But sales fell to 8.5 million in the following quarter, and down to 8.1 million in the most recent three-month period. Wall Street is reportedly starting to worry that the bubble will burst.'"
T You mean to say that iPod sales were lower in the 7 months following the holiday season?? Ne freakin' way!!
I agree with most of what you said, but I think you really should give OSX more of a chance. Lots of your criticisms are unwarrented with OSX 10.4 and later. I get the feeling you really have not used a Mac in many years... Some examples:
but things like Gnucash has to be run by seperately starting a X session and then starning the *nix program.
Absolutely true. But don't make it seem like a big deal to do! Apple wrote a pretty good X system for OSX. Just click the app, wait a second and you're all up and running with an Xterm. You can even leave X running and have a menu populated with your favorite X apps. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/
Even then, things like printing don't go as smoothly.
OS X has some minor issues, like having no "show desktop" button that I'd have to get a script for that doesn't always work correct.
This is what I mean by not using a Mac in years. Expose comes standard and is really pretty cool. It has three modes: Show desktop, show all windows arranged nicely and show ONLY windows of your currently active App. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/
I don't really use the rest of the mac programs (itunes, imovie, etcetera) so I may be one of the few that don't really care about that stuff.
I don't use most of them either (like sherlock, iLife and the like). One thing I will say about iTunes is that I resisted a lot in the beginning, but it grows on you. Not sure why you hate iPhoto though... it seems to work well, albeit not perfect.
1 - the iPod regularly sells in the same $300 (and up) price bracket. can you imagine the what apple would do to the phone market would if they replaced the Hard Drive iPod line with hard drive iPod phones in the same price bracket? wow.
Yes I can. It will be a huge waste for Apple. Like I said, the whole "phone" aspect is still not understood by most people. Apple sells MILLIONS of iPods every year, and mostly to people with little to no real technical ability. Much of the success of the iPod is due to its simplicity (click "import" to copy your cd then just plug in the ipod). 95% of iPod users will be lost when you tell them to pull the sim card from their phone and plug it into their ipod. So to make this work, you need support from at least one major carrier (at first). You need to be able to active the phone service at the Apple store, or the cell store.
Would the device be CDMA or GSM? 3G support? Bluetooth too I hope, right? It'd be cool if it ran cool Java games too! Hopefully a speakerphone function too.
Look, I would embrace an iPod phone with open arms. However, I doubt that even Apple can cram a full featured cell phone into the iPod form factor. Would it have good battery life? Somehow I doubt that the iPod-phone will do "phone" better than my cell... (hope i'm wrong)
2 - metroPCS. i have a metroPCS razr. $250 out of my pocket, no contracts. in hindsight it was a crappy deal, but it made a statement. i will NOT stand for being forced into a contract.
I paid $295 out-of-pocket for my phone for the same reason. Just changed providers too. Again, hardly anybody does this. Techno-Geeks are a very small (sometimes lucrative) niche of users.
Yeah, it needs an integrated phone, but Apple already sabotaged that idea with the lackluster ROKR joint-venture with motorola.
You think it is that simple? Did you follow the whole Apple-ROKR debacle? It's true that Apple burned one of its bridges on that, but there are still many other options (internal devel, nokia, sony, etc). The fundamental flaw that really killed the ROKR before it was even developed: Cellular Carriers.
The cell carriers are the gatekeepers to the phone bussiness. Without their adoption of your phone, it won't be offered "officially" with their services. You can develop the best, most awesome, feature-rich cellular phone ever imagined and still not make money on it without this type of support. Think about the Razor. AMAZING hit for motorola. Why?? Sure, many people really liked the phone... But for USD $300 or more? NO WAY!! It was the fact that carriers bundled the phone with plans for a mere $99 or even free that make the Razor a hit. The carriers even advertised it FOR motorola on TV, in newspapers, etc. Remember?
So now you say, 'okay that make sense, but why wouldnt the carriers LOVE to offer an iPod phone?' If you have not figured it out yet, go ahead and take a moment to think...
