Why is a third party monitor having problems a big blow to apple?
(1) Because these displays were advertised (by Apple) as being designed by LG in close collaboration with Apple. They featured prominently in the launch of the new MacBook Pro.
(2) Apple's new policy seems to be not to produce their own displays, routers, back-up drives (they've stopped AirPort development, dropped their existing display) - this is a blow to that policy.
(3) Because Apple have staked a lot on the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port by making it the only port on the new machines (TB3 has been around on newer PCs for a while, but always backed up by USB, HDMI/DP etc.). Having a single cable to a display that provides 5k, webcam, audio, downstream USB3 ports and can power the laptop is TB3's party trick - but the LG/Apple display is the only thing on the market that currently does that. There are a few 4k USB-C displays but they can only support USB2 downstream and don't typically supply enough power to do more than trickle-charge a MacBook Pro.
(4) Its early days for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 and Apple has forced the pace with its new machine - we've had stories about cheap USB-C devices frying machines, incompatibility problems (didn't Dell have to drop their TB3 dock?) so, yeah, at this stage in the game I'd have a preference for buying USB-C/TB3 gear from Apple's list where feasible.
Also, its kinda likely that this was originally going to be an Apple-branded product - if you ignore the black plastic case, the restricted choice of ports and their layout is far more iMac/Apple Thunderbolt Display-like than other LG products. That would also explain the interference problem: if the electronics were supposed to go in an Apple-style solid aluminium case then who needs extra RF shielding?
Of course VIM beat Emacs. If you want to interactively and visually manipulate your text "directly" - there are plenty of great, modern editors around (with masses of extensibility and customisation potential) of which Emacs is just one, rather dated, example. If, instead, you prefer to modify your text by applying functions to it - with visual feedback and interaction playing second fiddle - then VIM/vi is the only game in town.
The mistake is people in the second group (who might well tend to over-represent the Sheldon Cooper end of the spectrum, shall we say) trying to evangelise it to people in the first group.
Personally, I loathe vi, but that's partly because (a) I spend a lot of time, unavoidably, using non-modal wordprocessors and editors and can't cope with the constant mental paradigm shifts and (b) I didn't learn vi when I was 15. That said, I still use vi more than emacs (comparing two very small numbers there), but only because it would never occur to me to type 'export VISUAL=/bin/emacs'.
Funny. I'm typing this on a Mac. Got an iPad too. I just ignored the little cartons labelled "drink me" that they include in the box... was that important?
Or, to put it another way, the apparent quarter-on-quarter growth that they were happy to see trumpeted in all the headlines was less than the "measurement error" due to the way the figures were calculated. (As, to be fair, is any quarter-on-quarter decrease of the same size). So, a flat quarter then...
Of course, for a quarter during which Apple's main competitor in the phone market (Samsung) had to withdraw their new flagship phone, Apple's iPhone 7 (a completely new phone c.f. last year's 6s spec bump) had its first holiday season (even if the quarter missed out on the launch), as did the Watch 2, and they released their new MacBook Pro laptops after an 18-month wait, not having a significantly better quarter seems a bit embarrasing.
He went to an important event where he needed 100% up-time in a public place that he most doubtfully was on a 3rd party wireless network and he made no effort to make sure his computer was up to date before hand.
Have you actually used a computer? You seem to have reality entirely back-to-front.
Updating your OS or other key software just before an important event or deadline is the stupid move here. Once in a blue moon, there's a major vulnerability of the "instant remote pwnage" variety that might justify dropping everything and patching, but for the vast majority of updates, the risk of the update process going wrong, or the update breaking or changing something exceeds any risk from running unpatched. Auto update - even automatic checking for updates - became an abomination as soon as it was used for anything other than the highest-priority critical security updates. Update your software when it has a bug or vulnerability that affects you. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Patch during quiet periods.
If your "security policy" is causing downtime or data loss then you've got your risk assessment all screwed up.
Fake news, maybe. If any large company "leaks" its post-Brexit investment plans before the terms of Brexit have been agreed, then somebody probably misspoke or was misquoted.
We'll find out the in a few years' time if it is a fake issue, when Brexit has actually happened, the trading terms with the EU are known and Random Big Corp decides if its going to invest in the UK or Poland. However, the UK not going to be in the single market or customs union then - the PM has said that much, and anything else would be tantamount to Brussels voting to disband the EU. To pretend that isn't going to be a factor in corporate investment is just plain fantasy.
PS: if the Tories' solution is to become a tax haven thats going to be good news for the owners of the flat over the fish & chip shop in London where BigCorp declares its profits, but doesn't guarantee that the actual work (and employment) won't still be sited in Poland - unless there's some fantastic new international accord on tax avoidance (oh, my aching sides!)
US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and India are not in the EU, but they aren't being punished.
Yeah... if only you could build a factory in the US and get unfettered access to a single market of 300 million consumers... or a data-centre in India and hire well-trained workers at near-third-world wages...
Plus, those countries haven't been building their economic infrastructure around the EU single market & customs union for the last 40 years.
It's not a reason why we can't, it's a reason why it would be a terrible idea.
I think you and I only differ on the pragmatic meaning of "can" and "can't".
Meanwhile, could someone please explain to the Lib Dems and others proposing a referendum on the final agreement as a condition for supporting Art. 50 that if Art, 50 is invoked we are leaving and the only choice at the end of the process will be "take the deal and leave" or "just leave".
Nothing quite kicks an Eton toff in the teeth like giving him everything he wants and more.
That is, stop attending the meetings, stop paying the fees, stop letting in filty immgrunts and repeal the EC act.
Seriously? While we're at it, perhaps if we hooked enough rowing boats to the UK and paddled really, really hard we could move the entire country away from Europe and next door to some other international pariah with a reputation for behaving like a moody teenager and being impossible to do business with - North Korea maybe? Or, give our New Best Friend Trump a few more months. As someone who's opinion you, presumably, respect said:
Of course, if you act like a total dickhead to your trading partners by not honouring prior agreements, they're unlikely to want to do much negotiating with you since you've proven untrustworthy.
