Do we really need complex systems theorists to tell us that "if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe"?!?
Okay then, where do I apply for D.O.T.O.M.O.O. (Department of the Obvious Made Obviously Obvious)?
The Hittites (among many others) would have beg to differ:
Deuteronomy 20:17: But thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee;
Deuteronomy 7:1: When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
Exodus 32:2: And I will send an angel before thee; and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite:
Love, you say? Well, if there is one thing that I love is how people cherry-pick quotes (from the very same source, no less) to prove the others wrong which, incidentally, it's exactly what I did here -- and no, the irony is not lost on me.
That the artists are being robbed by streaming. I don't know
As I see it, the whole concept is wrong. Why should a song played on the radio or streamed by services like Pandora be considered a performance? And why should royalties be payed for every listener? I mean, there's been EXACTLY ONE performance and that performance has been recorded ONCE. The fact that is being played over and over again should be irrelevant. And yes, of course writers don't expect money if I read a novel again, actors and directors get absolutely ZERO if I watch a movie more than once, etc.
Apparently rules against phones being on during flight isn't an FAA thing, it's an FCC thing. You pass from cell tower to cell tower so fast it confuses and stresses the system.
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will publish by the end of November 2013 guidance which will extend to all phases of flight the possibility to use personal electronic devices (PED) such as tablets, smartphones, e-readers and mp3 players as long as the devices are in ‘Flight Mode’ or ‘Airplane Mode’. [...] In the long term, the Agency is looking at new ways to certify the use of mobile phones on-board aircraft to make phone calls.
The battery life per Watt-Hour of the Sony Vaio Pro 13 (Haswell, Windows 8) vs. 2013 Macbook Air (Haswell, OS X) are pretty similar, according to Anand's own tests
Shortly after general availability of the Surface Pro 2, Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that allowed the Marvell WiFi solution to drive down to even lower power states. I spoke with Microsoft after the update went live and immediately re-ran both of our battery life benchmarks on the Surface Pro 2. The improvement is significant.
Also, and not to defend Microsoft here, but benchmarks of Windows running on a Mac, especially those about battery life, should always been taken with a grain of salt: the drivers provided by BootCamp are neither the latest, nor the better optimized. And don't get me started on the futility of comparing entirely different CPU architectures. Battery life on the Surface Pro 2 still lags far behind Android and iOS tablets?!? Quick, stop the press!;-)
Last but not least: I'm a bit sad to see that Mr. Coding Horror himself has resorted to write something I've come to expect from less reputable authors.
The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want.
How is that any different from Valve's business model?
That 30% cut looks pretty good to them.
You mean that Valve let games in the store just because they're a bunch of nice guys?
Valve can see what's happening and wants to get ahead of the pack.
Call me jaded but, as I see it, this is just Valve's pushing for more control and a bigger slice of the pie -- just like any other company. The fact that they say Linux (but mostly SteamOS, really) might make us feel all warm inside, but it doesn't change that.
Oh, and let's not forget for a moment that STEAM is, in fact, a subscription service. Try to not to accept the next change to their ToS and see how many of those games you'll be to play.
Things that take fifteen seconds in Interface Builder can take hours or even days to do correctly with HTML/CSS, assuming you're designing to accommodate variably sized browser windows.
Not really a fair comparison, considering that there are no authoring tools worth mentioning for HTML5/CCS. Or, to rephrase that: would it still take 15 seconds to do the same things if you'd have to code everything yourself?
ms fail. for ipad, 32 GB advertised storage = ~29.7 GB available storage (just checked on my ipad)
Wow! I had no idea the iPad came with a copy of Microsoft Office preinstalled! Also, the available space could be expanded via SD card or external USB storage. What are your options again?;-)
Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only.
Not to mention that the "article" is making it sound as AMD and Qualcomm are even in the same market:
"Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space". What space is the author talking about, exactly?
Also, Qualcomm is licensing ARM Holdings PLC's technology, like just about everybody else, but you won't find many people waxing lyrical about them.
