I've never understood the theoretical problem, and can only assume that the opponents of ID cards in principle must be people who:
Don't drive a car
Never leave the country
Look old enough to buy alcohol
Never take out loans, open bank accounts, savings accounts, mobile phone contracts...
...all of which currently require ID, and in many cases have to resort to silly, ad-hoc ID checks such as abusing passports/driving licenses for purposes other than travel/driving, asking for utility bills etc. A properly designed universal ID system with modern technology would be much less intrusive than these by only letting bartenders/banks/phone companies check the precise information that they needed (e.g. is this person over 18? Y/N?)
If the cops stopped you, they could swipe your card on the spot and just see your photograph (not even your name) and record a one-time code. Then, later, they can go and explain to a magistrate why they need to access your details. Its not as if a cop can't find an excuse to stop & search you anyway if they feel so inclined - and when they do that they might feel obliged to charge you with something to justify themselves. Having ID cards doesn't mean you have to give the police carte blanche... and should the fascists win an election, or stage a coup, its going to take them all of a week to issue "papers" (and until then woe betide anybody who goes out without a utility bill, driving license or birth certificate).
No, the real practical problem for me is that this is a Large IT Project and if there's one thing that both governments and Big Industry are congenitally incapable of doing it is organizing a Large IT Project. I think that, while they just about comprehend that you can't sign up a contractor to build a tunnel under the Bristol channel and two-thirds of the way through decide that you want a bridge over the English Channel instead, they haven't quite managed to extend that logic to anything involving computers. So the odds are that we'd all have to pay huge fees for our ID cards, have huge difficulty getting any mistakes or abuse corrected, the encryption would be cracked within a week and that the entire database of personal information would turn up on Wikileaks within 24 hours of the launch.
Also, the now defunct ID card scheme was going to solve the problems of illegal immigration, terrorism, crime and halitosis, but making it possible to open a bank account without presenting a gas bill and a birth certificate was never mentioned.
The least expensive Google Shopping result that I got for "A4 paper ream" was $8.99 for Hammermill Fore Multipuprose.
Because A4 paper is a specialist item in the land of US Letter, DUH! The sensible cost comparison is with your local default paper size.
My guesstimate was based on UK prices - £3/ream - take off the 20% tax that includes, multiply by $1.6 and you have about $4. I just looked on amazon.com and you can get US Letter (in the US) for $3.72, so I was pretty much on the money.
Actually, I'm sick of people who seriously make the complaint "the cost has to come down" when things like this are still in the research/development phase
Sure the cost will come down - but what to? Even if the cost comes down to 10 cents, you'll still need to re-use each sheet an average of 10 times to compete with a 1 cent bit of paper. Now, looking at CD-R disks, they started out at $30 a pop (back in the days when making a coaster really sucked) and now cost about 10 cents - so its not impossible that ePaper might end up costing little more than treePaper. However, that sort of drop requires economy of scale: the product has to succeed a bit before prices start to drop, creating a cycle of falling price and increasing uptake. That means the product has to be useful from day 1. In the early days of CD-Rs, developers needed them for authoring CD-ROMs, so there was a market. Then they started to become useful for backup, and were cheaper than tape, then they became cheaper than Zips and Syquests, and the market expanded... then they became cheaper than albums on CD (hoist the Jolly Rodger!) and the rest is history. The question is, what will ePaper be good for on day 1?
Sticking with CDs, this may be why CD-RWs have always been "bubbling under" - they've always cost several times more than CD-Rs so you only use them if you're really sure that you're going to be organized and re-use them multiple times.
1) The startup up costs of buying the printer: will any thermal transfer printer do, or do I need get a special one for this type of paper?
Again, that depends if they can get momentum. Thermal printers are a lot simpler than lasers, and there's no ink/toner/delicate photosensitive roller to replace - so the cost of ownership should be low provided people are organized enough to maintain a high rate of paper re-use.
...erased up to 260 times... and an A4 sheet costs only US $2
(1) You'll have a job selling a European pinko-commie A4 sheet measured in spawn-of-the-Devil millimeters* for US dollars. They'll give up their 8.5 x 11 God-fearin' inches Letter when you pry it from their cold, dead 3-ring binders.
(2) More seriously, that price has got to come down before it makes financial sense. Lets see - A4 paper... google.. about $3.83** for 500 sheets, so to break even you'd need to use each bit of ePaper, hmmm... $2 / ( 3.83 / 500) ) equals... 261 times! Oh, wait....
(* They say you can keep foldin' it and it keeps its aspect ratio. WITCHCRAFT I tell you!!!)
(** OK, I totally fudged this but its not far off...)
This guy is totally right. All this choice is just too confusing. There are too many competing options, and it's ruining things for everybody.
(OK, I did spot the sarcasm, but...)
What's needed is the Goldilocks solution: just enough choice. A monopoly is bad. A new option every month is equally bad (diluting the talent pool and ensuring that nothing is ever finished). A couple of strong competitors for each major application = good.
vi, or emacs?
Sorry: nano.
Seriously: it doesn't matter one jot. Anybody who has an opinion on vi or emacs will have the appropriate variant installed in a jiffy. What matters is that when Joe Luser double-clicks on a.txt file it should open in something which most emphatically isn't a marginally desktopized vi or emacs, has a "File: Save As" menu option and which is labelled "Text Editor" and not "KGViMACS2". When they double-click on a.doc or a.docx it doesn't really matter whether it opens in OpenOffice, LibreOffice or KOffice provided (a) it does a half-decent job of converting the.doc and (b) is described in the menu as "Word Processor".
