"if you look at growth in Silicon Vally over the last 20 years and "flatten" (whatever that means)"
It means that if you look at a graph of growth, there will be a spike in it for the bubble.
If you take the start level of the spike, and the level to which it drops at the tail of the spike, and interpolate a line between those two levels, the overall growth rate remains the same.
i.e. the bubble was, in fact, a spike; it went up, it went down; everything else grew at the same rate.
This is in fact the most damning thing you could note about the.com speculation; when it blew up, and then blew down - it might as well have NEVER HAPPENED.
Re:The diffrence that matters
on
Apple Backs Blu-ray
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No.
As with DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W). Prices will be similar, devices will have either singular-support, or very sketchy dual-support.
Current / Older home DVD-Players and DVD-ROM drives will either be incompatible, or very, very picky.
Prices will be in fact pretty high for a good time because take up will be slow until the 2nd gen of the technology comes through (reasonably solid dual-format writers, common and solid dual-format players).
Meanwhile, someone will have produced DivX++, that can re-encode the content of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD, allowing it to be written to a standard DVD, in a quality that is acceptable for the drop in price. It is these files that will be popular, downloaded from the net.
After a while of that, people will start to use HD-DVD or Blu Ray DVD to backup their multiple DivX++ images onto one big-ass disc.
At which point the tech companies will reveal their plans for SDD-DVD (super-duper-density DVD), and the competing standard Puce-Ray DVD. Which will be sony's concept. These discs will be the future because they hold such better-qualtiy movies, and the capacity makes piracy impractical...
(Re-)opens a good niche market for research + development houses, without needing the backing to make marketable use of their developments.
Develop / Patent / Licence as a business model is FAR more useful to humanity than the current one; Develop (or not...) / Patent(-snipe) / Wait / Litigate
"The biggest problem is that using the Dock(ing station) requires you to memorize the state of all your open Windows -- was that browser window minimized or not? You have to go hunt for it. The Windows taskbar presents a consistent view no matter what you are doing -- the icon is always in the same place."
Untrue.
If a window is minimised, there will be a miniature view of it on the right hand sidde of the dock - look for the window that looks like the one you want, if its not there; its not minimised.
Alternately; click and hold on the icon for the window's application. A popup menu will appear with all the windows for that application listed; highlight the one you want and it is brought to the fore, un-minimised if required and focussed (this is EXACTLY like grouped task icons in WinXP, btw)
"Just as a simple example, opening a new browser window on the Mac takes 3 steps (click Safari to restore window, click New Window, minimize the first window), while on Windows it only takes 1 step (click quicklaunch icon). For something that I might do dozens of times a day, it starts to add up."
This is fair comment, though tabbed browsing diminishes the problem (open same window and hit MAC-T for a new tab), assuming you use Safari (I do; don't know how this works in FF or IE-Mac). But in general, your comment is accurate, opening multiple instances of most apps is slightly more awkward. MAC-N is your friend.
"I think the OS X interface is designed to accommodate people who are using only a small number of open windows and applications. (Keep in mind that OS 9 had serious technical limitations to multitasking, so many Mac users just avoided it.)"
Untrue; Expose. QED.
"Finally, it seems even most Mac fans admit that the Finder is a pain-in-the-ass. (Personally, I don't understand the utility of that column view at all, especially in Save dialogs)"
Col-View has some, feeble, uses. But not much (it basically acts as a support to having "back" but not "up" to navigate the file structure (you go back one column). Finder as file-manager works like Windows if you turn off the folders pane, and open 2 explorer windows to drag files between.
There are only 2 things I miss from WinXP when on my powerbook; the tree-view folder pane, and TextPad - I have yet to find a really good text editor on OSX (I am using BBEdit light on the Mac; BBEdit compared to TextPad is as excrement is compared to cream. I have used the full version of BBEdit, briefly; it is not worth anywhere near the money)
"Tip 1: Stick your Applications folder in the Dock and use it like a start menu."
