Don't know but I can think about a scenario: he's a hotel and needs to charge customers that don't show on the checkin day. Is there a way to do it without storing their credit card numbers?
Actually I program for a living in both Java and Ruby. In the last year I wrote about half of my code in Java and half in Ruby, all of it as part of web applications. I use Rails for the Ruby ones.
Unless a customer forces me to use Java I never suggest to use it because it makes me a lot less productive than Ruby and yes, coding in Java is a horrible experience compared to coding in Ruby. I need to write about 3-4 times as much code to do the same things, I need 3-4 times more time and I have to charge my customers 3-4 times as much. Customers using Java have a worse time to market than customers using Ruby. In a competitive world this puts them at a disadvantage and damages my chances of getting new projects from them.
The usual objection is that Java performs so much better than Ruby (*), which is true, but only a few projects need to be optimized for performance. For most projects the users feel the application fast enough even if in Java it could be 100 times faster and as a matter of fact many customer facing applications never get so successful to require optimization. Discovering quickly and cheaply that a business model is a failure is very important. If your webapp gets successful you'll have the money to optimize and replace slow code with faster one (think about Twitter).
If time to market isn't important or it's trumped by an absolute need for performances, then yes, in that case I'd recommend to use Java or C++ or whatever achieves the mandated performance level.
(*) By the way, how much of a web request's time is spent on the server and how much is spent moving the data to and from the server and waiting for the browser to render it? The weight of the server performances might be not so big on an average web request.
I can believe it as it was about the opposite in spirit of what the original one was. Actually I don't know what Larson tough about the new BSG but Dirk Benedict didn't like it. Personally I enjoyed both shows, I hope the movie will be as good as them.
Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.
Traditional textbooks are purchased because of the ancillary material that comes with them. This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.
(emphasys is mine)
This is exactly my point. I downloaded CK12's trigonometry book and I've been extremely surprised by the small number of assignments (they call them Review Questions). One can't get good at something by solving so little problems so having a companion problems book should be mandatory. On the other side I don't see why the trigonometry problems I solved 25 years ago at high school should not be ok for today's students. Trigonometry didn't change at all and if one's got the attitude of copying the solutions s/he'll always find somebody to copy from.
Damn, I wanted so much to be the first one to point out how good this a multitouch pressure sensor will be for my emacs typing sessions.
I'm going to have control, shift, meta, extra light, very light, light, strong, very strong, extra strong and many others. It looks like Christmas.
I look forward to a light-x, very-strong-c, alt-ctrl-shift b combo. I just wonder if I can make it. I'll start training right now!
Oh I see. I'm running Firefox 3.5 like this (I'm on Linux too):
1213m 272m 43m R
and this is not a problem. The first figure 1213 MB includes also libraries shared with other programs. 272 MB is how much memory Firefox is using on its own. 639 MB for you, which is quite a lot but if you have a lot of tabs and windows it should be expected.
However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.
Me too!
About the memory leaks, Firefox 3.0 solved that for me on Windows and I'm using a lot of extensions. I'm on Linux now so this might be totally different beast. Did you try disabling one extension per day and checking the level of your RAM after browsing all the day?
Actually I spent more than 30 seconds at that. As this is about OO and not MS Office, any talk about the way MS Office's ribbon works have little relevance. I tried OO's demo instead. It's a Java Web Start application on one of the web sites linked to the news. There are no hints that you can hide the ribbon and get back the toolbars but there is evidence that the ribbon takes more space on screen than the toolbars I'm using now in OO.
In one of the many demoed configurations the ribbon is hidden and only a basic open/save toolbar is shown. However that toolbar is visible in every other demo so it's not an indication that the old toolbar system will be supported. On the other side, the menu is always available on the top of the ribbon. Finally, I understand that this is only a demo and it's focused on the ribbon so I can't expect it to show anything else or hide it. The best we can do is try it and give feedback. My feedback is that I won't use that OO on my netbook in its present form. There is just no space for it on screen.
