"but it feels like the actors have no careers any more (especially Craig Charles, who is now badly dubbing Japanese game shows for cable channels) and just want to milk sucess 30 years ago."
To be fair on the guy, back in the 90s during Red Dwarf's peak he was victim of a false rape allegation which delayed the later series and harmed the ratings somewhat as a result. After that he seemed to dissapear from public view somewhat.
Still, since 2005 he's been on the UK's longest runnning, most popular, and regular award winning prime time soap which, unlike American ongoing soaps are held in much higher regard here, and have much higher audiences proportional to population differences. This largely came about with the British terrestrial TV system which for years meant there was only 5 main channels and cable/sky TV with hundreds of channels was much less common. Whilst we have more channels today via Freeview the original channels have kept their status as being generally seen as the better quality channels, so getting a role on a soap on one of these channels is really a sign of success- to give an example, Ian McKellen that played Gandelf in Lord of the Rings took up a short storyline in the same soap that Craig Charles is in just a few years ago only shortly after the success of the LotR movies.
Craig Charles also has a radio DJ show on a popular radio channel in the UK.
So he may not have moved on to say, Hollywood movies, and given the setbacks he's seen in terms of the false rape allegation over the years he's done pretty well for himself, certainly you can guarantee he's far more widely known now for his Coronation Street role, and far better paid than he will have been for Red Dwarf, as good as it was.
Shit like Coronation Street, Friends, Sex and the City has always rated better than science comedies simply because there are more brainless drones in the world than there are people who appreciate science enough to get the jokes in science comedies.
It doesn't matter where you are, mass market stuff that anyone can get into is always going to do better than more targetted sciency stuff.
For years browser vendors have done an utterly shit job of supporting the standards, they've just been hopeless at it, largely because they want to do things their way. Previously the W3C and it's members and contributors built the spec, these people were generally software engineers from companies like Nokia, Siemens, as well as from more desktop oriented companies, the browser manufacturers didn't hold the balance of power, they were given a spec that suited the people that actually build the web and aren't interested in platform specific bias. In contrast they wanted a web that suited them and their goals even though these often ran contrary to each other when really they should merely exist to display the web according to the spec designed by the more platform and content neutral developers.
Then came the rise of WHATWG, a group that basically represented the browser vendors and key technology players that long had vested interests, like the browser vendors, in ensuring the web goes the way they want- Apple wants it to work best for Apple's platform, Google wants it to be great at displaying ads whatever the platform and so on. They managed to wrestle away power from the more neutral committee at the W3C and they forced HTML5 onto the world.
The problem is of course, these companies haven't stopped being self-interested, and so what you get is rather than a spec designed to be generic and not specific to any single specific interests, you get a spec which has had everyone's individual interests lumped in as a big mangled mess, and suprise suprise, where interests collide, you get disagreement and refusal to budge. Look what a farce HTML5's video tag has turned out to be whereas in contrast the W3C historically where such issues came up simply specified the tag and was neutral to the format, which is why there are a number of image formats that work well on the web for different purposes and why formats such as PNG have been allowed to rise, the W3C let the market decide and letting the market decide has allowed things to adapt and change over time. This is the route the video tag appears to have been forced into anyway albeit in a much messier less explicit manner that doesn't look set to end well as unlike with images where all browsers implemented the popular market chosen formats, different browsers may well play different video to try and force theirs as the standard, a standard which may not be easily replaced without another HTML5 standards cluster fuck as it becomes outdated and obsolete.
The delay with HTML5 stems entirely from the reasons why WHATWG and HTML5 should never really have been allowed to hijack the web in the first place. Sure the W3C has got itself in on it now, but it knows it's merely there to try and cling on to what little power it has left, rather than the overall custodian of quality web oriented specifications. Letting the W3C lose it's prominent position of covering the views of many many companies to a handful powerful vested interests is probably the worst thing to happen to the web since Microsoft managed to get IE in a position go largely unchallenged for years with IE5 and IE6 causing many years of web stagnation.
"I'm puzzled by these comments. There is no memory leak of that size in Firefox, are you sure it isn't a runaway plug in or extension? Firefox pretty consistently beats out the competition in terms of memory utilization."
How do you really know? I've seen plenty of other people with similar complaints. It could be a plugin or extension certainly but I'm not using anything out of the order- Firebug, AdBlock plus.
