"You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did. I don't consider it to be "culture" either."
No, but you should have a right to play content you've paid for on a device of your choosing without artificial restrictions.
Which is really the problem. If the content creators can choose what you play content you've paid for on, especially from the web, then they can arbitrarily prevent it working on your old device, and force you to buy a new device when there's nothing wrong with your old one. They can work with companies like Microsoft to ensure it only works on Microsoft devices for example and kill viewing of content on iOS and Android dead in the water.
You seem to think it's just about viewing content illegally, it's not. It's about having control of content you have obtained legally and not allowing content to be used as a tool to be used by vendors in other markets such as hardware to gain advantages through artificial incompatibility and planned obsolescence.
If content producers want us to rent content only then they need to lower their prices to reflect that and make it clear. Right now they want to pretend you're purchasing content to keep whilst only giving you rental rights. This is unacceptable.
The dream of content companies is that they can use DRM to force you to rebuy content every single time you buy a new device. They view this as a way of increasing profits without doing any additional work by profiting off the same thing over and over. They're trying to turn a purchased product into a throwaway consumable that you have to replace with each device using artificial means without dropping the price to match. That is not acceptable.
The internet and digital revolution has made content far cheaper to reproduce and deliver so in a healthy natural market the price for consumers should come down. Content producers want to use DRM to subvert that and instead make the cost of content in the digital age go up by making you buy it over and over if you want to keep watching it. This is their ultimate dream and their preferred goal with DRM as it allows massive company growth for zero effort if it's ever achieved.
The BBC can be a bit hit and miss. It really depends who is writing the article.
Robert Peston can be a bit of a plonker and revert to his Tory-boy Telegraph journalistic roots sometimes and make a tit of himself, or just make a tit of himself in general, i.e. see this article:
Originally it was titled something like "Treasury could clean up from help to buy", he obviously was trying to create an overly dramatic headline with an agenda implying the help to buy scheme was pure genius by the treasury, but eventually after successive edits he relented upon realising he'd got his math wrong which obliterated the entire premise of the original article.
Also Mark Mardell the US correspondent lets his biases shine through, and Rory Cellan-Jones has almost fanboy levels of bias to certain technology companies.
But others like Nick Robinson always seem pretty decent and level headed.
I agree The Guardian is biased but it's certainly not at Fox levels, I'd tend to rate media that broadcasts in the UK using the following examples:
Most extreme (where Fox News would go): The Daily Mail The Daily Mirror Russia Today The Sun
Sometimes extreme: The Telegraph The Times Sky News
Reasonably objective: The Independent The Guardian Channel 4 News The BBC
Most objective: Al Jazeera
The independent I would have put in the most objective category but since it's became influenced by the Russian oligarch that took it over it's gotten worse. The most extreme listings just aren't worth the time of day, they're so full of lies and propaganda that you just can't extract anything of value from them. The sometimes extreme category sometimes have valuable articles, but usually it's a bunch of biased tosh, and all the others are worth paying attention to. Even the most objective category has it's biases sometimes though, but I'd argue they're still markedly less numerous than those in the reasonably object category.
Because at the time the citizens of the UK were fucked off with a constant stream of absurd extraditions to the US and another high profile one like Assange would've been political suicide for any government to accept, especially as the government in question was elected on the platform of putting an end to such idiocy. Couple this with the height of austerity measures and a government at it's lowpoint of popularity, that was also a coalition, part of which strongly sympathises with Assange's cause and which if disbanded would bring down the government as there's no way the Tories could operate as a minority government and you can see why there wasn't a chance in hell they were going to take that risk.
The Tories will have made a calculated decision to make it clear to the US they couldn't help them without risking losing everything. If they'd gone ahead with such a request they wouldn't be in power long enough to action it and the opposition being the opportunists they are would seize on the issue to decimate the number of seats the Tories held taking away all power from them for the foreseeable future.
It just wasn't politically feasible for the Tories to extradite Assange at the request of the US, not least because he'd committed no crime in the UK - it took them long enough to get rid of the likes of Abu Hamza.
"As for "better than JIT" argument, I think you are putting too much trust into a rather generic approach."
It's not generic, that's the point. You have a JIT compiler specific to the platform, or at least, a generic one configured for the platform on which it has been installed, and that allows it to optimise for the specific platform it is executing on. In contrast, with, say, C++, you tend to only compile for a generic architecture, otherwise you end up with a combinatorial explosion of binaries for every case. This is why all in all, Java normally performs as well as C++.
"My statement of JIT weakness is supported by the well-known fact that server-side software rarely has great single-thread performance (and often it doesn't need it, but it's another topic), so server CPUs tend to have gobs of cache in order to alleviate that."
What do you mean server-side software doesn't have great single-thread performance? I could write a WCF web service right now and set it to single thread mode and it'll perform exactly the same on a desktop as it will an equivalently performant server. There's a lot of server software that's optimised for multi-threaded environments, but that's because normally when you're serving you rarely want to only be able to serve one client at a time and normally want to be able to serve multiple clients simultaneously. Server CPUs having more cache has literally fuck all to do with JIT compilers, I don't know where you came up with such an absurd idea. Server CPUs have more cache because a) corporations that buy such servers are more willing to accept the additional cost of greater CPU cache than consumers who would balk at CPU prices if consumer CPUs had more cache, and b) because it's extremely beneficial for many server applications, for example, databases.
"I wouldn't mind Java if it allowed me to get as close to hardware as possible, even via non-portable extensions."
Then pay attention to the GP's suggestion of using JNI. Sure you're not writing in Java, but that's not what Java was ever designed for. For the bits where you genuinely need to go native though, Java provides an interface, whilst for the bits where you don't, you can avoid all the pitfalls that come with doing so and gain the benefits of Java.
