Installing software on Linux distributions is a huge pain in the ass.
Was a huge pain in the ass, a long time ago. Now there are even pretty "App Store" package managers that will suggest applications for you, and even sell you commercial ones. Sometimes I have to add a repository for an extra package (something you can't do on iOS without jailbreaking it, right?).
Very occasionally I have to build something from sources (but only because I'm a software developer ; non-technical people would almost never have to do this). This is usually as simple as running./configure and paying attention to the libraries it says it needs the -dev package for, and then running make. On Windows I would have to bend over backwards installing a compiler (maybe I'd even have to buy a specific compiler), libraries, setting up my environment, etc.
Windows falls half way between Linux's hell and MacOS.
I'm sorry, Windows is by far the worst. The point you make about Windows 3.1 apps repeatedly installed shared libraries? Windows installers still do this. Having built Windows installers, a lot of the effort is finding and integrating all the 3rd party dependencies into your MSI database. Making Debian packages isn't any kind of fun, but at least you only have to list the packages you need, rather than working out what you need, desperately trying to find merge modules with the correct versions in them, swearing, and then having to repackage third-party dependencies because you can't find a module for them, and then rolling it all into your installer, making it many multiples of the size of your actual application.
Because in a Linux distro there is a single central resource for packages, you don't end up with multiple different packages of the same libraries competing with each other, you don't have to include shared libraries that are available in the repository, etc. Not to mention that you don't have to screw around with registry settings just to make libraries work at all. It is literally the difference between writing a simple list of dependencies, and constructing a whole database.
Because Windows packages don't integrate into any kind of package management, if you want your application kept up to date to improve the opinion of your customers, you at the minimum have to implement some kind of update checker. The less obtrusive ones integrate into the application and check when you run it, but a lot of applications include a separate program that loads at boot time, consuming resources and probably screen real estate by inserting itself into your system tray.
All too often the only way to source updates for Windows applications is to manually check the website and download a new installer.
How you put these things on a scale with Linux at the bottom I have no idea. A distribution that uses a package manager does all three of the things that you state are the ideal, only better, because applications don't have to bundle shared libraries that they can get from the repository, meaning you don't waste bandwidth and disk space (trivial concerns these days, I will acknowledge) on rolling the same libraries into your packages. Applications don't have to update themselves because the package manager will do it, so the developer can concentrate on the core of his application, instead of having to write a web browser and update engine into it. You don't even have to reboot for most updates, because the files can be updated in-place, unlike Windows with it's obligate read locks on every file.
I've done packages for both, and neither are fun, but Windows is much, much harder to package software for, and a much less pleasant experience when it comes to updating software.
Conversely, if you can actually do a good job and replace their old software with new software that does the job better, you're sorted.
I replaced a monstrous thing that was a custom facade on a UML modeller with integrated CVS handling with a couple of Eclipse plugins, a small Java program and a few shell scripts. Their startup time went from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, all their basic operations are at least an order of magnitude faster, the editor is WYSIWYG instead of having to paste HTML in from Dreamweaver, and it uses autocomplete to place links instead of some horrendous wizard where you have to find the thing you want to link to in a tree view.
They don't even mind that I left a whole bunch of features out, because they were there to compensate for the incredible suckitude of the original solution. The only thing they'd really like is a few more GUI widgets, but they have a good (self-maintained wiki) manual and nice friendly shell scripts and really, the tasks the GUI would be for are a minor part of their work - the bits that consume the time are already wrapped in GUIs. I just view it as a minor anxiety with command lines - a GUI wouldn't make anything more robust, or even easier to use (really - just LOOK easier to use), and it would make things harder to debug when they do go wrong.
Just the savings on not having to pay the support licenses for the horrible proprietary Java CVS server they were using has paid for the time I spent on it, and then some. The increased productivity is just gravy. I get about 1 support call a month for it, usually asking for a change to one of the XSLT sheets because they need their templates updating.
The key is not to look at what the old app does and try to replicate it exactly. If you take a step back and work out what the actual requirements are, you'll end up with a better product that the users actually want. The old application can help considerably with that - usually the thing that frustrates them the most is the thing that wastes most of their time and needs to be made the most streamlined or even automated away. For this app, that was the linking - instead firing up a wizard and making of a whole bunch of clicks in a tree view, you now just type the first few letters, hit ctrl-space, and find the item you wanted to link in a menu with the mouse or keyboard. And you can actually copy and paste the links now, which you couldn't do in the old version.