The real problem is not choice: its Linux, you always have choice if you know how. The problem is making sensible default choices for non-techy users who can't easily change things. Sticking to those choices for more than 6 months is good, too.
It should be the case that increasing reliance on cloud software will make it easier for businesses to choose Linux, but for that to happen, Linux communities need to stop fighting the old fights, says Proffitt."
If the cloud takes over, most of the old fights should become irrelevant... apart from Firefox vs. IceWeasel vs. Epiphany vs. Konqueror vs. Chrome vs. Lynx. Last time I looked, ChromeOS and Android were, technically, Linux.
LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, Evolution vs. Thunderbird
...provided distro designers wise up, realize that none of those will be household names to switchers, and have large friendly icons called "Wordprocessor", "Spredsheet", "Mail", "Browse the Web" (with a "preferred applications" config somewhere for those of us that give a damn) that should be irrelevant.
GNOME3 vs. Unity vs. KDE
If distros keep rushing these out before they are ready* and still lack key functionality then this will kill linux on the desktop deader than it already is, without help from the cloud.
* That's me giving Gnome 3 and Unity the benefit of the doubt. I'd like to give them a chance, but I prefer to use virtualbox to play with new distros, and it doesn't seem to want to play nice with all the new eye candy.
Given Intel integrated GPUs in laptops were capable of driving a couple of 27" LCDs over displayport 2-3 years ago, I find that difficult to believe.
I think the "one display port" may have been a brainfart on my part, but the bottom line is that the chipset can only support two simultaneous displays.
I doubt that the latest gen is incapable of driving two external displays
Intel HD graphics can support a maximum of two simultaneous displays total (http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-031040.htm#11). One internal laptop display + one external display = two displays.
Maybe Apple could have designed the MacBook so that it could blank the internal display and drive two external monitors (but also bear in mind that the number of monitors which support displayport daisy-chaining can be counted on the fingers of a boxing glove).
I've never understood the nigh-jesuitical levels of logic chopping(with not infrequent descent into mere hand-waving) that go on surrounding "fair" and "unfair" advantages in high level sports.
The underlying problem is the idea of "high level sports", "professional athletes", massive sponsorship deals and huge capital pork projects to host athletics events. If it was just a case of the misty-eyed wholesome self-improvement aspect of sport for sport's sake then it would be petty to argue about such things and there would be less incentive to cheat. As it is, though, these are professionals (highly paid in some cases) trying to defend their livelihood against "unfair competition".
"Oh, no! We have to set a good example for the kids! Professional athletes are just regular folks who get a good night's rest and eat their wheaties!".
Of course there's nothing particularly natural about regular folks who eat their wheaties (or anything else that doesn't grow on trees in the Rift Valley), had their childhood diseases cured and can expect to live 40 years beyond the MTBF of the original homo sapiens. Should we stop worrying and embrace the PharmaLympics, and treat anybody who wrecks their health with performance-enhancing drugs the same way we treat those of us who have wrecked our health by sitting behind a desk all day and living on pizza and coffee for the sake of our career?
That'd be Wheaties(tm) - fortified with iron and vitamins, official breakfast cereal of the BigSportsTornament(r)(tm)(c) by the way.
Apple should simply integrate a modern GPU in their monitors: there's room to properly cool down and the monitor becomes the definitve docking station. It would also justify the price, even if it's slightly increased.
They do: it's called an iMac. They throw in a CPU and a hard drive, too.
If the thing can't even handle two external screens, I doubt it'll handle an external screen and an external graphics card...
The "lite" thunderbolt chip on the Airs has zero practical consequences: The limitation on external screens ultimately comes from the on-CPU Intel HD Graphics which only support one DisplayPort and a maximum of two displays (including the built-in screen). The 13" MB Pro has the same limitation for the same reason.
The full-fat Thunderbolt chip supports a second physical Thunderbolt port (but only the iMac actually uses this) and can carry a second DisplayPort signal (only useful on the machines with Radeon graphics like the 15" and 17" pros). It would be completely pointless in an Air.
You can currently get a remote controlled helicopter based camera that has a run time of 10+ mins.
I'm guessing that this is for spying on the sort of people who are likely to shoot down any suspicious looking mini-helicopters before they can get close.
Not a lot you can do about a ballistic camera apart from try and find where it landed so you can moon the operators.
I remember the days when apple play commercials claiming their OS don't get virus's, malware, etc.
That was in the old days when major Windows applications required you to run as administrator, when mail messages could silently install software and an unpatched XP machine connected to the internet would be infected before you had a chance to download the patches. Win 7 has done a lot to reduce that, which may by why Apple dropped the ads...
An iOS exploit that requires physical access to the machine, a custom cable and only works on a machine which has already been jailbroken (i.e. deliberately cracked by the legitimate user) isn't exactly in the same league as the sort of remote pwnage seen on PCs in the Bad Old Days.
I can't think of any other country with as many stories of the form "restricted-access data from XXX was left in a pub by a contractor/employee with company/agency YYY".