That's called a reason why we can't just take our ball and go home.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
What's wrong with that is that the EU Council & Parliament just need to filibuster for a couple of years and they can give us a "take it or leave it" deal that only has to be better than the default...
Why, if we're leaving, do you think we're owed some sort of special treatment?
Its not "special treatment" because no other state has seceded from the EU, so there's no "usual treatment" to compare it with. None of the non-EU states with existing agreements (Norway, Switzerland) were in the EU to start with. The EU is a lot more complicated than a trade deal (and those take a decade to negotiate). What about EU citizens living in the UK? What about UK citizens living in the EU - do they get shipped back? Arrested as illegal immigrants? Oh, and those immigrants you are so worried about - many of them currently get stopped by border controls in the EU. EU companies with offices and assets in the UK? UK companies with offices in the EU? Tourists currently in the EU (who have no right to be there the second we leave the EU)? Students? What happens to the lorries full of imports and exports passing between UK and EU docks if nobody knows on what terms they are allowed in or out?. Even if we don't actually get concessions, long-term, at the very least we need some sort of orderly plan and timetable for making the transition without overnight chaos - unless we want to re-enact the Berlin air lift?
You know all those stupid, stupid horror stories and ridiculous threats of economic cataclysm that Camoron and Osbourne built their pathetic "remain" campaign around? The reason that everybody thought they were stupid and ridiculous was that people assumed that there's be some sort of civilised negotiation about the terms of departure that would anticipate and mitigate - or at least plan for - those problems. You start saying "well, we could just tell the EU to fuck off" and suddenly all that FUD starts sounding plausible.
This was a well known and understood consequence of leaving.
Not according to the "Leave" campaign who told everybody that the Europeans would be so desperate to trade with us that they'd let us stay in the single market and custom union at the same time as "taking back control", and that anybody who suggested that there might be any downside was "running down Britain".
I have no quarrel with the minority of Brexit voters who weighed up the arguments, did the research and decided it was all worth the risk. However, if you think such people swung the Brexit vote then I have this brilliant scheme for using our EU contributions to fund the NHS that you may like...
Still trying to work out how handing a huge victory to the hard right, richest minority of the Conservative party struck a blow for the little guy against elitism...
No. The Lisbon Treaty on the procedure for leaving the EU can be summarised as: "the state wishing to leave shall bend over and pick up the soap." - now, technically, it was a bit silly to sign up to that, but at the time nobody thought that the UK PM would be stupid enough to call a Brexit referendum and, even if they did, no PM would be gormless enough to lose such a referendum, and even if they lost the referendum no PM would be stupid enough to pretend that they were obliged to pay more than lip service to the result of an advisory referendum.
More specifically, the procedure under the treaty is:
So, once Article 50 is invoked, the only way Brexit doesn't happen in March 2019 is if the European Council unanimously decides to extend the deadline. If that doesn't happen, and (predictably) the deal negotiations go to the wire then the only choice that the UK parliament will have in step (3) is "take the deal on offer or crash out of the EU with no agreement causing maximum chaos and confusion".
Oh, and note that the "deal" isn't necessarily this mythical trade deal that gives us access to the single market - according to some EU politicians we can't start talking about that until after we've actually left (and, in any case, negotiating such a deal in 2 years would be a new world record). No, this will just be things like who gets the cat, who gets the record collection and what happens to all the EU citizens living in the UK and all the UK citizens living in the EU (probably they'll get to go home on alternate Saturdays).
...is it true that the cell company Three allows unlimited data when roaming in the US? Has anyone tried using hundreds of gigs of data while traveling here?
Yes. I haven't tried "hundreds of gigs" but I've used Maps, email etc. freely and haven't incurred any charges. Only gotcha is that calling a US phone still counts as an international call from the UK.
I think there's a time limit on how many weeks you can use it for in one run, so there's no point trying the old "Hi dude... er, sorry, hello old chaps at Three I am and genuine lime... sorry... British person (I say, what ho, God Bless the Queen, poh-tay-to, al-you-min-y-um and all that) and can I get... er... I want to pur-chase one of your fine SIMS for use here at my home in Londonengland..." routine.
I'm paying £20/month for 200 minutes and unlimited data.... I think its a bit more now for new customers (I got grandfathered).
This traveller gets "free" roaming and data in the US as part of his regular UK contract. (Three with "feel at home" - £20-£30 month depending on how many minutes you want). The only snag is that although voice calls to UK numbers come out of the regular contract allowance, calling another US phone still counts as an international call - still, for phoning home, mail & maps its great.
Using Wine on Linux is much better for development and there are hardly any other use-cases.
...only for the subset of Windows applications (often old versions) that have gold/platinum support in Wine.
That said, once you accept that some people do actually want to run Windows (probably for the GUI - Linux folk never did get the message that a GUI is more than a way of running 8 copies of vim side-by-side), the real competitor to WSL for development is running Windows, with Linux as a virtual machine (as others have said, nobody ever picked Linux for its user-friendliness) set up to mimic your target environment.
Seems like the long-term advantage of WSL would be if future containerisation products could support both Windows and Linux containers side-by-sice while running natively on a Windows machine: currently Docker et. al. on WIndows install a Linux VM as the base OS. Of course, presumably you could use Wine to run server-side Windows stuff on a Linux container, but you can see that Microsoft wouldn't see that as Plan A. That said, hell did freeze over when MS started doing SQL Server for Linux...
you obviously don't remember the "smartphones" of the day. yes, they had those paper features but in real life it was easier not to use them.
This.
I had bought a Windows smartphone shortly before the iPhone came out. Yeah, it did lots of stuff that the iPhone did but it was horrible to use. Basic problem: it had a slide-out querty keyboard, a joystick, a jog wheel, a touchscreen, a toothpick stylus and a set of applications that were optimised for none of those input methods. Apple took the minimalist approach: multitouch + one home button, and everything was designed to work well that way.
