I'm just saying that because I really liked that film.
Didn't anyone read the first few words in the summary, "Citing fears over a lack of an industry standard"?
Yes, but it doesn't square with reality. Visa and Mastercard both have cards that can be read by a single reader. Now maybe that's a proprietary, de-facto standard but it's a standard nonetheless, and those readers are in shops now.
If you live in a country where cards are still swiped, you're behind the technology curve and are probably not the target market.
In the UK we've been using chip and pin for years, and one of the perceived disadvantages of the system is the time it takes to complete a transaction. It makes small, quick purchases very cumbersome. Contactless payments are an attempt to provide a solution to that problem.
Admittedly though, in many countries, it's not mandatory to use it (you can ~choose~ whether to PIN or sign), which sorta defeats the point
As far as I know, in the UK the difference between using a PIN and a signature is in the liability for a fraudulent transaction. If chip and pin is used and the cardholder hasn't been 'negligent', the card issuer is liable for any fraud. If a signature is used (on a card which has a chip), then the retailer is liable. Whether or not the retailer will accept a signature is their decision. Often, large retailers will accept a signature - I guess the cost of turning down a legitimate transaction is greater than allowing a fraudulent one.
It might have been my imagination, but I'm sure that when I was in Australia a few years ago they were using PINs with magnetic swipe cards. I vaguely remember almost getting caught out when using a UK debit card. Fortunately it doubled as an ATM card and my ATM PIN seemed to satisfy it.
I think it's a little late for that. Contactless payment readers compatible with Mastercard's Paypass and Visa's Paywave are already appearing in stores. My bank sent me a contactless debit card ages ago. There's already a standard (albeit possibly de-facto, I don't know) that's backed by the two biggest players by far in the industry. Apple cannot possibly create its own standard and hope to have it gain any acceptance.
The RC certainly starts up a lot quicker than the latest 3.x release, which was so slow it was actually comical (the other day my boss and I stood and laughed while we waited the ~30 s for Firefox to start up).
Chrome on the Mac used to have a nice, native-looking preferences dialog. The move to an in-tab preferences menu is a move away from native components, which I regard as a backward step. The lack of native components was one of the reasons I stopped using Opera.
Also, when laying out the window bar this time round, Google seem to have copied what Apple did with the Mac App Store and suspended the 'traffic light' buttons in the middle of the bar rather than at the top. It's hideous, and I hope it's not turning into a trend.
If you're a bank, using a Mac as a server in the first place is insane.
If you're a B&B, it might be an ideal solution. And if the building goes on fire, the fact that your booking system would be knocked offline would be the least of your problems.
It's not a very good answer though, because the Scottish Parliament doesn't have power over time zones. It's a matter reserved to Westminster. England could unilaterally decide to move the whole of the UK to Central European Time, and we Scots wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it.
I'm sure the majority of Scots don't give a stuff what time zone England uses, as long as we are able to opt out of any change. The problem is that there are plenty or politicians both north and south of the border, who would see the division of the UK into multiple time zones as a step towards Scottish independence, and would oppose it on that basis alone.
This is a shining example of how immature political discourse in the UK has become.
'Promises' made during an election campaign are made on the assumption that the party making them gains an absolute majority in parliament, and is actually in a position to fulfil them. Because absolute majorities are the rule in Westminster rather than the exception, the British public and media are used to being able to hold parties in government to the promises they made during their campaign.
The whole thing falls apart when no party has an absolute majority, as is the case right now, because no party is in a position to fulfil its promises. They simply don't have the votes on their own.
We have a coalition between the Tories and Lib Dems right now, and the expectation of the public and the media at this point seems to be that both the Tory manifesto and the Lib Dem manifesto are implemented in full. This is a ludicrous expectation.
In a coalition, each party has to compromise on some (or most, in the case of the smaller party) of its policies, in order to have most (or some) of its policies implemented. The alternative is to not participate and have none of your policies implemented.
The sad fact is that this doesn't make good headlines and is hard to explain to the knuckle-draggers who read the Sun and Daily Record, who would rather have politics exposed to them as the kind of Punch and Judy performance that you see in PMQs, as opposed to the practicalities and ins and outs of actually running the country.
What was the appeal of TiVo in the first place, that justified the £10 a month subscription? There are plenty of DVRs with EPGs available, where the only cost is the up-front cost of the box.
What was the alternative? The TiVo box relies on the TiVo service, which surely the customers must have been aware of. If the service is shut down, then the boxes no longer operate. The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
We have Freeview+, Freesat+, Sky+, and whatever Virgin Media call their DVR (I'm one of the unlucky sods living in the half of the country without cable). TalkTalk TV also has the option of a DVR box, although I'm not sure that service is open to new customers at the moment.
The Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk boxes are supplied by the service provider, but there are loads of Freeview and Freesat DVRs available on general sale. TiVo isn't even a blip on the UK DVR market, and I'm not surprised that they're risking the wrath of their existing users, all five of them, by cancelling the service.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points for this, because it's a very good analogy. National central banks can (and on occasion do) print 'free money' as a measure to stimulate their economies. It's exactly the same as duplicating data.
The reason they try not to do it unless it's absolutely necessary is that it leads to high inflation, which devalues the cash in your pocket.
The same thing is happening with information, the difference being that duplication of information is not tightly controlled by central banks - it's rampant. The effect is that information rapidly becomes worthless.
You owe me a new keyboard!
Joking aside, you missed the point slightly. Top Gear is made by the BBC. There is no advertising revenue to pull.
It's simple (hell, the IDE will autocomplete it for you) and makes your code easier to maintain.
That doesn't help you at all when you have to call a method (that you didn't write) with the signature doSomething(int, int, double) and the documentation is poor.
I haven't done a huge amount of work in Xcode 4 yet (just minor changes to a project that started life in Xcode 3), but my initial impression is that this is Apple's way of trying to goad me into buying one of their cinema displays. Or at the very least, a new laptop with a higher-res screen.
You'll find the radically different syntax a blessing rather than a curse if you plan on flitting between languages on a regular basis. If you work with two almost identical but subtly different languages, the small differences with catch you out more often than you'd like. When you work with Objective-C and Java at the same time, the differences are substantial, so you end up putting more effort into learning them.
That's my experience, anyway.
Apple's Interface Builder is very much a double-edged sword though. Because it's designed as the way to create interfaces on iOS, the .xib XML files that it creates are inscrutable. They're a step up from the old .nib files, which were binary, but they're still not made for human consumption.
This means that you can't fall back to the text editor to make changes when Interface Builder refuses to do what you want it to do. Thankfully, IB is good enough that this is a fairly rare occurrence (other graphical editors might not be so good). Worse, it makes diagnosing and fixing bugs that crop up during regression testing much more difficult, because it's hard to tell exactly what's changed when viewing a diff between versions.
The graphical environment that comes with the ADT plugin is crap by comparison (hey, when your dev environment is built on Eclipse, my expectations are low). But the fundamental idea behind it is different. Android layout XML files are meant to be written and read by humans, and the graphical editor is just an optional extra that can help you learn how to write the XML. And a diff between two different versions of an Android layout XML file will be illuminating, not baffling.
I've only had the briefest introduction to Visual Studio, so I won't comment on it. It reminded me of using Visual Basic 6 in high school though.
And your spelling.
It doesn't cost nothing. It costs less, much less, but not nothing. Servers and bandwidth aren't free.
Advertising... from whose perspective? Amazon advertises the Kindle on TV, and that certainly isn't free. For individual books, having your book appear in a store alongside 600,000 other books isn't advertising. You need to do much more than that in order to promote your book.
As usual, where iTunes is involved, things get convoluted.
On a Mac, the media player is called 'iTunes', the music (etc.) store is called the 'iTunes Store'. iPhone apps can be bought through the iTunes Store.
On an iPhone, the media player is called 'iPod' (the same name as another line of physical products), the music (etc.) store is called 'iTunes' (the same name as the media player on OS X), and iPhone apps are bought through a separate app called the 'App Store'.
If Apple is really concerned about customer confusion, they should sort this mess out first, because it sure as hell confuses me.
Rubbish. If Iraq played a part, it was a very small part indeed. The motivation had much more to do with unemployment, food prices and corruption, with the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi providing the spark (no pun intended). The situation in Iraq is exactly what these countries will be trying their hardest to avoid in the coming months and years. They can do that, as long as the revolutions are seen as home-grown and not due to outside influence (which is why we have to be very careful about intervention in Libya), after which they are much more likely to sustain lasting democracies than Iraq.
You couldn't really make them before without sounding like a twat.
The problem with trying to find examples of science fiction "based on solid science", is that a vanishingly small percentage of what we consider to be science fiction actually involves scientific principles. I haven't seen all the films in the list so I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that none of them involve the testing of hypotheses through scientific method.
A better term would be 'technological fiction', if we're going to be pedantic about it.
If 2001 involved any science, it must have been during the part that was erased when the screensaver came on during the mastering process.
Splice came close to fitting the definition, but maybe I'm just saying that because I really liked that film.
Yes, but it doesn't square with reality. Visa and Mastercard both have cards that can be read by a single reader. Now maybe that's a proprietary, de-facto standard but it's a standard nonetheless, and those readers are in shops now.
If you live in a country where cards are still swiped, you're behind the technology curve and are probably not the target market.
In the UK we've been using chip and pin for years, and one of the perceived disadvantages of the system is the time it takes to complete a transaction. It makes small, quick purchases very cumbersome. Contactless payments are an attempt to provide a solution to that problem.
As far as I know, in the UK the difference between using a PIN and a signature is in the liability for a fraudulent transaction. If chip and pin is used and the cardholder hasn't been 'negligent', the card issuer is liable for any fraud. If a signature is used (on a card which has a chip), then the retailer is liable. Whether or not the retailer will accept a signature is their decision. Often, large retailers will accept a signature - I guess the cost of turning down a legitimate transaction is greater than allowing a fraudulent one.
It might have been my imagination, but I'm sure that when I was in Australia a few years ago they were using PINs with magnetic swipe cards. I vaguely remember almost getting caught out when using a UK debit card. Fortunately it doubled as an ATM card and my ATM PIN seemed to satisfy it.
I think it's a little late for that. Contactless payment readers compatible with Mastercard's Paypass and Visa's Paywave are already appearing in stores. My bank sent me a contactless debit card ages ago. There's already a standard (albeit possibly de-facto, I don't know) that's backed by the two biggest players by far in the industry. Apple cannot possibly create its own standard and hope to have it gain any acceptance.
The RC certainly starts up a lot quicker than the latest 3.x release, which was so slow it was actually comical (the other day my boss and I stood and laughed while we waited the ~30 s for Firefox to start up).
Ironically, the BBC have a follow-up article, the first paragraph of which reads:
Chrome on the Mac used to have a nice, native-looking preferences dialog. The move to an in-tab preferences menu is a move away from native components, which I regard as a backward step. The lack of native components was one of the reasons I stopped using Opera.
Also, when laying out the window bar this time round, Google seem to have copied what Apple did with the Mac App Store and suspended the 'traffic light' buttons in the middle of the bar rather than at the top. It's hideous, and I hope it's not turning into a trend.
That depends on what your work is.
If you're a bank, using a Mac as a server in the first place is insane.
If you're a B&B, it might be an ideal solution. And if the building goes on fire, the fact that your booking system would be knocked offline would be the least of your problems.
This was a problem with OS X 10.4 as well. Good for the Kenyan economy though.
It's not a very good answer though, because the Scottish Parliament doesn't have power over time zones. It's a matter reserved to Westminster. England could unilaterally decide to move the whole of the UK to Central European Time, and we Scots wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it.
I'm sure the majority of Scots don't give a stuff what time zone England uses, as long as we are able to opt out of any change. The problem is that there are plenty or politicians both north and south of the border, who would see the division of the UK into multiple time zones as a step towards Scottish independence, and would oppose it on that basis alone.
This is a shining example of how immature political discourse in the UK has become.
'Promises' made during an election campaign are made on the assumption that the party making them gains an absolute majority in parliament, and is actually in a position to fulfil them. Because absolute majorities are the rule in Westminster rather than the exception, the British public and media are used to being able to hold parties in government to the promises they made during their campaign.
The whole thing falls apart when no party has an absolute majority, as is the case right now, because no party is in a position to fulfil its promises. They simply don't have the votes on their own.
We have a coalition between the Tories and Lib Dems right now, and the expectation of the public and the media at this point seems to be that both the Tory manifesto and the Lib Dem manifesto are implemented in full. This is a ludicrous expectation.
In a coalition, each party has to compromise on some (or most, in the case of the smaller party) of its policies, in order to have most (or some) of its policies implemented. The alternative is to not participate and have none of your policies implemented.
The sad fact is that this doesn't make good headlines and is hard to explain to the knuckle-draggers who read the Sun and Daily Record, who would rather have politics exposed to them as the kind of Punch and Judy performance that you see in PMQs, as opposed to the practicalities and ins and outs of actually running the country.
What was the appeal of TiVo in the first place, that justified the £10 a month subscription? There are plenty of DVRs with EPGs available, where the only cost is the up-front cost of the box.
What was the alternative? The TiVo box relies on the TiVo service, which surely the customers must have been aware of. If the service is shut down, then the boxes no longer operate. The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
We have Freeview+, Freesat+, Sky+, and whatever Virgin Media call their DVR (I'm one of the unlucky sods living in the half of the country without cable). TalkTalk TV also has the option of a DVR box, although I'm not sure that service is open to new customers at the moment.
The Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk boxes are supplied by the service provider, but there are loads of Freeview and Freesat DVRs available on general sale. TiVo isn't even a blip on the UK DVR market, and I'm not surprised that they're risking the wrath of their existing users, all five of them, by cancelling the service.