Answer: The iPod is part of a three-way orgy that does not work on its own. iPod + iTunes + iTunes Music Store. See it yet? How much do the cell carriers make on their proprietary ring-tone/music sales? My carrier sells songs for $3 USD/each. My buddy's sells them for $2.99-4.99 EACH SONG! iTMS sells songs for $0.99 USD, of which there is no room to cut the Carriers in. Officially supporting an iPod-iTunes-iTMS phone would result in a carrier potentially losing MILLIONS of dollars in global music sales.
Finally, I am comfortable buying any GSM phone, unlocking it by hand, and changing the sim card. Done it two or three times already. However, most people will not pay big bucks for a phone that requires such a procedure.
Interesting. They say that you can... not that they should or will.
Actually I think the wording is grammatically perfect. If you read the link you will see that this is the first sentence of a section of Google's corporate policy. They are making a statement that the rest of the paragraph can build upon. Saying "will" would be wrong because that is no longer an assumption (its a fact). Additionally it is probably incorrect. I think Google can make insane money by releasing "GSmoke" brand of cigarettes with AdWords on them:-)
don't be evil" (by the way, where the FUCK on any of Google's pages does it actually say that? I've looked fairly hard and not found it, nor 'do no evil'), but I think they've got all the best intentions.
This whole issue falls under disaster planning. The terms does not just cover terrorist attacks and acts of god...
My father is currently an executive director for a billion dollar/year company, managing the disaster plan and more. They do increasingly more bussiness via telephone and internet, though its probably still mostly "storefront." Regardless, if the internal network went down (it spans much of New York City) or the net connection died, they stand to lose over USD $1,000,000/day (on an off day).
When your net connection is that critical, you do several things to protect it. First, have more than one peering point (wrong word?) with your primary ISP (i.e. 2xT1's). Second, have another ISP providing online backup service. The secondary ISP does not need to be as high bandwith/price as the primary (i.e. bussiness cable). Lastly, COLOCATE!! Offsite servers provide unparrelled redundancy.
Anyway... on a small scale, it is really cheap to provide backup net service. In a 50 person company, a second net connection (dsl if primary is cable or vice versa) is really not too expensive.
You know it's time to sell stock in a company when you see the company in a technical arms raise against the customer to deny the customer service. Great thinking, ISPs!
Yes! Just what I was thinking. When my ISP blocks torrent traffic, I will change to another ISP that does not restrict how much its customers use the service. Cool how that works!
They've had competition of a serious nature for several years now at least. That (by itself) doesn't seem to justify the layoffs.
Of course not, but who said that was the only reason? Intel may have had competition from AMD for a while, but Intel are just now starting to take that seriously. Intel hung on to the P4 - against a constant AMD barrage - for a really long time. But in the past year AMD has beaten Intel to the affordable 64-bit chips, affordable dual-core chips, affordable enterprise-class server chips (opteron), and affordable preformance chips (overclockers, gamers).
I will admit that the last 4 computers I have built for myself wore a sticker that read "AMD Inside." Most recently, in Feb of this year, I constructed a PC that ran a dual core AMD Opteron processor (165). On the first boot I cranked the core speed from 1.8ghz to 2.5ghz and its been running smoothly ever since. Thats a great chip, and it only cost $2xx USD, whereas the equivalent P4 at the time was near 850-1000 USD.
I will also say that I am extremely pleased with Intel lately. The archetecture of the "Core" line of processors is really cool. They are fast, dual-core, and low power. To me, this symbolizes the first REAL response to AMD by Intel.
I have spoken to people who worked as engineers at Intel. Some of the projects were really cool, but most never made it out of the labratory. Intel is an R&D firm... they do great research. I hope the layoffs don't really affect that part of the company.
Well they'll change the lesson plans when the text books change. The text books will change when the "facts" are decided. Public schools are at least 5 years behind on text books. In the worst case, Pluto has got at least a decade more as a planet:)
I don't like how Adblock and Flashblock are no longer compatible with it.
