That's not quite true. In theory, you can use a standard APN for data instead of a BES or BIS.
The problem is that there's no global setting that dictates which communications method should be used. The app developer has to manually detect whether a BES, BIS, APN or WiFi should be used, and switch between them. What you'll probably find is that most won't support all four, especially as data over an APN tends not to be included in bundled data allowances on 'BlackBerry' tariffs.
Contrast this with Android and iOS, where switching between APN and WiFi is handled globally by the OS, and is completely transparent to individual applications.
On the one hand, there's the problem that you've had where the task doesn't seem to do anything useful. I think your teachers have failed you if you take an entire course, learn all the concepts, but still can't write an end-to-end program that would be half-way useful in the real world.
At the other end of the spectrum, if you want to teach a concept, you don't want your examples to be filled with so much code that is irrelevant to what you are trying to teach, that it gets in the way. My high school computing classes used Java as a teaching language, and the examples were 90% event handling code for the GUI that was showing our results, and 10% code for the actual concept I was trying to learn.
When we'd talk after class as juniors in college we wondered if we really knew anything at all, because it felt like we didn't.
When I was learning to program, everything seemed difficult at first, and I wasn't good at looking at a problem and identifying the solution. Then, sometime in my first year of university, everything just clicked, and I started learning at a much faster pace than previously. Different people hit that point at different times, and some never hit it at all.
Still, I look back on those years and think, hell, I knew nothing. I even look back on the time when I'd left uni with a degree and started my job, and think that I knew very little then. And I'm sure that in five years' time I'll think the same thing about now. I don't think you should feel too bad about not knowing much at the start of college, as you've got a lot of time to learn. Just wait for everything to click.
I think there's mileage in the idea of a drastically simplified TV. The actual 'TV' parts of my TV are redundant. The analogue tuner is useless because analogue broadcasts have ceased, and I don't use the built-in DVB-T tuner because I use an external, HDMI satellite tuner.
All my TV really does is accept inputs from other devices (rapidly converging on HDMI), and output audio to an external box through an optical cable. The only thing I do with my TV remote is turn it on and off, and switch between inputs. Make a TV with a lot of HDMI ports and an optical output on the back, and I might well buy it.
Of course this leaves me with a plethora of remotes, but a programmable remote with an LCD touchscreen, or an eInk screen with one of those infra-red touchscreens, would be pretty cool and shouldn't be difficult to build. I had a remote that came with a set-top box where you could program the volume keys by pointing another remote at it, and it would record the infra-red signal. Much better than relying on entering codes that never work.
People holding rocks are so much more effective at killing people than people without rocks. Or shovels, or an ax, or sticks, or cars, or pretty much any hard object. Should we outlaw all these and line the streets and walls with padding?
Sticks and stones are natural parts of the landscape. Shovels, axes and cars are tools whose primary purpose is something other than killing.
Guns have one purpose and that is for killing. The only other thing they are good for is target practice (i.e. practicing killing).
I live in MA with some of the toughest gun laws in the nation. Crime here is not lower than neighboring states, actually it's higher. And crime didn't drop when the law was put in place 15 years ago. And criminals are still easily able to obtain guns.
Of course criminals are still easily able to obtain guns. All they have to do is cross the unprotected border into a neighbouring state with lax gun laws. If gun control is to be effective it has to apply to the whole country.
There are plenty of countries out there with tighter gun laws than the US and lower crime rates to match.
There's no requirement for you to keep your savings in fiat currency, there are any number of commodities and stock markets in which you could invest if the idea of fiat currency scares you so much. In theory, you could use fiat currency merely as a short term means of trading with, you know, ordinary people. This would leave your savings immune to fluctuations or rapid devaluation of that particular currency. Of course, you're then at the mercy of the value of those commodities.
Covering the cost of financial transactions is just part of being a retailer. Retailers are charged a fee for credit and debit card transactions, the fee for debit card transactions usually being significantly less. Cash has its own indirect handling costs, whether it's the cost of security, the cost of employing somebody to lug it down to the bank, or whatever fees the bank might charge for a business account.