Stick your most used applications in the dock, go to the application dir through finder; if you go for the same program more than twice, on the third time drag it to the dock!
"Tip 2: Bind Expose to a convenient mouse or keyboard button."
FFS! It DEFAULTS to F9, F10 and F11, jeez! Turn on the special corner thingies if need be (they irritated me, but YMMV)
Re:"Buisness" as usual
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
Oh, it was your comment about "exercising every code path" that told me you were working from the design at best if not the source.
If writing tests from REQUIREMENTS, how will you know what paths the CODE will have in it, let alone take for any test case?
Re:"Buisness" as usual
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
I think you and I are working from different concepts of "pretty complex".
You are thining of a few-dozen if-then-else statements.
I am remembering trying to assure the corner and border cases for SDH Framer syncing. Its more like a few thousand cases to tie down.
With cases like, "What if there is clock-wander on the remote end? What about at our end? What about Jitter? What about both Wander and Jitter?"
Plus those test cases were to be fed to the logic probe and a Xylinx chip, not knocked up in C.
Re:"Buisness" as usual
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"From what I've seen of QA, it is testing, just not in the "Testing" phase. It is having well-defined objects, interfaces, input ranges, output ranges, unit tests and so on to make sure that when you assemble everything together, it has few bugs left. Basicly, weeding them out at an earlier point in the process."
No offense, but you missed out:
Ensuring that the requirements the SW is built to match are complete / correct in the first place.
Ensuring that the SW is built in a way that is suitably efficient for the project.
Ensuring that the SW has at least been thought about in terms of being built for re-use.
Ensuring that there was at least some thought about "is there something already here that we could re-use or modify?"
Ensuring that the SW is built in a method that lends itself to maintenance and modification without tearing out of hair.
Ensuring that some form of profiling or metrication has been performed, in case the project as a whole needs optimisation (being able to look at the metrics for each unit speeds that first "where to optimise" pass SOOOO much)
Ensuring that throughout all those processes the correct feedback was fedback to the people who actually DID all those things you just ensured...
ALL of that is part of the QA for software development, very little of it actually involves testing the software does its job right...
Re:Quality != Good
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
External ISO9001 audits ONLY check that you are following your own processes, and that you have addressed the requirements (which may or may not be in a sensible way).
I think there is a requirement that you review your processes regularly; but having a meeting where the PHB says "we have good processes? Right?" and every drone nods dutifully is fine for that requirement.
ISO9001 is designed to assure outside entities (customers, investors) that you have taken steps to do things in a way that mitigates against cockups, corruption (rogue projects that do not add value but leech resources) and terminally bad output.
It is NOT the purpose of the standard to give the company efficient processes (it is assumed that you will begin from something that does what you need, and add quality to it, not bork your processes totally because thats the "quality" way to do it)
Unfortunately, being an exernally visible marker, ISO9001 is largely treated as a marketting tool by the PHBs of the world.
Re:Quality != Good
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do you (personally) understand the actual ISO9001 system?
A specific example; the standard requires that you have a process in place to ensure that the copies of company documentation in use are up to date and valid.
The fact that someone at your company wrote in their company standard for that requirement that they would do this by only having one copy (and weren't intelligent enough to make that an ELECTRONIC shared copy) is very far from being a problem of the standard.
The company could just as easily have pointed to a secretary and stated "Documents are to be taken from XYZ, where the up to date version will be available". Combine this with a procedure for document release that includes "archive old copy, replace in XYZ with new version" and you are done. Make XYZ a network drive which is backed up properly, and you've also filled the document protection and retention requirement.
ISO9001 is only as hard as you make it for yourself. In some cases, you can fulfill the requirement by stating that you have looked at, and are not addressing, that requirement.
Re:"Buisness" as usual
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
" Imagine a complex program containing many code paths"
Mmmkay.
"QA spends a day to code a test suite which exercises every code path"
erm... "QA spends a day"
Yeah, right.