I could consider using it on my 1680x1050 notebook but not on my 1024x600 netbook: it's either the ribbon or the document, and I value the document more than the ribbon. I really hope there is the option to keep using the old menu system and that they think about small displays.
Yes they write good things about Win7 but they also show bad benchmarks about it, particularly the Office one. This may not be FUD in the traditional way but makes me a little uncertain and doubtful about both CNET and Win7.
There are people who buy noisy H-D bikes to get noticed. A Segway is quieter and cheaper;-)
I think I only saw a couple of Segways in some airport last year and they didn't look so strange.
That said a bicycle is a much better choice than a Segway for most people in most environments, but maybe not on the floors of the average airport.
MS is being penalized for the anticompetitive behavior they had in the past, when they forced OEMs not to install other browsers unless they were also willing to pay more the license for Windows. If they didn't do that they could still bundle anything they want with their OS.
That said I wonder when somebody will eventually take Apple into a court for the no function duplication clause of their appstore.
Apple's market share could grow to 100% and they still not get into any trouble by installing Safari in every Mac they sell. Why? MS got into troubles not because of the zero price of their products bundled with Windows but because of the anticompetitive deals they made with PC manufacturers: I'll make you pay more for a Windows license if you install anything else but what I accept. If they didn't do that, the bundling of IE would still be fine. MS is being penalized now as an attempt to recreate equal market conditions.
By the way, Apple is the only company that can sell OSX based computers so there are no other manufacturers to bully but I wonder what's going to happen if Apple's market share will reach 25%: how the other manufacturer will react to the shrinking of their market shares? What's sure is that they won't silently die out.
How about getting the source code of the iPhone version (if they don't release it, tell FSF to sue them) and distribute it on the shop for free (if that is possible) or for a lower price? That's why the price of GPLed programs tends to zero and Xpilot for the iPhone should not be an exception.
I solved the first three levels of the 3SAT game turning all rectangles yellow and deselecting them in turn until all circles turned green. Basically I didn't understand what was going on and I played in a mechanical way, so I quickly lost interest. I think that any computer can do than faster than me (and that made me loose interest too): was I really helping the design of new hardware or slowing it down?
By the way, can anybody estimate how many million people playing this game they need to create ICs faster than a single computer can?
If it were the lions than invented men, my take is that lions didn't make a smart decision and they probably agreed the first time they saw a men with a rifle.
If it were the cow that invented men... right, it may be nice to have somebody that cares about you all the day long but wait, don't do men breed, milk and eat cows all the time? Another unwise decision.
Those two fun or not so fun examples state my position on this matter: don't invent something with the potential of outsmarting you, because you'll be outsmarted. If you compete for the same resources, you'll go extinct quickly. If you're useful, you'll live as a slave even if you might not realize it.
Argument granted, but McDonald's can compete on price with any Italian restaurant and Starbucks can't compete on price with Italian bars.
However there are customers willing to pay for their products here in Italy and there are several customers groups advocating for SB stores in Italy (google for starbucks italia, maybe select pages in Italian language). On the other side I also have to point out this article of Financial Times of 2007, with a statement of Howard Schultz about not opening stores in Italy and to this analysis. The following discussion is interesting as it presents the differing views of Italian people on the subject intertwined with comments of people from other countries.
Furthermore Italy's Autogrill is the licensee of the Starbucks brand for Italy at least since 2007 (and many others). However Autogrill has its own coffee shops so my suspect is that it's paying the license to keep a competitor out of the country.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I agree but there might be some reasons that can make the Wi-Fi service attractive to some people.
One is that for your 3G contract to be competitive you have stay under a 10 MB cap. That won't let you upload your vacation pictures or download large attachments for business. Nothing that matters to you, probably, but it could matter to somebody else.
Wi-Fi could also be an easier connection to setup: tourists will probably be able to register online from their home before leaving for Italy (Venice residents are registering online for the service now). That's seems a better option than looking for the right telephone shop in a foreign country and trying to communicate with personnel that maybe don't speak their language too well.