So there are definitely benefits. Fortunately, the manager of this team could see that. Even better for me, he's now become greatly elevated in the hierarchy, carrying my reputation as a miracle worker with him...
Not the same scale though.. we're talking in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions.
I actually got recruiters on LinkedIn trying to pitch me to work in Qatar ; specifically, for healthcare related IT purposes. I was too nervous about leaving my comfy government job in exchange for uncertain contracting work, and upsetting my wife and daughter by moving to another country, however temporarily, but I was sure tempted ; £500 per day is nothing to sneeze at, especially when it's virtually tax free. A couple of months of that would have paid off the residual capital on my mortgage ; a few more would have set me up nicely to build my own house.
This is because I have a few key technologies on my CV that are not in widespread demand, but are in short supply. Specifically, HL7 - "Health Level 7", a healthcare interoperability protocol.
So the advice would be
* Learn some really obscure technologies that the Qatar government want.
* Post your CV on LinkedIn and as many other places as possible.
* Try and find recruiters that specialize in Qatar.
They're building a whole city just to host the World Cup, so I'm sure they have need of a lot of IT contractors.
If we can generate clean energy at half the price of coal, then the intrinsic value of coal as a chemical feedstock will dwarf it's value as an energy source - the same with oil and gas.
Remember, people have been optimizing the generation of energy from coal for many years - the market forces provide excellent reasons to do this. If you make it *that* uneconomic to use it for energy generation, it will stop being used for that within a decade, and maybe people will start taking that cheap energy and examining ways of changing coal tar into plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. If the carbon is locked up in a plastic doohickey it's not in the atmosphere. If those doohickeys end up in a landfill or the bottom of the sea... well, not so great. But at least our civilization might survive long enough to get around to cleaning them up.
Most of the oil in Canada is in the form of tar sands. The product requires a lot of processing to extract and I'm guessing that releases a lot of emissions. So for every say, 6 barrels you export, you have to burn a barrel yourself.
This really impacts the ability to exploit fossil fuel resources without busting your emissions cap. Which to be fair, is probably by design.
If you roll the emissions from extraction into the emissions count for the nation that purchases the oil, it discourages purchase from low EROI fossil fuel sources ; which would continue to have the desired effect of reducing emissions. But Canada are still not going to like it, because it makes their product less desirable.
The EROI of tar sands is now marginally worse than that of photovoltaic cells ; barring significant improvements in the production process for tar sands, and zero progress in solar panel research, this comparison is only going to get worse.
Because they are still working on making stable chemistry for OLED? The clue is in the name - O means organic. Organic molecules decay. The colours on OLED screens therefore fade with time and with UV light.
They can also consume MORE power than LCD under certain circumstances - the light doesn't need to pass through a filter, true, and they are much more efficient at displaying a mostly black screen (because the OLEDs just switch off while the LCD still generates all that backlight and then blocks it), but in a predominantly white picture, such as is common in computer applications, they can consume more power than the LCD does. I guess that lots of little LED elements are less efficient than a few big ones.
Quantum dots are teensy little aggregations of inorganic chemicals, so they shouldn't suffer from the same decay problems as OLED.
He trades HIS time for money. The value of his time is dictated to him by his employer, because he has no bargaining power, and his employers fight dirty to prevent any collective bargaining power accumulating in the form of a union, but at least it's his time, an honest trade of a real commodity.
Traders trade other peoples money. They dictate the value of stocks, and currencies. The very definition of the stock market is an instrument that defines the value of companies, and the traders play it for all they can get. By playing their games, they can make the cash value of something plummet, even though it's intrinsic value never changed, buy it for cents on the dollar, and reap the difference as profits. By inserting themselves as a kind of proxy in the loop via high frequency trading, they can squeeze even more out. They hire math PhDs specifically for their ability to invent financial instruments that are too complex to understand, so they can't be taxed or monitored.