I know its not exactly a USB stick with bank details, but other nationalities do quite famously leave things in bars that they probably shouldn't.
Maybe it's just that the British press covers this expecially aggressively,
I know, I had cancer, the day I found my lump I was in an MRI.
If we're doing anecdotal evidence, last time I had a MRI (invented at my local University, by the way) on the NHS I waited a whole week - and that was non-urgent (plus I had other scans and tests while I was waiting). If it was suspected cancer it would have been quicker. A relative had bowel cancer and it was successfully removed within a few days. Another relative has a rather neat home kidney machine and truckloads of supplies delivered to their door every fortnight - all without them worrying about where the money is coming from (sure, they've paid their tax in the past, when they had an income to pay it from). Unfortunately we have one or two ultracapitalist press barons (you may have heard of them recently) who love to scour the country for dirt on the NHS, BBC or any other organization that is a bit too left for their liking, and rarely report the good bits.
By the way, thanks very much for the extensive research you did in your earlier post (you know, the link to a google search for "NHS Horror" [27 hits]). I now realize that rather than bothering to find the actual report from the WHO on per-capita healthcare costs I should have taken a leaf from your book and Googled "USA health care horror" - that gives me 296 hits so, quite frankly, QED.
I also cannot think of a single example, national defense and courts not withstanding, where the government can do a better job than private industry. In fact, I challenge you to find me a single example..
I patiently await your reply.
Well, according to the WHO the USA spends more per capita on its nice capitalist healthcare system (that the right wing parties are fighting so hard to defend) than any other country, including all the free healthcare systems.
Of course, because that money isn't taxes that's fine and dandy, and everybody has the Gawd-given freedom to cross their fingers and hope they don't get ill.
But I guess middle-class Americans do have good teeth.
Oh, and a few years ago, most of the world listened to the ultracapitalists and removed lots of regulation from the financial industries.
That went well.
What with all the bail-outs needed to keep the credit flowing, is there any truly private industry left any more?
The UK government in this situation is (attempting) to fulfill a need of society by commissioning the construction of a piece of 'public infrastructure' that the government deemed the society needed.
Actually, the real problem in the UK is that, because, since WW2, we have alternated between socialist and capitalist governments, we have ended up with an infrastructure that sometimes combines the social conscience of capitalism with the freedom and efficiency of socialism. We have socialist structures that conservative governments hate and want to fail, but can't openly abolish because the voters actually rather like them (and know damned well that even if they were abolished, we'd only see token tax cuts). We get public money used to engage private contractors, and "commercial confidentiality" use by the government to avoid public scrutiny. We get road and rail transport nationalized by a socialist government, then the profitable bit (road) privatized by the next while rail goes to hell, finally we get rail semi-sold off in a bizarre kludge where one company owns the rails and other companies run the trains on ridiculously short franchises that deter any investment. We get nonsensical "internal markets" set up in the NHS whereby public bodies are supposed to compete like private companies...
Probably the best solution to the NHS would have been to set up a quango which employed its own development team to produce its own system based on an open data exchange standard. A socialist solution to a socialist problem: put taxpayers money in, get a bit of public infrastructure out. Instead, we get a half-baked mix of government bureaucracy and private contracts with "for profit" companies.
No I don't: if you don't like what Amazon is offering, walk away. (If you were talking about Android Marketplace or, especially, the Apple App Store, both of which enjoy "special relationships" with their platform, you might have more of a point.)
How gracious of them to waive it. I sure hope there is no autorenewal or contractual clauses to catch you out there.
No. That sucks when they pull it on elderly people changing their electricity supplier or teenagers signing up for "free" ringtones, but those scams are rarely worded as "there is a $100/year fee waived for the first year". If you're smart enough to write a worthwhile app you really should be capable of making a "cancel Amazon subscription" note in your diary.
a) Not all apps are released to make money b) Not all free apps are useless or not worth using c) $100 is $100 less in a developer's pocket.
Newsflash: Amazon are a business who do do things to make money. If you want to give your stuff away, stick it on a download site that specializes in free software (these are usually funded by ads or donations). "Vanity publishing" is a service for which you should expect to pay. Advertising and promotion is a service for which you should expect to pay. Oh, yes, they're doing all the credit card processing for you, too.
If you think Amazon's terms are greedy then you've clearly never dealt with a reseller before. ("Yes, send us a rolling stock of N units for free, if anybody ever finds it in our huge catalog and buys one we will pay you for the replacement stock", "A customer just walked in and specifically asked for your product without us having to lift a finger to promote it: please send us the item at 50% discount"...)
It's unjustifiable especially considering Marketplace charges $25 for lifetime exposure to 100x the number of users.
So use Marketplace then and stop whining. Except I've never seen Markeplace do one iota of promotion beyond its front-page "featured" list, whereas Amazon customers get frequent emails, which lots of people actually read because they do an excellent job of generating relevant recommendations rather than pushing the latest bestseller. When you go to the website, you find personalized recommendations as well as the usual bestsellers and paid placements. Browse an item and you'll get mostly sensible links to "People who bought this also bought..." and "After browsing this people went on to buy...". They've had a reasonable stab at making the mythical "long tail" model work, whereas with Marketplace/Apple App Store you're pretty much stuffed if you're not in the top 100. Its early days for the Amazon appstore, but I can see them reaching customers that Marketplace won't.