Most retailers just absorb the cost, no matter what the method of payment, but a few will charge extra for credit cards. Ikea springs to mind.
The law in the UK (which may be derived from an EU directive, I'm not sure) states that if you advertise at a particular price, you must accept at least one form of payment without additional fees, but you can charge fees for alternative forms of payment. Ryanair is notorious for playing this system by only accepting fee-free payment when an uncommon form of payment is used (currently Mastercard pre-paid cards, which have their own direct fees), and charging hefty fees for other, more common forms of payment.
My issue with euro coinage is that the designers spent so much time making sure that blind people could tell the coins apart by touch, that they apparently forgot to make them visually distinctive. 10, 20 and 50 cent use the same common-side design (and in many countries, the same country-side design), and aren't all that different in terms of size.
Not many people appreciate it, but UK coinage is very well designed in this regard. There are four different designs (copper, silver circular, silver 7-sided and brass), each with a small and large version. Very easy to tell apart.
Erm, which UK notes have braille on them? I'm not aware of any. In fact, IIRC, the RNIB specifically advised against including braille on banknotes because it only takes one squashed dot to alter the apparent (to a blind person) value of a note dramatically.
Most UK notes have some form of tactile identifier beyond just the size, but not braille.
Exactly. Regardless of the DRM situation, it's prudent to keep backups of digital files. You can retrieve your DRM'd books from your Kindle via USB mass storage, or you can download it via Kindle for PC/Mac. Amazon cannot make those files disappear, and I don't believe their DRM is granular enough to prevent an individual book from being read. All they can really do is nuke your entire library.
The same goes for iPhone/iPad apps.
Removing DRM from Kindle books, and Adobe Adept DRM from EPUB books, isn't hard. There are tools available online to do so. I've owned two e-readers, a Sony PRS-300 and a Kindle, and before buying them I checked that I could decrypt my purchases, which I do as a matter of course.
If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
There is one important difference: it's much cheaper to write a book than it is to make a film or even a TV episode. You don't have to sell all that many books in order to break even and start making a profit, so you can afford to target niches in the market. The result is that there's a huge breadth of material in printed form, which isn't the case for film and TV.
Books will also age better than film or TV. Whereas special effects that look good now might look cheesy in 20 years' time, the worst you have to worry about in a book is archaic language.
The Facebook app in the app store is free, and has no in-app purchases. Apple receives no cut now. In fact, Apple is subsidising the hosting of the Facebook app on their App Store. I'm sure they wouldn't be too distraught if Facebook decided to host an HTML5 version themselves.
And to be fair, nothing you've said is contradictory. Native apps > HTML5 > Flash.
I think you're getting muddled up - Snow Leopard was the first release to be priced at around $30 (and Lion will be the second). Previously, releases cost around $130.
Both of these releases were Intel only. The last version of OS X to support PPC was Leopard, and upgrading from Tiger to Leopard would have cost $130.
And the way every single major version of Mac OS stops being supported not too long after a major version goes out. Unless you buy the upgrade you're screwed.
Generally I find that it's support from app developers that starts to disappear first, as they start to take advantage of new OS features. Apple security updates for a given version of OS X are usually the last to dry up.
I'm under the impression that the App Store reviewers don't actually have access to the source code of your app, just the binary. This, combined with the use of HTTPS, makes it impossible for them to tell what data is being sent. All they know is that data is being sent, and what URL it's being sent to.
First, Android numbers are artificially high in the US because the iPhone was restricted to a single network with a poor reputation. This generally isn't the case in other countries, so you can't extrapolate from US figures if you want a worldwide perspective.
Second, limiting the sample to mobile phone users means that iPod Touch and iPad users aren't counted. iOS is way ahead of Android in the PMP and tablet market segments.
That depends on whether they want to use variable road pricing, which was an idea mooted in the UK a few years back. The idea being that you get charged more for driving on roads that are more congested. Or something like that.
needs to be in the right locations... Not everywhere... Needs to be near water... They need to be in the right spot
This is a recurring theme with renewables.
