Although I will miss the shitty joke of looking up "Boring" to see if it still says "See Civil Engineers"
In other news: the elderly ex-CEO of Yell.com was last seen doddering around second-hand book stores asking if they had a copy of an old book called "The Yellow Pages"...
NB, I received a copy of YP this year, and there's a BT directory for 2015-16 floating around (still in its shrink wrap)... but they're tiny compared to the ones we had in the Good Old Days and even a wimp could probably tear one in half.
So what did Apple do right (haters need not comment here)? Or What did Commodore and Radio Shack do wrong?
Yes, it's really more of a rhetorical question.
As well as the expandability mentioned by others, Apple had far better graphics than the TRS-80 (huge blocky 2x3 character-based things for pseudo-pixel-based graphics) or the PET (no pixel-based graphics, just the distant ancestors of emoji...) ISTR they also got a boost from being the original platform for Visicalc the first successful spreadsheet (I'm sure it had antecedents) and probably the first truly "new" application of the microcomputer age.
However, Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but Commodore, Radio Shack, the numerous CP/M-based small business systems and many others had a sustained run of success - and Apple can't claim responsibility for their demise.
Commodore did better in Europe/UK (where Apple charged silly prices), SInclair, Acorn, Commodore and Amstrad dominated in the UK. There was a bit of a shake-up in the early 80s which killed off most of the also-rans, but the big 3 got though that. Then the IBM PC Clones arrived at home/small business/hobbyist prices (I don't think IBM alone would have got that far - remember the PCJr?) and squashed everything... and would probably have squashed Apple if that young lady hadn't burst into the auditorium and thrown her hammer at the screen.
The Mac, or maybe even just that ad, is probably the only reason we're not saying "Anybody remember Apple? What happened to them?" today is the Mac, and maybe even more specifically that famous 1984 advert.
It's as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in butthurt and were suddenly silenced.
Only because it wasn't Joanna Lumley (again)/Summer Glau/Emma Watson (insert more fan favourited to taste). They've been dropping anvil-subtle hints for the last couple of years.
...because there was probably a rigorous paper-trail of risk-assessments, safety precautions, waivers, insurance, compliance by-laws for handling dangerous animals etc. proving that everything had been done to make the "stunt" relatively safe. Oh, and lawyers. Lots of lawyers. If it had just been a case of "hey, why don't you get in the cage and play with the tigers - I saw somewhere on Slashdot that tigers never attack humans" then there may well have been a prosecution. I bet there was also a doozy of an out-of-court settlement to stop the civil courts going mediaeval on someone's ass.
If this woman goes on trial, she will surely be asked why she imagined that firing a.50 cal at someone's chest at point-blank range would be OK provided they were holding a book. If she weeks of research that they did, practicing on dummies, comparing the effectiveness of phone directories, bibles, encyclopaedias to find a publication that could reliably stop bullets then maybe she can get off. I doubt it, though.
You are of course aware that according to Newtons third law of motion the same 2000J would be applied to the hand holding the gun, right?
Uh... methinks you're confusing energy (1/2 mass times velocity^2 or force * distance) with momentum (mass * velocity, or force*time). The kinetic energy comes from the chemical energy stored in the charge, and the bullet (plus the bang and the heat) gets the lions share.
Your hand gets the same force for the same time as the bullet but, as you say, its spread out over a wide area. You don't get the same energy (you're heavier than a bullet so the same force can't move you as far as it can the bullet in the same time, or as fast - the velocity squared in the KE equation is a bitch).
But if it get confused when spaces and tabs are used interchangeable, that's pretty bad.
I think that's by design to punish anybody who deviates from whatever the One True Indentation Style is this week. I'm only surprised that Python 2 doesn't require tabs and Python 3 spaces.
Any good thing said about Python comes from a person who can't see any problem with significant white space and never read the 20th Century "Thompson & Richie admit than Unix was a practical joke" email (in which significant whitespace in makefiles was "evidence").
Tried Python once - gritted my teeth and decided to get over the whitespace thing, flipped a coin to get over the whole "Python 2 or 3" thing... started on a little project... needed XML DOM and XPATH libraries so looked around and found about 4 half-written subsets plus a long argument about how DOM could be implemented in a truly "pythonesque" fashion - gave up and went back to another well-known scripting language beginning with a 'p' (tm) that is admittedly a pile of festering shit in terms of elegance and purity, but which offered bindings for the ubiquitous Apache XML libraries and thus got the job done.
Admittedly, that was years ago. so maybe they've found a way of implementing that particular requirement in a way that won't alert the Spanish Inquisition to break out the Comfy Chair. Maybe they've even sorted the "3rd Version of Python vs. Python Version 2" schism. Since all the evidence suggests that some people have managed to write substantial software in it, I might give it another spin someday, but my general feeling is that its just gratuitously different from C-descended-or-inspired syntax the sake of it.