And if you read the comments you will see they retroactively changed their terms so people were under the impression they got 20% but actually received nothing.
Sadly, nobody has turned up the old version of the T&C which allegedly offered this. The claimed addition in the new version according to this post is irrelevant as it talks about items with a $0.00 list price. The T&C say quite clearly that royalties are only due where Amazon has received payment. If you give something away for free you don't receive payment. Even your description of their terms talks about a minimum selling price of 20% list. TFA states quite categorically that the developer received an email asking for permission to distribute the app for free, and that the TFA authors understood this.
So in this instance 100,000 freeloaders got their app and the developer was burdened with supporting them for zero gain.
Except the majority those freeloaders downloaded the app because it was free, played wit
Amazon's robbery starts the minute they sign up - a $100 annual fee, graciously waived the first year. What a bargain compared to the $25 one time registration on Android Marketplace.
Sorry, I'm new to this. So when you develop an app, Jeff Bezos comes round to your house and says "I hear you're planning to use Android Marketplace, pity, this place is dry as tinder... one spark and it could all go up..."?
Really?
Otherwise, Amazon is just going to have to offer the chance of higher sales, better margins, better promotion etc. to justify the higher costs. Oh, and they give you a free year to try it out and decide if its worth $100/year to you.
Plus, $100 is chump change - about the equivalent of "serious callers only". If you don't sell enough to easily cover that then (lets break it to you gently) nobody wants your product. You seem to be looking for a vanity publishing service.
You set the list price, Amazon sets the sale price. Amazon can deep discount your app all the way down to 20% of its list price if they like. So instead of getting $7 revenue from $9.99 you get $2 from $2.
If you said that they'd only give you 70% of $2 then I might be more sympathetic, but if they effectively set a lower limit of 20% on your take, meaning that they get nothing on a $2 sale, that sounds more than fair. Their motive for doing that would be to drive sales, so they get more traffic and you stand to make a lot more $2s than you would $7s.
Or Amazon could even give the app away and you get nothing at all. Basically they're using your app to fuck you over.
Except that, if you read between the whines, TFA makes it quite clear that they explicitly write and ask for separate permission before giving away your app for nothing. As does your original statement that they could discount all the way to 20%of the list price.
This is just catching up to the state of the art of the mid 90s, when people started (perfectly reasonably) ripping unencrypted cds to their hard drives.
Make that the mid 70s when people not unreasonably started taping their vinyl LPs to compact casettes to play in the car...
There was a case of a (pretty high-end) product that copied cds to a drive so that they could be played in different rooms a little while back
Actually, the problem there is that the manufacturer violated "don't ask, don't tell" by explicitly suggesting in their advert that people could use it to rip their entire CD collection, and some curtain-twitcher complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (the advertising industry self-regulatory body) who then had no legal choice other than banning the ad.
Not teachers and students, just teachers. A teacher should know that it is inappropriate to have students on your facebook. The fact that its a law must mean that there are too many teachers in Missouri who are crossing the line.
No, its just another outbreak of zero-risk, zero-tolerance, zero-intelligence, nothing-eats-lawyers culture.
Having an "unprofessional" relationship with a student has long been a good way for a teacher to get fired, but heaven forbid that the decision of what was "unprofessional" should be subject to any sort of human judgement or interpretation. Ye gods man! Someone in management might have to take a decision (shudder) and someone might later challenge that decision (inconceivable!) No, we must have a specific law that bans every specific thing that might go wrong, and the next time we have a scandal the inquiry can have fun recommending new unenforceable laws to ban all the other specific things that they missed the last time round or have been invented since. Naturally these will be over-broad and result in lots of compliance documentation and periodically snare a teacher doing something perfectly innocent. Meanwhile, anybody contemplating serious abuse will just have to use a false Facebook name because (and this is the one that our illustrious leaders don't seem to get) criminals are people who don't obey the law.
Next semester's top school sport: use a false ID to trick teacher into friending you on Facebook, then report them.
That's just a Bad Idea. It was a Bad Idea decades before Facebook - take it from me. (You really, really don't want to be the only kid in class who can have their allowance docked/be grounded by your teacher). At least in a regular school setting: home schooling might be a different kettle of fish.
However, its the sort of Bad Idea that teachers ought to be able to sort out using their own professional judgements without using the law as a blunt instrument.
But at home, it would know exactly what tea means without him even programming it...
Pah. He should just count himself bloody lucky that he doesn't get handed a small cup of lukewarm water and a teabag on a string, which is what seems to pass for "tea" these days - even in establishments where the barrista will happily faff about drawing a smiley face in the tallskinnyhalffathalfsoychocomohofrappelatte made to your precise specifications from freshly ground beans, ask for "tea" and you still get the bloody self-assembly option. The only places that seem to have heard of a "teapot" are Chinese restaurants. I can forgive the Americans, but continental Europe is just as bad, and it has even infected Old Blighty.
Due to be visiting Boston next month. Somebody told me that they're good with tea. I'll ask.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it you don't like about it?
I've never understood the theoretical problem, and can only assume that the opponents of ID cards in principle must be people who:
...all of which currently require ID, and in many cases have to resort to silly, ad-hoc ID checks such as abusing passports/driving licenses for purposes other than travel/driving, asking for utility bills etc. A properly designed universal ID system with modern technology would be much less intrusive than these by only letting bartenders/banks/phone companies check the precise information that they needed (e.g. is this person over 18? Y/N?)