God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
There are no Starbucks in Italy and probably there will never be. Starbucks' idea of coffee is too different from the average Italian's idea of coffee, an espresso quickly brewed and quickly consumed at the bar. Ironically, the original Starbucks was selling coffee beans and equipment and started selling coffee drinks only after a journey to Italy of its marketing manager in 1982.
Yes, XP might be good enough but if Vista would have been any better, XP would be as dead as Win98 now. IMHO it's not the merit of XP that's keeping it alive but the demerits of its successor. There are some hints that Win7 can make it die, but we'll see how long it will take.
Finally, I agree that such a paradigm shift will kill most of today's desktop OSes.
One reason might be that building an industry that is entirely reliant on the whims of a foreign company could leave them holding the bag for thousands of idiots who thought they had a job.
Only a few countries build cars but every country service them. Local car service industries are at the mercy of manufacturers which, for example, make fully electronic cars that can be serviced only with expensive tools, but no country ever banned cars for that reason AFAIK. I really wonder what the reason for the gold farming ban is.
MS is happy that you pirate Windows 7: they're not losing money (you never paid them once) and they're not giving a customer to the competition. You should switch to Linux instead, or to OSX if you also want to buy a new computer. That would disappoint MS.
Actually I'm somewhat surprised that people selling beer in a bar don't know what a pint is and, yes, a pint is definitely a large one. However I've been in a place in Milan last Sunday where they are selling up to 15 liters of beer at once. They use large oddly shaped glass containers with valves to pour beer into the glass of each person at the table. The refrigerator is included.
Which pint? UK or US?
A UK pint is 0.568 liters so you won't like it if you ask for half liter, but if you're American a half liter is a little larger than your pint (0.473 liters). However in most pubs I've been in here in Europe beer is either large or small, whatever that means in that place. Ask for a large beer and you'll be happy:-)
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Don't know but I can think about a scenario: he's a hotel and needs to charge customers that don't show on the checkin day. Is there a way to do it without storing their credit card numbers?
Actually I program for a living in both Java and Ruby. In the last year I wrote about half of my code in Java and half in Ruby, all of it as part of web applications. I use Rails for the Ruby ones.
Unless a customer forces me to use Java I never suggest to use it because it makes me a lot less productive than Ruby and yes, coding in Java is a horrible experience compared to coding in Ruby. I need to write about 3-4 times as much code to do the same things, I need 3-4 times more time and I have to charge my customers 3-4 times as much. Customers using Java have a worse time to market than customers using Ruby. In a competitive world this puts them at a disadvantage and damages my chances of getting new projects from them.
The usual objection is that Java performs so much better than Ruby (*), which is true, but only a few projects need to be optimized for performance. For most projects the users feel the application fast enough even if in Java it could be 100 times faster and as a matter of fact many customer facing applications never get so successful to require optimization. Discovering quickly and cheaply that a business model is a failure is very important. If your webapp gets successful you'll have the money to optimize and replace slow code with faster one (think about Twitter).
If time to market isn't important or it's trumped by an absolute need for performances, then yes, in that case I'd recommend to use Java or C++ or whatever achieves the mandated performance level.
(*) By the way, how much of a web request's time is spent on the server and how much is spent moving the data to and from the server and waiting for the browser to render it? The weight of the server performances might be not so big on an average web request.
I can believe it as it was about the opposite in spirit of what the original one was. Actually I don't know what Larson tough about the new BSG but Dirk Benedict didn't like it. Personally I enjoyed both shows, I hope the movie will be as good as them.
(emphasys is mine)
This is exactly my point. I downloaded CK12's trigonometry book and I've been extremely surprised by the small number of assignments (they call them Review Questions). One can't get good at something by solving so little problems so having a companion problems book should be mandatory. On the other side I don't see why the trigonometry problems I solved 25 years ago at high school should not be ok for today's students. Trigonometry didn't change at all and if one's got the attitude of copying the solutions s/he'll always find somebody to copy from.