The BBC used to do this but nowadays the mods contracted to the BBC just censor anything they personally disagree with instead.
Discussion about immigration? Post far-right comments about how you hate immigrants and how they should all be purged from the country and your post will keep sitting there, post in defence of immigrants, for example, defending the excellent work ethic some of them have compared to many born and bred Brits and your comment can be removed.
I think I preferred it when they just didn't allow commentary on controversial topics rather than now where they have minimum wage bottom of the rung monkeys censoring arbitrarily to their personal biases.
Perhaps that's why Visa and Mastercard (or at least one of them IIRC?) has started processing payments for Wikileaks again. Because the government has infiltrated it?
I've worked on a lot of large Java projects using Eclipse and a lot of.NET projects using Visual Studio and you're right there are some features Eclipse has that are nice and Visual Studio doesn't, but that's not without it's problems.
For example, you hint at the fact that Eclipse will automatically rebuild for you, but I've found this feature particularly error prone in that it can sometimes fail to build, and like a jammed printer you have to prat around unjamming it before it will build properly again through no fault of your code (though this was the SpringToolSuite flavour, maybe the vanilla doesn't fail as badly at this). I've also found Eclipse's intellisense to be slow, sometimes too slow to be of any worth if you're a fast typer whereas I've never had that with Visual Studio. Things like code regions are much smarter in Visual Studio, it remembers properly what I have and haven't hid but Eclipse fails at this completely, you can make your document tidy by hiding rarely used regions only to have to do it all again next time you reopen the document. The theory behind Eclipse's plugin setup for supporting different frameworks and languages is nice but it almost never works requiring multiple installs for different flavours of Eclipse. Eclipse of course has a debugger but it's half-arsed compared to Visual Studios too. I think all this highlights the biggest problem I have with Eclipse - even where it does have features over and above Visual Studio they just never work well or properly and that applies to many features that it does share with Visual Studio.
But I think in general this highlights the fundamental difference between Eclipse and Visual Studio, Eclipse does have more features (though Visual Studio also has some Eclipse doesn't have) but it's a clusterfuck of everyone's favourite feature and none of it works well together. In contrast, Visual Studio may lack some of those features but at least the features it does have all work in a responsive and well integrated manner and that's why most developers who have used both prefer Visual Studio - because it's just hassle free, you basically never have to fix projects that the IDE has randomly broken, you don't have to sit waiting around for some interface element to respond, and features "just work". This is also why I prefer NetBeans to Eclipse in many cases - it follows the same philosophy as Visual Studio, less about number of features, more about making sure the features you do have work and that the IDE is fast enough to not be painful to use sometimes. Other Java IDEs like JDeveloper are even better again.
Eclipse would be best on the market if it cleaned up by making sure all features work properly, never break, and made the IDE more responsive in general, but it's had years and failed to achieve any of this - it's just added ever more features without making sure they all work well by themselves and work together with others also.
I don't think you can really separate the two, if you're doing a lot of work that has no benefit to the company then I wouldn't call that productive, it's the opposite of productivity.
Certainly when I work from home the work I'm doing is beneficial, normally we figure out whose doing what at the start of the week so by Wednesday or Thursday if I work from home then I know exactly what I need to get done and we can catch up on Friday. If there is something that needs clarification staff can always contact me via Skype using video or voice, or just call my mobile, or drop me an e-mail.
I'd be more concerned by a company whose staff have no idea what they're doing and need constant supervision at all time, that suggests deeper problems.
It may be that there are weeks where we're in the ideas stage of a product and it's good for me to be in so I go in, but this is key in getting telecommuting right. It's about making sure you have staff that will come in when it makes sense, but that can work from home and get more done when there's literally no benefit to them being in the office.
I agree if you have staff that are simply never ever seen then that can be a problem, but I think again that's just an example of doing it wrong. I think demanding people be in all the time is as wrong as letting them work from home all the time though and the optimal solution is I believe somewhere in the middle.
As with a lot of things in life it just needs a bit of common sense, but you know what they say about common sense - it isn't all that common. Hire staff with it though and telecommuting should be an integral part of your strategy.
I telecommute usually a day or two a week and I'm definitely more productive on the ways I do. I'm not distracted by others in the office and I'm far more rested as I can get an extra hour's sleep instead of having to deal with the early wake up followed by the stress of the commute.
Ultimately it depends what you're doing, I agree if people are working from home all the time and communicating you'll have problems, but that doesn't mean you need to ban telecommuting altogether - on the contrary that means you'll get less out of your workers as they're more tired, less happy, and more distracted than they were on the days where they used to work from home.
Companies like Google can make it work because they make sure there are places for their staff to rest up at work, and do what they can to limit the problems of the commute by generally offering many facilities that help people make sure they're happy.
Which is the problem HP has, they think they can do away with the telecommuting "because it works at Google" without doing any of the other things that make it work at Google like giving employees far better flexibility and far better facilities in general.
But FWIW I've also had the benefit of working in a relatively small company that had offices 300 miles apart in the past but projects shared between staff at each of them. We had to get used to video conf and other such collaboration tools for the company to even work and it did work absolutely fine. It took some getting used to so there's a cultural shift too.
So long story short, if telecommuting isn't working you're probably doing it wrong, but if you really do insist on getting rid of telecommuting you need to make sure staff have benefits at work that make up for the benefits of telecommuting such as letting them work flexible hours, or providing a place they can take a nap or so. Getting rid of telecommuting for no other reason than the sake of doing so is just another nail in your company's coffin as you lose talent and see lesser productivity from staff.
I'm not sure that the distinction matters, the fact is that the government has suggested we're all going to get current fibre level speed (i.e. 20mbps+) by 2017 so whether you're on dialup or ADSL below that is really irrelevant, the end goal is the same.