I'm going to jump out on a limb here and say that you are quite mistaken. You will need to update several extensions... thats always how FF updates go. Are you annoyed that Adblock has not released an updated version for an unreleased product??
This reminds me of what happens when dc circuits are severly overloaded. Anybody who has played with enough DIY radioshack breadboards knows how it happens... A miscalculation of the current and as soon as the power is on, a small crack forms in the IC, it heats up, small flames. I bet there was a power surge when the guy turned his computer on. Is it on a surge supressor...?
Remember to carefully check that you typed &$'$_ and not &$"$_ . Perl syntax gets me every time.
Perhaps it 'gets you' because you never actually took the time to figure out the syntax. For example, I am far from an expert on Perl, and I could see immediately that neither of those statements has a usable interpetation.
& is used to denote subroutines (er.. functions). It is almost always left out because Perl can tell if mysub; is a subroutine or something else in almost any case. $' is part of the last regex string evaluated. $_ is the default value that many functions set to their return value if no lvalue is specified. It is fairly generic and the use varies.
In C, you might write "if (pet == 'dog') { return true; }" while the Perl equivalent could be "return 1 if $pet eq 'dog';". I personally think the Perl version is much easier to read/write. Perl syntax can get ugly, but only if you let it get out of hand. Unreadable or confusing Perl code outside of an obsfucation contest, is a reflection on the coder, not the language.
I'm not sure if the bank sends the signal to the black helicopters which tell the gas station I don't have the cash to buy premium, or if my searching for "faster highway routes" in conjunction with my actual travel told that I was a cheapy to the gas pump....(readies tinfoil hat)
To start with, yes, I understand that this was a semi-sarcastic joke. I'm going to correct you anyway. I was not referring to this level of big brotherness. I was actually referring more to... say... using your Exxon-Mobil customer/credit card at an Exxon pump. Obviously Exxon's primary reason for going through all the trouble of rolling out a gas-card that can only be used at their pumps is to track customers. Another even more prolific example is the "store card" trend which exploded in the mid-90's. Almost any major supermarket or convienance store (ala Shaw's, StopnShop and CVS). You agree to provide the corprate machine with a record of everything you buy in their stores in exchange for $0.33 off soap every other week. It's just good bussiness practice on their part.
Aren't these sunk costs? Aren't these hundreds of thousands of machines already licensed?
Plus, as a MASS resident who has seen the state screw up almost everything it touches (see collapsing tunnel system link in the OP), I am not looking forward to MA doing a huge rollout of this new infrastucture. History tells me it will a) suck and b) cost me a lot of money. Now I'm not saying migrating to OSS/ODF is a bad idea; I just don't think state governments (and especially MY state government) should be the trailblazer. That thundering hoard you see is droves of people leaving MA (the only state in the union to suffer a decrease in population in the last two censuses) because of things like the Big Dig, and other callosally mismanaged debacles riddled with patronage, schedule slips, and massive budget overruns at the taxpayer's expense.
I also can't seem to shake the suspicion that this is mostly politically motivated. Recall that MA was the last state to withdraw from the MS monopoly penalty phase. That stubborness also ended up costing taxpayers millions, with nothing to show for it.
I agree 100%. MA has a pretty pitiful government. They really do screw up almost everything, from the Big Dig to the countries oldest (and worst) transit system. I am hoping this will be a new leaf. Maybe it will convince other governemnts (who know what they're doing) to jump onboard. Never underestimate what an underpaid and underutilized IT department can do (or not do).
Why do I think (as a lifelong MA resident) this is really more about revenge than it is about making things better?
Because it is. I'm originally from New York. Go Yankees.