It does have the advantage that it's not (AFAIK) indentured to Microsoft (C#), Apple (Swift), Oracle (Java) or Google (what day is it?) and doesn't promote mono-paradigm zealotry, so it might be a good choice for teaching principles.
Braces didn't win over whitespace because of C's readability.
Its not about readability: its about not having your code turned into line noise because you accidentally left "hard tabs" enabled in the editor, some idiot hit "reformat" or or mixed DOS and UNIX line endings, or tried to merge code written by some heretic who indented by 3 spaces instead of the 2 spaces carved in stone by His Noodley Appendage.
Like all punctuation, it is a bit of Belt and Braces (haha!) redundancy that removes any ambiguity and which you'll be grateful of should you ever need to reformat your code.
Maybe that's the thing - it appeals to the Sheldon Coopers of this world that code written by anybody who doesn't follow their particular One True Indentation Style (or nests blocks more than 1 deep when they should implement any sequence of more than two lines as a function) can be deemed officially unusable and can't be fixed at a stroke by hitting Escape-meta-whatever.
As I understood it, the key difference is that the PM has get it approved, and the opposition party duly did so. If they had said 'no', it wouldn't have happened.
...and yet approved it even though the prediction at the time was that the Labour party were going to be decimated and the PM returned with a stonking majority - which begs the question "under what circumstances would parliament not approve a snap election"?
Actually, since 2010-ish, the UK does have a fixed, 5-year election cycle, designed to stop PMs calling snap elections at their party's convenience whenever they like what they're hearing in the opinion polls.
However, the legislation was drafted by politicians and thus has an "unless you really want to" clause, which is why we've just had a snap election called by the PM at her party's convenience because she liked what she was hearing in the opinion polls.
On the other hand, maybe the resulting debacle will make future leaders learn from history and think twice,,, wait, no what am I saying?
I just want to know who was the weirdo in the yellow and black 'clown suit' standing behind Corbyn during one of his news conferences.
Probably the candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Sadly, they weren't standing in my neck of the woods, because if you read their manifesto you'll see its the most consistent and coherent of the lot (E.g. "Atheism will be given charity status, being a non-prophet organization").
The constituencies for the main party leaders always attract half a dozen or so, er... alternative candidates.
iTunes makes me want to shoot myself did when I ran OS X on a iMac does on windows it is just trash.
Yeah, as I said, Apple aren't perfect - you'll find plenty of Apple users (apart from the total evangelists) happy to criticise iTunes, be it on Mac, Windows or iOS and the lack of access to the file system on iOS. Apple have been guilty of messing up the iOS music player to promote their streaming services over local libraries, too.
I'd put iOS and MacOS in different categories: I really prefer MacOS to the alternative desktop OSs, as a platform for general computing. If there's any aspect you don't like (e.g. iTunes) and look for alternatives you're no worse off than with Windows (unless you want to praise Windows Media Player?)
iOS is great, seamless, consistent and easy to use if you use it the way Apple intended (e.g. iTunes syncing is much easier and more seamless than shifting.mp3 files around until you do something awkward like move your iDevice between two different computers) but otherwise it is definitely a walled garden. I ended up going with Android for my phone partly for this reason - I do have an iPad but honestly I just use that as a "consumption" device. However, it took a bit of hunting before I found good Android solutions to music syncing etc. and decent players with features like gapless playback.
Just checked on Outlook: it works as it should for me. Drag and drop recipients no problem.
Maybe that was just Win10 Mail then... (consistency!) there were plenty of other annoyances with Outlook for me.
Apple aren't perfect - their current hardware line up leaves much to be desired, which lead to me recently having a fling with a MS Surface Book: I wanted to mess with the tablet/stylus idea for a project I'm working on, plus the Surface range seemed like the closest thing to a windows "reference platform" that should showcase WIn10 at its best. The Surface Book failed within the 30 day "easy returns" period - now, other people have had good experiences with the SB so I'm not going to knock it on that basis, but there were other more fundamental reasons why I bailed and got my money back rather than accept the offer of a new replacement machine.
I'd also note that I've used DOS, Windows and Linux, MacOS and various others on and off since forever (ISTR there must have been at least one occasion when I used WIndows, MacOS ('classic' and X), Linux, RiscOS and VMS. Windows 95/NT5/2000/XP was my daily driver from about 1996-2006 before I switched to Mac, and I've always had a Win7 VM on my Mac for testing websites and stuff. What I'm saying is: this is not "eek, the keys are a bit different" - I can cope with things being "a bit different", I already mostly know how to use Windows (I've developed for Windows, whereas everything I've written on the Mac has been crossplatform) and I'd been getting real work done on the Surface before it failed.
Mac advantage 1: Mac OS and Mac OS apps are, typically, just nicer: they're responsive (click the mouse and, generally, there's an instant response - even if its only an hourglass you know you've clicked something). On windows, frequently, there was no sign of anything happening for a second or so. Apps tend to be consistent and designed with more "attention to detail" than you see on Windows.