Traders will freely admit they don't give a shit about any of the claimed positive effects that the market has. It is not some noble calling, providing liquidity and a fair valuation of your business. It's a racket. The first thing Wall Street thought after the planes hit the Twin Towers, after "Whoa!", was "Whoa, the price of gold must be skyrocketing." The first thing they think when war breaks out is "How can I get me some of that action?"
I've no problem with honest trade, until something better comes along. But Wall Street and the LSX have very little to do with honest trade.
Cave paintings, unless we sort out our various resource crises.
If we do.. well, maybe we'll have smart paper as envisioned in The Diamond Age, or Virtual Retinal Display goggles ("phenomenoscopes", also in Diamond Age), or direct brain interface.
The switches shouldn't matter ; it's the controller electronics that draw the current. I wouldn't be surprised if the Unicomp Customizers didn't have quite the same robust build quality as the original Model M, but I would expect that they draw much less juice since their controllers are far more likely to be a single IC.
I wonder if you could retrofit a Model M with a newer controller?
If you hadn't already exposed yourself to the owner, I'd write a how-to and send it to them anonymously, and later send the credit cards an ANONYMOUS tip.
Why anonymous? Hacking, even for white-hat reasons, is illegal in most jurisdictions. Even accidental hacking.
Now that you've exposed yourself to them it would be too easy for them to piece it together who turned them in for a nice PCI audit. It would be all too easy of them to send your emails to a computer crime division and get you busted, especially if they have any friends with influence there. Just avoid using their product and quietly tell your friends not to do the same.
The only time I have ever even considered informing a company of a security hole is on an occasion when I'd previously worked for them, personally knew the owner, and knew that the owner respected my ability.
Is Java an insane higher level language? What about Eclipse, which works well with a whole range of high AND low level languages?
There just isn't any programs available.
I find that most of my needs are met. In fact, a lot of the programs I use on Windows were ported from Linux. The only piece of software I pay for (a developers merge tool) had it's origins on Windows, but they sell a Linux port - presumably in recognition of the fact that so many professionals find Linux machines productive.
If you want to do C#, Monodevelop is available, although was distinctly inferior to it's Windows progenitor, SharpDevelop, the last I looked. But that's also true of Mono itself, IMHO. Aristeer is written in C#, so in principle there's no reason it couldn't be run on Mono / Linux, unless it uses some of the features that Mono hasn't caught up with yet.
For PHP (and a host of other things too) there's Komodo IDE (with it's free / Open counterpart Komodo Edit).
You probably have a point on the media side of things. But I think a media person could justifiably prefer OS X to Windows.
The appropriate technology for voting is a pencil.
Anything mechanized or computerized might be splendid, efficient, and offer a whole host of other benefits. But they all lack the absolutely vital feature; the average man on the street must be able to audit it. And verily, should be required to do so.
Making a voting system where only a limited set of technocrats can audit it's veracity is madness.
I think the main key point in Star Trek is that it's really easy to get a majority of people to agree to a policy of "Hey, lets use our totally awesome technology to make life comfortable for everyone on Earth, and use the spare resources for R&D, exploration, and defense."
For a greater or lesser degree of comfort, I would say that this has been a possibility for the people of Earth for some time now, and that the major obstacle is the entrenched power blocs who continue to consolidate their hold on our resources.
As Picard says in First Contact "We have an evolved sensibility". I wonder what needs to evolve the most? The 1%, who need to grow up enough to realize that they could be happy and fulfilled just making things better for people and forgoing the 2nd yacht with a gold toilet, or the 99%, who are starting to realize that they are really pissed off with the oligarchs. Or perhaps the trekkers who need to realize that fictional techno-utopia may be beyond the abilities of the human race.
The N9 isn't available in the markets that would embrace it. This is widely perceived to be totally on purpose ; it's suspected that the device has only been produced to satisfy contractual obligations. Releasing it in a few markets where it's destined to totally bomb [1] means that the new Microsoft contingent at Nokia can point the finger and say "look - Linux phones don't sell, we won't be doing *that* again".
[1] The Middle East and Africa? Not the first place I'd think of to release a high-cost mass market consumer product. You could just about the Middle East it if this was a gold-plated, Swarovski Crystal (oh wait ; "shiny bits of glass") encrusted version of an existing phone. Africa is the land of the candy-bar phone.