If the cops stopped you, they could swipe your card on the spot and just see your photograph (not even your name) and record a one-time code. Then, later, they can go and explain to a magistrate why they need to access your details. Its not as if a cop can't find an excuse to stop & search you anyway if they feel so inclined - and when they do that they might feel obliged to charge you with something to justify themselves. Having ID cards doesn't mean you have to give the police carte blanche... and should the fascists win an election, or stage a coup, its going to take them all of a week to issue "papers" (and until then woe betide anybody who goes out without a utility bill, driving license or birth certificate).
No, the real practical problem for me is that this is a Large IT Project and if there's one thing that both governments and Big Industry are congenitally incapable of doing it is organizing a Large IT Project. I think that, while they just about comprehend that you can't sign up a contractor to build a tunnel under the Bristol channel and two-thirds of the way through decide that you want a bridge over the English Channel instead, they haven't quite managed to extend that logic to anything involving computers. So the odds are that we'd all have to pay huge fees for our ID cards, have huge difficulty getting any mistakes or abuse corrected, the encryption would be cracked within a week and that the entire database of personal information would turn up on Wikileaks within 24 hours of the launch.
Also, the now defunct ID card scheme was going to solve the problems of illegal immigration, terrorism, crime and halitosis, but making it possible to open a bank account without presenting a gas bill and a birth certificate was never mentioned.
2. A gimicky feature that something like 10% of the people in the world can't see (myself included).
...and which prompted "OMG!!! Don't let your children play this or they'll grow up to be blind axe murderers!!!" stories in the press.
However, forcing people to pay extra for a crappy gimmick that ruins the entertainment seems to be working out for movie theaters, so who's to say...
The least expensive Google Shopping result that I got for "A4 paper ream" was $8.99 for Hammermill Fore Multipuprose.
Because A4 paper is a specialist item in the land of US Letter, DUH! The sensible cost comparison is with your local default paper size.
My guesstimate was based on UK prices - £3/ream - take off the 20% tax that includes, multiply by $1.6 and you have about $4. I just looked on amazon.com and you can get US Letter (in the US) for $3.72, so I was pretty much on the money.
Actually, I'm sick of people who seriously make the complaint "the cost has to come down" when things like this are still in the research/development phase
Sure the cost will come down - but what to? Even if the cost comes down to 10 cents, you'll still need to re-use each sheet an average of 10 times to compete with a 1 cent bit of paper. Now, looking at CD-R disks, they started out at $30 a pop (back in the days when making a coaster really sucked) and now cost about 10 cents - so its not impossible that ePaper might end up costing little more than treePaper. However, that sort of drop requires economy of scale: the product has to succeed a bit before prices start to drop, creating a cycle of falling price and increasing uptake. That means the product has to be useful from day 1. In the early days of CD-Rs, developers needed them for authoring CD-ROMs, so there was a market. Then they started to become useful for backup, and were cheaper than tape, then they became cheaper than Zips and Syquests, and the market expanded... then they became cheaper than albums on CD (hoist the Jolly Rodger!) and the rest is history. The question is, what will ePaper be good for on day 1?
Sticking with CDs, this may be why CD-RWs have always been "bubbling under" - they've always cost several times more than CD-Rs so you only use them if you're really sure that you're going to be organized and re-use them multiple times.
1) The startup up costs of buying the printer: will any thermal transfer printer do, or do I need get a special one for this type of paper?
Again, that depends if they can get momentum. Thermal printers are a lot simpler than lasers, and there's no ink/toner/delicate photosensitive roller to replace - so the cost of ownership should be low provided people are organized enough to maintain a high rate of paper re-use.
Xfce, light weight iterative development, reliable.
I know, I'd just like to try Unity and Gnome 3 without them crashing and glitching... then I'd feel entitled to slag them off on Slashdot.
...erased up to 260 times... and an A4 sheet costs only US $2
(1) You'll have a job selling a European pinko-commie A4 sheet measured in spawn-of-the-Devil millimeters* for US dollars. They'll give up their 8.5 x 11 God-fearin' inches Letter when you pry it from their cold, dead 3-ring binders.
(2) More seriously, that price has got to come down before it makes financial sense. Lets see - A4 paper... google.. about $3.83** for 500 sheets, so to break even you'd need to use each bit of ePaper, hmmm... $2 / ( 3.83 / 500) ) equals... 261 times! Oh, wait....
(* They say you can keep foldin' it and it keeps its aspect ratio. WITCHCRAFT I tell you!!!)
(** OK, I totally fudged this but its not far off...)
This guy is totally right. All this choice is just too confusing. There are too many competing options, and it's ruining things for everybody.
(OK, I did spot the sarcasm, but...)
What's needed is the Goldilocks solution: just enough choice. A monopoly is bad. A new option every month is equally bad (diluting the talent pool and ensuring that nothing is ever finished). A couple of strong competitors for each major application = good.
vi, or emacs?
Sorry: nano. .txt file it should open in something which most emphatically isn't a marginally desktopized vi or emacs, has a "File: Save As" menu option and which is labelled "Text Editor" and not "KGViMACS2". When they double-click on a .doc or a .docx it doesn't really matter whether it opens in OpenOffice, LibreOffice or KOffice provided (a) it does a half-decent job of converting the .doc and (b) is described in the menu as "Word Processor".