Examples: Apple Mail is not the best Mail client by a long chalk and receives much abuse, but select part of a message and hit reply and you get a new message with just that text quoted. How else should it work? I now know where all those silly huge chain emails come from - because that's what Win10 mail and Outlook force you to do. Someone on the 'To' line ought to be on 'CC' instead? Just drag them - the App recognises each address as a discrete object. On Windows, carefully select the email address by hand, copy & paste, being careful not to mess up the separating commas. Outlook 2016 is feature-rich but usability poor - not even properly integrated into the Win 10 notification or calendar system and I had to install a third party plug-in to stop it quitting (and hence stopping checking for new mail) every time I closed the window. Outlook wouldn't talk to my Google calendar or address list (and Outlook 2016 still doesn't do Google 2-factor login). Win10 Mail/Calendar/Contacts did a bit better - and knows about Google - but its feature-restricted (failed me when I needed to drag a message from my Google account to an Exchange folder) plus it has a horrible, space-inefficient design that assumes you're going to run it full-screen.
That's one example. There are, of course, lousy Mac OS apps, too, but generally they adhere to a much higher standard of 'thoughtful touches' than Windows.
As for Mac vs. Linux - Linux rules for server-side, but when it comes to GUI everything nasty you can say about Windows' responsiveness and attention to detail applies to Linux with two scoops of ice-cream and a cherry on the top. Linux GUI's design brief is "give us a horribly over-engineered windowing system, make it networkable but so clunky that VNC is a better solution for remote access, add a desktop manager that looks like - but doesn't work like - NeXTStep because I'm a Unix hacker and as long as I can run 6 copies of vim and 6 bash shells side-by-side I'll be in hog heaven." Or at least, that was the situation until Gnome 3 and Unity came along - which was like being rescued from the Titanic by the Marie Celeste.
Mac advantage 2: Win10 is still a ghastly hybrid of Windows 7 and The UI Formally Known as Metro. It didn'
Didn't happen, even if that's what they said was going to happen.
Nonsense - Apple was forced to produce a pointless MicroUSB to Lightning adapter for the iPhone to satisfy the EU.
Anyway, that particular EU directive was probably better than nothing (it dealt with companies using connectors that were not only proprietary but model-specific) but was badly misconceived because it concentrated on the socket on the phone rather than the more sensible practice of mandating a USB-A socket on the adapter leaving makers to experiment with the (heavily size-constrained) phone socket - something that Apple had already been doing with the iPad/iPod/iPhone adapters since forever. I was already using my iPod adapter to charge various Apple and non-Apple USB devices, including miniUSB ones for which the EU-mandated solution (which allowed an adapter with a captive microUSB cable) would have been useless.
I'm not sure that issue translates to the EV charging scenario (the cables are somewhat more bulky and expensive!)
That's kinda the problem as well as the solution: you still need chargers every 50-100 miles and at popular destinations (100 miles sounds fine for Teslas with 200+ mile range - not so much for other EVs with shorter ranges*) to support longer journeys, but home charging means that the volume (and hence profitability) of charging station use will be far smaller than for gas stations. Currently, it's something of a honeymoon period - Telsa has been building its network as a loss-leader (plus, unlike other carmakers, Musk actually gives a shit about making EVs successful) and the places that host superchargers like the idea of attracting wealthy Tesla owners. Even so, ISTR they've said that the Model 3 won't come with free charging.
Here in the UK the motorway network is fairly well equipped - with a couple of EV charging bays covering a couple of standards at most service stations that are usually empty given the current level of EV usage - but that won't suffice if EVs become more popular and they need to start wiring up a significant fraction of their parking spaces (cutting into valuable parking space for gas guzzlers). It'll be interesting to see how that business plan works out...
* I've looked open-mindedly at the logistics for some of my common journeys - once you start factoring in 'safety margins' (what if your planned charging point is occupied/out of order and you need to travel to the next one) and the desire to arrive at your destination with plenty of juice left (unless you want to start your return journey by driving into town to recharge) it is, well, do-able, but a lot more hassle and planning c.f. the "hop in and go" reality of a real car. Not so bad with the sort of 200+ mile range offered by Tesla - but a Model S is more car than I need for daily use.
I guess driving habits vary by country: I can imagine that, for a lot of people in the US, any journey beyond the nearest airport rapidly becomes a multi-day road trip where you have to plan your stops anyway. In the UK you'd only have to be slightly stupid to drive from London to Edinburgh in one go.
Additional: his other books which touch on digitisation are much more positive about the whole thing.
You obviously haven't read the short Transition Dreams (really horrible concept)... and there are several other shorts that pick at the philosophical aspects a bit more than the novels.
That's the one. San Junipero was positively upbeat by Black Mirror standards and seemed to be about "proper" uploading of consciousness (for the benefit of the person being uploaded) using not-invented-yet technology - something that's been exhaustively covered by SF (and we've got the TV adaptation of Altered Carbon coming soon). "Be right back" was much closer to the spawn of Eliza and Siri powered by Machine Learning snakeoil described in TFA.