"As far as speed goes, it hasn't been this fast since at least the 1.x series, and probably earlier than that. I'm not sure what full featured browsers you've found that are faster, but I'm skeptical. Most of them are larding up because they don't encompass the whole browser experience."
Well, to give you an example, my older spare Windows XP machine running on an Athlon XP 3200+ with 512mb RAM used to browse the web just fine with Firefox, but nowadays it's simply unusable. In contrast, IE runs better than Firefox, but is still a pain, however Google Chrome runs just fine and is perfectly usable. I'm not sure what you mean by not encompassing the whole browser experience, but most of what's missing from Firefox is useless tat- like being able to theme your browser window. This specific system actually has no addons installed for Firefox- it's literally just vanilla Firefox, and a completely fresh install rather than the original upgraded version makes no difference.
"As for the quality of the 2.0 release, this is how I know you're trolling. The 2.x series was crap, serious memory leaks and all sorts of problems. They've come a long way in the right direction since then."
Okay, so you claim I'm trolling despite the fact you suggested there are no memory leaks that could cause the problems I and others have encountered- you make this claim but lets face it, you haven't audited Firefox's entire source tree so if you're really going to make comments like that you should avoid criticising others. The reason I say Firefox 2.0 was better because that was simply the point at which Firefox never crashed for me, and never exhibited any memory leaks. Since then it's got progressively worse- I've seen that "Something went wrong, would you like to restore your tabs?" page many a time since, on different operating systems, on different machines, in different places. As I pointed out above, the browser has definitely become progressively more slow. I'm aware people reported issues with 2.0, and ironically, at the time, I was precisely in your shoes, defending it saying there aren't any memory leaks because it doesn't exhibit any for me, 3.0 and onwards taught me the hard way that with Firefox, just because you don't see a problem doesn't mean others do because as I say, it's just got progressively worse with each release since.
I know the sort of ISP you're referring to, I fell victim to any number of them during the dialup days, but, fingers crossed, have yet to have too much trouble since our neighbourhood finally got DSL back in about 2003. I've had other issues- i.e. Demon who I was with originally one day introduced an arbitrary unpublished cap without a contract change and said I'd be dropped to 128kbps for an entire month as punishment. Needless to say that was roughly about the moment I told a customer service rep to fuck off for the first time. Thankfully, with a small claims court claim they decided not to defend it and accepted payment to me of 2 months of subscription, 2 months of XBox live and Dark Age of Camelot subscription (for 2 accounts) and costs for moving to a new ISP, so hopefully they learnt their lesson there.
There are a few cheap ISPs still, PlusNet has a £6.49 offering which has a 10gb fair usage cap but is well managed in terms of connectivity speeds, contention and so forth so if all you do is browse the web or e-mail then it's a pretty good offering- they have a fairly decent UK support centre too. I think BT still has an offering, and they're really not so bad anymore in terms of connectivity, although wouldn't be my first choice simply because they're BT. There are one or two others but I don't really know anyone whose used them to judge.
Er, no. There's any number of reports across the internet so it's not just me either I'm afraid.
It's also not just my house, I use Firefox as my primary testing browser when building web apps at work, and it happens there too, my colleagues have a similar experience with it.
It's actually one reason we haven't rolled it out company wide yet, coupled with the fact support for corporate networks is still less than stellar so even the IT team agree it's a problem.
Sorry, your fanboyism doesn't alter reality. Firefox has become progressively more buggy and sluggish since 2.0. This is why 4.0 needs to be rock solid, so that it can finally reach a point where there's no longer a reason not to roll it out.
Wrong. I'm using the latest version - 3.6.13, I cited 2.0 as the best because that's the point at which memory leaks and speed were at their peak. Since then each successive release of Firefox- 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 has slowed the browser down more and more, and made it no more stable since the instabilities introduced with 3.0.
Addons are nothing to do with it unless ABP or Firebug cause this, but I've never heard either of them referred to as "shitty". It's nothing to do with my machines as it occurs on multiple machines, and will even occur on a clean install.
Chrome is fine, IE is fine, it's a Firefox problem, period.
"True, I only mentioned that bit because you said decent ISP, if you had said shitty ISP i'd have agreed with you."