So you say keep the status quo? All that does is keep people in poverty since there is no incentive to do anything about it. By your logic we perpetuate child labour and other horrors. At the same time it weakens the western world since they are losing jobs. You cannot make the weak strong by making the strong weak. This is capatilism. The only way to leverage things is by voting with where you spend your money. It is not a 'stick' approach, it is a 'carrot' approach. Provide some decent labour laws and we will trade more with your country. If we used your method, the working class would all sink to a poverty level while the industrialists keep right on making money. Even IT people would likely be poor workers since there would be an abundance of cheap programmers and IT staff in overcrowded countries. Those governments would have no incentive for population control either. The more people in squallor you have, the bigger and cheaper your labour pool. No, we need to make sure all people have a minimum level of 'living'. And like I say, the only way to leverage that in a capatilistic world is by restricting money from places that don't provide that standard of living to their people, until they do. Just like you wouldn't spend money at a store that provides bad service until you do get it. While the poor country might not progress until they do something about their situation, at least we won't sink into the same level of poverty and third world working conditions too.
No, actually the point of my first post was that there is no blanket policy to solve this situation. Close down all the foreign factories (not *sweatshops* mind you) and the third world loses so you can feel good at night. Embrace foreign manufacturing and we bring more poverty to the western world. Not even you can predict what would happen on either extreme.
Yes, I expect them not to. I have a right to my privacy, this is a clear violation of it. Keeping this type of data, even internally, should be illegal and result in criminal penalties against the executives who ok it.
You also have the right to read AOL's Term of Service and Privacy Policy when you use their free search engine.
You really are naive aren't you? You don't think that you bank keeps tabs on you? How about the state transit department when you use the automated (EZ-Pass, FastLane, whatever) payment system? What about the access card you use to get into work? Do you doubt that your gas station pumps don't know that you're going to put the cheap stuff in as soon as you swipe the card? The list goes on forever... get with it.
In other words, it does seem to shut down audio to conserve battery of both the phone and the headset, but it keeps the connection in full-out active mode. (it is probably closing down the SCO connection but nothing else).
I am a bit fuzzy as to how SCO is implemented in practice. It's QoS guarantee might be the real problem here. A note on "Parking"... I think parking the device will save any real battery life. Parked devices can ONLY recieve beacons, so the phone doesnt have to do any real legwork there. However, the active device only needs to recive beacons when no data needs to be transmitted. The beacons just sync the slave clocks to the master whether parked or active. While full-on audio transfer might suck the battery dry, I highly doubt active-mode without data requires any more power than parked mode.
Good luck with using the laptop as Master. Remember, this might simple be a hard limitation of the phones. There was another paragraph in the Core spec that said something like "Embedded devices might have buffer/processor limitations that preclude them from implementing all functionality." You get the picture...
True, but remember this is a phased rollout. The ODF plug-ins should be limited to people with disabilities. In the private sector I really would'nt care, however as a resident of MA, I think differently. You and I both know that VERY few people will switch to OO.org if MS Office is allowed to stay. I want Office removed from the default install of MA government machines. Maybe just give excel, etc to people who REALLY need it. That software is expensive, and the costs for ten or hundreds of thousands of site-licensed machines is enourmous. MA is a cash strapped right now. That money is better spent fixing their collapsing tunnel system.
But the only office applications that could do that -- such as the open-source OpenOffice and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice -- are not fully supported by the major screen readers and magnifiers that people with disabilities use.
Well hopefully this will cause the OO.org people to add support for such devices very quickly. That would be a net gain for the suite and also show MA that community supported software can work and tailor to their needs.
On another note... this should read "Microsoft Office Granted Temporary Injunction in MA"
Wait... if Microsoft released Office for Linux, would'nt they then add the cost of an Office license to the per-seat total cost of ownership for linux? Would that then not increase Microsoft's bullshift TCO statistics for linux by $200?
Mathematical equations editing that doesn't crash or slow to a crawl? Sane bibliography/reference management without a stupid payware addon? Page layout that doesn't randomly change according to your printer drivers.
I cannot find a phone that doesn't lock out all bluetooth communications when a headset is connected.