The example that springs to mind is the novel Zendigi by Greg Egan. (First novel I bought as an eBook - turns out to be a paean against digitisation. That's me told).
It's hard to ignore it when it's embedded in the computer boot ROM
...and it is hard to compile Pascal or C when your mass storage is a 300 bps audio cassette tape recorder, and you only have 4K of RAM (which was the main fallacy of the BASIC-haters at the time, when a floppy controller and drive cost twice as much as your original computer).
Can anybody tell me more about the humans and their Industrial Revolution that happened 50 million years ago to cause this earlier global warming incident?
Well, we could point you at the Wikipedia pages that explain all this, but you'll only accuse it of being warmist fake science and cherry-pick this for any uncertainties or unknowns which you can claim disprove the whole thing... While also missing the point that these were changes that took place over tens of millions of years and could have been driven by things like continental drift and very slow variations in orbit or solar output... rather than a few billion stupid apes digging up and burning every scrap of fossil carbon they could find over the course of a mere century.... or the concept that a small initial change in temperature could trigger the release of huge amounts of otherwise sequestered methane...
From TFS: Climate change denialists often mention that CO2 was high in the past, that it was warm in the past, so this means there's nothing to worry about,
Of course, in the past, the locations of many of our major cities or key agricultural lands were in the middle of parched deserts or under oceans which would be... inconvenient if it happened again.
Suddenly Apple cares enough to develop their own GPU?
Newsflash 1: Apple have been using their own A-series systems-on-a-chip (including CPU and GPU) in iPhone/iPad/Watch & AppleTV for a few years now. They license IP from various companies (ARM, Imagination and others) and have taken over a few chip designers to achieve this.
Newsflash 2: Apple owns one of the leading gaming platforms on the market: it's called the iPhone.
Apple has drunk deeply of the kool-aid that says that everybody is going to be using phones and tablets for all their computing needs in the next few years.
Macs, meanwhile, are mostly running on Intel integrated graphics or unspectacular AMD mobile graphics chips. Tim Cook recently stood up and re-iterated how important the Mac line is to Apple - and anybody who understands political talk will know that means exactly the opposite of what it says.
I think that will also be the first time the BBC have done Pratchett, too - very interesting.
We've all passed a lot of water since Neverwhere - the BBC had a bit of a "so what - it's only SciFi/Fantasy" attitude to production values in the 80s/90s which has hopefully been killed off by the success of Who. ISTR Neverwhere looking like the entire budget had gone on the title sequence...
There's also the BBC version of "His Dark Materials" in the pipeline, and Netflix's "Altered Carbon" coming soon. Both of which require a certain amount of...bravery on the part of the producers.
Plus there's more of the Expanse on the way, Wasn't overwhelmed by it (they've messed up the best character from the books - the potty-mouthed Indian UN bigwig) - but it was pretty watchable.
But if you can't code a sorting algorithm without a reference,
You're missing the point.
I agree, that if you can't jot down a simple sort algorithm on a whiteboard you're probably not much of a programmer. That's not what's being asked here.
The issue here is being expected to memorise Knuth from cover to cover (ISTR there was a whole volume on sorting and searching) so that you can regurgitate [insert name of reviewer's favourite sorting algorithm] on demand without thinking - because any moron with time on their hands and a high boredom threshold could do that. It's a lazy assessment technique that gets used because the interviewers don't understand the job they're interviewing for so if they asked a sensible question (like here's a problem - how would you begin developing a solution) they wouldn't be able to understand the answer.
The correct answer is (a) use whatever sort() function the language provides (or change the database query to get a sorted list to start with), because its probably better than anything you could pull out of your arse in 60 seconds or (b) if that won't do, ask "why not?" and spend an afternoon researching sorting algorithms & libraries to find something that meets these oh-so-special requirements before, as an absolute last resort, writing your own.
A better solution would be to give them some broken code to debug - that would separate the persons from the other persons....
Busses drive all day long every day. When are they supposed to recharge the batteries?
Bus stops. The clue is in the name. Especially the major bus stations at the beginning and end of routes where they already sit for significant periods between runs.
Thing is, busses drive fixed routes on a predictable timetable, in cities where they're never that far from electricity, so its straightforward to set up the infrastructure. That makes them much more practical for electrification than private cars (which have to cope with spontaneous road trips). I think its safe to say we're mainly talking urban busses here, not long-distance Greyhound-type routes.
Plus, who cares if they're not cheaper, or if you don't believe they'll stop polar bears from melting? This is still taking a substantial source of particularly nasty particulates off city streets.
I can't see cities jumping on the idea of busses that have to come back to the depot to be swapped out every 4 hours.
Why not? The drivers have to be swapped out regularly, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I will miss the shitty joke of looking up "Boring" to see if it still says "See Civil Engineers"
In other news: the elderly ex-CEO of Yell.com was last seen doddering around second-hand book stores asking if they had a copy of an old book called "The Yellow Pages"...