Well that was really my point, to these sorts of users those ISPs aren't shitty. I'd personally have said the shitty ISPs are the ones who perform badly even for light users- those that really are heavily oversubscribed for the bandwidth they have available. I think for the price, and for the fact you'll be able to do everything you want to do as a light user on some cheap ISPs it's hard to call them shitty. I suppose it depends where you're coming from, personally I wouldn't call even a low end Porsche a shitty car, but if you're been driving high end Ferrari's all your life your opinion might differ.
"If you don't have a phone line or don't feel you can commit for that long then this governemnt subsidised mobile based deal will probabblly be the cheapest way to get online."
Yes, it's a fair point in that context. That said, talking about shitty broadband, personally, I'd rather take 2mbps fixed ADSL over most 3G connections because I've yet to see 3G coverage where latency isn't a big issue, stability isn't a problem, and caps aren't horrendously low. I'd argue the 3G coverage problem is at least as bad, and almost certainly worse than that of ADSL availability. Will this in itself cause problems? who knows.
"Absolutely untrue. In my age group, almost no one has a landline because mobiles are much cheaper."
What age group is this exactly? I'm in my 20s and whilst I don't know anyone without a mobile phone, I still don't know anyone whose given up their landline either. I just don't know a single person without one.
"No, it's targeted at people who can't afford the Internet. Read their documentation - they claim that being online saves an average of £537/year and that this is most important for people with a very low income"
A figure which came about as part of Martha Lane Fox's role as Digital Inclusion Champion in which she is tasked with trying to get people online who simply weren't interested. The reason being that the government could then shift people to online services and save money by axing offices that were otherwise required to provide those services. The figure was a useful incentive to try and convince people to go online. Whatever the marketing is currently this is her core goal, and this project is clearly an offset of that. Obviously being poor is one of many reasons people don't go online, but note the text in the summary itself and on the Race Online site itself- less than half of those who are not online are in the disadvantaged category, there's still around 5 million they're targetting who are not online for other reasons than simply being poor so it's definitely not just about being unable to afford the internet.
"They are people who are often moving quite often to look for work, so can't afford any kind of Internet access that has an installation fee or requires a long contract in the same dwelling."
Huh? Most people who can't afford the internet are the long term unemployed, the elderly, and minimum wage workers. These are not the sort of people who move around a lot as they tend to be the recipients of council houses, or in the case of the elderly, often already have established homes. Those who are able to move around a lot have much less problem finding jobs simply because they can get away from the places where the job market is poor.
Agreed, Firefox has been on a horrible decline since version 2.0, the last thing they need to do is continue that trend.
Nowadays I find it slower than it's competitors, and I find it less stable, every once in a while it just crashes. It also seems to have horrendous memory leak issues, if I leave it running overnight it's not unusual to find it chewing up 2gb of RAM in the morning and I've even seen it edge pretty close to 4gb on one occasion. Even IE never does any of these things for me nowadays.
The best thing they can do is take their time and produce a release that's of the quality of 2.0 because if they release yet another release that's yet another step back in terms of stability and performance then they're really going to start reversing their trend towards being the number one browser globally.
This amuses me, I can imagine the moment in the Sony/Universal boardroom when someone came up with this idea and was treated like a genius, whilst the rest of the world has been pointing this out as part the piracy problem to them for decades now.
It's a big reason why people pirate music, movies, and even games. The disparity between US and European release dates of films for example has always been a big part of it- if the US has already had the DVD release when Europeans are being told in a few months they'll be able to watch some film with an awesome trailer, then what the fuck do they think people will do if they have the option? Sit waiting patiently, or just acquire a US copy?
Giving people an on-demand option at the same time as scheduled options such as radio based music or cinema based film is bound to help them out- you can't tease people by "setting them up" and then wonder why they went off and acquired the content their own way rather than continued putting up with your teasing. If people want something and you wont give it to them, they'll go and find their own copy from someone else which by and large, will be the likes of The Pirate Bay.
"If you are getting ADSL at that price in the UK and it's not a time limited offer you are on a really shitty ISP, heavilly traffic limited or most likely both."
This is true, but light users, which will be the target demographic here aren't ever going to notice the difference. They don't need an uncontended, uncapped service because they'll never use it. It'll still provide all they need for quick web browsing, e-mailing, youtube videos and that sort of thing.
This is the sort of package the vast majority of broadband users on the country use and are perfectly happy with. The people that this scheme is targetted at will almost in their entirety likely be part of this demographic rather than the low latency gaming, and high bandwidth downloading demographic who need more expensive connections, and besides, what makes you think this government sponsored offering is going to somehow be better than any of these cheap packages anyway? It's not like the government is interested in ensuring these people have better access than the millions across the country that have the cheap packages- they just want them online with basic service so that they can scrap physical services and replace them with online ones.