And yes, we need AMD around -- unless we want to go back to days when a Pentium costed an arm and a leg just because Intel said so.
In other words, the US patent system has been shit for a long time but for some stupid reason we have yet to get around to fixing it.
You make it sound as if law makers are just naive/dumb/lazy/whatever rather than, say, people who put corporations' best interest front and center. If they were, replacing them could be a first step towards cleaning this mess but, unfortunately, things are the way they are by design, not by incompetence.
In a pretty anaemic way. One of the reasons I use OSMAnd is that I can download an entire county's maps (as vector data, so they're not huge) and not have to pay roaming when I'm abroad. I also don't need to connect to a remote server (and pay data costs) when I want to find a route. Oh, and the map data is better in all of the places I've visited so far...
You can download maps for entire countries (plus voice guidance in several languages, with or without street names) with Nokia maps too -- for quite a few years now. Also, they can work completely offline, i.e. you could get by with GPS alone.
So effectively they're combining an inferior mapping system
There's nothing inferior about Nokia's mapping system. In fact they've been in this business for several years. Look up NavTeq, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nokia, when you have time.
The EULA already pretty much says that this software is sold as-is and is not fit for a particular purpose.
The point, and the real issue, is that Valve is licensing, not selling anything. What do you thing is going to happen to the games I "bought" from them if I should decide to refuse the new terms?
Loving my Model B Pi, but can't help thinking that there's a niche wanting filled for systems that can actually function as a near normal desktop. Something with more grunt, more RAM etc.
What about nettops, then? Okay, they cost more than the Raspberry PI, but you get a fairly decent, low power and small footprint desktop computer that can run your OS of choice while being a more than competent HTPC.
For what it's worth, I've been using a ZOTAC ZBOX HD-AD01 for more than one year as my main computer (while much more capable hardware is mostly gathering dust) and just the other day Tom's Hardware compared seven of them in great detail.
I haven't even checked the fucking article, because if the summary is any indication, this is a bullshit article compared to others out there on the same thing...
Pity, because the article is actually well done, bias free and from a fairly reputable site like The Tech Report. The Infinity even gets a "conditional recommendation" (if paired with the optional keyboard dock) but you couldn't tell from the summary because the submitter had to interject his own opinion. Repeatedly.
I've been using BlackVPN.com for 2 years and it's €5.00 a month or €13.00 for 3 months for a single server (i.e. tied to a specific geographic location) but they offer several different packages ingluding "global" for €9.50 a month.
Just a word to the wise: they don't like P2P traffic on the US server -- actually I think it's disabled altogether, as I couldn't even update WoW through that.;-)
Apple has never claimed that they invented the tablet. They claim they own the design patents of their tablet in that Samsung's phones and tablet looks too much like theirs. Notice that they have not sued others for design patents and they are specifically suing Samsung for certain models.
>and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes.
For the non-techies who know how to launch a VMware appliance...
Unzipping an archive, reading a file called README.txt (if you are feeling so inclined) and basically double-clicking an icon doesn't strike me as rocket science.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to imply that if you are used to running VMs you're not really a "non techie", that's a different matter altogether!;-)
Only thing I wonder - what are the hosts on which this runs as a VMware appliance?
Anywhere you can run any of the products in the VMware family, or VirtualBox, but they're clearly saying:
If nothing else, we like to think of VirtualBSD as a technology demonstrator -- and a good looking one at that!
and:
We think that FreeBSD really deserves a bigger following, so if we can motivate even a single person to upgrade from this virtual installation to a real one we'll feel that our mission has been accomplished
And while there's nothing really unique about this offer, the goal seems somewhat "noble" (for lack of a better word) to me.
However, it should be noted that VirtualBSD is more a technology demonstrator than a fully fledged distribution, therefore is squarely aimed at people that heard about FreeBSD but have never tried it
That's too bad.. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it altogether.
In all fairness, upgrading from 7.1 to 9.0 would be a big jump for any OS. I am not saying that it can't be done, but I usually prefer a clean install while moving from major release to major release.