This is exactly the conclusion of this article of Scientific American, May 2009.
Damn, I wanted so much to be the first one to point out how good this a multitouch pressure sensor will be for my emacs typing sessions. I'm going to have control, shift, meta, extra light, very light, light, strong, very strong, extra strong and many others. It looks like Christmas. I look forward to a light-x, very-strong-c, alt-ctrl-shift b combo. I just wonder if I can make it. I'll start training right now!
Oh I see. I'm running Firefox 3.5 like this (I'm on Linux too):
1213m 272m 43m R
and this is not a problem. The first figure 1213 MB includes also libraries shared with other programs. 272 MB is how much memory Firefox is using on its own. 639 MB for you, which is quite a lot but if you have a lot of tabs and windows it should be expected.
Me too!
About the memory leaks, Firefox 3.0 solved that for me on Windows and I'm using a lot of extensions. I'm on Linux now so this might be totally different beast. Did you try disabling one extension per day and checking the level of your RAM after browsing all the day?
Apparently there is a common misconception that I was writing about MS Office, but actually I was writing about OO's demo. I already answered about a similar post at http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1326929&cid=28968679
Actually I spent more than 30 seconds at that. As this is about OO and not MS Office, any talk about the way MS Office's ribbon works have little relevance. I tried OO's demo instead. It's a Java Web Start application on one of the web sites linked to the news. There are no hints that you can hide the ribbon and get back the toolbars but there is evidence that the ribbon takes more space on screen than the toolbars I'm using now in OO.
In one of the many demoed configurations the ribbon is hidden and only a basic open/save toolbar is shown. However that toolbar is visible in every other demo so it's not an indication that the old toolbar system will be supported. On the other side, the menu is always available on the top of the ribbon. Finally, I understand that this is only a demo and it's focused on the ribbon so I can't expect it to show anything else or hide it. The best we can do is try it and give feedback. My feedback is that I won't use that OO on my netbook in its present form. There is just no space for it on screen.
I could consider using it on my 1680x1050 notebook but not on my 1024x600 netbook: it's either the ribbon or the document, and I value the document more than the ribbon. I really hope there is the option to keep using the old menu system and that they think about small displays.
Yes they write good things about Win7 but they also show bad benchmarks about it, particularly the Office one. This may not be FUD in the traditional way but makes me a little uncertain and doubtful about both CNET and Win7.
There are people who buy noisy H-D bikes to get noticed. A Segway is quieter and cheaper ;-)
I think I only saw a couple of Segways in some airport last year and they didn't look so strange. That said a bicycle is a much better choice than a Segway for most people in most environments, but maybe not on the floors of the average airport.
MS is being penalized for the anticompetitive behavior they had in the past, when they forced OEMs not to install other browsers unless they were also willing to pay more the license for Windows. If they didn't do that they could still bundle anything they want with their OS.
That said I wonder when somebody will eventually take Apple into a court for the no function duplication clause of their appstore.
Apple's market share could grow to 100% and they still not get into any trouble by installing Safari in every Mac they sell. Why? MS got into troubles not because of the zero price of their products bundled with Windows but because of the anticompetitive deals they made with PC manufacturers: I'll make you pay more for a Windows license if you install anything else but what I accept. If they didn't do that, the bundling of IE would still be fine. MS is being penalized now as an attempt to recreate equal market conditions.
By the way, Apple is the only company that can sell OSX based computers so there are no other manufacturers to bully but I wonder what's going to happen if Apple's market share will reach 25%: how the other manufacturer will react to the shrinking of their market shares? What's sure is that they won't silently die out.
How about getting the source code of the iPhone version (if they don't release it, tell FSF to sue them) and distribute it on the shop for free (if that is possible) or for a lower price? That's why the price of GPLed programs tends to zero and Xpilot for the iPhone should not be an exception.