"And a big fat [citation needed] there. If you are using ADSL, then you have a £10.50 line rental to BT, plus whatever your ISP charges. If you have a LLU exchange, then you might be able to pay £6-7 line rental to some other company. If you go with cable, the cheapest package is £20/month."
It's a bit dishonest to try and factor in BT's line rental, because so few people, even the poorest in society don't have an existing line of some sort. I'll concede however that you're right, you can't get DSL for £5 anymore, as looking at the site of PlusNet et. al. they've upped their lowest package price to £6.49, although they've also upped it to an up to 20mbps package too. I hadn't realised ISPs had upped their prices of their low end packages, but regardless, there's still plenty offering it for below £9 a month, even if it's not the £5 a month style deals they had up until around 6 months to a year ago.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that this is for people living in rural areas where broadband coverage is poor- that doesn't seem to be the goal here and is really a different issue, this seems more targetted at the folks who simply aren't interested in the internet, in fact, it states that disadvantaged people are the core target demographic, and these are by and large live in run down inner city areas or the near outskirts of cities where broadband coverage is at least actually quite good. Whilst there are poor in rural areas, there are much fewer there which is precisely why such areas are rural in the first place- they have extremely low population density.
For what it's worth, I live in rural West Yorkshire and can't get more than 2mbps myself, even that was a push for the last 5 years it took BT to replace my phone line due to high line noise and was for a year towards the point they finally replaced the line stuck in the 512kbps - 1mbps range myself. Despite the fact I'd have absolutely loved faster it didn't stop me downloading movies, using iPlayer, or playing games. For the average person just starting out on the web with web pages and e-mail even 1mbps is plenty enough, they simply wont do anything that requires more- hell, I'm an advanced and heavy user and other than having to just schedule large downloads overnight I really don't find any inconvenience in it at all so a light web user really isn't going to.
Yes, you can get upto 8mbps in the UK for £5 on a decent ISP, or even free with some package deals, so I'm not sure why this subsidised internet still costs £9. That doesn't sound very subsidised to me, I suspect in typical inept British public sector style the government chose some pet contractor like Capita or similar to run the scheme and that pet contractor is trying to milk it from both ends by getting paid by the government to provide broadband to these folk and by running an ISP that turns a profit from these people too.
If someone knows for example, the Zend Framework inside out, then should their boss come along and say right, now I want you to build a web app in ASP.NET MVC, then an experienced developer shouldn't even flinch at the task. Once you understand request routing, the MVC pattern, and so forth, then switching between the Zend framework, ASP.NET MVC, Spring MVC or any similar such thing is, in my experience, a piece of cake. I've found it a very useful point to make on a CV too- to focus on core knowledge, rather than specific frameworks, because it massively increases the number of jobs open to you.
It's been said here before plenty of times, but many people don't seem to grasp it. Good developers are developers who can use the best tool for the job. If someone asked me what my favourite language was, I'd probably say C based purely on nostalgia, but when was the last time I actually used plain old C for a project? I really can't remember. This is the difference between good programmers and bad programmers- good programmers will only use a language if it's the best tool for the job, bad programmers will use their "favourite" language regardless.
The common excuse is often along the lines of "but I can do everything in C++!", that maybe true, but you can't do it as fast, and you can't do it in as inherently secure a manner as someone using a managed language. Sure, absolute performance where even a millisecond or two matters might be an overriding concern and C++ might be the right option, but for 90% of business apps at least the performance benefits of C++ don't outweigh the fact it's easier to make mistakes, and slower to develop with than some of it's more modern alternatives. I'm sure some smartass will also tell us as usual he doesn't make mistakes, so it's not a problem, but I guarantee if you take two equally competent coders and get one to build in a managed language and one in C++ that the C++ app will be more error prone, simply because both progammers are only human, but the managed developer at least had a safety blanket for those times where humans err.
I suspect those developers complaining about being paid less than new "upstarts" are the ones still building everything in whatever their favourite language is, no matter how unsuitable that language might be for the tasks they are assigned.