My point is simply that the amount of places that are so isolated that it'd be extraordinarily expensive to run fibre is really a negligible amount, an absolutely tiny fraction of the last 10% which the final £250million is earmarked for.
It's commonly implied that it's expensive to do that last 10% because they live up a hill in the arse end of nowhere, 10 of miles from the closest village even. My point is simply that this isn't true - the bulk of the last 10% don't need any magical solutions, we don't even necessarily need to give BT public funding, we just need them to enable us and accept a longer return on their investment which is a completely different problem than the one that talk of 4G is designed to resolve. It'd be fucking stupid to stick a 4G mast in places where all you need to do is run a hundred metres of fibre and stick a new cabinet in for a much better long term solution.
"Of course optical is better. If you live half way up a mountainside, 20 miles from the nearest village and perhaps 80 miles from the nearest town with a population over 10,000 you're going to be waiting a while. 4G is comparatively quick to deploy and a heck of a lot cheaper."
That's what they'd have you believe the final 10% of the population consists of, but in fact it consists largely of people like me. People who live in a village that's within a 20minute drive of the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK. A village that has had a fibre enabled exchange for over a year, for whom the majority of the village has fibre, yet I can't have it. I'm perfectly close to the exchange, so why?
Because of address lottery. Turns out that they've done two cabinets in the village including one that does up to house number 30 on our street out of 80 houses + a few more on side streets. But unfortunately those of us in house numbers 31+ and in the side streets are on our own cabinet, one that BT deems "not economically viable". Our cabinet is only 100 yards from the one that's enabled.
I'd wager the percentage of the population that live up far away hills and require an extraordinary rollout is actually less than 0.5%, most of that last 10% will be people like me for whom doing a rollout would be trivial and effortless with the only barrier being that BT want to turn a profit on the work in 10 - 15 years, rather than say, 15 years, or 20 years as would be the case on our lower populated exchange.
It really has fuck all to do with being in the arse end of nowhere a lot of the time and everything to do with whether you were a winner or loser in BT's lottery of whatever random cabinet you might be tied to. Something you unfortunately have zero control over.
For the millions of us in this situation (yes, millions) 4G wouldn't be a cheaper option and 4G is more shit and less futureproof anyway.
Don't fall into the trap of believing the last 10% live in the middle of nowhere, up a hill or on an island, they don't, most of us just need the government to tell BT to suck it up and accept a pay back on their investment over a longer period instead, especially if they want to keep receiving tax payers money and not be broken up to deal with their monopoly.
Not just that but I've always found latency to be an absolute ballache on all wireless technology.
Maybe 4G fixes that, I don't know, I've never used it, but up until now my experience with wireless tech has been annoying for things like gaming and video conferencing.
The government needs to get past this idea that they can just fob off the difficult ones with wireless. Proper fibre is required, it seems more future proof anyway.
"Actually Islamist groups make up by far the largest proportion of rebels in Syria."
But most of their members are easily swayed. They're only supporting the Islamist groups because they're the ones that have been most successful. You'll never switch the hard liners but many rebels aren't hard liners, they just want to stick with those who are most successful and hence least likely to get them killed . If you can strengthen the moderates to become the more successful force then many will switch back to them.
"It's hardly surprising because most people there are Muslims (notice how they are always saying "allahu akbar" on the civilian videos?) and because they are the ones supplying the weapons."
This is like saying someone who says "Jesus christ!" is a Christian and/or doesn't believe in secularism.
Is it really much of a big deal though? Even China which tends to keep it's forces in it's borders has started sending troops to support missions in Mali and Sudan, as well as being involved in anti-piracy work along Somalia's coast including at least one documented attack on Somalia proper as an anti-piracy action.
Asia has for decades been the manufacturing hub of the world as it offered plentiful resources and cheap labour. Now Asia is becoming wealthier where do you think it's looking to do what we in the West got Asia to do - act as cheap labour for us?
Africa is going to be the next battleground between East and West, that's why suddenly old colonial powers are interested in helping and suddenly give a shit about the countries it left behind there once more too when before they'd just leave them to rot.
I don't think there's anything surprising or unusually subversive about what's happening in Africa, it's largely just business as usual - the playing of the great game - extending to the next big thing. For that reason it makes sense for the US to have a specific organisational unit dedicate to military efforts there.
Whatever happened with these raids I wouldn't expect AFRICOM to change much, if anything funding will simply be increased to make sure they're backed up by heavier air power and surveillance next time.
Africa is too important, and actions there by everyone are only going to increase. Just as we had the Korean war, Vietnam, Cambodia et. al. post-World War II, followed by the Middle East in recent decades. Africa will be next as Syria's ability to matter has been all but destroyed even if Assad retains power, his nation will be third world and too poor to keep funding the likes of Hezbollah particularly well as all major commercial centres have been obliterated, and his chemical weapon threat against Israel is being dismantled. Iran appears to be coming in from the cold also, having seen how things end up in the middle east one way or another if you don't play ball. That's why focus there is decreasing in importance having had so much focus since the 80s relative to Africa.
This is also why things are hotting up with another set of competitors to the US, China, and European colonial powers in Africa - al Qaeda, affiliates, and similar.
I think more than anything the problem is ascribing to success too much of a weighting towards the power of achieving it being in your hands.
Let's be honest, there are thousands of people that are equally talented and competent as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg et. al. but didn't achieve what they did for no other reason than they weren't born and brought up somewhere like Silicon Valley, or didn't have parents wealthy enough to send them to Harvard or have friends with access to VC funding. Even when you were born matters. You'll have a far easier time starting up in a brand new frontier like Bill Gates had - that of the emerging possibility of home computing, than you will now where it's a crowded market and new ideas are ever more sparse. That's not to say other new frontiers don't come along - I'd argue mobile is the obvious most recent one, with the web before that, but it can make a difference if you're born too late to miss the boat on that sort of thing because it can be decades before the next such revolution.