I like the idea of controlling multiple devices with a single BT master (which is what I htink you were describing) so I decided to check into this. Note that I am not an export of BT and have never read any of the specs until now. Okay, so Google pointed me to the Bluetooth website at http://www.bluetooth.com./ There you can find the architecture specs for the protocal.
The handsfree spec requires certain QoS guarantees, and imposes some requirements on the phones. For example, there can be only one handsfree (HF) device perl phone (AG). ALL sounds, including voice, KEY TONES, voice dialing, music, etc must be routed over the link to the HF device. For that reason cell for phones likely try to keep handsfree devices in the Active state for as long as they are connected. The important bits of text can be found in the Hands Free Specification, section 4.6:
Upon a user action or an internal event, either the HF or the AG may initiate the establishment of an Audio Connection whenever necessary. Further internal actions may be needed by the HF or the AG to internally route the audio paths. An Audio Connection set up procedure always means the establishment of a SCO link and it is always associated with an existing Service Level Connection. In principle, setting up an Audio Connection by using the procedure described in this section is not necessarily related to any call process. Once an Audio Connection between the HF and the AG exists, the AG shall utilize the HF as its sole audio port. The AG shall keep the audio paths, call related or not, routed towards HF for all the operations (e.g. voice, alert, key press tones) involving presence of audio.
To elaborate, BT slave devices can be set to either Active or Parked. Parked devices can't talk back to the phone, but the phone still needs to transmit a beacon packet every time the slaves reserved time slice comes up. Active mode devices can communicate based on one of several protocols. Handsfree requires Synchronous Connection-Oriented or SCO, which provides 64Kb CDR audio communication. It also requires that the physical link connnection remain in the Active state.
Cell phones probably have very light BT stacks, including extremely limited buffers. That probably sets a hard limit on the number of devices that they can form active physical links with. To that end, the cell makers most likely set up handsfree systems to automatically park all other physical connections.
If you were thinking that the phones should then just set up a new BT network with other non HF devices, think again. I found this paragraph in Section volume 1, section 4.1 of the Core specification titled "Piconet Topology"
A Bluetooth device may participate concurrently in two or more piconets. It does this on a time-division multiplexing basis. A Bluetooth device can never be a master of more than one piconet. (Since the piconet is defined by synchronization to the master's Bluetooth clock it is impossible to be the master of two or more piconets.) A Bluetooth device may be a slave in many independent piconets.
Due to use of TDMA slices as the master channel, hosting more than once Piconet with the same master (or just on the same channel) would not work. If BT used CDMA, this would be possible. It should be possible for your phone to be a SLAVE to your other devices while MASTER to the handsfree.
Lesson: there is more to this than you think. The core spec alone is 1300 pages of IEEE dribble.
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You mean to say that iPod sales were lower in the 7 months following the holiday season?? Ne freakin' way!!
Ms. Cleo could have predicated that...
Absolutely true. But don't make it seem like a big deal to do! Apple wrote a pretty good X system for OSX. Just click the app, wait a second and you're all up and running with an Xterm. You can even leave X running and have a menu populated with your favorite X apps.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/
This I am just going to plain disagree with, unless you are using some 1985 dot matrix or obscure plotter thingy...
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/printing/
This is what I mean by not using a Mac in years. Expose comes standard and is really pretty cool. It has three modes: Show desktop, show all windows arranged nicely and show ONLY windows of your currently active App.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/
I don't use most of them either (like sherlock, iLife and the like). One thing I will say about iTunes is that I resisted a lot in the beginning, but it grows on you. Not sure why you hate iPhoto though... it seems to work well, albeit not perfect.
Glad to hear you're getting a MacBook.
No I'm not...
Yes I can. It will be a huge waste for Apple. Like I said, the whole "phone" aspect is still not understood by most people. Apple sells MILLIONS of iPods every year, and mostly to people with little to no real technical ability. Much of the success of the iPod is due to its simplicity (click "import" to copy your cd then just plug in the ipod). 95% of iPod users will be lost when you tell them to pull the sim card from their phone and plug it into their ipod. So to make this work, you need support from at least one major carrier (at first). You need to be able to active the phone service at the Apple store, or the cell store.