And this is why we are migrating away from Windows servers as fast as we can... they insist on having a root login, and on having the server SMNP extensions installed (but that we don't mind), but because they have no Linux skills, they can't cause too much damage.
The only reason we have any Windows servers left is either because we're too overstretched to migrate the services they are running, or because we need a few boxes for developing Windows client applications on, and an 8 core Xeon with 8GB of RAM is just about enough to bear up under the strain of the clogware.
Slashdotters will have a skewed perception of IT anyway.
The articles says "a department that is, after all, designed to help and support workers". For certain classes of users, this could not be further from the truth.
Last time I called IT, they commented on how little I called them. This is because the only reason I call them is for the occasional forgotten password. Everything else, I know it's going to take less time and frustration if I fix it myself. Yes, I know that some people who do this are rogue users who should be shot.
My department hates IT because they have to carry out the ridiculously over-protective policies forced on a large government department. And because the policy is designed for an army of clerical workers when we are an R&D organization.
They actually want to impose VDI on all of us - you have to justify not having it. Everyone I work with has a mix of custom tooling (users AND developers) that means that making a virtual machine image for each of them, or even for each user group, would be a nightmare. We are the least suitable set of users for VDI I can imagine, but hey, since we're the "tech guys", we get to be the guinea pigs and try it out first.
They're experimenting with Windows 7 - but not with 64-bit versions, which some of our apps are starting to need, because the enormous suite of software they install to enforce policy doesn't have a 64-bit version yet.
They changed our anti-virus from Symantec, which ate about 10% CPU time when checking, to McAfee, which eats about 40%. I/O heavy processes that used to take around 2 minutes now take 8. They got McAfee free in a bundle - it's a shame about the cost to our productivity. The snoopware that checks every path on your drive - including ones inside archives (yes, including jars - we're mostly Java developers) will thrash your disk for about 20 minutes and then will consume a whole CPU core for another 10 zipping up the list to send back to base. Since the change of antivirus, reading all those files of course also thrashes the CPU. This grinds some of our machines to a halt so well that you can watch the display being rendered, one raster line at a time.
Not a day goes past without my colleague cursing because his machine is doing the bidding of the IT department instead of compiling his code.
But what about the things they do for us? The things we ask for?
If you ask for software that's not sold by one of our official suppliers, they'll subcontract one of them to : buy it for you, mark it up 10% and then deduct the whole cost from your budget. Once this process took 13 weeks - by which time, the job the software was intended to speed up was already complete.
If you lock out your email account, they tell you to get in touch with your "local email admin". You can't get into the address book to find out who that is, without your email account.
To be honest, I ran out of anecdotes in that department there, because I barely ask them for anything ; as I said, it's easier to do it myself.
We get that IT is a department that perceives the majority of users to be hapless idiots who would install a worm that caused Armageddon in exchange for a smiley pack for their IM client. To be honest, as developers, we can really sympathise with that sometimes. But we get very frustrated being tarred with the same brush, because the tar makes doing our job so much harder.
In my case, I'm sure simulated flight has a lot to do with it. But what people now thing of as "inverted" is actually the original way around - the first FPS games that supported mouselook like Duke 3D did things this way round.
It makes sense. Imagine your hand on the mouse is actually on the top of the head of your gaming avatar. You push the hand forward, he looks down. You pull back, he looks up.
And you get to use the same reflex arcs for flight simulation - what's not to like?
After I bought the bundle, I sat and watched the sales counter, and the total raised counter, tick past for a while. I couldn't get over the number of assholes who were literally paying a single lousy US cent for the bundle. I think they were in the majority. Heavens knows how they got the average price figures they did - there must be a lot of people who pay way over the odds.
I would even believe that processing transactions like that costs more than the money you take in.
If ONLY you could disable the feature to download the document as an offline format, or restrict it to certain users.
Alas, the first thing that many users do is download the document, and make their edits there, and then you enter the horrible cycle of mailing it around and wondering who's got the "ball".
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I've had no trouble running it on OpenJDK, despite what the download pages claim.
Installing software on Linux distributions is a huge pain in the ass.
Was a huge pain in the ass, a long time ago. Now there are even pretty "App Store" package managers that will suggest applications for you, and even sell you commercial ones. Sometimes I have to add a repository for an extra package (something you can't do on iOS without jailbreaking it, right?).