Out of curiosity, what have you been doing with the FreeBSD 7.1 VM that getting the new one and move from there is not a viable solution? Honest question, mind.
Government taxes have little to do with it. When most of the manufacturing was moved to Asia, skill sets started to atrophy. It is very hard to find skilled manufacturing managers, engineers, or even operators in the West because there are few places to build up those skills.
The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producting flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.
In other words, outsourcing screws a lot more people than those being fired.
Actually, Apple was like other companies asked to report which patents they owned that they believed would cover web standards, and then they told which patents these were. So people working on the standard have the choice of trying to convince Apple to license their patents, or to make sure that the standard can be implemented without infringing any patents. This is exactly the opposite of what Rambus did, which cost memory manufacturers hundreds of millions of dollars.
This would seem very reasonable, but think about it: if Apple cares so much about open standards why wait until the last moment to reveal such minor details or, better yet, why not donate such patents for the sake of the common good, i.e. HTML5?
Yes, Apple is not a charity, blah blah blah. Bu then what's the point of supporting HTML5 and, at the same time, preventing useful features to be incorporated into the standard? As I wrote, I can't think of any other reason but laying the foundation for Apple version of HTML5. And just when I thought the days of "best view with Internet Explorer" where finally gone!
Also, last time I checked, it seems that you still need QuickTime to watch the trailers at trailers.apple.com, so excuse me if I have difficulties seeing Apple as a staunch supporter of open standards. Or could be that proprietary technologies are bad only when they're not Apple's?
Slashdot Mirror
Do we really need complex systems theorists to tell us that "if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe"?!?
Okay then, where do I apply for D.O.T.O.M.O.O. (Department of the Obvious Made Obviously Obvious)?
RT.
John 4:8 tells us God is love
The Hittites (among many others) would have beg to differ:
Deuteronomy 20:17: But thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee;
Deuteronomy 7:1: When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
Exodus 32:2: And I will send an angel before thee; and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite:
Love, you say? Well, if there is one thing that I love is how people cherry-pick quotes (from the very same source, no less) to prove the others wrong which, incidentally, it's exactly what I did here -- and no, the irony is not lost on me.
RT.
That the artists are being robbed by streaming. I don't know
As I see it, the whole concept is wrong. Why should a song played on the radio or streamed by services like Pandora be considered a performance? And why should royalties be payed for every listener? I mean, there's been EXACTLY ONE performance and that performance has been recorded ONCE. The fact that is being played over and over again should be irrelevant. And yes, of course writers don't expect money if I read a novel again, actors and directors get absolutely ZERO if I watch a movie more than once, etc.
RT.
Apparently rules against phones being on during flight isn't an FAA thing, it's an FCC thing. You pass from cell tower to cell tower so fast it confuses and stresses the system.
More to the point: Not only is the summary wrong, the TFA is wrong too. A different (and somewhat contrasting) Press Release from the European Aviation Safety Agency clearly states:
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) will publish by the end of November 2013 guidance which will extend to all phases of flight the possibility to use personal electronic devices (PED) such as tablets, smartphones, e-readers and mp3 players as long as the devices are in ‘Flight Mode’ or ‘Airplane Mode’. [...] In the long term, the Agency is looking at new ways to certify the use of mobile phones on-board aircraft to make phone calls.
RT.
The battery life per Watt-Hour of the Sony Vaio Pro 13 (Haswell, Windows 8) vs. 2013 Macbook Air (Haswell, OS X) are pretty similar, according to Anand's own tests
This morning I spotted an interesting update: Microsoft Surface Pro 2 Firmware Update Improves Battery Life:
Shortly after general availability of the Surface Pro 2, Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that allowed the Marvell WiFi solution to drive down to even lower power states. I spoke with Microsoft after the update went live and immediately re-ran both of our battery life benchmarks on the Surface Pro 2. The improvement is significant.