Summly was the ultimate example of this, it was sold as the teenage genius who made millions off his own back with his invention by selling it to Yahoo, but the real story is that his dad was an investment banker who got people he invested for ranging from the Murdochs to Ashton Kutcher and Steven Fry to hype up the product. His father also bought in Silicon Valley veterans to run and develop his son's product for him and his mother was a lawyer at the very company that bought the product (Yahoo). The story of the teenager who invented something and made a fortune from his bedroom was anything but, but his father wanted to set him up for life by attaching his name to it all as the supposed teenage genius. Ultimately the only thing that got that kid where he is is the fact that his dad was a wealthy investment banker with excellent highly influential connections.
Hard work can get you a very long way, but ultimately right place, right time or even simply who you were born to plays more of a factor into it all than anything.
You can study and learn everything about the greatest leaders of all time, but if you were born in a slum in India then it probably wont do you the slightest bit of good unless you get extremely lucky.
Of course that doesn't mean it's a worthless task, or that it can't make you a better leader at all, but the idea you can learn every minute detail of Steve Jobs' working patterns and end up being as successful a leader making a business as successful as Apple is unrealistic.
It's easy to forget that these guys may not be all that special and that there's in fact nothing you'd want to learn from them- they may have just been like you or me, but in the right place, at the right time. I do not believe talent is all that rare, but I think great opportunities are.
Coincidentally I was connected to a US based VPN last night and started browsing the web to the BBC without disconnecting first, so was presented with the US version of BBC.
I stumbled across this exact article, but seriously, what the fuck. There was this BBC Capital thing that seemed to have way more interesting articles than the complete and utterly meaningless wank-drivel that we get given in the UK with the "BBC Magazine".
I'm rather disgusted that they say "Sorry this isn't available in the UK because it's not funded by the license fee" - What the fuck?
Everything is funded by the license fee, even if indirectly, BBC Worldwide can only make money to create things like that because it's been able to sell things like Planet Earth overseas which was created with, guess what? License fee money. BBC Worldwide doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's very creation and ability to thrive was 100% dependent on content produced using the license fee.
So I shall go home tonight and use my VPN to read more of what I'm frankly fucking entitled to read and that should be available to all UK license fee payers without needing a VPN.
I'll also be contacting the trust (HAH, like they'll give a shit!) and my MP to ask why the BBC is now restricting access to content that could not exist without license fee money which is frankly a breach of the royal charter under which they exist. The whole justification for BBC Worldwide's existence is that it can act as a commercial money making entity to feed back better content for the British license fee payer, if that's no longer true then we should stop subsidising BBC Worldwide, sell it off as a private entity and pass the windfall back to license fee payers.
Well I guess the BBC execs have got to fund their arguably fraudulent payoffs somehow...
No Facebook, they work for you because you have enough money to pay extremely well, no more, no less.
No one works at Facebook because they believe in farming people's personal data and breaking various data protection laws around the world and getting away with it every 5 minutes.
Yep, by definition DRM reduces interoperability so those suggesting otherwise clearly don't even really get what DRM is or does.
The whole point in DRM is to determine where and on what you can and can't play your content, that by definition is reduction of interoperability from "plays on anything that supports the format".
Exactly. Why the fuck should it be made ever easier for them to use my computing resources, powered by my electricity, for absolutely no benefit to me?
We shouldn't be making it easier to do this sort of shit. If they want to do it they should have to go out their way and suffer the subsequent penalties of pissed off users at the fact they've intentionally made things difficult for the user for absolutely no benefit to the user.
Sure then people will just keep pirating their content from elsewhere until they go bust until someone comes in and fills their place.
Contrary to the view the industry would have you believe, there's no scarcity of performers willing to make films and music and many would be happy to do so for a fraction of the amount the manufactured pop junk the music industry churns out makes.
No one should be catering to big content, it's pretty obvious they're entirely clueless on the web and if they want to remain clueless then let them. Don't break things just because they're stupid.
Because an unarmed woman with a child being gunned down right outside the capitol building isn't newsworthy?
Is this some American thing where because you're used to this sort of over the top gun violence it's non-news? I know in pretty much every other country in the world bar perhaps Iraq, Afghanistan and the like some woman getting gunned down right outside their nations centre of power would be an important headline story.
I'd like to think that's true in the US too, I don't think your country is quite that fucked up yet such that an unarmed woman with a child getting gunned down in your capitol by police isn't headline news.
"OK, I chuckled a bit when I read that. I guess you forgot about 9/11, the subway bombings in London, Hotel bombings in Mumbia, or the random idiots that do things like the Boston Marathon Bombing."
I guess you don't even know what the Taliban is.
Hint: The Taliban did none of those things.
"I also guess that you forgot why she was targeted. It wasn't just because she was going to school. If that was the case, they would have just shot up the bus/van she was on & killed all of the girls with her."
That's what the Taliban do, or throw acid in their faces. Though your ethnocentric world view apparently prevents you realising this isn't America and you don't have big yellow school buses for every student and many just walk to school with friends, but individual groups are usually attacked before the attackers flee. Two other girls were shot and wounded alongside Malala, which shows how stupid your comment is.
See here for other such attacks on schoolgirls in Pakistan/Afghanistan:
(Specifically, I quote: "But what kind of justification can possibly be offered for the firebombing of a college bus carrying forty girls from their Quetta campus? Fourteen defenseless girls died in the bombing; eight more people died when the terrorists ambushed the hospital.")
Slashdot Mirror
"You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did. I don't consider it to be "culture" either."
No, but you should have a right to play content you've paid for on a device of your choosing without artificial restrictions.
Which is really the problem. If the content creators can choose what you play content you've paid for on, especially from the web, then they can arbitrarily prevent it working on your old device, and force you to buy a new device when there's nothing wrong with your old one. They can work with companies like Microsoft to ensure it only works on Microsoft devices for example and kill viewing of content on iOS and Android dead in the water.
You seem to think it's just about viewing content illegally, it's not. It's about having control of content you have obtained legally and not allowing content to be used as a tool to be used by vendors in other markets such as hardware to gain advantages through artificial incompatibility and planned obsolescence.
If content producers want us to rent content only then they need to lower their prices to reflect that and make it clear. Right now they want to pretend you're purchasing content to keep whilst only giving you rental rights. This is unacceptable.
The dream of content companies is that they can use DRM to force you to rebuy content every single time you buy a new device. They view this as a way of increasing profits without doing any additional work by profiting off the same thing over and over. They're trying to turn a purchased product into a throwaway consumable that you have to replace with each device using artificial means without dropping the price to match. That is not acceptable.
The internet and digital revolution has made content far cheaper to reproduce and deliver so in a healthy natural market the price for consumers should come down. Content producers want to use DRM to subvert that and instead make the cost of content in the digital age go up by making you buy it over and over if you want to keep watching it. This is their ultimate dream and their preferred goal with DRM as it allows massive company growth for zero effort if it's ever achieved.
The BBC can be a bit hit and miss. It really depends who is writing the article.
Robert Peston can be a bit of a plonker and revert to his Tory-boy Telegraph journalistic roots sometimes and make a tit of himself, or just make a tit of himself in general, i.e. see this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24427274
Originally it was titled something like "Treasury could clean up from help to buy", he obviously was trying to create an overly dramatic headline with an agenda implying the help to buy scheme was pure genius by the treasury, but eventually after successive edits he relented upon realising he'd got his math wrong which obliterated the entire premise of the original article.
Also Mark Mardell the US correspondent lets his biases shine through, and Rory Cellan-Jones has almost fanboy levels of bias to certain technology companies.
But others like Nick Robinson always seem pretty decent and level headed.
I agree The Guardian is biased but it's certainly not at Fox levels, I'd tend to rate media that broadcasts in the UK using the following examples:
Most extreme (where Fox News would go):
The Daily Mail
The Daily Mirror
Russia Today
The Sun
Sometimes extreme:
The Telegraph
The Times
Sky News
Reasonably objective:
The Independent
The Guardian
Channel 4 News
The BBC
Most objective:
Al Jazeera
The independent I would have put in the most objective category but since it's became influenced by the Russian oligarch that took it over it's gotten worse. The most extreme listings just aren't worth the time of day, they're so full of lies and propaganda that you just can't extract anything of value from them. The sometimes extreme category sometimes have valuable articles, but usually it's a bunch of biased tosh, and all the others are worth paying attention to. Even the most objective category has it's biases sometimes though, but I'd argue they're still markedly less numerous than those in the reasonably object category.
Because at the time the citizens of the UK were fucked off with a constant stream of absurd extraditions to the US and another high profile one like Assange would've been political suicide for any government to accept, especially as the government in question was elected on the platform of putting an end to such idiocy. Couple this with the height of austerity measures and a government at it's lowpoint of popularity, that was also a coalition, part of which strongly sympathises with Assange's cause and which if disbanded would bring down the government as there's no way the Tories could operate as a minority government and you can see why there wasn't a chance in hell they were going to take that risk.
The Tories will have made a calculated decision to make it clear to the US they couldn't help them without risking losing everything. If they'd gone ahead with such a request they wouldn't be in power long enough to action it and the opposition being the opportunists they are would seize on the issue to decimate the number of seats the Tories held taking away all power from them for the foreseeable future.
It just wasn't politically feasible for the Tories to extradite Assange at the request of the US, not least because he'd committed no crime in the UK - it took them long enough to get rid of the likes of Abu Hamza.
Oops. I guess one of those BBC moderators has Slashdot mod points too.
Sorry minimum wage bottom of the rung monkey, don't be too upset.
"As for "better than JIT" argument, I think you are putting too much trust into a rather generic approach."
It's not generic, that's the point. You have a JIT compiler specific to the platform, or at least, a generic one configured for the platform on which it has been installed, and that allows it to optimise for the specific platform it is executing on. In contrast, with, say, C++, you tend to only compile for a generic architecture, otherwise you end up with a combinatorial explosion of binaries for every case. This is why all in all, Java normally performs as well as C++.
"My statement of JIT weakness is supported by the well-known fact that server-side software rarely has great single-thread performance (and often it doesn't need it, but it's another topic), so server CPUs tend to have gobs of cache in order to alleviate that."
What do you mean server-side software doesn't have great single-thread performance? I could write a WCF web service right now and set it to single thread mode and it'll perform exactly the same on a desktop as it will an equivalently performant server. There's a lot of server software that's optimised for multi-threaded environments, but that's because normally when you're serving you rarely want to only be able to serve one client at a time and normally want to be able to serve multiple clients simultaneously. Server CPUs having more cache has literally fuck all to do with JIT compilers, I don't know where you came up with such an absurd idea. Server CPUs have more cache because a) corporations that buy such servers are more willing to accept the additional cost of greater CPU cache than consumers who would balk at CPU prices if consumer CPUs had more cache, and b) because it's extremely beneficial for many server applications, for example, databases.
"I wouldn't mind Java if it allowed me to get as close to hardware as possible, even via non-portable extensions."
Then pay attention to the GP's suggestion of using JNI. Sure you're not writing in Java, but that's not what Java was ever designed for. For the bits where you genuinely need to go native though, Java provides an interface, whilst for the bits where you don't, you can avoid all the pitfalls that come with doing so and gain the benefits of Java.
The BBC used to do this but nowadays the mods contracted to the BBC just censor anything they personally disagree with instead.
Discussion about immigration? Post far-right comments about how you hate immigrants and how they should all be purged from the country and your post will keep sitting there, post in defence of immigrants, for example, defending the excellent work ethic some of them have compared to many born and bred Brits and your comment can be removed.
I think I preferred it when they just didn't allow commentary on controversial topics rather than now where they have minimum wage bottom of the rung monkeys censoring arbitrarily to their personal biases.
Perhaps that's why Visa and Mastercard (or at least one of them IIRC?) has started processing payments for Wikileaks again. Because the government has infiltrated it?
I've worked on a lot of large Java projects using Eclipse and a lot of .NET projects using Visual Studio and you're right there are some features Eclipse has that are nice and Visual Studio doesn't, but that's not without it's problems.
For example, you hint at the fact that Eclipse will automatically rebuild for you, but I've found this feature particularly error prone in that it can sometimes fail to build, and like a jammed printer you have to prat around unjamming it before it will build properly again through no fault of your code (though this was the SpringToolSuite flavour, maybe the vanilla doesn't fail as badly at this). I've also found Eclipse's intellisense to be slow, sometimes too slow to be of any worth if you're a fast typer whereas I've never had that with Visual Studio. Things like code regions are much smarter in Visual Studio, it remembers properly what I have and haven't hid but Eclipse fails at this completely, you can make your document tidy by hiding rarely used regions only to have to do it all again next time you reopen the document. The theory behind Eclipse's plugin setup for supporting different frameworks and languages is nice but it almost never works requiring multiple installs for different flavours of Eclipse. Eclipse of course has a debugger but it's half-arsed compared to Visual Studios too. I think all this highlights the biggest problem I have with Eclipse - even where it does have features over and above Visual Studio they just never work well or properly and that applies to many features that it does share with Visual Studio.
But I think in general this highlights the fundamental difference between Eclipse and Visual Studio, Eclipse does have more features (though Visual Studio also has some Eclipse doesn't have) but it's a clusterfuck of everyone's favourite feature and none of it works well together. In contrast, Visual Studio may lack some of those features but at least the features it does have all work in a responsive and well integrated manner and that's why most developers who have used both prefer Visual Studio - because it's just hassle free, you basically never have to fix projects that the IDE has randomly broken, you don't have to sit waiting around for some interface element to respond, and features "just work". This is also why I prefer NetBeans to Eclipse in many cases - it follows the same philosophy as Visual Studio, less about number of features, more about making sure the features you do have work and that the IDE is fast enough to not be painful to use sometimes. Other Java IDEs like JDeveloper are even better again.
Eclipse would be best on the market if it cleaned up by making sure all features work properly, never break, and made the IDE more responsive in general, but it's had years and failed to achieve any of this - it's just added ever more features without making sure they all work well by themselves and work together with others also.
I don't think you can really separate the two, if you're doing a lot of work that has no benefit to the company then I wouldn't call that productive, it's the opposite of productivity.
Certainly when I work from home the work I'm doing is beneficial, normally we figure out whose doing what at the start of the week so by Wednesday or Thursday if I work from home then I know exactly what I need to get done and we can catch up on Friday. If there is something that needs clarification staff can always contact me via Skype using video or voice, or just call my mobile, or drop me an e-mail.
I'd be more concerned by a company whose staff have no idea what they're doing and need constant supervision at all time, that suggests deeper problems.
It may be that there are weeks where we're in the ideas stage of a product and it's good for me to be in so I go in, but this is key in getting telecommuting right. It's about making sure you have staff that will come in when it makes sense, but that can work from home and get more done when there's literally no benefit to them being in the office.
I agree if you have staff that are simply never ever seen then that can be a problem, but I think again that's just an example of doing it wrong. I think demanding people be in all the time is as wrong as letting them work from home all the time though and the optimal solution is I believe somewhere in the middle.
As with a lot of things in life it just needs a bit of common sense, but you know what they say about common sense - it isn't all that common. Hire staff with it though and telecommuting should be an integral part of your strategy.
I telecommute usually a day or two a week and I'm definitely more productive on the ways I do. I'm not distracted by others in the office and I'm far more rested as I can get an extra hour's sleep instead of having to deal with the early wake up followed by the stress of the commute.
Ultimately it depends what you're doing, I agree if people are working from home all the time and communicating you'll have problems, but that doesn't mean you need to ban telecommuting altogether - on the contrary that means you'll get less out of your workers as they're more tired, less happy, and more distracted than they were on the days where they used to work from home.
Companies like Google can make it work because they make sure there are places for their staff to rest up at work, and do what they can to limit the problems of the commute by generally offering many facilities that help people make sure they're happy.
Which is the problem HP has, they think they can do away with the telecommuting "because it works at Google" without doing any of the other things that make it work at Google like giving employees far better flexibility and far better facilities in general.
But FWIW I've also had the benefit of working in a relatively small company that had offices 300 miles apart in the past but projects shared between staff at each of them. We had to get used to video conf and other such collaboration tools for the company to even work and it did work absolutely fine. It took some getting used to so there's a cultural shift too.
So long story short, if telecommuting isn't working you're probably doing it wrong, but if you really do insist on getting rid of telecommuting you need to make sure staff have benefits at work that make up for the benefits of telecommuting such as letting them work flexible hours, or providing a place they can take a nap or so. Getting rid of telecommuting for no other reason than the sake of doing so is just another nail in your company's coffin as you lose talent and see lesser productivity from staff.
Then rapidly decreases by one as the developer in question is taken out back and shot.
I'm not sure that the distinction matters, the fact is that the government has suggested we're all going to get current fibre level speed (i.e. 20mbps+) by 2017 so whether you're on dialup or ADSL below that is really irrelevant, the end goal is the same.
My point is simply that the amount of places that are so isolated that it'd be extraordinarily expensive to run fibre is really a negligible amount, an absolutely tiny fraction of the last 10% which the final £250million is earmarked for.
It's commonly implied that it's expensive to do that last 10% because they live up a hill in the arse end of nowhere, 10 of miles from the closest village even. My point is simply that this isn't true - the bulk of the last 10% don't need any magical solutions, we don't even necessarily need to give BT public funding, we just need them to enable us and accept a longer return on their investment which is a completely different problem than the one that talk of 4G is designed to resolve. It'd be fucking stupid to stick a 4G mast in places where all you need to do is run a hundred metres of fibre and stick a new cabinet in for a much better long term solution.
"Of course optical is better. If you live half way up a mountainside, 20 miles from the nearest village and perhaps 80 miles from the nearest town with a population over 10,000 you're going to be waiting a while. 4G is comparatively quick to deploy and a heck of a lot cheaper."
That's what they'd have you believe the final 10% of the population consists of, but in fact it consists largely of people like me. People who live in a village that's within a 20minute drive of the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK. A village that has had a fibre enabled exchange for over a year, for whom the majority of the village has fibre, yet I can't have it. I'm perfectly close to the exchange, so why?
Because of address lottery. Turns out that they've done two cabinets in the village including one that does up to house number 30 on our street out of 80 houses + a few more on side streets. But unfortunately those of us in house numbers 31+ and in the side streets are on our own cabinet, one that BT deems "not economically viable". Our cabinet is only 100 yards from the one that's enabled.
I'd wager the percentage of the population that live up far away hills and require an extraordinary rollout is actually less than 0.5%, most of that last 10% will be people like me for whom doing a rollout would be trivial and effortless with the only barrier being that BT want to turn a profit on the work in 10 - 15 years, rather than say, 15 years, or 20 years as would be the case on our lower populated exchange.
It really has fuck all to do with being in the arse end of nowhere a lot of the time and everything to do with whether you were a winner or loser in BT's lottery of whatever random cabinet you might be tied to. Something you unfortunately have zero control over.
For the millions of us in this situation (yes, millions) 4G wouldn't be a cheaper option and 4G is more shit and less futureproof anyway.
Don't fall into the trap of believing the last 10% live in the middle of nowhere, up a hill or on an island, they don't, most of us just need the government to tell BT to suck it up and accept a pay back on their investment over a longer period instead, especially if they want to keep receiving tax payers money and not be broken up to deal with their monopoly.
Not just that but I've always found latency to be an absolute ballache on all wireless technology.
Maybe 4G fixes that, I don't know, I've never used it, but up until now my experience with wireless tech has been annoying for things like gaming and video conferencing.
The government needs to get past this idea that they can just fob off the difficult ones with wireless. Proper fibre is required, it seems more future proof anyway.
"Actually Islamist groups make up by far the largest proportion of rebels in Syria."
But most of their members are easily swayed. They're only supporting the Islamist groups because they're the ones that have been most successful. You'll never switch the hard liners but many rebels aren't hard liners, they just want to stick with those who are most successful and hence least likely to get them killed . If you can strengthen the moderates to become the more successful force then many will switch back to them.
"It's hardly surprising because most people there are Muslims (notice how they are always saying "allahu akbar" on the civilian videos?) and because they are the ones supplying the weapons."
This is like saying someone who says "Jesus christ!" is a Christian and/or doesn't believe in secularism.
Is it really much of a big deal though? Even China which tends to keep it's forces in it's borders has started sending troops to support missions in Mali and Sudan, as well as being involved in anti-piracy work along Somalia's coast including at least one documented attack on Somalia proper as an anti-piracy action.
Asia has for decades been the manufacturing hub of the world as it offered plentiful resources and cheap labour. Now Asia is becoming wealthier where do you think it's looking to do what we in the West got Asia to do - act as cheap labour for us?
Africa is going to be the next battleground between East and West, that's why suddenly old colonial powers are interested in helping and suddenly give a shit about the countries it left behind there once more too when before they'd just leave them to rot.
I don't think there's anything surprising or unusually subversive about what's happening in Africa, it's largely just business as usual - the playing of the great game - extending to the next big thing. For that reason it makes sense for the US to have a specific organisational unit dedicate to military efforts there.
Whatever happened with these raids I wouldn't expect AFRICOM to change much, if anything funding will simply be increased to make sure they're backed up by heavier air power and surveillance next time.
Africa is too important, and actions there by everyone are only going to increase. Just as we had the Korean war, Vietnam, Cambodia et. al. post-World War II, followed by the Middle East in recent decades. Africa will be next as Syria's ability to matter has been all but destroyed even if Assad retains power, his nation will be third world and too poor to keep funding the likes of Hezbollah particularly well as all major commercial centres have been obliterated, and his chemical weapon threat against Israel is being dismantled. Iran appears to be coming in from the cold also, having seen how things end up in the middle east one way or another if you don't play ball. That's why focus there is decreasing in importance having had so much focus since the 80s relative to Africa.
This is also why things are hotting up with another set of competitors to the US, China, and European colonial powers in Africa - al Qaeda, affiliates, and similar.
I think more than anything the problem is ascribing to success too much of a weighting towards the power of achieving it being in your hands.
Let's be honest, there are thousands of people that are equally talented and competent as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg et. al. but didn't achieve what they did for no other reason than they weren't born and brought up somewhere like Silicon Valley, or didn't have parents wealthy enough to send them to Harvard or have friends with access to VC funding. Even when you were born matters. You'll have a far easier time starting up in a brand new frontier like Bill Gates had - that of the emerging possibility of home computing, than you will now where it's a crowded market and new ideas are ever more sparse. That's not to say other new frontiers don't come along - I'd argue mobile is the obvious most recent one, with the web before that, but it can make a difference if you're born too late to miss the boat on that sort of thing because it can be decades before the next such revolution.