Very occasionally I have to build something from sources (but only because I'm a software developer ; non-technical people would almost never have to do this). This is usually as simple as running ./configure and paying attention to the libraries it says it needs the -dev package for, and then running make. On Windows I would have to bend over backwards installing a compiler (maybe I'd even have to buy a specific compiler), libraries, setting up my environment, etc.
Windows falls half way between Linux's hell and MacOS.
I'm sorry, Windows is by far the worst. The point you make about Windows 3.1 apps repeatedly installed shared libraries? Windows installers still do this. Having built Windows installers, a lot of the effort is finding and integrating all the 3rd party dependencies into your MSI database. Making Debian packages isn't any kind of fun, but at least you only have to list the packages you need, rather than working out what you need, desperately trying to find merge modules with the correct versions in them, swearing, and then having to repackage third-party dependencies because you can't find a module for them, and then rolling it all into your installer, making it many multiples of the size of your actual application.
Because in a Linux distro there is a single central resource for packages, you don't end up with multiple different packages of the same libraries competing with each other, you don't have to include shared libraries that are available in the repository, etc. Not to mention that you don't have to screw around with registry settings just to make libraries work at all. It is literally the difference between writing a simple list of dependencies, and constructing a whole database.
Because Windows packages don't integrate into any kind of package management, if you want your application kept up to date to improve the opinion of your customers, you at the minimum have to implement some kind of update checker. The less obtrusive ones integrate into the application and check when you run it, but a lot of applications include a separate program that loads at boot time, consuming resources and probably screen real estate by inserting itself into your system tray.
All too often the only way to source updates for Windows applications is to manually check the website and download a new installer.
How you put these things on a scale with Linux at the bottom I have no idea. A distribution that uses a package manager does all three of the things that you state are the ideal, only better, because applications don't have to bundle shared libraries that they can get from the repository, meaning you don't waste bandwidth and disk space (trivial concerns these days, I will acknowledge) on rolling the same libraries into your packages. Applications don't have to update themselves because the package manager will do it, so the developer can concentrate on the core of his application, instead of having to write a web browser and update engine into it. You don't even have to reboot for most updates, because the files can be updated in-place, unlike Windows with it's obligate read locks on every file.
I've done packages for both, and neither are fun, but Windows is much, much harder to package software for, and a much less pleasant experience when it comes to updating software.
Conversely, if you can actually do a good job and replace their old software with new software that does the job better, you're sorted.
I replaced a monstrous thing that was a custom facade on a UML modeller with integrated CVS handling with a couple of Eclipse plugins, a small Java program and a few shell scripts. Their startup time went from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, all their basic operations are at least an order of magnitude faster, the editor is WYSIWYG instead of having to paste HTML in from Dreamweaver, and it uses autocomplete to place links instead of some horrendous wizard where you have to find the thing you want to link to in a tree view.
They don't even mind that I left a whole bunch of features out, because they were there to compensate for the incredible suckitude of the original solution. The only thing they'd really like is a few more GUI widgets, but they have a good (self-maintained wiki) manual and nice friendly shell scripts and really, the tasks the GUI would be for are a minor part of their work - the bits that consume the time are already wrapped in GUIs. I just view it as a minor anxiety with command lines - a GUI wouldn't make anything more robust, or even easier to use (really - just LOOK easier to use), and it would make things harder to debug when they do go wrong.
Just the savings on not having to pay the support licenses for the horrible proprietary Java CVS server they were using has paid for the time I spent on it, and then some. The increased productivity is just gravy. I get about 1 support call a month for it, usually asking for a change to one of the XSLT sheets because they need their templates updating.
The key is not to look at what the old app does and try to replicate it exactly. If you take a step back and work out what the actual requirements are, you'll end up with a better product that the users actually want. The old application can help considerably with that - usually the thing that frustrates them the most is the thing that wastes most of their time and needs to be made the most streamlined or even automated away. For this app, that was the linking - instead firing up a wizard and making of a whole bunch of clicks in a tree view, you now just type the first few letters, hit ctrl-space, and find the item you wanted to link in a menu with the mouse or keyboard. And you can actually copy and paste the links now, which you couldn't do in the old version.