After persisting with the WinPhone for a year or two I actually ended up going with Android (iPhone was more than I wanted to pay for a phone), but its obvious that Android would be nothing like it is today if the iPhone hadn't happened.
I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago
It wasn't an easy boat for Kodak to jump on.
Kodak's reputation (and the core of their business) was film and film processing, not making good cameras . Their famous cameras of the past - Brownie, Instamatic etc. - were mainly about innovations in film & processing, not cameras per se. The arrival of digital killed the "Gillette razor blade" business model - suddenly Kodak had to start making its money from actually selling cameras, not film. They were stuffed.
Kodak did launch digital cameras - both professional 'digital backs' and a consumer range (ISTR they tried to establish a standard camera OS) - but if you see a rack of expensive digital cameras of various brands, which one were you going to pick up first: Nikon, Canon, Olympus... or Kodak? Right. Even Sony, by then, had a rep for making video cameras & they got themselves some more cred by using Zeiss-branded lenses. Panasonic, likewise, released Leica-branded digicams.
Also, in the 90s, Kodak did start to shift their processing systems to a digital workflow - i.e. scan the negs and print digitally, offering all sorts of post-processing and printing options - which would have put them in pole position to offer print services for digital cameras. One spin-off was PhotoCD for which they had great plans - but in practice I think it just got used by semi-pros who wanted a cheap way of digitising their slides. As for print-from-digital, people getting blow-ups of their favourite shots is never going to replace the volume of business from developing film. I guess their biggest mistake was letting the likes of Epson beat them to the punch when it came to photo-quality home inkjet printing (welcome back King Camp Gillette!)
that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads.
So, its about turnover rather than numbers of sales. Lets have a look on Amazon...
Thought so:
Dark side of the moon vinyl: £18.98
Dark side of the moon digital download: £7.99
...or stream for £0 if you already have Amazon Prime
...or rip the CD you bought in 1988 for £0
...or screw over those poor, penniless artists and torrent for £0.
So, yeah, you can see why the turnover on vinyl is tasty.
Got to hand it to the music industry: after getting everybody to replace all their vinyl with CDs in the 80s, it must have been so frustrating when the next big format let you convert all your CDs for free, but now they've gone back to the drawing board, applied themselves and found a wheeze to get everybody to replace all of their MP3s with vinyl again... so it looks like vinyl may even outlive the CD.
Remember guys - store all your CDs carefully for the grandkids so they're ready for the big 16-bit revival in 2050...
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Someone has got the measure of the typical user...
E.g. I type "o-p-e-r"...
Browser immediately opens "Download Google Chrome"* page.
*or other browser of your choice provided it doesn't have a mouth-frothingly insane "speculatively download and render potential malware" feature... because nobody ever left any security loopholes in any code ever.
Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.
Postgres / HSTORE could have probably solved pretty much the entire set of persistence use cases
Hey, but PostgreSQL is buzzword compliant with the new hipness... you want a JSON-based document store?
CREATE TABLE docstore (
docid SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
userid INTEGER REFERENCES users,
document JSON
);
OK, don't code-review that off-the-cuff doodle too seriously, but implementing NoSQL features in a decent RDBMS is easy, implementing RDBMS features in NoSQL is hard...
Wow, ExtJS brought all development to a complete multi year halt. In the first few months ExtJS development is way way way faster than any other framework out there. But after about 6 months all you are doing is fighting with the framework
This is the good old "Rapid Application Development" myth that has been doing the rounds since before many of today's trendy agile NoSQL programmers and the PHBs who encourage them were born. Even with things like Microsoft Foundation Classes and Borland's OWL that were used to create substantial apps, the initial drag-n-drool honeymoon didn't last very long. Then when Multimedia came along there were more "authoring systems" than applications created using authoring systems, and they were all great until you hit the brick wall that the designers had never anticipated, and ended up re-writing from scratch.
"Ooh look, I can create a fully-functioning GUI app by clicking 3 buttons and writing 1 line of code... this is going to save weeks of development"
Six months later: "Ooh, look - I'm wading through the sparsely-commented source code of the framework trying to figure out why I can't get the 'print' method to do anything beyond the trivial case given in the sample project... what's this? '/// TODO - implement print function'...?" (Its too long ago for me to remember the details so I won't name the application framework in question).
Turns out that a couple of days writing the "boilerplate" code for your application paid dividends further down the line...
First example I remember was this: The Last One - yes folks, the last computer program that would ever need to be written, heralded by magazine articles predicting mass unemployment of programmers... but I'll bet you an internet that Ada Lovelace had some brilliant ideas for making the Analytical Engine take all the hard work out of programming...
Put simply: we all know that the last 10% of development takes 90% of the time. RAD tools eliminate the first 10% of the development thus ensuring that the last 10% takes 100% of the time.
Making a entire spin-off distro for one single specific application seems like the biggest waste of time and effort to me.
I think that's true now, but back in the day there were very good reasons for Mythbuntu: first, it was used for single-purpose Home Theatre PC "Appliances" - often small-form-factor systems with mediocre resources. MythTV needed X Window, but you didn't want the bloat of a full distro. TV tuners, hardware-assisted video playback, infra-red remote control didn't work straight out of the box on regular distros - you had to at least build and install kernel drivers, if not customise the kernel, then faff around to get it to boot straight to full screen MythTV. Mythbuntu had a lot of this already set up.
Now, things have moved on - the standard distros now typically include all the LinuxTV kernel drivers so well-supported cards are plug'n'play, and the unsupported ones usually rely on binary blobs or customised versions of the LinuxTV stack that can't be distributed with Mythbuntu either. As someone already pointed out, PCIe-based cards that support HD are like hen's teeth (YMMV depending on which standard you use) and the "driver-free" HDHomeRun seems to be cornering the market.
Also, now, any streaming box that can run Kodi or MrMC (XBMC as was) can be a MythTV frontend - a Raspberry Pi works brilliantly, or you can use a FireTV, AppleTV, or Android TV box - so it makes much more sense to run the backend on a server or NAS and keep that noisy spinning rust out of your living room. That cuts out all the frontend/video/remote control setup stuff, at least on the MythTV side. You're probably using the server for other things so you don't want a dedicated distro.