Also, and not to defend Microsoft here, but benchmarks of Windows running on a Mac, especially those about battery life, should always been taken with a grain of salt: the drivers provided by BootCamp are neither the latest, nor the better optimized. And don't get me started on the futility of comparing entirely different CPU architectures. Battery life on the Surface Pro 2 still lags far behind Android and iOS tablets?!? Quick, stop the press! ;-)
Last but not least: I'm a bit sad to see that Mr. Coding Horror himself has resorted to write something I've come to expect from less reputable authors.
RT.
The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want.
How is that any different from Valve's business model?
That 30% cut looks pretty good to them.
You mean that Valve let games in the store just because they're a bunch of nice guys?
Valve can see what's happening and wants to get ahead of the pack.
Call me jaded but, as I see it, this is just Valve's pushing for more control and a bigger slice of the pie -- just like any other company. The fact that they say Linux (but mostly SteamOS, really) might make us feel all warm inside, but it doesn't change that.
Oh, and let's not forget for a moment that STEAM is, in fact, a subscription service. Try to not to accept the next change to their ToS and see how many of those games you'll be to play.
RT.
Things that take fifteen seconds in Interface Builder can take hours or even days to do correctly with HTML/CSS, assuming you're designing to accommodate variably sized browser windows.
Not really a fair comparison, considering that there are no authoring tools worth mentioning for HTML5/CCS. Or, to rephrase that: would it still take 15 seconds to do the same things if you'd have to code everything yourself?
RT.
I would say that St. Jobs must be rotating furiously in his grave by now...
I don't know about that, but for sure he can't blush or try hard to keep a straight face about his "Who wants a stylus?" remark from Macworld 2007!
RT.
ms fail. for ipad, 32 GB advertised storage = ~29.7 GB available storage (just checked on my ipad)
Wow! I had no idea the iPad came with a copy of Microsoft Office preinstalled! Also, the available space could be expanded via SD card or external USB storage. What are your options again? ;-)
RT.
Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only.
Not to mention that the "article" is making it sound as AMD and Qualcomm are even in the same market: "Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space". What space is the author talking about, exactly?
Also, Qualcomm is licensing ARM Holdings PLC's technology, like just about everybody else, but you won't find many people waxing lyrical about them.
And yes, we need AMD around -- unless we want to go back to days when a Pentium costed an arm and a leg just because Intel said so.
RT.
In other words, the US patent system has been shit for a long time but for some stupid reason we have yet to get around to fixing it.
You make it sound as if law makers are just naive/dumb/lazy/whatever rather than, say, people who put corporations' best interest front and center. If they were, replacing them could be a first step towards cleaning this mess but, unfortunately, things are the way they are by design, not by incompetence.
RT.
In a pretty anaemic way. One of the reasons I use OSMAnd is that I can download an entire county's maps (as vector data, so they're not huge) and not have to pay roaming when I'm abroad. I also don't need to connect to a remote server (and pay data costs) when I want to find a route. Oh, and the map data is better in all of the places I've visited so far...
You can download maps for entire countries (plus voice guidance in several languages, with or without street names) with Nokia maps too -- for quite a few years now. Also, they can work completely offline, i.e. you could get by with GPS alone.
RT.
So effectively they're combining an inferior mapping system
There's nothing inferior about Nokia's mapping system. In fact they've been in this business for several years. Look up NavTeq, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nokia, when you have time.
RT.
The EULA already pretty much says that this software is sold as-is and is not fit for a particular purpose.
The point, and the real issue, is that Valve is licensing, not selling anything. What do you thing is going to happen to the games I "bought" from them if I should decide to refuse the new terms?
RT.
Loving my Model B Pi, but can't help thinking that there's a niche wanting filled for systems that can actually function as a near normal desktop. Something with more grunt, more RAM etc.
What about nettops, then? Okay, they cost more than the Raspberry PI, but you get a fairly decent, low power and small footprint desktop computer that can run your OS of choice while being a more than competent HTPC.
For what it's worth, I've been using a ZOTAC ZBOX HD-AD01 for more than one year as my main computer (while much more capable hardware is mostly gathering dust) and just the other day Tom's Hardware compared seven of them in great detail.
RT.