So there are definitely benefits. Fortunately, the manager of this team could see that. Even better for me, he's now become greatly elevated in the hierarchy, carrying my reputation as a miracle worker with him...
Not the same scale though.. we're talking in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions.
I actually got recruiters on LinkedIn trying to pitch me to work in Qatar ; specifically, for healthcare related IT purposes. I was too nervous about leaving my comfy government job in exchange for uncertain contracting work, and upsetting my wife and daughter by moving to another country, however temporarily, but I was sure tempted ; £500 per day is nothing to sneeze at, especially when it's virtually tax free. A couple of months of that would have paid off the residual capital on my mortgage ; a few more would have set me up nicely to build my own house.
This is because I have a few key technologies on my CV that are not in widespread demand, but are in short supply. Specifically, HL7 - "Health Level 7", a healthcare interoperability protocol.
So the advice would be
* Learn some really obscure technologies that the Qatar government want.
* Post your CV on LinkedIn and as many other places as possible.
* Try and find recruiters that specialize in Qatar.
They're building a whole city just to host the World Cup, so I'm sure they have need of a lot of IT contractors.
If we can generate clean energy at half the price of coal, then the intrinsic value of coal as a chemical feedstock will dwarf it's value as an energy source - the same with oil and gas.
Remember, people have been optimizing the generation of energy from coal for many years - the market forces provide excellent reasons to do this. If you make it *that* uneconomic to use it for energy generation, it will stop being used for that within a decade, and maybe people will start taking that cheap energy and examining ways of changing coal tar into plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. If the carbon is locked up in a plastic doohickey it's not in the atmosphere. If those doohickeys end up in a landfill or the bottom of the sea... well, not so great. But at least our civilization might survive long enough to get around to cleaning them up.
Most of the oil in Canada is in the form of tar sands. The product requires a lot of processing to extract and I'm guessing that releases a lot of emissions. So for every say, 6 barrels you export, you have to burn a barrel yourself.
This really impacts the ability to exploit fossil fuel resources without busting your emissions cap. Which to be fair, is probably by design.
If you roll the emissions from extraction into the emissions count for the nation that purchases the oil, it discourages purchase from low EROI fossil fuel sources ; which would continue to have the desired effect of reducing emissions. But Canada are still not going to like it, because it makes their product less desirable.
The EROI of tar sands is now marginally worse than that of photovoltaic cells ; barring significant improvements in the production process for tar sands, and zero progress in solar panel research, this comparison is only going to get worse.
Because they are still working on making stable chemistry for OLED? The clue is in the name - O means organic. Organic molecules decay. The colours on OLED screens therefore fade with time and with UV light.
They can also consume MORE power than LCD under certain circumstances - the light doesn't need to pass through a filter, true, and they are much more efficient at displaying a mostly black screen (because the OLEDs just switch off while the LCD still generates all that backlight and then blocks it), but in a predominantly white picture, such as is common in computer applications, they can consume more power than the LCD does. I guess that lots of little LED elements are less efficient than a few big ones.
Quantum dots are teensy little aggregations of inorganic chemicals, so they shouldn't suffer from the same decay problems as OLED.
He trades HIS time for money. The value of his time is dictated to him by his employer, because he has no bargaining power, and his employers fight dirty to prevent any collective bargaining power accumulating in the form of a union, but at least it's his time, an honest trade of a real commodity.
Traders trade other peoples money. They dictate the value of stocks, and currencies. The very definition of the stock market is an instrument that defines the value of companies, and the traders play it for all they can get. By playing their games, they can make the cash value of something plummet, even though it's intrinsic value never changed, buy it for cents on the dollar, and reap the difference as profits. By inserting themselves as a kind of proxy in the loop via high frequency trading, they can squeeze even more out. They hire math PhDs specifically for their ability to invent financial instruments that are too complex to understand, so they can't be taxed or monitored.
Traders will freely admit they don't give a shit about any of the claimed positive effects that the market has. It is not some noble calling, providing liquidity and a fair valuation of your business. It's a racket. The first thing Wall Street thought after the planes hit the Twin Towers, after "Whoa!", was "Whoa, the price of gold must be skyrocketing." The first thing they think when war breaks out is "How can I get me some of that action?"