Finally, sadly, MythTV is getting long in the tooth - all the support for analog TV is now redundant, it depends on everything from X.org to MySQL to Apache (if you want the web interface) so its not great for a NAS/Server, and all the tedious X.org GUI configuration screens desperately need ripping out and replacing with web-based versions.
I stopped using the MythTV frontend some time ago, in favor of Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, and I've actually just (tentatively) dumped the backend for TVHeadEnd + HDHomeRun with a MrMC frontend running on a FireTV. TVHeadend is quite a bit less sophisticated when it comes to managing recorded programs (the plus side is that you get a bunch of media files with human-readable names) but, boy, is it easier to set up. I'll see how it works out...
Plex have a PVR app in beta, as do HDHomeRun.
Still, thanks to both the Mythbuntu and MythTV devs for years of service...
Except you can't, because some countries use the weird 104-key layout and the rest of the world uses the wonderful 105-key keyboard.
Well, at least they could reduce the number of physically different keyboards to about 3 - ISO, ANSI and JIS - rather than have a different model for every country with suitable key caps.
Also, maybe then we could get a patch to fix the hideous mutated chimera of UK and US layouts that is Apple's current UK keyboard (I mean, how the hell? I'd get it if they'd just taken a US keyboard and changed the "#" label to "£", but they've gone to the trouble of re-shaping the Enter key... and then still just changed the "#" label to "£", missing all the other US/UK differences....)
If you weren't using computers and programming between 1976 and 1984, you probably can't intuitively grasp how things actually were,
Nobody was advertising computers on prime-time TV much, and they certainly weren't advertising big-budget games and online services targeted at the mass market. The kids buying (or pestering their parents into buying) those early "home" computers were the nerds who'd seen them in electronics magazines etc. and read the reviews (which, at the time, used half of their column-inches to discuss how good they were for programming). Sure, there were kids who couldn't have a home computer because their family couldn't afford one, or because the Commodore PET at the orphanage had been stolen to pay for drugs... but at the time there were many, many kids who could have had a computer, if they'd made it a priority, but didn't because they weren't remotely interested in computers and Facebook hadn't been invented yet.
I got one mainly because I'd been hooked on programmable calculators and wanted to take the next step. To afford it, I flogged virtually every half-decent, non-essential possession I had (not claiming too much hardship here - at least I had the stuff to sell - point is it didn't just magically appear after a hint to Mum & Dad). Oh, and as for that "BASIC programming book" it was missing from the set of photocopied manuals I got with my Superboard II so I had to suss it out from a couple of examples, a list of keywords and a couple of pages of "Illustrating BASIC" serialised in a magazine that I had a couple of copies of (I did eventually find a copy of Kenemy & Kurtz in the school library - god knows how it got there - and that was a brilliant book). When you wrote programs you saved them to cassette tape and crossed your fingers. "Editing" code mainly consisted of completely re-typing the line you wanted to change - maybe your system had some sort of kludgey "line editor" to help. Later on, you got to save up money for things like an assembler, decent text editor, FORTH, Pascal and eventually C - the latter two being complete non-starters unless you had a floppy drive (which, at the time, cost more than the rest of the computer).
In short, not many kids in the late 70s or early 80s stumbled into programming because they stumbled onto something called BASIC on this box that they'd been given to play games on (not that you'd get a 1980 personal computer purely on the strength of a game of "Star Trek", "Hunt The Wampus" or a Scott Adams text adventure). Later, maybe, when the first generation of kids had written some games for them to play, but not then.
I remember, circa 1981, "acquiring" a copy of a new game that had (for the time) a massive advertising campaign consisting of quarter page adverts in colour in a computing magazine... it was a huge inspiration on the grounds that, (a) it was pretty crap, and (b) if they were prepared to publish that crap, they might publish my crap. So I threw together my own crappy game in a weekend and, sure enough, a few weeks later I was published and slightly richer: Never got to join the ranks of those teenage computer game millionaires who learned to drive in Ferraris, but I did stretch to a 70cc scooter. There were plenty of opportunities for anybody who could do simple programming at the time, and even those of us who didn't join the lucky few who hit the jackpot could, with a bit of application, make useful money. Certainly, my first computer was the last time I had to rely on the Bank of Mum & Dad for stuff I wanted.
Fast forward to today: if you care to look that "basic-free" Mac actually comes with Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and bash scripting as standard. The browser has Javascript built-in. For a free download you can get XCode with C, C++, Objective C and Swift, along with a complete IDE - including the "Swift Playgrounds" that Apple have been working on specifically to provide an "instant gratification" tool f
Do you know how hard it is to keep exponential growth going for any length of time?
Hang on - I thought that the end of the world was nigh because, if humanity were destined to expand exponentially for the next 1000 years, there would be so many trillions of people living in the future that the odds of us "finding ourself" amongst the few billion humans alive today would be negligibly small... I'm confused - which bit of pseudo-statistics attempting to extrapolate an unfalsifiable claim from a single data point should I believe?
If you extrapolate from zero data, the logic may appear valid but the uncertainty of the conclusion is infinite.
I suggest that Musk has SpaceX send an expedition to the far side of the sun to look for that bloody teapot - the chances that the designers of his simulation didn't add an easter egg are truly negligible and that would be an obvious choice...
Meanwhile - when is someone going to arrest all of these so-called "lottery winners"? Everybody knows that the odds of you winning the lottery jackpot are as near to zero as makes no difference, so these people claiming to have won millions are clearly liars and any big houses, yachts and sports cars they posses must be stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is a third party monitor having problems a big blow to apple?
(1) Because these displays were advertised (by Apple) as being designed by LG in close collaboration with Apple. They featured prominently in the launch of the new MacBook Pro.
(2) Apple's new policy seems to be not to produce their own displays, routers, back-up drives (they've stopped AirPort development, dropped their existing display) - this is a blow to that policy.