Would the device be CDMA or GSM? 3G support? Bluetooth too I hope, right? It'd be cool if it ran cool Java games too! Hopefully a speakerphone function too.
Look, I would embrace an iPod phone with open arms. However, I doubt that even Apple can cram a full featured cell phone into the iPod form factor. Would it have good battery life? Somehow I doubt that the iPod-phone will do "phone" better than my cell... (hope i'm wrong)
I paid $295 out-of-pocket for my phone for the same reason. Just changed providers too. Again, hardly anybody does this. Techno-Geeks are a very small (sometimes lucrative) niche of users.
You think it is that simple? Did you follow the whole Apple-ROKR debacle? It's true that Apple burned one of its bridges on that, but there are still many other options (internal devel, nokia, sony, etc). The fundamental flaw that really killed the ROKR before it was even developed: Cellular Carriers.
The cell carriers are the gatekeepers to the phone bussiness. Without their adoption of your phone, it won't be offered "officially" with their services. You can develop the best, most awesome, feature-rich cellular phone ever imagined and still not make money on it without this type of support. Think about the Razor. AMAZING hit for motorola. Why?? Sure, many people really liked the phone... But for USD $300 or more? NO WAY!! It was the fact that carriers bundled the phone with plans for a mere $99 or even free that make the Razor a hit. The carriers even advertised it FOR motorola on TV, in newspapers, etc. Remember?
So now you say, 'okay that make sense, but why wouldnt the carriers LOVE to offer an iPod phone?' If you have not figured it out yet, go ahead and take a moment to think...
Answer: The iPod is part of a three-way orgy that does not work on its own. iPod + iTunes + iTunes Music Store. See it yet? How much do the cell carriers make on their proprietary ring-tone/music sales? My carrier sells songs for $3 USD/each. My buddy's sells them for $2.99-4.99 EACH SONG! iTMS sells songs for $0.99 USD, of which there is no room to cut the Carriers in. Officially supporting an iPod-iTunes-iTMS phone would result in a carrier potentially losing MILLIONS of dollars in global music sales.
Finally, I am comfortable buying any GSM phone, unlocking it by hand, and changing the sim card. Done it two or three times already. However, most people will not pay big bucks for a phone that requires such a procedure.
Actually I think the wording is grammatically perfect. If you read the link you will see that this is the first sentence of a section of Google's corporate policy. They are making a statement that the rest of the paragraph can build upon. Saying "will" would be wrong because that is no longer an assumption (its a fact). Additionally it is probably incorrect. I think Google can make insane money by releasing "GSmoke" brand of cigarettes with AdWords on them
"Our Philosophy"
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
This whole issue falls under disaster planning. The terms does not just cover terrorist attacks and acts of god...
My father is currently an executive director for a billion dollar/year company, managing the disaster plan and more. They do increasingly more bussiness via telephone and internet, though its probably still mostly "storefront." Regardless, if the internal network went down (it spans much of New York City) or the net connection died, they stand to lose over USD $1,000,000/day (on an off day).
When your net connection is that critical, you do several things to protect it. First, have more than one peering point (wrong word?) with your primary ISP (i.e. 2xT1's). Second, have another ISP providing online backup service. The secondary ISP does not need to be as high bandwith/price as the primary (i.e. bussiness cable). Lastly, COLOCATE!! Offsite servers provide unparrelled redundancy.
Anyway... on a small scale, it is really cheap to provide backup net service. In a 50 person company, a second net connection (dsl if primary is cable or vice versa) is really not too expensive.
Yes! Just what I was thinking. When my ISP blocks torrent traffic, I will change to another ISP that does not restrict how much its customers use the service. Cool how that works!