Summly was the ultimate example of this, it was sold as the teenage genius who made millions off his own back with his invention by selling it to Yahoo, but the real story is that his dad was an investment banker who got people he invested for ranging from the Murdochs to Ashton Kutcher and Steven Fry to hype up the product. His father also bought in Silicon Valley veterans to run and develop his son's product for him and his mother was a lawyer at the very company that bought the product (Yahoo). The story of the teenager who invented something and made a fortune from his bedroom was anything but, but his father wanted to set him up for life by attaching his name to it all as the supposed teenage genius. Ultimately the only thing that got that kid where he is is the fact that his dad was a wealthy investment banker with excellent highly influential connections.
Hard work can get you a very long way, but ultimately right place, right time or even simply who you were born to plays more of a factor into it all than anything.
You can study and learn everything about the greatest leaders of all time, but if you were born in a slum in India then it probably wont do you the slightest bit of good unless you get extremely lucky.
Of course that doesn't mean it's a worthless task, or that it can't make you a better leader at all, but the idea you can learn every minute detail of Steve Jobs' working patterns and end up being as successful a leader making a business as successful as Apple is unrealistic.
It's easy to forget that these guys may not be all that special and that there's in fact nothing you'd want to learn from them- they may have just been like you or me, but in the right place, at the right time. I do not believe talent is all that rare, but I think great opportunities are.
Coincidentally I was connected to a US based VPN last night and started browsing the web to the BBC without disconnecting first, so was presented with the US version of BBC.
I stumbled across this exact article, but seriously, what the fuck. There was this BBC Capital thing that seemed to have way more interesting articles than the complete and utterly meaningless wank-drivel that we get given in the UK with the "BBC Magazine".
I'm rather disgusted that they say "Sorry this isn't available in the UK because it's not funded by the license fee" - What the fuck?
Everything is funded by the license fee, even if indirectly, BBC Worldwide can only make money to create things like that because it's been able to sell things like Planet Earth overseas which was created with, guess what? License fee money. BBC Worldwide doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's very creation and ability to thrive was 100% dependent on content produced using the license fee.
So I shall go home tonight and use my VPN to read more of what I'm frankly fucking entitled to read and that should be available to all UK license fee payers without needing a VPN.
I'll also be contacting the trust (HAH, like they'll give a shit!) and my MP to ask why the BBC is now restricting access to content that could not exist without license fee money which is frankly a breach of the royal charter under which they exist. The whole justification for BBC Worldwide's existence is that it can act as a commercial money making entity to feed back better content for the British license fee payer, if that's no longer true then we should stop subsidising BBC Worldwide, sell it off as a private entity and pass the windfall back to license fee payers.
Well I guess the BBC execs have got to fund their arguably fraudulent payoffs somehow...
That's the bit that made me chuckle.
No Facebook, they work for you because you have enough money to pay extremely well, no more, no less.
No one works at Facebook because they believe in farming people's personal data and breaking various data protection laws around the world and getting away with it every 5 minutes.
Yep, by definition DRM reduces interoperability so those suggesting otherwise clearly don't even really get what DRM is or does.
The whole point in DRM is to determine where and on what you can and can't play your content, that by definition is reduction of interoperability from "plays on anything that supports the format".
Exactly. Why the fuck should it be made ever easier for them to use my computing resources, powered by my electricity, for absolutely no benefit to me?
We shouldn't be making it easier to do this sort of shit. If they want to do it they should have to go out their way and suffer the subsequent penalties of pissed off users at the fact they've intentionally made things difficult for the user for absolutely no benefit to the user.
Sure then people will just keep pirating their content from elsewhere until they go bust until someone comes in and fills their place.
Contrary to the view the industry would have you believe, there's no scarcity of performers willing to make films and music and many would be happy to do so for a fraction of the amount the manufactured pop junk the music industry churns out makes.
No one should be catering to big content, it's pretty obvious they're entirely clueless on the web and if they want to remain clueless then let them. Don't break things just because they're stupid.
Because an unarmed woman with a child being gunned down right outside the capitol building isn't newsworthy?
Is this some American thing where because you're used to this sort of over the top gun violence it's non-news? I know in pretty much every other country in the world bar perhaps Iraq, Afghanistan and the like some woman getting gunned down right outside their nations centre of power would be an important headline story.
I'd like to think that's true in the US too, I don't think your country is quite that fucked up yet such that an unarmed woman with a child getting gunned down in your capitol by police isn't headline news.
Bullshit. You just need to go down to your local parking lot and get some off the Libyans.
"OK, I chuckled a bit when I read that. I guess you forgot about 9/11, the subway bombings in London, Hotel bombings in Mumbia, or the random idiots that do things like the Boston Marathon Bombing."
I guess you don't even know what the Taliban is.
Hint: The Taliban did none of those things.
"I also guess that you forgot why she was targeted. It wasn't just because she was going to school. If that was the case, they would have just shot up the bus/van she was on & killed all of the girls with her."
That's what the Taliban do, or throw acid in their faces. Though your ethnocentric world view apparently prevents you realising this isn't America and you don't have big yellow school buses for every student and many just walk to school with friends, but individual groups are usually attacked before the attackers flee. Two other girls were shot and wounded alongside Malala, which shows how stupid your comment is.
See here for other such attacks on schoolgirls in Pakistan/Afghanistan:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/23/world/asia/afghanistan-girls-poisoned/index.html
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/international/26-Jun-2013/a-fragile-peace-with-taliban-if-school-attacks-escalate
(Specifically, I quote: "But what kind of justification can possibly be offered for the firebombing of a college bus carrying forty girls from their Quetta campus? Fourteen defenseless girls died in the bombing; eight more people died when the terrorists ambushed the hospital.")
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/pakistan-acid-attack/index.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/02/world/meast/cnnheroes-jan-afghan-school/index.html