Seriously: it doesn't matter one jot. Anybody who has an opinion on vi or emacs will have the appropriate variant installed in a jiffy. What matters is that when Joe Luser double-clicks on a
The real problem is not choice: its Linux, you always have choice if you know how. The problem is making sensible default choices for non-techy users who can't easily change things. Sticking to those choices for more than 6 months is good, too.
It should be the case that increasing reliance on cloud software will make it easier for businesses to choose Linux, but for that to happen, Linux communities need to stop fighting the old fights, says Proffitt."
If the cloud takes over, most of the old fights should become irrelevant... apart from Firefox vs. IceWeasel vs. Epiphany vs. Konqueror vs. Chrome vs. Lynx. Last time I looked, ChromeOS and Android were, technically, Linux.
LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, Evolution vs. Thunderbird
...provided distro designers wise up, realize that none of those will be household names to switchers, and have large friendly icons called "Wordprocessor", "Spredsheet", "Mail", "Browse the Web" (with a "preferred applications" config somewhere for those of us that give a damn) that should be irrelevant.
GNOME3 vs. Unity vs. KDE
If distros keep rushing these out before they are ready* and still lack key functionality then this will kill linux on the desktop deader than it already is, without help from the cloud.
* That's me giving Gnome 3 and Unity the benefit of the doubt. I'd like to give them a chance, but I prefer to use virtualbox to play with new distros, and it doesn't seem to want to play nice with all the new eye candy.
Given Intel integrated GPUs in laptops were capable of driving a couple of 27" LCDs over displayport 2-3 years ago, I find that difficult to believe.
I think the "one display port" may have been a brainfart on my part, but the bottom line is that the chipset can only support two simultaneous displays.
I doubt that the latest gen is incapable of driving two external displays
Intel HD graphics can support a maximum of two simultaneous displays total (http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-031040.htm#11). One internal laptop display + one external display = two displays.
Maybe Apple could have designed the MacBook so that it could blank the internal display and drive two external monitors (but also bear in mind that the number of monitors which support displayport daisy-chaining can be counted on the fingers of a boxing glove).
I've never understood the nigh-jesuitical levels of logic chopping(with not infrequent descent into mere hand-waving) that go on surrounding "fair" and "unfair" advantages in high level sports.
The underlying problem is the idea of "high level sports", "professional athletes", massive sponsorship deals and huge capital pork projects to host athletics events. If it was just a case of the misty-eyed wholesome self-improvement aspect of sport for sport's sake then it would be petty to argue about such things and there would be less incentive to cheat. As it is, though, these are professionals (highly paid in some cases) trying to defend their livelihood against "unfair competition".
"Oh, no! We have to set a good example for the kids! Professional athletes are just regular folks who get a good night's rest and eat their wheaties!".
Of course there's nothing particularly natural about regular folks who eat their wheaties (or anything else that doesn't grow on trees in the Rift Valley), had their childhood diseases cured and can expect to live 40 years beyond the MTBF of the original homo sapiens. Should we stop worrying and embrace the PharmaLympics, and treat anybody who wrecks their health with performance-enhancing drugs the same way we treat those of us who have wrecked our health by sitting behind a desk all day and living on pizza and coffee for the sake of our career?
That'd be Wheaties(tm) - fortified with iron and vitamins, official breakfast cereal of the BigSportsTornament(r)(tm)(c) by the way.
Apple should simply integrate a modern GPU in their monitors: there's room to properly cool down and the monitor becomes the definitve docking station. It would also justify the price, even if it's slightly increased.
They do: it's called an iMac. They throw in a CPU and a hard drive, too.
If the thing can't even handle two external screens, I doubt it'll handle an external screen and an external graphics card...
The "lite" thunderbolt chip on the Airs has zero practical consequences: The limitation on external screens ultimately comes from the on-CPU Intel HD Graphics which only support one DisplayPort and a maximum of two displays (including the built-in screen). The 13" MB Pro has the same limitation for the same reason.
The full-fat Thunderbolt chip supports a second physical Thunderbolt port (but only the iMac actually uses this) and can carry a second DisplayPort signal (only useful on the machines with Radeon graphics like the 15" and 17" pros). It would be completely pointless in an Air.
You can currently get a remote controlled helicopter based camera that has a run time of 10+ mins.
I'm guessing that this is for spying on the sort of people who are likely to shoot down any suspicious looking mini-helicopters before they can get close.
Not a lot you can do about a ballistic camera apart from try and find where it landed so you can moon the operators.
I remember the days when apple play commercials claiming their OS don't get virus's, malware, etc.
That was in the old days when major Windows applications required you to run as administrator, when mail messages could silently install software and an unpatched XP machine connected to the internet would be infected before you had a chance to download the patches. Win 7 has done a lot to reduce that, which may by why Apple dropped the ads...
An iOS exploit that requires physical access to the machine, a custom cable and only works on a machine which has already been jailbroken (i.e. deliberately cracked by the legitimate user) isn't exactly in the same league as the sort of remote pwnage seen on PCs in the Bad Old Days.
I can't think of any other country with as many stories of the form "restricted-access data from XXX was left in a pub by a contractor/employee with company/agency YYY".
I know its not exactly a USB stick with bank details, but other nationalities do quite famously leave things in bars that they probably shouldn't.
Maybe it's just that the British press covers this expecially aggressively,
Ding!
I know, I had cancer, the day I found my lump I was in an MRI.
If we're doing anecdotal evidence, last time I had a MRI (invented at my local University, by the way) on the NHS I waited a whole week - and that was non-urgent (plus I had other scans and tests while I was waiting). If it was suspected cancer it would have been quicker. A relative had bowel cancer and it was successfully removed within a few days. Another relative has a rather neat home kidney machine and truckloads of supplies delivered to their door every fortnight - all without them worrying about where the money is coming from (sure, they've paid their tax in the past, when they had an income to pay it from). Unfortunately we have one or two ultracapitalist press barons (you may have heard of them recently) who love to scour the country for dirt on the NHS, BBC or any other organization that is a bit too left for their liking, and rarely report the good bits.
By the way, thanks very much for the extensive research you did in your earlier post (you know, the link to a google search for "NHS Horror" [27 hits]). I now realize that rather than bothering to find the actual report from the WHO on per-capita healthcare costs I should have taken a leaf from your book and Googled "USA health care horror" - that gives me 296 hits so, quite frankly, QED.
Lego Capricorn 1: The Lego Jupiter mission was a fake, and three Lego figures who Know Too Much are now being pursued across the California desert...
I also cannot think of a single example, national defense and courts not withstanding, where the government can do a better job than private industry. In fact, I challenge you to find me a single example..
I patiently await your reply.
Well, according to the WHO the USA spends more per capita on its nice capitalist healthcare system (that the right wing parties are fighting so hard to defend) than any other country, including all the free healthcare systems.
Of course, because that money isn't taxes that's fine and dandy, and everybody has the Gawd-given freedom to cross their fingers and hope they don't get ill.
But I guess middle-class Americans do have good teeth.
Oh, and a few years ago, most of the world listened to the ultracapitalists and removed lots of regulation from the financial industries.
That went well.
What with all the bail-outs needed to keep the credit flowing, is there any truly private industry left any more?
The UK government in this situation is (attempting) to fulfill a need of society by commissioning the construction of a piece of 'public infrastructure' that the government deemed the society needed.
Actually, the real problem in the UK is that, because, since WW2, we have alternated between socialist and capitalist governments, we have ended up with an infrastructure that sometimes combines the social conscience of capitalism with the freedom and efficiency of socialism. We have socialist structures that conservative governments hate and want to fail, but can't openly abolish because the voters actually rather like them (and know damned well that even if they were abolished, we'd only see token tax cuts). We get public money used to engage private contractors, and "commercial confidentiality" use by the government to avoid public scrutiny. We get road and rail transport nationalized by a socialist government, then the profitable bit (road) privatized by the next while rail goes to hell, finally we get rail semi-sold off in a bizarre kludge where one company owns the rails and other companies run the trains on ridiculously short franchises that deter any investment. We get nonsensical "internal markets" set up in the NHS whereby public bodies are supposed to compete like private companies...
Probably the best solution to the NHS would have been to set up a quango which employed its own development team to produce its own system based on an open data exchange standard. A socialist solution to a socialist problem: put taxpayers money in, get a bit of public infrastructure out. Instead, we get a half-baked mix of government bureaucracy and private contracts with "for profit" companies.
You know exactly what I mean.
No I don't: if you don't like what Amazon is offering, walk away. (If you were talking about Android Marketplace or, especially, the Apple App Store, both of which enjoy "special relationships" with their platform, you might have more of a point.)
How gracious of them to waive it. I sure hope there is no autorenewal or contractual clauses to catch you out there.
No. That sucks when they pull it on elderly people changing their electricity supplier or teenagers signing up for "free" ringtones, but those scams are rarely worded as "there is a $100/year fee waived for the first year". If you're smart enough to write a worthwhile app you really should be capable of making a "cancel Amazon subscription" note in your diary.
a) Not all apps are released to make money b) Not all free apps are useless or not worth using c) $100 is $100 less in a developer's pocket.
Newsflash: Amazon are a business who do do things to make money. If you want to give your stuff away, stick it on a download site that specializes in free software (these are usually funded by ads or donations). "Vanity publishing" is a service for which you should expect to pay. Advertising and promotion is a service for which you should expect to pay. Oh, yes, they're doing all the credit card processing for you, too.
If you think Amazon's terms are greedy then you've clearly never dealt with a reseller before. ("Yes, send us a rolling stock of N units for free, if anybody ever finds it in our huge catalog and buys one we will pay you for the replacement stock", "A customer just walked in and specifically asked for your product without us having to lift a finger to promote it: please send us the item at 50% discount"...)
It's unjustifiable especially considering Marketplace charges $25 for lifetime exposure to 100x the number of users.
So use Marketplace then and stop whining. Except I've never seen Markeplace do one iota of promotion beyond its front-page "featured" list, whereas Amazon customers get frequent emails, which lots of people actually read because they do an excellent job of generating relevant recommendations rather than pushing the latest bestseller. When you go to the website, you find personalized recommendations as well as the usual bestsellers and paid placements. Browse an item and you'll get mostly sensible links to "People who bought this also bought..." and "After browsing this people went on to buy...". They've had a reasonable stab at making the mythical "long tail" model work, whereas with Marketplace/Apple App Store you're pretty much stuffed if you're not in the top 100. Its early days for the Amazon appstore, but I can see them reaching customers that Marketplace won't.