Of course not, but who said that was the only reason? Intel may have had competition from AMD for a while, but Intel are just now starting to take that seriously. Intel hung on to the P4 - against a constant AMD barrage - for a really long time. But in the past year AMD has beaten Intel to the affordable 64-bit chips, affordable dual-core chips, affordable enterprise-class server chips (opteron), and affordable preformance chips (overclockers, gamers).
I will admit that the last 4 computers I have built for myself wore a sticker that read "AMD Inside." Most recently, in Feb of this year, I constructed a PC that ran a dual core AMD Opteron processor (165). On the first boot I cranked the core speed from 1.8ghz to 2.5ghz and its been running smoothly ever since. Thats a great chip, and it only cost $2xx USD, whereas the equivalent P4 at the time was near 850-1000 USD.
I will also say that I am extremely pleased with Intel lately. The archetecture of the "Core" line of processors is really cool. They are fast, dual-core, and low power. To me, this symbolizes the first REAL response to AMD by Intel.
I have spoken to people who worked as engineers at Intel. Some of the projects were really cool, but most never made it out of the labratory. Intel is an R&D firm... they do great research. I hope the layoffs don't really affect that part of the company.
Well they'll change the lesson plans when the text books change. The text books will change when the "facts" are decided. Public schools are at least 5 years behind on text books. In the worst case, Pluto has got at least a decade more as a planet :)
I'm going to jump out on a limb here and say that you are quite mistaken. You will need to update several extensions... thats always how FF updates go. Are you annoyed that Adblock has not released an updated version for an unreleased product??
This reminds me of what happens when dc circuits are severly overloaded. Anybody who has played with enough DIY radioshack breadboards knows how it happens... A miscalculation of the current and as soon as the power is on, a small crack forms in the IC, it heats up, small flames. I bet there was a power surge when the guy turned his computer on. Is it on a surge supressor...?
Perhaps it 'gets you' because you never actually took the time to figure out the syntax. For example, I am far from an expert on Perl, and I could see immediately that neither of those statements has a usable interpetation.
& is used to denote subroutines (er.. functions). It is almost always left out because Perl can tell if mysub; is a subroutine or something else in almost any case.
$' is part of the last regex string evaluated.
$_ is the default value that many functions set to their return value if no lvalue is specified. It is fairly generic and the use varies.
In C, you might write "if (pet == 'dog') { return true; }" while the Perl equivalent could be "return 1 if $pet eq 'dog';". I personally think the Perl version is much easier to read/write. Perl syntax can get ugly, but only if you let it get out of hand. Unreadable or confusing Perl code outside of an obsfucation contest, is a reflection on the coder, not the language.
To start with, yes, I understand that this was a semi-sarcastic joke. I'm going to correct you anyway. I was not referring to this level of big brotherness. I was actually referring more to... say... using your Exxon-Mobil customer/credit card at an Exxon pump. Obviously Exxon's primary reason for going through all the trouble of rolling out a gas-card that can only be used at their pumps is to track customers. Another even more prolific example is the "store card" trend which exploded in the mid-90's. Almost any major supermarket or convienance store (ala Shaw's, StopnShop and CVS). You agree to provide the corprate machine with a record of everything you buy in their stores in exchange for $0.33 off soap every other week. It's just good bussiness practice on their part.
Did the microbiologist take discrete math/logic?
I agree 100%. MA has a pretty pitiful government. They really do screw up almost everything, from the Big Dig to the countries oldest (and worst) transit system. I am hoping this will be a new leaf. Maybe it will convince other governemnts (who know what they're doing) to jump onboard. Never underestimate what an underpaid and underutilized IT department can do (or not do).
Because it is. I'm originally from New York. Go Yankees.
(just kidding
Honestly I don't even know. I just hope that the community does what it can to fix the root of this delay.
No, actually the point of my first post was that there is no blanket policy to solve this situation. Close down all the foreign factories (not *sweatshops* mind you) and the third world loses so you can feel good at night. Embrace foreign manufacturing and we bring more poverty to the western world. Not even you can predict what would happen on either extreme.