You do realise that a FULL code path test suite will, perforce, be LARGER than the source code it tests?
When doing QA, I used to start writing the test cases for software when the REQUIREMENTS document arrived, so that they were ready for use during the tail end of coding and for the unit testing. Its a BIG job.
And you design tests from the reqs, not from the code - how will you trap a completely missing boundary case, if you build tests from the source? Or the design?
Requirements drive source and test design, separately so that the assumptions in the former cannot pollute the latter.
Re:If it works it still may not
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
There is a job in the process of turning business rules into software systems.
It is called "Requirements Ellicitation".
Someone who is a professional at that bridges the gap, if you can't be bothered to bridge the gap, be prepared to fall into it.
What you propose would simply result in PHBs telling SW Devs how to code, and SW Devs telling PHBs their business rules are wrong.
Been there, done that;
PHB handing looking at his flow chart he had produced as requirements for a stored procedure, asking me "Why have you used so many variables; there aren't any variables on my chart..."
Seriously.
He did eat humble pie when I recoded the procedure without caching ANY select results... "why is it so slow now?"
Re:What is QA Always a Separate Organization?
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I used to work as a QA person.
In our company QA was a separate organisation, for 3 simple reasons;
1 - you are auditing and commenting on other people's work, not in a peer review "did you think about doing it like this" way, but in a "That is not acceptable; redo" way. Close colleagues in a department are NOT suitable for that role; you cannot be expected to say that about the person in the next cubicle's work, whereas a department with that as their job will be accepted when they do it.
2 - Keeping up to date on the quality requirements, combined with performing your live QA duties for the engineering department was a full time job. Or at least, it certainly was if the company wanted to keep its ISO9001 certification.
3 - Its a case of the buck stopping here. In our company project proposals, requirements and plans HAD to be signed off by QA before the funding got released for the project. At the same time, due to our doing telecoms stuff, we had a legal responsibility to sign off that the EMC conformity, physical safety and electrical safety tests had been conducted properly and passed. (and that meant constantly checking updates of the various national standards to ensure the company standards used the strictest requirements in each case). Random engineer is not good enough. (you have to have passed the right courses to audit each various section, need to be a qualified ISO9001 auditor to do the internal audits for that etc)
Professional QA is a full and seperate job. (but I did get to play with the 20KV discharge equipment!)
Re:"Buisness" as usual
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No.
What you have described is a large bug-hunting exercise.
QA is a process by which errors are supposed to be PREVENTED, not FOUND OUT.
That's why QA != Testing
Better QA == fewer bugs to find (it assures you are building quality)
Better Testing == more bugs found (it is, in fact, closer quality verification)
Good QA begins when the Business Case proposing a new project gets reviewed.
It continues constantly until the Project Post Mortem gets reviewed.
QA should be involved in every activity regarding the projet in between. (including reviewing the requirements ellicitation process)
Happily, when I worked in QA (for a telecoms test equipment manufacturer) that was how we did things. We, in QA, were responsible to the QA Director, and the Managing Director, and nobody else - that gets engineering in touch with you early and ofen...
Using the HTTP protocol for that kind of web application is an ABUSE of the protocol.
It was not designed for it, and is fundamentally (spoofable to the Nth degree in both directions, non-stateful, un-encrypted, the list is longer, but time is short) unsuited to it.
Everything conglomerated to the web to support web applications is a series of ludges and half-measures, none really up to the task, half at least making the situation WORSE (activex's tunnel to the core windows API,.Net's default-permit security model), none escaping the underlying unsuitability of HTTP for distributed computing
its a hyper TEXT TRANSFER protocol; the clue is in the name...
Ultimately, what is required is for the browser (whichever one) to control what elements of CSS and Javascript sites are allowed to use.
Ergo; the user can simply dissallow CSS allowing flying elements ("float"-ing is a different thing, you see).