It's fair enough, and I was quite surprised that Germany, with its relatively short coastline, is one of the first countries as a whole to announce that they're to attempt this.
When your country is in the right location, though, then arguing for nuclear and against renewables on this basis starts to become slightly silly. You'd be laughed out of Iceland for suggesting nuclear, for example, given their geothermal resources.
The Scottish Government has had a policy similar to Germany's for a while now, but on a longer timeframe. Despite not having control of energy policy, the SG is using its control over planning permission to block the building of new nuclear power plants, and is promoting the build-out of renewables.
And we are better placed than almost any other European country for wind, wave and most importantly tidal energy, which runs like clockwork and doesn't rely on the weather. In fact, it's going to be a matter of national embarrassment if Germany succeed in this and we fail.
I thought that FUD stood for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
And Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt describes quite well what some of the anti-renewables commenters are saying. Fear, that the lights will go out without nuclear. Uncertainty, over what will replace nuclear. Doubt, that renewables can cope with energy demand in a post-nuclear world.
I'm not saying that those aren't legitimate concerns, but having read the article it strikes me more about hope and aspiration, so I think your use of 'FUD' is misplaced. It's not a synonym for "I disagree".
IIRC, 100 W incandescent lightbulbs are banned, in the EU as a whole and not just Germany. Of course, the media left out the '100 W' part when writing their stories, playing it as an attempt to force fluorescent bulbs down our throats.
Yeah, I could have almost swallowed everything else that Google has said on the subject, but this is just grandstanding. Wikipedia manages to localise its website for tens, if not hundreds, of world languages under a single.org domain (with subdomains), so it's utterly ridiculous to think that Google couldn't do the same.
I agree in principle that a national domain registrar should be able to restrict their domain names to people and organisations with a connection to the country. Simply having a localisation on your foreign website isn't a good enough reason to own a local domain, in my opinion.
It's not just about freedom of speech issues. If I buy something from a.co.uk website, for example, I would like that to be an indicator that I am covered by UK consumer protection laws. Unfortunately, Nominet doesn't require the owner of a.co.uk domain to have any connection to the UK, a policy I strongly disagree with.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, the SUV goes in front so that it has something to slipstream.
That's not quite true. In theory, you can use a standard APN for data instead of a BES or BIS.
The problem is that there's no global setting that dictates which communications method should be used. The app developer has to manually detect whether a BES, BIS, APN or WiFi should be used, and switch between them. What you'll probably find is that most won't support all four, especially as data over an APN tends not to be included in bundled data allowances on 'BlackBerry' tariffs.
Contrast this with Android and iOS, where switching between APN and WiFi is handled globally by the OS, and is completely transparent to individual applications.
Could be, but the fact is that they won't be, certainly not on a consistent systemwide basis.
There's a balance to be struck.
On the one hand, there's the problem that you've had where the task doesn't seem to do anything useful. I think your teachers have failed you if you take an entire course, learn all the concepts, but still can't write an end-to-end program that would be half-way useful in the real world.
At the other end of the spectrum, if you want to teach a concept, you don't want your examples to be filled with so much code that is irrelevant to what you are trying to teach, that it gets in the way. My high school computing classes used Java as a teaching language, and the examples were 90% event handling code for the GUI that was showing our results, and 10% code for the actual concept I was trying to learn.
When I was learning to program, everything seemed difficult at first, and I wasn't good at looking at a problem and identifying the solution. Then, sometime in my first year of university, everything just clicked, and I started learning at a much faster pace than previously. Different people hit that point at different times, and some never hit it at all.
Still, I look back on those years and think, hell, I knew nothing. I even look back on the time when I'd left uni with a degree and started my job, and think that I knew very little then. And I'm sure that in five years' time I'll think the same thing about now. I don't think you should feel too bad about not knowing much at the start of college, as you've got a lot of time to learn. Just wait for everything to click.
I think there's mileage in the idea of a drastically simplified TV. The actual 'TV' parts of my TV are redundant. The analogue tuner is useless because analogue broadcasts have ceased, and I don't use the built-in DVB-T tuner because I use an external, HDMI satellite tuner.