"Iceland did not bail out its banks, they let them fail (and were branded as terrorists by the UK for doing so)"
Er no, that's not quite what happened. Iceland didn't let them fail, the problem was, the banks were so poorly run and the government so oblivious to the problems that they failed before the government even had time to figure out whether to try and save them or not. Further the UK didn't brand Iceland terrorists for letting the banks fail, they just used anti-terrorism legislation to seize the UK assets of those banks because it was the only tool they had to hand to do that. I agree however, this was a bit of a political fuck up on behalf of the Brown government, and it's easy to see why this upset the Icelandic people, it would've been better to try and pass emergency legislation specific to the issue. The upside is, it's provided a perfect situation to cite in future with regards to laws being used beyond their intended purpose when governments implement unspecific laws that could have grave consequences.
"The economy of Iceland is actually growing again, which is more than can be said for "The Eurozone"."
Well, large parts of the eurozone are growing, and although I can't be bothered to check recent figures I'm sure it as a whole is, certainly France and Germany - the two key economies have seen strong growth.
But despite all this, I do generally agree with your view, that banks should be allowed to fail. The issue is that by propping up you've not taught the people responsible a lesson, this is why we're seeing banks paid silly bonuses even now- because they can, whereas if they had been allowed to fail then they'd instead likely be out collecting their unemployment benefits. When there are no repercussions for failure, there's also no incentive in future to avoid the things that led to failure because they can fail, and still get multi-million pound payoffs. It's really just a typical emergent process like evolution, if you allow the unfit to fail, then only the fit will thrive in the market whereas as is the artificially supported unfit are thriving in an environment where they probably shouldn't be in the long run.
"The US has a very legitimate sovereign concern regarding gathering any information it can on the leakage of state secrets. If that includes the use of subpoena to gain that information from US sources OR use of other methods i.e. espionage to gather it outside the US they are justified in doing so."
Yes, and the EU has a very legitimate sovereign concern in protecting the privacy of it's citizens, and if that includes penalising a US firm for breaching privacy laws of EU citizens if it wishes to continue doing business in the EU then they're perfectly justified in doing so too.
"EU privacy laws are not binding on the US or on information stored in the US, they have no jurisdiction. By acting to hold a private company responsible for the actions of a sovereign power they are behaving like asses."
Yes, but they're binding on US firms wishing to do business and gain ad-revenue from the world's largest economy- the EU. They have every jurisdiction about Twitter's EU operations, and the only people acting like "asses" are the US government for putting their nations firms in that position by trying to snoop on data about citizens - even politicians - living in sovereign nations.
"If the EU wishes to fight this they are perfectly capable of doing so through diplomatic channels."
Perhaps, but they might not win. The EU is a bigger economy with a larger population and greater international respect than the US nowadays.
"Sanctioning Twitter in the EU for obeying laws in the US is stupid. Twitter has no ability to affect the situation."
Other than the afformentioned option of speaking to the leaders of their primary host nation to ask them to try and be a bit more respectful to international law.
The problem for you is you have a deeply nationalistic mindset- you seem to believe US law trumps all other law in the case of an international case. The irony is, you would no doubt be the first to complain if the EU started using all the US banking data it has for it's own personal interests, but the EU doesn't do that, the EU doesn't do it to the US, so why do you think the US should do it to the EU? Whether the US has an interest in doing it or not is irrelevant- the real question is is it worth doing it? Is placing a subpoena on the personal information of a foreign MP and foreign citizens really worth creating international tension over? The most obvious, sane answer, is no, but if the US does otherwise anyway, then they can't complain if the EU responds in kind, they can't complain if China and Russia similarly do things the US does not like.
I agree it's shit for Twitter, but that's for them to take up as a business with the government in which they do business, or if that government isn't willing to budge, consider moving their business elsewhere where privacy is respected more.
"The EU are acting like asses imho. They know full well that Twitter has no options in this case. If they try to impose sanctions on Twitter the US will simply file a case with the WTO, or impose some sort of penalty on a EU company."
Why is it the EU's fault? Why not the US government's fault for making such an absurd request in the first place - let's be clear here, amongst others, the US government is asking for private data about an MP from Iceland whose only connection with the US is the fact she used a service based in that country. I find it incredible anyone would believe it's the EU who are being asses about this simply because they raise concerns about that.
It's also a very slippery slope- what next, the US government demands access to data held by foreign businesses hosted on private server hosts in the US, or on GMail? What if it gets leaked to competing US businesses, where's the hope for US corporations if the rest of the world can no longer trust them to keep their data secure in the face of US government snooping?
It's very much the US government's request that's at fault here, because it's not just bad for rights of individuals such as their right to privacy and interference in their lives from foreign governments, but it's also potentially very bad for US corporations themselves. If the EU makes no noise about this then absolutely everyone loses, if they make a noise then yes it's shitty for Twitter, but at least they're attempting to steer the US away from causing harm to many more people and businesses whether they're based in the US or not.
The WTO would not help because it would side with the EU based on the very fact that the EU is legally in the right here- if a company wishes to conduct business in a region, it must adhere to that region's laws, and if it does not, may suffer a penalty decided upon by that region. There is nothing wrong with the EU's actions legally, in fact, they're doing everything by the book- they've not even out and out said Twitter has broken the law yet, they are merely investigating whether that is the case. If the US were to inflict a penalty in response without any legal basis it would then itself be in breach of international law, and would lose any case under the WTO, if it came down to an out and out trade war the US would almost certainly lose because the EU is the bigger economy, and the US is much more vulnerable to actions by countries like China. It'll never get that far though, at worst Twitter will get fined and lobby the US government, but I'll be suprised if even that happens- most likely as I say, this is just a simple threat with no real substance behind it put forward in the hope that it's enough to make the US government reconsider it's absurd position. The US government may not listen to privacy activists in the US or Twitter itself, but it may well listen to the politicians of it's largest ally at least and that's all they're really trying to achieve here- to make the US government see sense.
Then Twitter can be fined, and if it doesn't pay up, banned from doing business in the EU, and any European assets seized.
Not doing business in the EU would mean no advertising revenue from the EU, which, as an economy bigger than China and the US would massively devalue Twitter. Whilst none of this would stop European users using Twitter, it'd become near impossible to monetize those users.
The US government may find itself no longer privileged enough in European eyes to enjoy access to banking data and so forth for "counter terrorism" purposes and other such privileged data access it enjoys too.
It probably wouldn't ever reach this stage, but it's naive to think that simply because they're a US company, they have no interests in Europe that can't be squeezed if they breach European law. It's also likely if the EU did levy a fine, that Twitter would just pay it anyway, simply because the fine is still going to be less than the long term profits to be obtained from a continued European prescence.
Besides, it's possible that the MEPs in question have no intention of seeing Twitter penalised anyway, more likely they're simply doing this to add pressure to the US government to drop it's request because like many people across the globe, including some in America, they simply believe that subpoena for communication records of a foreign MP just because that MP used an American firm is a step too far. I believe they're probably just sending a message that it's not acceptable, that's all- the US government undoubtedly knows how far the EU could take this if they so decided to.
It's probably worth keeping in mind that even if a language is updated that many developers don't need or wont utilise new features anyway. For example, many people will still be using C++ as it was 20 years ago. Of course, it can also take time for language tools such as compilers to catch up to standards too, so it might be some years post standards ratification before the tools are fully upto the job of supporting the new standard anyway.
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't recall language updates ever having been a frequent thing historically, and rapid updates in more modern languages are born from the release early, patch often mentality that came about with the rise of the connected world and people becoming used to the likes of Windows update downloading 10s, sometimes hundreds of megabytes of updates each month.
This is not to say frequent updates are bad or anything, just that I don't think it should be seen as unusual that updates to older languages like C++ are relatively infrequent.
It's a shame you didn't apply this logic to the person I was responding to, else you may not have completely and utterly missed the point of the paragraphs in my post that you are apparently struggling with.
The OP stated that AMD processors are left and right implying that he believes they are common and perhaps even hold a majority marketshare. I gave a counter example of a personal anecdote with an illustration of my own circumstances where it's not the case that AMD processors are "left and right" demonstrating the point that his experience is not universal to everyone. I'm sorry if you needed this explicitly pointing out to you, most people don't.
My second paragraph merely illustrated the fact that people have their own good reasons to switch from AMD, and whether people have reasons to switch back is neither here nor there, it's merely a point made in the context of the fact AMD is struggling and a demonstration of one of many reasons why they may be struggling.