There needs to be a definite shift from the web-site having "control" unless the browser is patched to snatch it back, towards the web-page being permitted to do its thing within certain boundaries (boundaries that the user is in control of).
The rush to provide "web applications" runs contary to this; web pages are DATA, not programs and the further we go from that state, the more invasive mal-intentioned pages can be (example; ActiveX)
A stack or queue of filters, with select box GUI, and text+gfx output at the end. (oh, and potentially sound clips - edgy!)
The only "innovation" I can see is that you can add + remove individual filters. Which is not, so to speak, going to launch rockets...
I recal looking at a system (in java) that allowed overlay of viewports (little square windows) onto a graphic to add + remove filters (in the photoshop sense in this case). You could drag around these viewports and overlay them to get a venn-diagram like effect with filters (real time, over the web in an applet)
That was while I was a University (so was between 1993 - 1998, probably 96 at a guess). That was simultaneously; similar in concept, more impressive by far and much more of an "innovation" at that time...
I may be missing something, but I couldn't see anything "new" there.
"All I ever hear about Al Jazeera is how they always seem to have new tapes from various terrorists..."
You might want to consider the sources from which you hear about Al-Jazeera from, before using that information to form an opinion...
Do you think the news you watch would tell you if Al-Jazeera had a report on anything else? No. Only "Al Jazeera does X that we wouldn't, aren't they bad?". Or "Al-Jazeera has X new tape, aren't they bad?"
Maybe they get the tapes from terrorists because:
They will actually transmit them
They transmit in the relevant languages, to audiences that speak the relevant languages
Slashdot Mirror
"if you look at growth in Silicon Vally over the last 20 years and "flatten" (whatever that means)"
.com speculation; when it blew up, and then blew down - it might as well have NEVER HAPPENED.
It means that if you look at a graph of growth, there will be a spike in it for the bubble.
If you take the start level of the spike, and the level to which it drops at the tail of the spike, and interpolate a line between those two levels, the overall growth rate remains the same.
i.e. the bubble was, in fact, a spike; it went up, it went down; everything else grew at the same rate.
This is in fact the most damning thing you could note about the
No.
As with DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W). Prices will be similar, devices will have either singular-support, or very sketchy dual-support.
Current / Older home DVD-Players and DVD-ROM drives will either be incompatible, or very, very picky.
Prices will be in fact pretty high for a good time because take up will be slow until the 2nd gen of the technology comes through (reasonably solid dual-format writers, common and solid dual-format players).
Meanwhile, someone will have produced DivX++, that can re-encode the content of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD, allowing it to be written to a standard DVD, in a quality that is acceptable for the drop in price. It is these files that will be popular, downloaded from the net.
After a while of that, people will start to use HD-DVD or Blu Ray DVD to backup their multiple DivX++ images onto one big-ass disc.
At which point the tech companies will reveal their plans for SDD-DVD (super-duper-density DVD), and the competing standard Puce-Ray DVD. Which will be sony's concept. These discs will be the future because they hold such better-qualtiy movies, and the capacity makes piracy impractical...
And the big circle-jerk will begin again!
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that!
(Re-)opens a good niche market for research + development houses, without needing the backing to make marketable use of their developments.
Develop / Patent / Licence as a business model is FAR more useful to humanity than the current one; Develop (or not...) / Patent(-snipe) / Wait / Litigate
"It will be _interesting_ to see what direction Groove takes now."
I believe you have mis-typed "bloody obvious and deeply depressing" in that sentence.
"The biggest problem is that using the Dock(ing station) requires you to memorize the state of all your open Windows -- was that browser window minimized or not? You have to go hunt for it. The Windows taskbar presents a consistent view no matter what you are doing -- the icon is always in the same place."
Untrue.
If a window is minimised, there will be a miniature view of it on the right hand sidde of the dock - look for the window that looks like the one you want, if its not there; its not minimised.