All my TV really does is accept inputs from other devices (rapidly converging on HDMI), and output audio to an external box through an optical cable. The only thing I do with my TV remote is turn it on and off, and switch between inputs. Make a TV with a lot of HDMI ports and an optical output on the back, and I might well buy it.
Of course this leaves me with a plethora of remotes, but a programmable remote with an LCD touchscreen, or an eInk screen with one of those infra-red touchscreens, would be pretty cool and shouldn't be difficult to build. I had a remote that came with a set-top box where you could program the volume keys by pointing another remote at it, and it would record the infra-red signal. Much better than relying on entering codes that never work.
Sticks and stones are natural parts of the landscape. Shovels, axes and cars are tools whose primary purpose is something other than killing.
Guns have one purpose and that is for killing. The only other thing they are good for is target practice (i.e. practicing killing).
Of course criminals are still easily able to obtain guns. All they have to do is cross the unprotected border into a neighbouring state with lax gun laws. If gun control is to be effective it has to apply to the whole country.
There are plenty of countries out there with tighter gun laws than the US and lower crime rates to match.
Okay.
There's no requirement for you to keep your savings in fiat currency, there are any number of commodities and stock markets in which you could invest if the idea of fiat currency scares you so much. In theory, you could use fiat currency merely as a short term means of trading with, you know, ordinary people. This would leave your savings immune to fluctuations or rapid devaluation of that particular currency. Of course, you're then at the mercy of the value of those commodities.
Covering the cost of financial transactions is just part of being a retailer. Retailers are charged a fee for credit and debit card transactions, the fee for debit card transactions usually being significantly less. Cash has its own indirect handling costs, whether it's the cost of security, the cost of employing somebody to lug it down to the bank, or whatever fees the bank might charge for a business account.
Most retailers just absorb the cost, no matter what the method of payment, but a few will charge extra for credit cards. Ikea springs to mind.
The law in the UK (which may be derived from an EU directive, I'm not sure) states that if you advertise at a particular price, you must accept at least one form of payment without additional fees, but you can charge fees for alternative forms of payment. Ryanair is notorious for playing this system by only accepting fee-free payment when an uncommon form of payment is used (currently Mastercard pre-paid cards, which have their own direct fees), and charging hefty fees for other, more common forms of payment.
My issue with euro coinage is that the designers spent so much time making sure that blind people could tell the coins apart by touch, that they apparently forgot to make them visually distinctive. 10, 20 and 50 cent use the same common-side design (and in many countries, the same country-side design), and aren't all that different in terms of size.
Not many people appreciate it, but UK coinage is very well designed in this regard. There are four different designs (copper, silver circular, silver 7-sided and brass), each with a small and large version. Very easy to tell apart.
Erm, which UK notes have braille on them? I'm not aware of any. In fact, IIRC, the RNIB specifically advised against including braille on banknotes because it only takes one squashed dot to alter the apparent (to a blind person) value of a note dramatically.
Most UK notes have some form of tactile identifier beyond just the size, but not braille.
Exactly. Regardless of the DRM situation, it's prudent to keep backups of digital files. You can retrieve your DRM'd books from your Kindle via USB mass storage, or you can download it via Kindle for PC/Mac. Amazon cannot make those files disappear, and I don't believe their DRM is granular enough to prevent an individual book from being read. All they can really do is nuke your entire library.
The same goes for iPhone/iPad apps.
Removing DRM from Kindle books, and Adobe Adept DRM from EPUB books, isn't hard. There are tools available online to do so. I've owned two e-readers, a Sony PRS-300 and a Kindle, and before buying them I checked that I could decrypt my purchases, which I do as a matter of course.
There is one important difference: it's much cheaper to write a book than it is to make a film or even a TV episode. You don't have to sell all that many books in order to break even and start making a profit, so you can afford to target niches in the market. The result is that there's a huge breadth of material in printed form, which isn't the case for film and TV.
Books will also age better than film or TV. Whereas special effects that look good now might look cheesy in 20 years' time, the worst you have to worry about in a book is archaic language.