I solved the first three levels of the 3SAT game turning all rectangles yellow and deselecting them in turn until all circles turned green. Basically I didn't understand what was going on and I played in a mechanical way, so I quickly lost interest. I think that any computer can do than faster than me (and that made me loose interest too): was I really helping the design of new hardware or slowing it down?
By the way, can anybody estimate how many million people playing this game they need to create ICs faster than a single computer can?
If it were the lions than invented men, my take is that lions didn't make a smart decision and they probably agreed the first time they saw a men with a rifle.
If it were the cow that invented men... right, it may be nice to have somebody that cares about you all the day long but wait, don't do men breed, milk and eat cows all the time? Another unwise decision.
Those two fun or not so fun examples state my position on this matter: don't invent something with the potential of outsmarting you, because you'll be outsmarted. If you compete for the same resources, you'll go extinct quickly. If you're useful, you'll live as a slave even if you might not realize it.
Argument granted, but McDonald's can compete on price with any Italian restaurant and Starbucks can't compete on price with Italian bars.
However there are customers willing to pay for their products here in Italy and there are several customers groups advocating for SB stores in Italy (google for starbucks italia, maybe select pages in Italian language). On the other side I also have to point out this article of Financial Times of 2007, with a statement of Howard Schultz about not opening stores in Italy and to this analysis. The following discussion is interesting as it presents the differing views of Italian people on the subject intertwined with comments of people from other countries.
Furthermore Italy's Autogrill is the licensee of the Starbucks brand for Italy at least since 2007 (and many others). However Autogrill has its own coffee shops so my suspect is that it's paying the license to keep a competitor out of the country.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I agree but there might be some reasons that can make the Wi-Fi service attractive to some people. One is that for your 3G contract to be competitive you have stay under a 10 MB cap. That won't let you upload your vacation pictures or download large attachments for business. Nothing that matters to you, probably, but it could matter to somebody else. Wi-Fi could also be an easier connection to setup: tourists will probably be able to register online from their home before leaving for Italy (Venice residents are registering online for the service now). That's seems a better option than looking for the right telephone shop in a foreign country and trying to communicate with personnel that maybe don't speak their language too well.
God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
There are no Starbucks in Italy and probably there will never be. Starbucks' idea of coffee is too different from the average Italian's idea of coffee, an espresso quickly brewed and quickly consumed at the bar. Ironically, the original Starbucks was selling coffee beans and equipment and started selling coffee drinks only after a journey to Italy of its marketing manager in 1982.
Yes, XP might be good enough but if Vista would have been any better, XP would be as dead as Win98 now.
IMHO it's not the merit of XP that's keeping it alive but the demerits of its successor. There are some hints that Win7 can make it die, but we'll see how long it will take.
Finally, I agree that such a paradigm shift will kill most of today's desktop OSes.
One reason might be that building an industry that is entirely reliant on the whims of a foreign company could leave them holding the bag for thousands of idiots who thought they had a job.
Only a few countries build cars but every country service them. Local car service industries are at the mercy of manufacturers which, for example, make fully electronic cars that can be serviced only with expensive tools, but no country ever banned cars for that reason AFAIK.
I really wonder what the reason for the gold farming ban is.
MS is happy that you pirate Windows 7: they're not losing money (you never paid them once) and they're not giving a customer to the competition. You should switch to Linux instead, or to OSX if you also want to buy a new computer. That would disappoint MS.
Actually I'm somewhat surprised that people selling beer in a bar don't know what a pint is and, yes, a pint is definitely a large one. However I've been in a place in Milan last Sunday where they are selling up to 15 liters of beer at once. They use large oddly shaped glass containers with valves to pour beer into the glass of each person at the table. The refrigerator is included.
Which pint? UK or US? A UK pint is 0.568 liters so you won't like it if you ask for half liter, but if you're American a half liter is a little larger than your pint (0.473 liters). However in most pubs I've been in here in Europe beer is either large or small, whatever that means in that place. Ask for a large beer and you'll be happy :-)