(3) Because Apple have staked a lot on the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port by making it the only port on the new machines (TB3 has been around on newer PCs for a while, but always backed up by USB, HDMI/DP etc.). Having a single cable to a display that provides 5k, webcam, audio, downstream USB3 ports and can power the laptop is TB3's party trick - but the LG/Apple display is the only thing on the market that currently does that. There are a few 4k USB-C displays but they can only support USB2 downstream and don't typically supply enough power to do more than trickle-charge a MacBook Pro.
(4) Its early days for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 and Apple has forced the pace with its new machine - we've had stories about cheap USB-C devices frying machines, incompatibility problems (didn't Dell have to drop their TB3 dock?) so, yeah, at this stage in the game I'd have a preference for buying USB-C/TB3 gear from Apple's list where feasible.
Also, its kinda likely that this was originally going to be an Apple-branded product - if you ignore the black plastic case, the restricted choice of ports and their layout is far more iMac/Apple Thunderbolt Display-like than other LG products. That would also explain the interference problem: if the electronics were supposed to go in an Apple-style solid aluminium case then who needs extra RF shielding?
Of course VIM beat Emacs. If you want to interactively and visually manipulate your text "directly" - there are plenty of great, modern editors around (with masses of extensibility and customisation potential) of which Emacs is just one, rather dated, example. If, instead, you prefer to modify your text by applying functions to it - with visual feedback and interaction playing second fiddle - then VIM/vi is the only game in town.
The mistake is people in the second group (who might well tend to over-represent the Sheldon Cooper end of the spectrum, shall we say) trying to evangelise it to people in the first group.
Personally, I loathe vi, but that's partly because (a) I spend a lot of time, unavoidably, using non-modal wordprocessors and editors and can't cope with the constant mental paradigm shifts and (b) I didn't learn vi when I was 15. That said, I still use vi more than emacs (comparing two very small numbers there), but only because it would never occur to me to type 'export VISUAL=/bin/emacs'.
Your Apple hate makes you powerfully stupid
Funny. I'm typing this on a Mac. Got an iPad too. I just ignored the little cartons labelled "drink me" that they include in the box... was that important?
Or, to put it another way, the apparent quarter-on-quarter growth that they were happy to see trumpeted in all the headlines was less than the "measurement error" due to the way the figures were calculated. (As, to be fair, is any quarter-on-quarter decrease of the same size). So, a flat quarter then...
Of course, for a quarter during which Apple's main competitor in the phone market (Samsung) had to withdraw their new flagship phone, Apple's iPhone 7 (a completely new phone c.f. last year's 6s spec bump) had its first holiday season (even if the quarter missed out on the launch), as did the Watch 2, and they released their new MacBook Pro laptops after an 18-month wait, not having a significantly better quarter seems a bit embarrasing.
He went to an important event where he needed 100% up-time in a public place that he most doubtfully was on a 3rd party wireless network and he made no effort to make sure his computer was up to date before hand.
Have you actually used a computer? You seem to have reality entirely back-to-front.
Updating your OS or other key software just before an important event or deadline is the stupid move here. Once in a blue moon, there's a major vulnerability of the "instant remote pwnage" variety that might justify dropping everything and patching, but for the vast majority of updates, the risk of the update process going wrong, or the update breaking or changing something exceeds any risk from running unpatched. Auto update - even automatic checking for updates - became an abomination as soon as it was used for anything other than the highest-priority critical security updates. Update your software when it has a bug or vulnerability that affects you. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Patch during quiet periods.
If your "security policy" is causing downtime or data loss then you've got your risk assessment all screwed up.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/microsoft_brexit_fakenews/
Fake news, maybe. If any large company "leaks" its post-Brexit investment plans before the terms of Brexit have been agreed, then somebody probably misspoke or was misquoted.
We'll find out the in a few years' time if it is a fake issue, when Brexit has actually happened, the trading terms with the EU are known and Random Big Corp decides if its going to invest in the UK or Poland. However, the UK not going to be in the single market or customs union then - the PM has said that much, and anything else would be tantamount to Brussels voting to disband the EU. To pretend that isn't going to be a factor in corporate investment is just plain fantasy.
PS: if the Tories' solution is to become a tax haven thats going to be good news for the owners of the flat over the fish & chip shop in London where BigCorp declares its profits, but doesn't guarantee that the actual work (and employment) won't still be sited in Poland - unless there's some fantastic new international accord on tax avoidance (oh, my aching sides!)
US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and India are not in the EU, but they aren't being punished.
Yeah... if only you could build a factory in the US and get unfettered access to a single market of 300 million consumers... or a data-centre in India and hire well-trained workers at near-third-world wages...
Plus, those countries haven't been building their economic infrastructure around the EU single market & customs union for the last 40 years.
It's not a reason why we can't, it's a reason why it would be a terrible idea.
I think you and I only differ on the pragmatic meaning of "can" and "can't".
Meanwhile, could someone please explain to the Lib Dems and others proposing a referendum on the final agreement as a condition for supporting Art. 50 that if Art, 50 is invoked we are leaving and the only choice at the end of the process will be "take the deal and leave" or "just leave".
Nothing quite kicks an Eton toff in the teeth like giving him everything he wants and more.
Its the only language they understand...
That is, stop attending the meetings, stop paying the fees, stop letting in filty immgrunts and repeal the EC act.
Seriously? While we're at it, perhaps if we hooked enough rowing boats to the UK and paddled really, really hard we could move the entire country away from Europe and next door to some other international pariah with a reputation for behaving like a moody teenager and being impossible to do business with - North Korea maybe? Or, give our New Best Friend Trump a few more months. As someone who's opinion you, presumably, respect said:
Of course, if you act like a total dickhead to your trading partners by not honouring prior agreements, they're unlikely to want to do much negotiating with you since you've proven untrustworthy.
That's called a reason why we can't just take our ball and go home.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
What's wrong with that is that the EU Council & Parliament just need to filibuster for a couple of years and they can give us a "take it or leave it" deal that only has to be better than the default...