Alternately; click and hold on the icon for the window's application. A popup menu will appear with all the windows for that application listed; highlight the one you want and it is brought to the fore, un-minimised if required and focussed (this is EXACTLY like grouped task icons in WinXP, btw)
"Just as a simple example, opening a new browser window on the Mac takes 3 steps (click Safari to restore window, click New Window, minimize the first window), while on Windows it only takes 1 step (click quicklaunch icon). For something that I might do dozens of times a day, it starts to add up."
This is fair comment, though tabbed browsing diminishes the problem (open same window and hit MAC-T for a new tab), assuming you use Safari (I do; don't know how this works in FF or IE-Mac). But in general, your comment is accurate, opening multiple instances of most apps is slightly more awkward. MAC-N is your friend.
"I think the OS X interface is designed to accommodate people who are using only a small number of open windows and applications. (Keep in mind that OS 9 had serious technical limitations to multitasking, so many Mac users just avoided it.)"
Untrue; Expose. QED.
"Finally, it seems even most Mac fans admit that the Finder is a pain-in-the-ass. (Personally, I don't understand the utility of that column view at all, especially in Save dialogs)"
Col-View has some, feeble, uses. But not much (it basically acts as a support to having "back" but not "up" to navigate the file structure (you go back one column). Finder as file-manager works like Windows if you turn off the folders pane, and open 2 explorer windows to drag files between.
There are only 2 things I miss from WinXP when on my powerbook; the tree-view folder pane, and TextPad - I have yet to find a really good text editor on OSX (I am using BBEdit light on the Mac; BBEdit compared to TextPad is as excrement is compared to cream. I have used the full version of BBEdit, briefly; it is not worth anywhere near the money)
"Tip 1: Stick your Applications folder in the Dock and use it like a start menu."
Stick your most used applications in the dock, go to the application dir through finder; if you go for the same program more than twice, on the third time drag it to the dock!
"Tip 2: Bind Expose to a convenient mouse or keyboard button."
FFS! It DEFAULTS to F9, F10 and F11, jeez!
Turn on the special corner thingies if need be (they irritated me, but YMMV)
Oh, it was your comment about "exercising every code path" that told me you were working from the design at best if not the source.
If writing tests from REQUIREMENTS, how will you know what paths the CODE will have in it, let alone take for any test case?
I think you and I are working from different concepts of "pretty complex".
You are thining of a few-dozen if-then-else statements.
I am remembering trying to assure the corner and border cases for SDH Framer syncing. Its more like a few thousand cases to tie down.
With cases like, "What if there is clock-wander on the remote end? What about at our end? What about Jitter? What about both Wander and Jitter?"
Plus those test cases were to be fed to the logic probe and a Xylinx chip, not knocked up in C.
"From what I've seen of QA, it is testing, just not in the "Testing" phase. It is having well-defined objects, interfaces, input ranges, output ranges, unit tests and so on to make sure that when you assemble everything together, it has few bugs left. Basicly, weeding them out at an earlier point in the process."
No offense, but you missed out:
Ensuring that the requirements the SW is built to match are complete / correct in the first place.
Ensuring that the SW is built in a way that is suitably efficient for the project.
Ensuring that the SW has at least been thought about in terms of being built for re-use.
Ensuring that there was at least some thought about "is there something already here that we could re-use or modify?"
Ensuring that the SW is built in a method that lends itself to maintenance and modification without tearing out of hair.
Ensuring that some form of profiling or metrication has been performed, in case the project as a whole needs optimisation (being able to look at the metrics for each unit speeds that first "where to optimise" pass SOOOO much)
Ensuring that throughout all those processes the correct feedback was fedback to the people who actually DID all those things you just ensured...
ALL of that is part of the QA for software development, very little of it actually involves testing the software does its job right...
External ISO9001 audits ONLY check that you are following your own processes, and that you have addressed the requirements (which may or may not be in a sensible way).
I think there is a requirement that you review your processes regularly; but having a meeting where the PHB says "we have good processes? Right?" and every drone nods dutifully is fine for that requirement.