I've no problem with honest trade, until something better comes along. But Wall Street and the LSX have very little to do with honest trade.
Cave paintings, unless we sort out our various resource crises.
If we do.. well, maybe we'll have smart paper as envisioned in The Diamond Age, or Virtual Retinal Display goggles ("phenomenoscopes", also in Diamond Age), or direct brain interface.
The switches shouldn't matter ; it's the controller electronics that draw the current. I wouldn't be surprised if the Unicomp Customizers didn't have quite the same robust build quality as the original Model M, but I would expect that they draw much less juice since their controllers are far more likely to be a single IC.
I wonder if you could retrofit a Model M with a newer controller?
If you hadn't already exposed yourself to the owner, I'd write a how-to and send it to them anonymously, and later send the credit cards an ANONYMOUS tip.
Why anonymous? Hacking, even for white-hat reasons, is illegal in most jurisdictions. Even accidental hacking.
Now that you've exposed yourself to them it would be too easy for them to piece it together who turned them in for a nice PCI audit. It would be all too easy of them to send your emails to a computer crime division and get you busted, especially if they have any friends with influence there. Just avoid using their product and quietly tell your friends not to do the same.
The only time I have ever even considered informing a company of a security hole is on an occasion when I'd previously worked for them, personally knew the owner, and knew that the owner respected my ability.
any other sane higher level language
Is Java an insane higher level language? What about Eclipse, which works well with a whole range of high AND low level languages?
There just isn't any programs available.
I find that most of my needs are met. In fact, a lot of the programs I use on Windows were ported from Linux. The only piece of software I pay for (a developers merge tool) had it's origins on Windows, but they sell a Linux port - presumably in recognition of the fact that so many professionals find Linux machines productive.
If you want to do C#, Monodevelop is available, although was distinctly inferior to it's Windows progenitor, SharpDevelop, the last I looked. But that's also true of Mono itself, IMHO. Aristeer is written in C#, so in principle there's no reason it couldn't be run on Mono / Linux, unless it uses some of the features that Mono hasn't caught up with yet.
For PHP (and a host of other things too) there's Komodo IDE (with it's free / Open counterpart Komodo Edit).
You probably have a point on the media side of things. But I think a media person could justifiably prefer OS X to Windows.
The appropriate technology for voting is a pencil.
Anything mechanized or computerized might be splendid, efficient, and offer a whole host of other benefits. But they all lack the absolutely vital feature; the average man on the street must be able to audit it. And verily, should be required to do so.
Making a voting system where only a limited set of technocrats can audit it's veracity is madness.
I think the main key point in Star Trek is that it's really easy to get a majority of people to agree to a policy of "Hey, lets use our totally awesome technology to make life comfortable for everyone on Earth, and use the spare resources for R&D, exploration, and defense."
For a greater or lesser degree of comfort, I would say that this has been a possibility for the people of Earth for some time now, and that the major obstacle is the entrenched power blocs who continue to consolidate their hold on our resources.
As Picard says in First Contact "We have an evolved sensibility". I wonder what needs to evolve the most? The 1%, who need to grow up enough to realize that they could be happy and fulfilled just making things better for people and forgoing the 2nd yacht with a gold toilet, or the 99%, who are starting to realize that they are really pissed off with the oligarchs. Or perhaps the trekkers who need to realize that fictional techno-utopia may be beyond the abilities of the human race.
The N9 isn't available in the markets that would embrace it. This is widely perceived to be totally on purpose ; it's suspected that the device has only been produced to satisfy contractual obligations. Releasing it in a few markets where it's destined to totally bomb [1] means that the new Microsoft contingent at Nokia can point the finger and say "look - Linux phones don't sell, we won't be doing *that* again".
[1] The Middle East and Africa? Not the first place I'd think of to release a high-cost mass market consumer product. You could just about the Middle East it if this was a gold-plated, Swarovski Crystal (oh wait ; "shiny bits of glass") encrusted version of an existing phone. Africa is the land of the candy-bar phone.
Thrumpberry Juice!
Ick, yes. Our teacher actually wrote the manual for COMAL. I think it just has too many letters, the L on the end is redundant.
That's Lady Lara Croft to you, peasant.
Lucy Liu could be more effective in the geek sphere..
And this is why we are migrating away from Windows servers as fast as we can... they insist on having a root login, and on having the server SMNP extensions installed (but that we don't mind), but because they have no Linux skills, they can't cause too much damage.
The only reason we have any Windows servers left is either because we're too overstretched to migrate the services they are running, or because we need a few boxes for developing Windows client applications on, and an 8 core Xeon with 8GB of RAM is just about enough to bear up under the strain of the clogware.
Slashdotters will have a skewed perception of IT anyway.
The articles says "a department that is, after all, designed to help and support workers". For certain classes of users, this could not be further from the truth.
Last time I called IT, they commented on how little I called them. This is because the only reason I call them is for the occasional forgotten password. Everything else, I know it's going to take less time and frustration if I fix it myself. Yes, I know that some people who do this are rogue users who should be shot.
My department hates IT because they have to carry out the ridiculously over-protective policies forced on a large government department. And because the policy is designed for an army of clerical workers when we are an R&D organization.
They actually want to impose VDI on all of us - you have to justify not having it. Everyone I work with has a mix of custom tooling (users AND developers) that means that making a virtual machine image for each of them, or even for each user group, would be a nightmare. We are the least suitable set of users for VDI I can imagine, but hey, since we're the "tech guys", we get to be the guinea pigs and try it out first.
They're experimenting with Windows 7 - but not with 64-bit versions, which some of our apps are starting to need, because the enormous suite of software they install to enforce policy doesn't have a 64-bit version yet.
They changed our anti-virus from Symantec, which ate about 10% CPU time when checking, to McAfee, which eats about 40%. I/O heavy processes that used to take around 2 minutes now take 8. They got McAfee free in a bundle - it's a shame about the cost to our productivity. The snoopware that checks every path on your drive - including ones inside archives (yes, including jars - we're mostly Java developers) will thrash your disk for about 20 minutes and then will consume a whole CPU core for another 10 zipping up the list to send back to base. Since the change of antivirus, reading all those files of course also thrashes the CPU. This grinds some of our machines to a halt so well that you can watch the display being rendered, one raster line at a time.
Not a day goes past without my colleague cursing because his machine is doing the bidding of the IT department instead of compiling his code.
But what about the things they do for us? The things we ask for?
If you ask for software that's not sold by one of our official suppliers, they'll subcontract one of them to : buy it for you, mark it up 10% and then deduct the whole cost from your budget. Once this process took 13 weeks - by which time, the job the software was intended to speed up was already complete.
If you lock out your email account, they tell you to get in touch with your "local email admin". You can't get into the address book to find out who that is, without your email account.
To be honest, I ran out of anecdotes in that department there, because I barely ask them for anything ; as I said, it's easier to do it myself.
We get that IT is a department that perceives the majority of users to be hapless idiots who would install a worm that caused Armageddon in exchange for a smiley pack for their IM client. To be honest, as developers, we can really sympathise with that sometimes. But we get very frustrated being tarred with the same brush, because the tar makes doing our job so much harder.
In my case, I'm sure simulated flight has a lot to do with it. But what people now thing of as "inverted" is actually the original way around - the first FPS games that supported mouselook like Duke 3D did things this way round.
It makes sense. Imagine your hand on the mouse is actually on the top of the head of your gaming avatar. You push the hand forward, he looks down. You pull back, he looks up.
And you get to use the same reflex arcs for flight simulation - what's not to like?
And that's a million on choose your own price.
After I bought the bundle, I sat and watched the sales counter, and the total raised counter, tick past for a while. I couldn't get over the number of assholes who were literally paying a single lousy US cent for the bundle. I think they were in the majority. Heavens knows how they got the average price figures they did - there must be a lot of people who pay way over the odds.
I would even believe that processing transactions like that costs more than the money you take in.
I mean, WTF? This is for a children's charity.
To a degree, this works nicely on Google Docs.
If ONLY you could disable the feature to download the document as an offline format, or restrict it to certain users.
Alas, the first thing that many users do is download the document, and make their edits there, and then you enter the horrible cycle of mailing it around and wondering who's got the "ball".
Yeah, but a giant switch statement with no operations in it should be optimized out by any compiler worth it's salt.
Unless some peckerhead in management told the developers to turn off all optimization because he heard about optimization problems...