And if you read the comments you will see they retroactively changed their terms so people were under the impression they got 20% but actually received nothing.
Sadly, nobody has turned up the old version of the T&C which allegedly offered this. The claimed addition in the new version according to this post is irrelevant as it talks about items with a $0.00 list price. The T&C say quite clearly that royalties are only due where Amazon has received payment. If you give something away for free you don't receive payment. Even your description of their terms talks about a minimum selling price of 20% list. TFA states quite categorically that the developer received an email asking for permission to distribute the app for free, and that the TFA authors understood this.
So in this instance 100,000 freeloaders got their app and the developer was burdened with supporting them for zero gain.
Except the majority those freeloaders downloaded the app because it was free, played wit
Amazon's robbery starts the minute they sign up - a $100 annual fee, graciously waived the first year. What a bargain compared to the $25 one time registration on Android Marketplace.
Sorry, I'm new to this. So when you develop an app, Jeff Bezos comes round to your house and says "I hear you're planning to use Android Marketplace, pity, this place is dry as tinder... one spark and it could all go up..."?
Really?
Otherwise, Amazon is just going to have to offer the chance of higher sales, better margins, better promotion etc. to justify the higher costs. Oh, and they give you a free year to try it out and decide if its worth $100/year to you.
Plus, $100 is chump change - about the equivalent of "serious callers only". If you don't sell enough to easily cover that then (lets break it to you gently) nobody wants your product. You seem to be looking for a vanity publishing service.
You set the list price, Amazon sets the sale price. Amazon can deep discount your app all the way down to 20% of its list price if they like. So instead of getting $7 revenue from $9.99 you get $2 from $2.
If you said that they'd only give you 70% of $2 then I might be more sympathetic, but if they effectively set a lower limit of 20% on your take, meaning that they get nothing on a $2 sale, that sounds more than fair. Their motive for doing that would be to drive sales, so they get more traffic and you stand to make a lot more $2s than you would $7s.
Or Amazon could even give the app away and you get nothing at all. Basically they're using your app to fuck you over.
Except that, if you read between the whines, TFA makes it quite clear that they explicitly write and ask for separate permission before giving away your app for nothing. As does your original statement that they could discount all the way to 20%of the list price.
This is just catching up to the state of the art of the mid 90s, when people started (perfectly reasonably) ripping unencrypted cds to their hard drives.
Make that the mid 70s when people not unreasonably started taping their vinyl LPs to compact casettes to play in the car...
There was a case of a (pretty high-end) product that copied cds to a drive so that they could be played in different rooms a little while back
Actually, the problem there is that the manufacturer violated "don't ask, don't tell" by explicitly suggesting in their advert that people could use it to rip their entire CD collection, and some curtain-twitcher complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (the advertising industry self-regulatory body) who then had no legal choice other than banning the ad.
Not teachers and students, just teachers. A teacher should know that it is inappropriate to have students on your facebook. The fact that its a law must mean that there are too many teachers in Missouri who are crossing the line.
No, its just another outbreak of zero-risk, zero-tolerance, zero-intelligence, nothing-eats-lawyers culture.
Having an "unprofessional" relationship with a student has long been a good way for a teacher to get fired, but heaven forbid that the decision of what was "unprofessional" should be subject to any sort of human judgement or interpretation. Ye gods man! Someone in management might have to take a decision (shudder) and someone might later challenge that decision (inconceivable!) No, we must have a specific law that bans every specific thing that might go wrong, and the next time we have a scandal the inquiry can have fun recommending new unenforceable laws to ban all the other specific things that they missed the last time round or have been invented since. Naturally these will be over-broad and result in lots of compliance documentation and periodically snare a teacher doing something perfectly innocent. Meanwhile, anybody contemplating serious abuse will just have to use a false Facebook name because (and this is the one that our illustrious leaders don't seem to get) criminals are people who don't obey the law.
Next semester's top school sport: use a false ID to trick teacher into friending you on Facebook, then report them.
What happens if your teacher is your parent?
That's just a Bad Idea. It was a Bad Idea decades before Facebook - take it from me. (You really, really don't want to be the only kid in class who can have their allowance docked/be grounded by your teacher). At least in a regular school setting: home schooling might be a different kettle of fish.
However, its the sort of Bad Idea that teachers ought to be able to sort out using their own professional judgements without using the law as a blunt instrument.
But at home, it would know exactly what tea means without him even programming it...
Pah. He should just count himself bloody lucky that he doesn't get handed a small cup of lukewarm water and a teabag on a string, which is what seems to pass for "tea" these days - even in establishments where the barrista will happily faff about drawing a smiley face in the tallskinnyhalffathalfsoychocomohofrappelatte made to your precise specifications from freshly ground beans, ask for "tea" and you still get the bloody self-assembly option. The only places that seem to have heard of a "teapot" are Chinese restaurants. I can forgive the Americans, but continental Europe is just as bad, and it has even infected Old Blighty.
Due to be visiting Boston next month. Somebody told me that they're good with tea. I'll ask.