ISO9001 is designed to assure outside entities (customers, investors) that you have taken steps to do things in a way that mitigates against cockups, corruption (rogue projects that do not add value but leech resources) and terminally bad output.
It is NOT the purpose of the standard to give the company efficient processes (it is assumed that you will begin from something that does what you need, and add quality to it, not bork your processes totally because thats the "quality" way to do it)
Unfortunately, being an exernally visible marker, ISO9001 is largely treated as a marketting tool by the PHBs of the world.
Do you (personally) understand the actual ISO9001 system?
A specific example; the standard requires that you have a process in place to ensure that the copies of company documentation in use are up to date and valid.
The fact that someone at your company wrote in their company standard for that requirement that they would do this by only having one copy (and weren't intelligent enough to make that an ELECTRONIC shared copy) is very far from being a problem of the standard.
The company could just as easily have pointed to a secretary and stated "Documents are to be taken from XYZ, where the up to date version will be available". Combine this with a procedure for document release that includes "archive old copy, replace in XYZ with new version" and you are done. Make XYZ a network drive which is backed up properly, and you've also filled the document protection and retention requirement.
ISO9001 is only as hard as you make it for yourself. In some cases, you can fulfill the requirement by stating that you have looked at, and are not addressing, that requirement.
" Imagine a complex program containing many code paths"
Mmmkay.
"QA spends a day to code a test suite which exercises every code path"
erm... "QA spends a day"
Yeah, right.
You do realise that a FULL code path test suite will, perforce, be LARGER than the source code it tests?
When doing QA, I used to start writing the test cases for software when the REQUIREMENTS document arrived, so that they were ready for use during the tail end of coding and for the unit testing. Its a BIG job.
And you design tests from the reqs, not from the code - how will you trap a completely missing boundary case, if you build tests from the source? Or the design?
Requirements drive source and test design, separately so that the assumptions in the former cannot pollute the latter.
There is a job in the process of turning business rules into software systems.
It is called "Requirements Ellicitation".
Someone who is a professional at that bridges the gap, if you can't be bothered to bridge the gap, be prepared to fall into it.
What you propose would simply result in PHBs telling SW Devs how to code, and SW Devs telling PHBs their business rules are wrong.
Been there, done that;
PHB handing looking at his flow chart he had produced as requirements for a stored procedure, asking me "Why have you used so many variables; there aren't any variables on my chart..."
Seriously.
He did eat humble pie when I recoded the procedure without caching ANY select results... "why is it so slow now?"
I used to work as a QA person.
In our company QA was a separate organisation, for 3 simple reasons;
1 - you are auditing and commenting on other people's work, not in a peer review "did you think about doing it like this" way, but in a "That is not acceptable; redo" way. Close colleagues in a department are NOT suitable for that role; you cannot be expected to say that about the person in the next cubicle's work, whereas a department with that as their job will be accepted when they do it.
2 - Keeping up to date on the quality requirements, combined with performing your live QA duties for the engineering department was a full time job. Or at least, it certainly was if the company wanted to keep its ISO9001 certification.
3 - Its a case of the buck stopping here. In our company project proposals, requirements and plans HAD to be signed off by QA before the funding got released for the project. At the same time, due to our doing telecoms stuff, we had a legal responsibility to sign off that the EMC conformity, physical safety and electrical safety tests had been conducted properly and passed. (and that meant constantly checking updates of the various national standards to ensure the company standards used the strictest requirements in each case). Random engineer is not good enough. (you have to have passed the right courses to audit each various section, need to be a qualified ISO9001 auditor to do the internal audits for that etc)
Professional QA is a full and seperate job. (but I did get to play with the 20KV discharge equipment!)
No.
What you have described is a large bug-hunting exercise.
QA is a process by which errors are supposed to be PREVENTED, not FOUND OUT.