You also have the right to read AOL's Term of Service and Privacy Policy when you use their free search engine.
You really are naive aren't you? You don't think that you bank keeps tabs on you? How about the state transit department when you use the automated (EZ-Pass, FastLane, whatever) payment system? What about the access card you use to get into work? Do you doubt that your gas station pumps don't know that you're going to put the cheap stuff in as soon as you swipe the card? The list goes on forever... get with it.
I am a bit fuzzy as to how SCO is implemented in practice. It's QoS guarantee might be the real problem here. A note on "Parking"... I think parking the device will save any real battery life. Parked devices can ONLY recieve beacons, so the phone doesnt have to do any real legwork there. However, the active device only needs to recive beacons when no data needs to be transmitted. The beacons just sync the slave clocks to the master whether parked or active. While full-on audio transfer might suck the battery dry, I highly doubt active-mode without data requires any more power than parked mode.
Good luck with using the laptop as Master. Remember, this might simple be a hard limitation of the phones. There was another paragraph in the Core spec that said something like "Embedded devices might have buffer/processor limitations that preclude them from implementing all functionality." You get the picture...
True, but remember this is a phased rollout. The ODF plug-ins should be limited to people with disabilities. In the private sector I really would'nt care, however as a resident of MA, I think differently. You and I both know that VERY few people will switch to OO.org if MS Office is allowed to stay. I want Office removed from the default install of MA government machines. Maybe just give excel, etc to people who REALLY need it. That software is expensive, and the costs for ten or hundreds of thousands of site-licensed machines is enourmous. MA is a cash strapped right now. That money is better spent fixing their collapsing tunnel system.
Well hopefully this will cause the OO.org people to add support for such devices very quickly. That would be a net gain for the suite and also show MA that community supported software can work and tailor to their needs.
On another note... this should read "Microsoft Office Granted Temporary Injunction in MA"
Wait... if Microsoft released Office for Linux, would'nt they then add the cost of an Office license to the per-seat total cost of ownership for linux? Would that then not increase Microsoft's bullshift TCO statistics for linux by $200?
Sounds like you do all your editing in LaTeX.
I like the idea of controlling multiple devices with a single BT master (which is what I htink you were describing) so I decided to check into this. Note that I am not an export of BT and have never read any of the specs until now. Okay, so Google pointed me to the Bluetooth website at http://www.bluetooth.com./ There you can find the architecture specs for the protocal.
The handsfree spec requires certain QoS guarantees, and imposes some requirements on the phones. For example, there can be only one handsfree (HF) device perl phone (AG). ALL sounds, including voice, KEY TONES, voice dialing, music, etc must be routed over the link to the HF device. For that reason cell for phones likely try to keep handsfree devices in the Active state for as long as they are connected. The important bits of text can be found in the Hands Free Specification, section 4.6:
To elaborate, BT slave devices can be set to either Active or Parked. Parked devices can't talk back to the phone, but the phone still needs to transmit a beacon packet every time the slaves reserved time slice comes up. Active mode devices can communicate based on one of several protocols. Handsfree requires Synchronous Connection-Oriented or SCO, which provides 64Kb CDR audio communication. It also requires that the physical link connnection remain in the Active state.
Cell phones probably have very light BT stacks, including extremely limited buffers. That probably sets a hard limit on the number of devices that they can form active physical links with. To that end, the cell makers most likely set up handsfree systems to automatically park all other physical connections.
If you were thinking that the phones should then just set up a new BT network with other non HF devices, think again.
I found this paragraph in Section volume 1, section 4.1 of the Core specification titled "Piconet Topology"
Due to use of TDMA slices as the master channel, hosting more than once Piconet with the same master (or just on the same channel) would not work. If BT used CDMA, this would be possible. It should be possible for your phone to be a SLAVE to your other devices while MASTER to the handsfree.
Lesson: there is more to this than you think. The core spec alone is 1300 pages of IEEE dribble.