Why, if we're leaving, do you think we're owed some sort of special treatment?
Its not "special treatment" because no other state has seceded from the EU, so there's no "usual treatment" to compare it with. None of the non-EU states with existing agreements (Norway, Switzerland) were in the EU to start with. The EU is a lot more complicated than a trade deal (and those take a decade to negotiate). What about EU citizens living in the UK? What about UK citizens living in the EU - do they get shipped back? Arrested as illegal immigrants? Oh, and those immigrants you are so worried about - many of them currently get stopped by border controls in the EU. EU companies with offices and assets in the UK? UK companies with offices in the EU? Tourists currently in the EU (who have no right to be there the second we leave the EU)? Students? What happens to the lorries full of imports and exports passing between UK and EU docks if nobody knows on what terms they are allowed in or out?. Even if we don't actually get concessions, long-term, at the very least we need some sort of orderly plan and timetable for making the transition without overnight chaos - unless we want to re-enact the Berlin air lift?
You know all those stupid, stupid horror stories and ridiculous threats of economic cataclysm that Camoron and Osbourne built their pathetic "remain" campaign around? The reason that everybody thought they were stupid and ridiculous was that people assumed that there's be some sort of civilised negotiation about the terms of departure that would anticipate and mitigate - or at least plan for - those problems. You start saying "well, we could just tell the EU to fuck off" and suddenly all that FUD starts sounding plausible.
This was a well known and understood consequence of leaving.
Not according to the "Leave" campaign who told everybody that the Europeans would be so desperate to trade with us that they'd let us stay in the single market and custom union at the same time as "taking back control", and that anybody who suggested that there might be any downside was "running down Britain".
I have no quarrel with the minority of Brexit voters who weighed up the arguments, did the research and decided it was all worth the risk. However, if you think such people swung the Brexit vote then I have this brilliant scheme for using our EU contributions to fund the NHS that you may like...
Still trying to work out how handing a huge victory to the hard right, richest minority of the Conservative party struck a blow for the little guy against elitism...
No. The Lisbon Treaty on the procedure for leaving the EU can be summarised as: "the state wishing to leave shall bend over and pick up the soap." - now, technically, it was a bit silly to sign up to that, but at the time nobody thought that the UK PM would be stupid enough to call a Brexit referendum and, even if they did, no PM would be gormless enough to lose such a referendum, and even if they lost the referendum no PM would be stupid enough to pretend that they were obliged to pay more than lip service to the result of an advisory referendum.
More specifically, the procedure under the treaty is:
(1) UK invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty saying it wants to leave. The PM has said she'll do that in March.
(2) Then the UK gets to negotiate a deal for leaving that, yes, has to be passed by the European Parliament "or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period."
(3) At that point, the UK parliament may be given the option to approve the deal or reject it.
So, once Article 50 is invoked, the only way Brexit doesn't happen in March 2019 is if the European Council unanimously decides to extend the deadline. If that doesn't happen, and (predictably) the deal negotiations go to the wire then the only choice that the UK parliament will have in step (3) is "take the deal on offer or crash out of the EU with no agreement causing maximum chaos and confusion".
Oh, and note that the "deal" isn't necessarily this mythical trade deal that gives us access to the single market - according to some EU politicians we can't start talking about that until after we've actually left (and, in any case, negotiating such a deal in 2 years would be a new world record). No, this will just be things like who gets the cat, who gets the record collection and what happens to all the EU citizens living in the UK and all the UK citizens living in the EU (probably they'll get to go home on alternate Saturdays).
...is it true that the cell company Three allows unlimited data when roaming in the US? Has anyone tried using hundreds of gigs of data while traveling here?
Yes. I haven't tried "hundreds of gigs" but I've used Maps, email etc. freely and haven't incurred any charges. Only gotcha is that calling a US phone still counts as an international call from the UK.
I think there's a time limit on how many weeks you can use it for in one run, so there's no point trying the old "Hi dude... er, sorry, hello old chaps at Three I am and genuine lime... sorry... British person (I say, what ho, God Bless the Queen, poh-tay-to, al-you-min-y-um and all that) and can I get... er... I want to pur-chase one of your fine SIMS for use here at my home in Londonengland..." routine.
I'm paying £20/month for 200 minutes and unlimited data.... I think its a bit more now for new customers (I got grandfathered).
This traveller gets "free" roaming and data in the US as part of his regular UK contract. (Three with "feel at home" - £20-£30 month depending on how many minutes you want). The only snag is that although voice calls to UK numbers come out of the regular contract allowance, calling another US phone still counts as an international call - still, for phoning home, mail & maps its great.
I'm sure it won't last...
Using Wine on Linux is much better for development and there are hardly any other use-cases.
...only for the subset of Windows applications (often old versions) that have gold/platinum support in Wine.
That said, once you accept that some people do actually want to run Windows (probably for the GUI - Linux folk never did get the message that a GUI is more than a way of running 8 copies of vim side-by-side), the real competitor to WSL for development is running Windows, with Linux as a virtual machine (as others have said, nobody ever picked Linux for its user-friendliness) set up to mimic your target environment.
Seems like the long-term advantage of WSL would be if future containerisation products could support both Windows and Linux containers side-by-sice while running natively on a Windows machine: currently Docker et. al. on WIndows install a Linux VM as the base OS. Of course, presumably you could use Wine to run server-side Windows stuff on a Linux container, but you can see that Microsoft wouldn't see that as Plan A. That said, hell did freeze over when MS started doing SQL Server for Linux...
you obviously don't remember the "smartphones" of the day. yes, they had those paper features but in real life it was easier not to use them.
This.
I had bought a Windows smartphone shortly before the iPhone came out. Yeah, it did lots of stuff that the iPhone did but it was horrible to use. Basic problem: it had a slide-out querty keyboard, a joystick, a jog wheel, a touchscreen, a toothpick stylus and a set of applications that were optimised for none of those input methods. Apple took the minimalist approach: multitouch + one home button, and everything was designed to work well that way.
After persisting with the WinPhone for a year or two I actually ended up going with Android (iPhone was more than I wanted to pay for a phone), but its obvious that Android would be nothing like it is today if the iPhone hadn't happened.
I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago
It wasn't an easy boat for Kodak to jump on.
Kodak's reputation (and the core of their business) was film and film processing, not making good cameras . Their famous cameras of the past - Brownie, Instamatic etc. - were mainly about innovations in film & processing, not cameras per se. The arrival of digital killed the "Gillette razor blade" business model - suddenly Kodak had to start making its money from actually selling cameras, not film. They were stuffed.
Kodak did launch digital cameras - both professional 'digital backs' and a consumer range (ISTR they tried to establish a standard camera OS) - but if you see a rack of expensive digital cameras of various brands, which one were you going to pick up first: Nikon, Canon, Olympus... or Kodak? Right. Even Sony, by then, had a rep for making video cameras & they got themselves some more cred by using Zeiss-branded lenses. Panasonic, likewise, released Leica-branded digicams.
Also, in the 90s, Kodak did start to shift their processing systems to a digital workflow - i.e. scan the negs and print digitally, offering all sorts of post-processing and printing options - which would have put them in pole position to offer print services for digital cameras. One spin-off was PhotoCD for which they had great plans - but in practice I think it just got used by semi-pros who wanted a cheap way of digitising their slides. As for print-from-digital, people getting blow-ups of their favourite shots is never going to replace the volume of business from developing film. I guess their biggest mistake was letting the likes of Epson beat them to the punch when it came to photo-quality home inkjet printing (welcome back King Camp Gillette!)
that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads.
So, its about turnover rather than numbers of sales. Lets have a look on Amazon...
Thought so:
Dark side of the moon vinyl: £18.98
Dark side of the moon digital download: £7.99
...or stream for £0 if you already have Amazon Prime
...or rip the CD you bought in 1988 for £0
...or screw over those poor, penniless artists and torrent for £0.
So, yeah, you can see why the turnover on vinyl is tasty.
Got to hand it to the music industry: after getting everybody to replace all their vinyl with CDs in the 80s, it must have been so frustrating when the next big format let you convert all your CDs for free, but now they've gone back to the drawing board, applied themselves and found a wheeze to get everybody to replace all of their MP3s with vinyl again... so it looks like vinyl may even outlive the CD.
Remember guys - store all your CDs carefully for the grandkids so they're ready for the big 16-bit revival in 2050...
Thanks, but had to laugh: from the article:
This article describes the preference keyword.enabled. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.
Someone has got the measure of the typical user...
E.g. I type "o-p-e-r"...
Browser immediately opens "Download Google Chrome"* page.
*or other browser of your choice provided it doesn't have a mouth-frothingly insane "speculatively download and render potential malware" feature... because nobody ever left any security loopholes in any code ever.
Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.
Please note that in order to use this device on your new MacBookPro that you'll require a special USB-3->USB-C adapter.
Pah. This just proves what a superior technology USB-C is - devices to fry your USB-C laptop have been available online for ages!
Postgres / HSTORE could have probably solved pretty much the entire set of persistence use cases
Hey, but PostgreSQL is buzzword compliant with the new hipness... you want a JSON-based document store?
CREATE TABLE docstore (
docid SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
userid INTEGER REFERENCES users,
document JSON
);
OK, don't code-review that off-the-cuff doodle too seriously, but implementing NoSQL features in a decent RDBMS is easy, implementing RDBMS features in NoSQL is hard...
Wow, ExtJS brought all development to a complete multi year halt. In the first few months ExtJS development is way way way faster than any other framework out there. But after about 6 months all you are doing is fighting with the framework
This is the good old "Rapid Application Development" myth that has been doing the rounds since before many of today's trendy agile NoSQL programmers and the PHBs who encourage them were born. Even with things like Microsoft Foundation Classes and Borland's OWL that were used to create substantial apps, the initial drag-n-drool honeymoon didn't last very long. Then when Multimedia came along there were more "authoring systems" than applications created using authoring systems, and they were all great until you hit the brick wall that the designers had never anticipated, and ended up re-writing from scratch.
"Ooh look, I can create a fully-functioning GUI app by clicking 3 buttons and writing 1 line of code... this is going to save weeks of development"
Six months later: "Ooh, look - I'm wading through the sparsely-commented source code of the framework trying to figure out why I can't get the 'print' method to do anything beyond the trivial case given in the sample project... what's this? '/// TODO - implement print function'...?" (Its too long ago for me to remember the details so I won't name the application framework in question).
Turns out that a couple of days writing the "boilerplate" code for your application paid dividends further down the line...
First example I remember was this: The Last One - yes folks, the last computer program that would ever need to be written, heralded by magazine articles predicting mass unemployment of programmers... but I'll bet you an internet that Ada Lovelace had some brilliant ideas for making the Analytical Engine take all the hard work out of programming...
Put simply: we all know that the last 10% of development takes 90% of the time. RAD tools eliminate the first 10% of the development thus ensuring that the last 10% takes 100% of the time.
Making a entire spin-off distro for one single specific application seems like the biggest waste of time and effort to me.
I think that's true now, but back in the day there were very good reasons for Mythbuntu: first, it was used for single-purpose Home Theatre PC "Appliances" - often small-form-factor systems with mediocre resources. MythTV needed X Window, but you didn't want the bloat of a full distro. TV tuners, hardware-assisted video playback, infra-red remote control didn't work straight out of the box on regular distros - you had to at least build and install kernel drivers, if not customise the kernel, then faff around to get it to boot straight to full screen MythTV. Mythbuntu had a lot of this already set up.
Now, things have moved on - the standard distros now typically include all the LinuxTV kernel drivers so well-supported cards are plug'n'play, and the unsupported ones usually rely on binary blobs or customised versions of the LinuxTV stack that can't be distributed with Mythbuntu either. As someone already pointed out, PCIe-based cards that support HD are like hen's teeth (YMMV depending on which standard you use) and the "driver-free" HDHomeRun seems to be cornering the market.
Also, now, any streaming box that can run Kodi or MrMC (XBMC as was) can be a MythTV frontend - a Raspberry Pi works brilliantly, or you can use a FireTV, AppleTV, or Android TV box - so it makes much more sense to run the backend on a server or NAS and keep that noisy spinning rust out of your living room. That cuts out all the frontend/video/remote control setup stuff, at least on the MythTV side. You're probably using the server for other things so you don't want a dedicated distro.
Finally, sadly, MythTV is getting long in the tooth - all the support for analog TV is now redundant, it depends on everything from X.org to MySQL to Apache (if you want the web interface) so its not great for a NAS/Server, and all the tedious X.org GUI configuration screens desperately need ripping out and replacing with web-based versions.
I stopped using the MythTV frontend some time ago, in favor of Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, and I've actually just (tentatively) dumped the backend for TVHeadEnd + HDHomeRun with a MrMC frontend running on a FireTV. TVHeadend is quite a bit less sophisticated when it comes to managing recorded programs (the plus side is that you get a bunch of media files with human-readable names) but, boy, is it easier to set up. I'll see how it works out...
Plex have a PVR app in beta, as do HDHomeRun.
Still, thanks to both the Mythbuntu and MythTV devs for years of service...
Except you can't, because some countries use the weird 104-key layout and the rest of the world uses the wonderful 105-key keyboard.
Well, at least they could reduce the number of physically different keyboards to about 3 - ISO, ANSI and JIS - rather than have a different model for every country with suitable key caps.
Also, maybe then we could get a patch to fix the hideous mutated chimera of UK and US layouts that is Apple's current UK keyboard (I mean, how the hell? I'd get it if they'd just taken a US keyboard and changed the "#" label to "£", but they've gone to the trouble of re-shaping the Enter key... and then still just changed the "#" label to "£", missing all the other US/UK differences....)
If you weren't using computers and programming between 1976 and 1984, you probably can't intuitively grasp how things actually were,
Nobody was advertising computers on prime-time TV much, and they certainly weren't advertising big-budget games and online services targeted at the mass market. The kids buying (or pestering their parents into buying) those early "home" computers were the nerds who'd seen them in electronics magazines etc. and read the reviews (which, at the time, used half of their column-inches to discuss how good they were for programming). Sure, there were kids who couldn't have a home computer because their family couldn't afford one, or because the Commodore PET at the orphanage had been stolen to pay for drugs... but at the time there were many, many kids who could have had a computer, if they'd made it a priority, but didn't because they weren't remotely interested in computers and Facebook hadn't been invented yet.
I got one mainly because I'd been hooked on programmable calculators and wanted to take the next step. To afford it, I flogged virtually every half-decent, non-essential possession I had (not claiming too much hardship here - at least I had the stuff to sell - point is it didn't just magically appear after a hint to Mum & Dad). Oh, and as for that "BASIC programming book" it was missing from the set of photocopied manuals I got with my Superboard II so I had to suss it out from a couple of examples, a list of keywords and a couple of pages of "Illustrating BASIC" serialised in a magazine that I had a couple of copies of (I did eventually find a copy of Kenemy & Kurtz in the school library - god knows how it got there - and that was a brilliant book). When you wrote programs you saved them to cassette tape and crossed your fingers. "Editing" code mainly consisted of completely re-typing the line you wanted to change - maybe your system had some sort of kludgey "line editor" to help. Later on, you got to save up money for things like an assembler, decent text editor, FORTH, Pascal and eventually C - the latter two being complete non-starters unless you had a floppy drive (which, at the time, cost more than the rest of the computer).
In short, not many kids in the late 70s or early 80s stumbled into programming because they stumbled onto something called BASIC on this box that they'd been given to play games on (not that you'd get a 1980 personal computer purely on the strength of a game of "Star Trek", "Hunt The Wampus" or a Scott Adams text adventure). Later, maybe, when the first generation of kids had written some games for them to play, but not then.
I remember, circa 1981, "acquiring" a copy of a new game that had (for the time) a massive advertising campaign consisting of quarter page adverts in colour in a computing magazine... it was a huge inspiration on the grounds that, (a) it was pretty crap, and (b) if they were prepared to publish that crap, they might publish my crap. So I threw together my own crappy game in a weekend and, sure enough, a few weeks later I was published and slightly richer: Never got to join the ranks of those teenage computer game millionaires who learned to drive in Ferraris, but I did stretch to a 70cc scooter. There were plenty of opportunities for anybody who could do simple programming at the time, and even those of us who didn't join the lucky few who hit the jackpot could, with a bit of application, make useful money. Certainly, my first computer was the last time I had to rely on the Bank of Mum & Dad for stuff I wanted.
Fast forward to today: if you care to look that "basic-free" Mac actually comes with Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and bash scripting as standard. The browser has Javascript built-in. For a free download you can get XCode with C, C++, Objective C and Swift, along with a complete IDE - including the "Swift Playgrounds" that Apple have been working on specifically to provide an "instant gratification" tool f
Do you know how hard it is to keep exponential growth going for any length of time?
Hang on - I thought that the end of the world was nigh because, if humanity were destined to expand exponentially for the next 1000 years, there would be so many trillions of people living in the future that the odds of us "finding ourself" amongst the few billion humans alive today would be negligibly small... I'm confused - which bit of pseudo-statistics attempting to extrapolate an unfalsifiable claim from a single data point should I believe?
If you extrapolate from zero data, the logic may appear valid but the uncertainty of the conclusion is infinite.
I suggest that Musk has SpaceX send an expedition to the far side of the sun to look for that bloody teapot - the chances that the designers of his simulation didn't add an easter egg are truly negligible and that would be an obvious choice...
Meanwhile - when is someone going to arrest all of these so-called "lottery winners"? Everybody knows that the odds of you winning the lottery jackpot are as near to zero as makes no difference, so these people claiming to have won millions are clearly liars and any big houses, yachts and sports cars they posses must be stolen.