It sounds incorrect to me, although I'm not infallible :)
I do distinctly remember that I didn't upgrade my PowerBook G4 to Leopard because I couldn't justify the cost. $30 I could stomach, $130 not so much.
The Facebook app in the app store is free, and has no in-app purchases. Apple receives no cut now. In fact, Apple is subsidising the hosting of the Facebook app on their App Store. I'm sure they wouldn't be too distraught if Facebook decided to host an HTML5 version themselves.
And to be fair, nothing you've said is contradictory. Native apps > HTML5 > Flash.
That only refers to the introduction page.
I think you're getting muddled up - Snow Leopard was the first release to be priced at around $30 (and Lion will be the second). Previously, releases cost around $130.
Both of these releases were Intel only. The last version of OS X to support PPC was Leopard, and upgrading from Tiger to Leopard would have cost $130.
Generally I find that it's support from app developers that starts to disappear first, as they start to take advantage of new OS features. Apple security updates for a given version of OS X are usually the last to dry up.
I'm under the impression that the App Store reviewers don't actually have access to the source code of your app, just the binary. This, combined with the use of HTTPS, makes it impossible for them to tell what data is being sent. All they know is that data is being sent, and what URL it's being sent to.
Those number are for "U.S. mobile subscribers".
First, Android numbers are artificially high in the US because the iPhone was restricted to a single network with a poor reputation. This generally isn't the case in other countries, so you can't extrapolate from US figures if you want a worldwide perspective.
Second, limiting the sample to mobile phone users means that iPod Touch and iPad users aren't counted. iOS is way ahead of Android in the PMP and tablet market segments.
That depends on whether they want to use variable road pricing, which was an idea mooted in the UK a few years back. The idea being that you get charged more for driving on roads that are more congested. Or something like that.
Maybe they want it to run on Windows 8.
This is a recurring theme with renewables.
It's fair enough, and I was quite surprised that Germany, with its relatively short coastline, is one of the first countries as a whole to announce that they're to attempt this.
When your country is in the right location, though, then arguing for nuclear and against renewables on this basis starts to become slightly silly. You'd be laughed out of Iceland for suggesting nuclear, for example, given their geothermal resources.
The Scottish Government has had a policy similar to Germany's for a while now, but on a longer timeframe. Despite not having control of energy policy, the SG is using its control over planning permission to block the building of new nuclear power plants, and is promoting the build-out of renewables.
And we are better placed than almost any other European country for wind, wave and most importantly tidal energy, which runs like clockwork and doesn't rely on the weather. In fact, it's going to be a matter of national embarrassment if Germany succeed in this and we fail.
I thought that FUD stood for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
And Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt describes quite well what some of the anti-renewables commenters are saying. Fear, that the lights will go out without nuclear. Uncertainty, over what will replace nuclear. Doubt, that renewables can cope with energy demand in a post-nuclear world.
I'm not saying that those aren't legitimate concerns, but having read the article it strikes me more about hope and aspiration, so I think your use of 'FUD' is misplaced. It's not a synonym for "I disagree".
IIRC, 100 W incandescent lightbulbs are banned, in the EU as a whole and not just Germany. Of course, the media left out the '100 W' part when writing their stories, playing it as an attempt to force fluorescent bulbs down our throats.
Yeah, I could have almost swallowed everything else that Google has said on the subject, but this is just grandstanding. Wikipedia manages to localise its website for tens, if not hundreds, of world languages under a single .org domain (with subdomains), so it's utterly ridiculous to think that Google couldn't do the same.
I agree in principle that a national domain registrar should be able to restrict their domain names to people and organisations with a connection to the country. Simply having a localisation on your foreign website isn't a good enough reason to own a local domain, in my opinion.
It's not just about freedom of speech issues. If I buy something from a .co.uk website, for example, I would like that to be an indicator that I am covered by UK consumer protection laws. Unfortunately, Nominet doesn't require the owner of a .co.uk domain to have any connection to the UK, a policy I strongly disagree with.