NB, I received a copy of YP this year, and there's a BT directory for 2015-16 floating around (still in its shrink wrap)... but they're tiny compared to the ones we had in the Good Old Days and even a wimp could probably tear one in half.
So what did Apple do right (haters need not comment here)? Or What did Commodore and Radio Shack do wrong?
Yes, it's really more of a rhetorical question.
As well as the expandability mentioned by others, Apple had far better graphics than the TRS-80 (huge blocky 2x3 character-based things for pseudo-pixel-based graphics) or the PET (no pixel-based graphics, just the distant ancestors of emoji...) ISTR they also got a boost from being the original platform for Visicalc the first successful spreadsheet (I'm sure it had antecedents) and probably the first truly "new" application of the microcomputer age.
However, Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but Commodore, Radio Shack, the numerous CP/M-based small business systems and many others had a sustained run of success - and Apple can't claim responsibility for their demise.
Commodore did better in Europe/UK (where Apple charged silly prices), SInclair, Acorn, Commodore and Amstrad dominated in the UK. There was a bit of a shake-up in the early 80s which killed off most of the also-rans, but the big 3 got though that. Then the IBM PC Clones arrived at home/small business/hobbyist prices (I don't think IBM alone would have got that far - remember the PCJr?) and squashed everything... and would probably have squashed Apple if that young lady hadn't burst into the auditorium and thrown her hammer at the screen.
The Mac, or maybe even just that ad, is probably the only reason we're not saying "Anybody remember Apple? What happened to them?" today is the Mac, and maybe even more specifically that famous 1984 advert.
It's as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in butthurt and were suddenly silenced.
Only because it wasn't Joanna Lumley (again)/Summer Glau/Emma Watson (insert more fan favourited to taste). They've been dropping anvil-subtle hints for the last couple of years.
Did either of them get prosecuted? Of course not.
...because there was probably a rigorous paper-trail of risk-assessments, safety precautions, waivers, insurance, compliance by-laws for handling dangerous animals etc. proving that everything had been done to make the "stunt" relatively safe. Oh, and lawyers. Lots of lawyers. If it had just been a case of "hey, why don't you get in the cage and play with the tigers - I saw somewhere on Slashdot that tigers never attack humans" then there may well have been a prosecution. I bet there was also a doozy of an out-of-court settlement to stop the civil courts going mediaeval on someone's ass.
If this woman goes on trial, she will surely be asked why she imagined that firing a .50 cal at someone's chest at point-blank range would be OK provided they were holding a book. If she weeks of research that they did, practicing on dummies, comparing the effectiveness of phone directories, bibles, encyclopaedias to find a publication that could reliably stop bullets then maybe she can get off. I doubt it, though.
You are of course aware that according to Newtons third law of motion the same 2000J would be applied to the hand holding the gun, right?
Uh... methinks you're confusing energy (1/2 mass times velocity^2 or force * distance) with momentum (mass * velocity, or force*time). The kinetic energy comes from the chemical energy stored in the charge, and the bullet (plus the bang and the heat) gets the lions share.
Your hand gets the same force for the same time as the bullet but, as you say, its spread out over a wide area. You don't get the same energy (you're heavier than a bullet so the same force can't move you as far as it can the bullet in the same time, or as fast - the velocity squared in the KE equation is a bitch).
But if it get confused when spaces and tabs are used interchangeable, that's pretty bad.
I think that's by design to punish anybody who deviates from whatever the One True Indentation Style is this week. I'm only surprised that Python 2 doesn't require tabs and Python 3 spaces.
Any good thing said about Python comes from a person who can't see any problem with significant white space and never read the 20th Century "Thompson & Richie admit than Unix was a practical joke" email (in which significant whitespace in makefiles was "evidence").
Tried Python once - gritted my teeth and decided to get over the whitespace thing, flipped a coin to get over the whole "Python 2 or 3" thing... started on a little project... needed XML DOM and XPATH libraries so looked around and found about 4 half-written subsets plus a long argument about how DOM could be implemented in a truly "pythonesque" fashion - gave up and went back to another well-known scripting language beginning with a 'p' (tm) that is admittedly a pile of festering shit in terms of elegance and purity, but which offered bindings for the ubiquitous Apache XML libraries and thus got the job done.
Admittedly, that was years ago. so maybe they've found a way of implementing that particular requirement in a way that won't alert the Spanish Inquisition to break out the Comfy Chair. Maybe they've even sorted the "3rd Version of Python vs. Python Version 2" schism. Since all the evidence suggests that some people have managed to write substantial software in it, I might give it another spin someday, but my general feeling is that its just gratuitously different from C-descended-or-inspired syntax the sake of it.
It does have the advantage that it's not (AFAIK) indentured to Microsoft (C#), Apple (Swift), Oracle (Java) or Google (what day is it?) and doesn't promote mono-paradigm zealotry, so it might be a good choice for teaching principles.
Braces didn't win over whitespace because of C's readability.
Its not about readability: its about not having your code turned into line noise because you accidentally left "hard tabs" enabled in the editor, some idiot hit "reformat" or or mixed DOS and UNIX line endings, or tried to merge code written by some heretic who indented by 3 spaces instead of the 2 spaces carved in stone by His Noodley Appendage.
Like all punctuation, it is a bit of Belt and Braces (haha!) redundancy that removes any ambiguity and which you'll be grateful of should you ever need to reformat your code.
Maybe that's the thing - it appeals to the Sheldon Coopers of this world that code written by anybody who doesn't follow their particular One True Indentation Style (or nests blocks more than 1 deep when they should implement any sequence of more than two lines as a function) can be deemed officially unusable and can't be fixed at a stroke by hitting Escape-meta-whatever.
As I understood it, the key difference is that the PM has get it approved, and the opposition party duly did so. If they had said 'no', it wouldn't have happened.
...and yet approved it even though the prediction at the time was that the Labour party were going to be decimated and the PM returned with a stonking majority - which begs the question "under what circumstances would parliament not approve a snap election"?
Actually, since 2010-ish, the UK does have a fixed, 5-year election cycle, designed to stop PMs calling snap elections at their party's convenience whenever they like what they're hearing in the opinion polls.
However, the legislation was drafted by politicians and thus has an "unless you really want to" clause, which is why we've just had a snap election called by the PM at her party's convenience because she liked what she was hearing in the opinion polls.
On the other hand, maybe the resulting debacle will make future leaders learn from history and think twice,,, wait, no what am I saying?
I just want to know who was the weirdo in the yellow and black 'clown suit' standing behind Corbyn during one of his news conferences.
Probably the candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Sadly, they weren't standing in my neck of the woods, because if you read their manifesto you'll see its the most consistent and coherent of the lot (E.g. "Atheism will be given charity status, being a non-prophet organization").
The constituencies for the main party leaders always attract half a dozen or so, er... alternative candidates.
XYZZY, plough and Y2 are still stuck in my brain..
"plugh" surely?
Good job they didn't have autocorrect in the 1970s or the grues would have been well fed....
iTunes makes me want to shoot myself did when I ran OS X on a iMac does on windows it is just trash.
Yeah, as I said, Apple aren't perfect - you'll find plenty of Apple users (apart from the total evangelists) happy to criticise iTunes, be it on Mac, Windows or iOS and the lack of access to the file system on iOS. Apple have been guilty of messing up the iOS music player to promote their streaming services over local libraries, too.
I'd put iOS and MacOS in different categories: I really prefer MacOS to the alternative desktop OSs, as a platform for general computing. If there's any aspect you don't like (e.g. iTunes) and look for alternatives you're no worse off than with Windows (unless you want to praise Windows Media Player?)
iOS is great, seamless, consistent and easy to use if you use it the way Apple intended (e.g. iTunes syncing is much easier and more seamless than shifting .mp3 files around until you do something awkward like move your iDevice between two different computers) but otherwise it is definitely a walled garden. I ended up going with Android for my phone partly for this reason - I do have an iPad but honestly I just use that as a "consumption" device. However, it took a bit of hunting before I found good Android solutions to music syncing etc. and decent players with features like gapless playback.
Just checked on Outlook: it works as it should for me. Drag and drop recipients no problem.
Maybe that was just Win10 Mail then... (consistency!) there were plenty of other annoyances with Outlook for me.
Apple aren't perfect - their current hardware line up leaves much to be desired, which lead to me recently having a fling with a MS Surface Book: I wanted to mess with the tablet/stylus idea for a project I'm working on, plus the Surface range seemed like the closest thing to a windows "reference platform" that should showcase WIn10 at its best. The Surface Book failed within the 30 day "easy returns" period - now, other people have had good experiences with the SB so I'm not going to knock it on that basis, but there were other more fundamental reasons why I bailed and got my money back rather than accept the offer of a new replacement machine.
I'd also note that I've used DOS, Windows and Linux, MacOS and various others on and off since forever (ISTR there must have been at least one occasion when I used WIndows, MacOS ('classic' and X), Linux, RiscOS and VMS. Windows 95/NT5/2000/XP was my daily driver from about 1996-2006 before I switched to Mac, and I've always had a Win7 VM on my Mac for testing websites and stuff. What I'm saying is: this is not "eek, the keys are a bit different" - I can cope with things being "a bit different", I already mostly know how to use Windows (I've developed for Windows, whereas everything I've written on the Mac has been crossplatform) and I'd been getting real work done on the Surface before it failed.
Mac advantage 1: Mac OS and Mac OS apps are, typically, just nicer: they're responsive (click the mouse and, generally, there's an instant response - even if its only an hourglass you know you've clicked something). On windows, frequently, there was no sign of anything happening for a second or so. Apps tend to be consistent and designed with more "attention to detail" than you see on Windows.
Examples: Apple Mail is not the best Mail client by a long chalk and receives much abuse, but select part of a message and hit reply and you get a new message with just that text quoted. How else should it work? I now know where all those silly huge chain emails come from - because that's what Win10 mail and Outlook force you to do. Someone on the 'To' line ought to be on 'CC' instead? Just drag them - the App recognises each address as a discrete object. On Windows, carefully select the email address by hand, copy & paste, being careful not to mess up the separating commas. Outlook 2016 is feature-rich but usability poor - not even properly integrated into the Win 10 notification or calendar system and I had to install a third party plug-in to stop it quitting (and hence stopping checking for new mail) every time I closed the window. Outlook wouldn't talk to my Google calendar or address list (and Outlook 2016 still doesn't do Google 2-factor login). Win10 Mail/Calendar/Contacts did a bit better - and knows about Google - but its feature-restricted (failed me when I needed to drag a message from my Google account to an Exchange folder) plus it has a horrible, space-inefficient design that assumes you're going to run it full-screen.
That's one example. There are, of course, lousy Mac OS apps, too, but generally they adhere to a much higher standard of 'thoughtful touches' than Windows.
As for Mac vs. Linux - Linux rules for server-side, but when it comes to GUI everything nasty you can say about Windows' responsiveness and attention to detail applies to Linux with two scoops of ice-cream and a cherry on the top. Linux GUI's design brief is "give us a horribly over-engineered windowing system, make it networkable but so clunky that VNC is a better solution for remote access, add a desktop manager that looks like - but doesn't work like - NeXTStep because I'm a Unix hacker and as long as I can run 6 copies of vim and 6 bash shells side-by-side I'll be in hog heaven." Or at least, that was the situation until Gnome 3 and Unity came along - which was like being rescued from the Titanic by the Marie Celeste.
Mac advantage 2: Win10 is still a ghastly hybrid of Windows 7 and The UI Formally Known as Metro. It didn'
Didn't happen, even if that's what they said was going to happen.
Nonsense - Apple was forced to produce a pointless MicroUSB to Lightning adapter for the iPhone to satisfy the EU.
Anyway, that particular EU directive was probably better than nothing (it dealt with companies using connectors that were not only proprietary but model-specific) but was badly misconceived because it concentrated on the socket on the phone rather than the more sensible practice of mandating a USB-A socket on the adapter leaving makers to experiment with the (heavily size-constrained) phone socket - something that Apple had already been doing with the iPad/iPod/iPhone adapters since forever. I was already using my iPod adapter to charge various Apple and non-Apple USB devices, including miniUSB ones for which the EU-mandated solution (which allowed an adapter with a captive microUSB cable) would have been useless.
I'm not sure that issue translates to the EV charging scenario (the cables are somewhat more bulky and expensive!)
That's kinda the problem as well as the solution: you still need chargers every 50-100 miles and at popular destinations (100 miles sounds fine for Teslas with 200+ mile range - not so much for other EVs with shorter ranges*) to support longer journeys, but home charging means that the volume (and hence profitability) of charging station use will be far smaller than for gas stations. Currently, it's something of a honeymoon period - Telsa has been building its network as a loss-leader (plus, unlike other carmakers, Musk actually gives a shit about making EVs successful) and the places that host superchargers like the idea of attracting wealthy Tesla owners. Even so, ISTR they've said that the Model 3 won't come with free charging.
Here in the UK the motorway network is fairly well equipped - with a couple of EV charging bays covering a couple of standards at most service stations that are usually empty given the current level of EV usage - but that won't suffice if EVs become more popular and they need to start wiring up a significant fraction of their parking spaces (cutting into valuable parking space for gas guzzlers). It'll be interesting to see how that business plan works out...
* I've looked open-mindedly at the logistics for some of my common journeys - once you start factoring in 'safety margins' (what if your planned charging point is occupied/out of order and you need to travel to the next one) and the desire to arrive at your destination with plenty of juice left (unless you want to start your return journey by driving into town to recharge) it is, well, do-able, but a lot more hassle and planning c.f. the "hop in and go" reality of a real car. Not so bad with the sort of 200+ mile range offered by Tesla - but a Model S is more car than I need for daily use.
I guess driving habits vary by country: I can imagine that, for a lot of people in the US, any journey beyond the nearest airport rapidly becomes a multi-day road trip where you have to plan your stops anyway. In the UK you'd only have to be slightly stupid to drive from London to Edinburgh in one go.
Additional: his other books which touch on digitisation are much more positive about the whole thing.
You obviously haven't read the short Transition Dreams (really horrible concept)... and there are several other shorts that pick at the philosophical aspects a bit more than the novels.
That's the one. San Junipero was positively upbeat by Black Mirror standards and seemed to be about "proper" uploading of consciousness (for the benefit of the person being uploaded) using not-invented-yet technology - something that's been exhaustively covered by SF (and we've got the TV adaptation of Altered Carbon coming soon). "Be right back" was much closer to the spawn of Eliza and Siri powered by Machine Learning snakeoil described in TFA.