That's why QA != Testing
Better QA == fewer bugs to find (it assures you are building quality)
Better Testing == more bugs found (it is, in fact, closer quality verification)
Good QA begins when the Business Case proposing a new project gets reviewed.
It continues constantly until the Project Post Mortem gets reviewed.
QA should be involved in every activity regarding the projet in between. (including reviewing the requirements ellicitation process)
Happily, when I worked in QA (for a telecoms test equipment manufacturer) that was how we did things. We, in QA, were responsible to the QA Director, and the Managing Director, and nobody else - that gets engineering in touch with you early and ofen...
Mmmm, memories of my A1200HD;
:)
20 seconds for a cold boot, 2 seconds for a reboot.
and a 20Mb hard disk
Using the HTTP protocol for that kind of web application is an ABUSE of the protocol.
.Net's default-permit security model), none escaping the underlying unsuitability of HTTP for distributed computing
It was not designed for it, and is fundamentally (spoofable to the Nth degree in both directions, non-stateful, un-encrypted, the list is longer, but time is short) unsuited to it.
Everything conglomerated to the web to support web applications is a series of ludges and half-measures, none really up to the task, half at least making the situation WORSE (activex's tunnel to the core windows API,
its a hyper TEXT TRANSFER protocol; the clue is in the name...
Ultimately, what is required is for the browser (whichever one) to control what elements of CSS and Javascript sites are allowed to use.
Ergo; the user can simply dissallow CSS allowing flying elements ("float"-ing is a different thing, you see).
There needs to be a definite shift from the web-site having "control" unless the browser is patched to snatch it back, towards the web-page being permitted to do its thing within certain boundaries (boundaries that the user is in control of).
The rush to provide "web applications" runs contary to this; web pages are DATA, not programs and the further we go from that state, the more invasive mal-intentioned pages can be (example; ActiveX)
"Joe Wilcox"
Spot the insanely rich analyst who lives in a world of disposable personal computers.
Meanwhile in the real-world; our shop does a healthy trade in second hand PII class machines (£60 to you guv, windows EXTRA...)
That letter basically amounts to blackmail;
"Take this offer, because the next will be worse..."
A stack or queue of filters, with select box GUI, and text+gfx output at the end. (oh, and potentially sound clips - edgy!)
The only "innovation" I can see is that you can add + remove individual filters. Which is not, so to speak, going to launch rockets...
I recal looking at a system (in java) that allowed overlay of viewports (little square windows) onto a graphic to add + remove filters (in the photoshop sense in this case). You could drag around these viewports and overlay them to get a venn-diagram like effect with filters (real time, over the web in an applet)
That was while I was a University (so was between 1993 - 1998, probably 96 at a guess). That was simultaneously; similar in concept, more impressive by far and much more of an "innovation" at that time...
I may be missing something, but I couldn't see anything "new" there.
You obviously were never much of a "math geek" then, since you can apparently neither subtract, or divide by 10, without cocking up.
:)
Googol = 1 followed by 100 zeros.
1 followed by 99 zeros would be 1 googol DIVIDED by 10 (basic maths, really)
NOT 1 googol MINUS 1 (which would be 100 NINES in a row...)
ninety nine zeros on its own, is not even a number (unless a really badly written 0), but a bitfield, and a null one at that
" TFA states that no Blackberry or Blackberry-like devices were counted.....Could this have pulled the numbers up?"
hardly insightful, really. Adding a load of sales of a DIFFERENT class of device, is not a sensible way to pull up numbers.
Sales of steam trains are falling; could adding in sales of cars pull the numbers up?
Try just not putting it in at all...
You might want to consider the sources from which you hear about Al-Jazeera from, before using that information to form an opinion...
Do you think the news you watch would tell you if Al-Jazeera had a report on anything else? No. Only "Al Jazeera does X that we wouldn't, aren't they bad?". Or "Al-Jazeera has X new tape, aren't they bad?"
Maybe they get the tapes from terrorists because: