Actually even successful private companies can become inefficient and incompetent, usually when they start operating almost in monopoly. Then other leaner and more focused companies appear and start killing them. I believe it's not public vs private, it's about competition and also the inefficiencies due to the size of the company. Public often is big and has no competition by default, so the problem is aggravated.
18.4" means it's a very wide skateboard-class laptop:-) so I'm probably not interested in it, but what model is it?
I'm not afraid by small pixels: Ubuntu has a setting for the monitor's DPI and it scales the fonts accordingly. The last Windows I used regularly was XP three years ago and I remember it had something similar even if it didn't work well all the times (some programs had their opinions on the size of fonts) but I bet it has been solved since then.
Anyway, I'd be happy to get a laptop with the same 1680x1050 screen I'm using now but I know I can't because the 16:10 form factor has been replaced by 16:9.
You won't be able to opt to use the Intel version if you're going to buy a ARM-based Win8 tablet o Windows phone. That's funny because there are many different browsers for Android and iOS. Microsoft could be unique in locking competitor browsers out of their platform.
I try to rephrase: 13" just don't cut it for development no matter what editor you are using. I sometimes have to develop on a 9" netbook but it's only for emergencies.
6 years ago HP was able to make the nc8430. It weighted 2.7 kg (6 lbs?) had 2 GB RAM (expandable to 4), 80 GB disk (I replaced it with a 500 GB one two years ago), 1600x1050 15", 2 cores 2 GHz (the T7200), 3 hours battery life for about 1200-1300 Euro. After six years a 4 cores processor (I'm not up to date with the GHz race), 4 GB RAM, 500 GB disk, HD resolution, 3-4 hours of battery life for the same price and a little less weight (not that I care) should be fair.
My biggest complaint with modern laptops is that they have either a tiny screen (reduced height) or they are so large you could mistake them for skateboards if it were not for the number pad at the right end;-)
Agreed but there is more to that. W3C should take its share of blame for not having standardized yet rounded corners and the like. But among W3C members there are also browser vendors, so maybe it's them who don't like to agree on standards with their competitors.
A Ruby method either explicitly "return expression" or just returns the last expression it evaluates. That's similar to a number of other languages. There are many languages that return the value assigned to the name of the function (Matlab, almost, in a slightly more bizarre way ; Pascal, if I remember well). Ruby gives a choice.
I've been using Octave (an open source version of Matlab) in Stanford's online PGM course. My first reaction was "great matrix manipulation library, extremely bad language". It's like time travelling to the 70's and discarding every progress CS made in the last forty years. Actually Matlab has object oriented classes now but somebody commented in the PGM forums that it's not so good. (Octave uses an older Matlab OO syntax I'll be merciful not to comment about.) I don't have any direct experience with R but on the PGM forum I read that its status is not so different.
My suggestion to the scientific community is to work on replacing those old languages with something modern, even Python which I cordially hate because of that white space thing. Obviously you need a fast (written in C) scientific library and an interactive prompt is extremely handy. Python and Ruby are sensible choices IMHO. Matlab and R won't disappear, Cobol didn't go away, but there is no reason why a 20 years old student shouldn't start coding with a modern language, if it's on par with the old ones (a big if, I know).
All of them except for the Pisa tower are far larger than the Enterprise would have been.
I had to google the exact measures but the Eiffel Tower (320 m) is way bigger than the other two monuments (I've seen the three of them with my eyes). It's a little taller than what the Enterprise is long (286 m). The Statue of Liberty (93 m) is much smaller and the statue alone (46 m) without the base would be shorter than the Pisa tower (58 m). Check this for the relative sizes (Pisa tower not included).
I misclicked the options when moderating. I wanted to mod you as informative but clicked troll and Slashdot doesn't let me change it. The only way to undo moderation is posting a comment so I do. Sorry for that.
I'd wish I could file a bug or a feature request.
That problem is real and it could be solved by swapping the whole battery pack with a charged one. That would also solve the problem of battery aging: old packs will be retired and replaced by new ones. The cost of new packs will be diluted in the cost of servicing the swap. Recharging with a plug should still be possible because it's convenient when the car is stopped at home at night or far away from power stations.
Nevertheless it's not an easy solution as one can think. Swapping batteries means that they must be standardized to a few sizes because a power station can't store a large number of a hundred of different models, one per car model. Obviously a SUV or a truck have very different power need than a small and light car. I'm not an engineer so I leave the feasibility study to them. I just wonder if that would be a step towards power stations managed by car manufacturers, i.e. stop to a Ford station to replace a Ford's battery because their on sale only there.
That would be a walled garden for cars and maybe the start of reverse cars analogies, but also the start of a revolution in the way cars will be made and thought of: if you start replacing batteries, why stop there? They could start selling replacements for the electrical engines or for anything up to the very same car body. A complete new business model that would change all the market.
That's basically what happens here in Italy. Phones are unlocked and you can terminate the contact by paying it out at any time. I still prefer to buy my phone. I'm using a prepaid card for voice and I charge it with 9 euro every month for data which is a nice backup for when I'm not on wifi. I can stop it at any time.
We can progress in many directions. Maybe progress in a direction that destroys everybody's privacy for the profit of a few people is not the right direction to progress to.
Italy 1987, getting the driving license: my instructor told me to drive with hands at 9-3 and position the seat so that I can touch the top of the wheel with my wrist.
Italy 2004, a one day safe drive course: my driving instructor told me to drive with hands at 9-3.
The rationale of 9-3 has nothing to do with airbags. It is that you can steer the wheel more and faster than if you start at 10-2 (basic physics). The rationale of being close to the wheel is that with flexed harms you have a stronger grip than if your harms are fully stretched (basic physics again). But if you get too close you can't steer it much anyway, so touching it with the wrist gives a kind of optimal position.
Customary joke from Europe: maybe the 10-2 position is optimal for racing on ovals;-)
You know, people are the same everywhere and they like simple stuff and small numbers. Driving 20 km from home to office is easier to say and understand than 20,000 m and distance signs on roads are in km anyway. 10,000 m is a race at the Olimpic Games, anything longer is said in km, even the marathon (commonly said to be 42 km, which it isn't).
A km is metric and any school children knows that it is 1000 m long, or that 100 m are 0.1 km, it's just a matter of moving the decimal separator by the appropriate number of places like dividing or multiplying by 10. Even people in non metric countries count mainly in base-10, right? Don't know why they insist converting units in multiple different basis but the matter is pretty much settled: the world will stay almost completely metric forever and the USA maybe will slowly follow it there. Everybody like what they are born with, food, sports, units... and that explains it IMHO:-)
They teach M to us at school but kilometers are more convenient than meters for long distances so we think about a 1,000 km flight and never think about a 1 Mm one. In all my life I think I used M only for Mega bytes. The common units for distances are mm, cm, m and km. Anything else is used almost only by professionals in their own fields of activity.
I can't see how reasonable excludes free. Free is the limit case of the cost of the license approaching zero. FOSS licenses should be a subset of FRAND by any definition.
What FSF is worried about is (I think) that we could end up having standards we must pay for when using them. What FSF would like to see (me too) is that only free standards become recognized standards, in the same way we don't have to pay for measuring things with meters, liters and kilograms.
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They're using the ooyala player which should support Apple devices http://www.ooyala.com/support/docs/tutorial_mobileoptions
Actually even successful private companies can become inefficient and incompetent, usually when they start operating almost in monopoly. Then other leaner and more focused companies appear and start killing them. I believe it's not public vs private, it's about competition and also the inefficiencies due to the size of the company. Public often is big and has no competition by default, so the problem is aggravated.
18.4" means it's a very wide skateboard-class laptop :-) so I'm probably not interested in it, but what model is it?
I'm not afraid by small pixels: Ubuntu has a setting for the monitor's DPI and it scales the fonts accordingly. The last Windows I used regularly was XP three years ago and I remember it had something similar even if it didn't work well all the times (some programs had their opinions on the size of fonts) but I bet it has been solved since then.
Anyway, I'd be happy to get a laptop with the same 1680x1050 screen I'm using now but I know I can't because the 16:10 form factor has been replaced by 16:9.
Thank you, I didn't notice that. Luckily I'm on Android.
You won't be able to opt to use the Intel version if you're going to buy a ARM-based Win8 tablet o Windows phone. That's funny because there are many different browsers for Android and iOS. Microsoft could be unique in locking competitor browsers out of their platform.
For reference: http://www.theblog.ca/bilingual-canadian-keyboard
Ubuntu 12.04 minus Unity plus Mate should be ok. I'm using Unity on my netbook but I won't upgrade (wrong word) my notebook to it.
I try to rephrase: 13" just don't cut it for development no matter what editor you are using. I sometimes have to develop on a 9" netbook but it's only for emergencies.
6 years ago HP was able to make the nc8430. It weighted 2.7 kg (6 lbs?) had 2 GB RAM (expandable to 4), 80 GB disk (I replaced it with a 500 GB one two years ago), 1600x1050 15", 2 cores 2 GHz (the T7200), 3 hours battery life for about 1200-1300 Euro. After six years a 4 cores processor (I'm not up to date with the GHz race), 4 GB RAM, 500 GB disk, HD resolution, 3-4 hours of battery life for the same price and a little less weight (not that I care) should be fair.
My biggest complaint with modern laptops is that they have either a tiny screen (reduced height) or they are so large you could mistake them for skateboards if it were not for the number pad at the right end ;-)
Agreed but there is more to that. W3C should take its share of blame for not having standardized yet rounded corners and the like. But among W3C members there are also browser vendors, so maybe it's them who don't like to agree on standards with their competitors.
A Ruby method either explicitly "return expression" or just returns the last expression it evaluates. That's similar to a number of other languages. There are many languages that return the value assigned to the name of the function (Matlab, almost, in a slightly more bizarre way ; Pascal, if I remember well). Ruby gives a choice.
I've been using Octave (an open source version of Matlab) in Stanford's online PGM course. My first reaction was "great matrix manipulation library, extremely bad language". It's like time travelling to the 70's and discarding every progress CS made in the last forty years. Actually Matlab has object oriented classes now but somebody commented in the PGM forums that it's not so good. (Octave uses an older Matlab OO syntax I'll be merciful not to comment about.) I don't have any direct experience with R but on the PGM forum I read that its status is not so different.
My suggestion to the scientific community is to work on replacing those old languages with something modern, even Python which I cordially hate because of that white space thing. Obviously you need a fast (written in C) scientific library and an interactive prompt is extremely handy. Python and Ruby are sensible choices IMHO. Matlab and R won't disappear, Cobol didn't go away, but there is no reason why a 20 years old student shouldn't start coding with a modern language, if it's on par with the old ones (a big if, I know).
Italy is going to repay its debt quickly if it could collect royalties on the Roman alphabet.
TFA repeatedly states that the Enterprise would have been a full scale copy.
All of them except for the Pisa tower are far larger than the Enterprise would have been.
I had to google the exact measures but the Eiffel Tower (320 m) is way bigger than the other two monuments (I've seen the three of them with my eyes). It's a little taller than what the Enterprise is long (286 m). The Statue of Liberty (93 m) is much smaller and the statue alone (46 m) without the base would be shorter than the Pisa tower (58 m). Check this for the relative sizes (Pisa tower not included).
I wonder if the employee which proposed the idea is appointed to implement it or if s/he gets a share of the money the company makes or saves.
I misclicked the options when moderating. I wanted to mod you as informative but clicked troll and Slashdot doesn't let me change it. The only way to undo moderation is posting a comment so I do. Sorry for that.
I'd wish I could file a bug or a feature request.
That problem is real and it could be solved by swapping the whole battery pack with a charged one. That would also solve the problem of battery aging: old packs will be retired and replaced by new ones. The cost of new packs will be diluted in the cost of servicing the swap. Recharging with a plug should still be possible because it's convenient when the car is stopped at home at night or far away from power stations.
Nevertheless it's not an easy solution as one can think. Swapping batteries means that they must be standardized to a few sizes because a power station can't store a large number of a hundred of different models, one per car model. Obviously a SUV or a truck have very different power need than a small and light car. I'm not an engineer so I leave the feasibility study to them. I just wonder if that would be a step towards power stations managed by car manufacturers, i.e. stop to a Ford station to replace a Ford's battery because their on sale only there.
That would be a walled garden for cars and maybe the start of reverse cars analogies, but also the start of a revolution in the way cars will be made and thought of: if you start replacing batteries, why stop there? They could start selling replacements for the electrical engines or for anything up to the very same car body. A complete new business model that would change all the market.
That's basically what happens here in Italy. Phones are unlocked and you can terminate the contact by paying it out at any time. I still prefer to buy my phone. I'm using a prepaid card for voice and I charge it with 9 euro every month for data which is a nice backup for when I'm not on wifi. I can stop it at any time.
We can progress in many directions. Maybe progress in a direction that destroys everybody's privacy for the profit of a few people is not the right direction to progress to.
Italy 1987, getting the driving license: my instructor told me to drive with hands at 9-3 and position the seat so that I can touch the top of the wheel with my wrist.
Italy 2004, a one day safe drive course: my driving instructor told me to drive with hands at 9-3.
The rationale of 9-3 has nothing to do with airbags. It is that you can steer the wheel more and faster than if you start at 10-2 (basic physics). The rationale of being close to the wheel is that with flexed harms you have a stronger grip than if your harms are fully stretched (basic physics again). But if you get too close you can't steer it much anyway, so touching it with the wrist gives a kind of optimal position.
Customary joke from Europe: maybe the 10-2 position is optimal for racing on ovals ;-)
ZeuS became self aware on February 25, 2012. That's what they'll teach. Are they sending terminators back in time to try winning the war?
You know, people are the same everywhere and they like simple stuff and small numbers. Driving 20 km from home to office is easier to say and understand than 20,000 m and distance signs on roads are in km anyway. 10,000 m is a race at the Olimpic Games, anything longer is said in km, even the marathon (commonly said to be 42 km, which it isn't).
A km is metric and any school children knows that it is 1000 m long, or that 100 m are 0.1 km, it's just a matter of moving the decimal separator by the appropriate number of places like dividing or multiplying by 10. Even people in non metric countries count mainly in base-10, right? Don't know why they insist converting units in multiple different basis but the matter is pretty much settled: the world will stay almost completely metric forever and the USA maybe will slowly follow it there. Everybody like what they are born with, food, sports, units... and that explains it IMHO :-)
They teach M to us at school but kilometers are more convenient than meters for long distances so we think about a 1,000 km flight and never think about a 1 Mm one. In all my life I think I used M only for Mega bytes. The common units for distances are mm, cm, m and km. Anything else is used almost only by professionals in their own fields of activity.
I can't see how reasonable excludes free. Free is the limit case of the cost of the license approaching zero. FOSS licenses should be a subset of FRAND by any definition.
What FSF is worried about is (I think) that we could end up having standards we must pay for when using them. What FSF would like to see (me too) is that only free standards become recognized standards, in the same way we don't have to pay for measuring things with meters, liters and kilograms.