The example that springs to mind is the novel Zendigi by Greg Egan. (First novel I bought as an eBook - turns out to be a paean against digitisation. That's me told).
It simply refuses to die.. even when it's dead.
Well, it always did have lousy garbage collection... :-)
It's hard to ignore it when it's embedded in the computer boot ROM
...and it is hard to compile Pascal or C when your mass storage is a 300 bps audio cassette tape recorder, and you only have 4K of RAM (which was the main fallacy of the BASIC-haters at the time, when a floppy controller and drive cost twice as much as your original computer).
Can anybody tell me more about the humans and their Industrial Revolution that happened 50 million years ago to cause this earlier global warming incident?
Well, we could point you at the Wikipedia pages that explain all this, but you'll only accuse it of being warmist fake science and cherry-pick this for any uncertainties or unknowns which you can claim disprove the whole thing... While also missing the point that these were changes that took place over tens of millions of years and could have been driven by things like continental drift and very slow variations in orbit or solar output... rather than a few billion stupid apes digging up and burning every scrap of fossil carbon they could find over the course of a mere century.... or the concept that a small initial change in temperature could trigger the release of huge amounts of otherwise sequestered methane...
From TFS: Climate change denialists often mention that CO2 was high in the past, that it was warm in the past, so this means there's nothing to worry about,
Of course, in the past, the locations of many of our major cities or key agricultural lands were in the middle of parched deserts or under oceans which would be... inconvenient if it happened again.
Suddenly Apple cares enough to develop their own GPU?
Newsflash 1: Apple have been using their own A-series systems-on-a-chip (including CPU and GPU) in iPhone/iPad/Watch & AppleTV for a few years now. They license IP from various companies (ARM, Imagination and others) and have taken over a few chip designers to achieve this.
Newsflash 2: Apple owns one of the leading gaming platforms on the market: it's called the iPhone.
Apple has drunk deeply of the kool-aid that says that everybody is going to be using phones and tablets for all their computing needs in the next few years.
Macs, meanwhile, are mostly running on Intel integrated graphics or unspectacular AMD mobile graphics chips. Tim Cook recently stood up and re-iterated how important the Mac line is to Apple - and anybody who understands political talk will know that means exactly the opposite of what it says.
I think that will also be the first time the BBC have done Pratchett, too - very interesting.
We've all passed a lot of water since Neverwhere - the BBC had a bit of a "so what - it's only SciFi/Fantasy" attitude to production values in the 80s/90s which has hopefully been killed off by the success of Who. ISTR Neverwhere looking like the entire budget had gone on the title sequence...
There's also the BBC version of "His Dark Materials" in the pipeline, and Netflix's "Altered Carbon" coming soon. Both of which require a certain amount of ...bravery on the part of the producers.
Plus there's more of the Expanse on the way, Wasn't overwhelmed by it (they've messed up the best character from the books - the potty-mouthed Indian UN bigwig) - but it was pretty watchable.
But if you can't code a sorting algorithm without a reference,
You're missing the point.
I agree, that if you can't jot down a simple sort algorithm on a whiteboard you're probably not much of a programmer. That's not what's being asked here.
The issue here is being expected to memorise Knuth from cover to cover (ISTR there was a whole volume on sorting and searching) so that you can regurgitate [insert name of reviewer's favourite sorting algorithm] on demand without thinking - because any moron with time on their hands and a high boredom threshold could do that. It's a lazy assessment technique that gets used because the interviewers don't understand the job they're interviewing for so if they asked a sensible question (like here's a problem - how would you begin developing a solution) they wouldn't be able to understand the answer.
The correct answer is (a) use whatever sort() function the language provides (or change the database query to get a sorted list to start with), because its probably better than anything you could pull out of your arse in 60 seconds or (b) if that won't do, ask "why not?" and spend an afternoon researching sorting algorithms & libraries to find something that meets these oh-so-special requirements before, as an absolute last resort, writing your own.
A better solution would be to give them some broken code to debug - that would separate the persons from the other persons....
Busses drive all day long every day. When are they supposed to recharge the batteries?
Bus stops. The clue is in the name. Especially the major bus stations at the beginning and end of routes where they already sit for significant periods between runs.
Thing is, busses drive fixed routes on a predictable timetable, in cities where they're never that far from electricity, so its straightforward to set up the infrastructure. That makes them much more practical for electrification than private cars (which have to cope with spontaneous road trips). I think its safe to say we're mainly talking urban busses here, not long-distance Greyhound-type routes.
Plus, who cares if they're not cheaper, or if you don't believe they'll stop polar bears from melting? This is still taking a substantial source of particularly nasty particulates off city streets.
I can't see cities jumping on the idea of busses that have to come back to the depot to be swapped out every 4 hours.
Why not? The drivers have to be swapped out regularly, too.