I haven't even checked the fucking article, because if the summary is any indication, this is a bullshit article compared to others out there on the same thing...
Pity, because the article is actually well done, bias free and from a fairly reputable site like The Tech Report. The Infinity even gets a "conditional recommendation" (if paired with the optional keyboard dock) but you couldn't tell from the summary because the submitter had to interject his own opinion. Repeatedly.
RT.
I've been using BlackVPN.com for 2 years and it's €5.00 a month or €13.00 for 3 months for a single server (i.e. tied to a specific geographic location) but they offer several different packages ingluding "global" for €9.50 a month.
Just a word to the wise: they don't like P2P traffic on the US server -- actually I think it's disabled altogether, as I couldn't even update WoW through that. ;-)
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Consumers just care about experience, how they get there isn't of interest to anyone other than nerds.
True, but then why is Apple boasting about 2x, 4x, whatever?
RT.
Apple has never claimed that they invented the tablet. They claim they own the design patents of their tablet in that Samsung's phones and tablet looks too much like theirs. Notice that they have not sued others for design patents and they are specifically suing Samsung for certain models.
Then why did Apple start (and then lose) a design lawsuit against Spanish tablet maker NT-K? It's not that their products are even remotely similar, are they?
RT.
>and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes.
For the non-techies who know how to launch a VMware appliance...
Unzipping an archive, reading a file called README.txt (if you are feeling so inclined) and basically double-clicking an icon doesn't strike me as rocket science.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to imply that if you are used to running VMs you're not really a "non techie", that's a different matter altogether! ;-)
RT.
Only thing I wonder - what are the hosts on which this runs as a VMware appliance?
Anywhere you can run any of the products in the VMware family, or VirtualBox, but they're clearly saying:
If nothing else, we like to think of VirtualBSD as a technology demonstrator -- and a good looking one at that!
and:
We think that FreeBSD really deserves a bigger following, so if we can motivate even a single person to upgrade from this virtual installation to a real one we'll feel that our mission has been accomplished
And while there's nothing really unique about this offer, the goal seems somewhat "noble" (for lack of a better word) to me.
RT.
According to Netcraft, is running Fedora with Apache 2.0.
Slow, but definitely not dead... make a brew while you wait! ;-)
RT.
That's too bad .. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it altogether.
In all fairness, upgrading from 7.1 to 9.0 would be a big jump for any OS. I am not saying that it can't be done, but I usually prefer a clean install while moving from major release to major release.
Out of curiosity, what have you been doing with the FreeBSD 7.1 VM that getting the new one and move from there is not a viable solution? Honest question, mind.
RT.
Government taxes have little to do with it. When most of the manufacturing was moved to Asia, skill sets started to atrophy. It is very hard to find skilled manufacturing managers, engineers, or even operators in the West because there are few places to build up those skills.
You are spot on. Last August Forbes published an article explaining that Amazon couldn’t make a Kindle in the US even if it wanted to citing, among other things:
In other words, outsourcing screws a lot more people than those being fired.
RT.
Actually, Apple was like other companies asked to report which patents they owned that they believed would cover web standards, and then they told which patents these were. So people working on the standard have the choice of trying to convince Apple to license their patents, or to make sure that the standard can be implemented without infringing any patents. This is exactly the opposite of what Rambus did, which cost memory manufacturers hundreds of millions of dollars.
This would seem very reasonable, but think about it: if Apple cares so much about open standards why wait until the last moment to reveal such minor details or, better yet, why not donate such patents for the sake of the common good, i.e. HTML5?
Yes, Apple is not a charity, blah blah blah. Bu then what's the point of supporting HTML5 and, at the same time, preventing useful features to be incorporated into the standard? As I wrote, I can't think of any other reason but laying the foundation for Apple version of HTML5. And just when I thought the days of "best view with Internet Explorer" where finally gone!
Also, last time I checked, it seems that you still need QuickTime to watch the trailers at trailers.apple.com, so excuse me if I have difficulties seeing Apple as a staunch supporter of open standards. Or could be that proprietary technologies are bad only when they're not Apple's?
RT.