If you had not jumped straight onto my post with the incorrect assumption that I was trying to use a set of personal anecdotes to prove that AMD has a smaller market share than Intel then you might not have so wildly missed the point of my post. Most people here are already almost certainly aware of the established fact that AMD does not hold a majority marketshare in really any segment of the processor business, most are aware that even for PCs for example - one of AMD's strongest segments - Intel still holds ~80% of the market. Anyone can trivially find this out for themselves with a few seconds of Googling, it's not a point that needs to be proven in a post on Slashdot when it's already fairly common knowledge.
What AMD CPUs left and right? My work laptop is Intel, my Netbook is Intel, both my Cell phones have Qualcomm ARM chips.
I don't even buy AMD chips at home now, since whilst Intel remained more expensive, AMD chips always ended up seeming to require excessive cooling, and AMD chips never seemed to give the performance I'd expect, yet the first Intel chip I bought in 15 years for my home PC did straight out the box.
Apart from extremely low margin budget PCs and laptops from your local electronics superstore I don't see much use of AMD chips at all now, they don't really seem to have done a good job of diversifying into an increasingly mobile world, and don't seem to have made any meaningful headway against Intel on the desktop. I understand they've had some success in the server market, but it alone wont cut it, and I'm not even sure the headway they made here is being sustained?
I'm not wishing ill of AMD or anything, I think it'd be a tragedy if they dissapeared because Intel would be largely competitorless on the desktop and have no real motivation to rapidly improve as they have with AMD in competition, but right now I don't see how AMD has been particularly well managed, they seemed to have largely failed to enter new markets well without improving their standing in existing markets also. In contrast, companies like nVidia and VIA seem to be doing a better job of diversifying into new markets, so I don't really see how AMDs woes can be anything other than bad management- presumably that's precisely why this guy is stepping down.
Of course you're assuming there's actually anything at all in the insurance file and it isn't just a bluff.
You seem to excel at reaching conclusions without having thought through the possible explanations. Congratulations on the comparison to Hitler too, very good that. Really adds weight to your argument.
Here's one for you, one on your level:
"Assange's detractors remind me of Hitler, and the spell he was able to cast on the ignorant haters who are jealous of Assanges achievements, obviously all his haters are as foolish and bad as the nazis who fell under Hitler's spell".
You see how that works now I've made a comment more on your level of logical ineptitude?
Really, thinking through something before reaching a conclusion, whilst still accepting that your conclusion may not be 100% correct isn't hard. You should try it some day, you may sound less ignorant.
Me, personally? I'll agree Assange probably is a dick, I say probably because in an interview I read from him with Forbes some weeks ago prior to much of the recent drama he actually came across as well reasoned, and sensible, so I accept that there's a possibility that although he probably is, he may not be. The fact remains though that he's done more in terms of gathering and bringing attention to high profile leaks than anyone else has this last few decades, which regardless of his personality, means he's good at what he does. The fact he has so many haters is evidence enough of that- most people even in technical circles can't even remember the Cryptome guy's name, let alone anyone in the mainstream being able to name a single thing he's published and what relevance it had to anything even though some were in fact quite big and important. You may think he could be a nicer guy or have done things better, and that's fine, but denying he's done a good job already of leaking and bringing attention to material is just fucking retarded.
Slashdot Mirror
"but it feels like the actors have no careers any more (especially Craig Charles, who is now badly dubbing Japanese game shows for cable channels) and just want to milk sucess 30 years ago."
To be fair on the guy, back in the 90s during Red Dwarf's peak he was victim of a false rape allegation which delayed the later series and harmed the ratings somewhat as a result. After that he seemed to dissapear from public view somewhat.
Still, since 2005 he's been on the UK's longest runnning, most popular, and regular award winning prime time soap which, unlike American ongoing soaps are held in much higher regard here, and have much higher audiences proportional to population differences. This largely came about with the British terrestrial TV system which for years meant there was only 5 main channels and cable/sky TV with hundreds of channels was much less common. Whilst we have more channels today via Freeview the original channels have kept their status as being generally seen as the better quality channels, so getting a role on a soap on one of these channels is really a sign of success- to give an example, Ian McKellen that played Gandelf in Lord of the Rings took up a short storyline in the same soap that Craig Charles is in just a few years ago only shortly after the success of the LotR movies.
Craig Charles also has a radio DJ show on a popular radio channel in the UK.
So he may not have moved on to say, Hollywood movies, and given the setbacks he's seen in terms of the false rape allegation over the years he's done pretty well for himself, certainly you can guarantee he's far more widely known now for his Coronation Street role, and far better paid than he will have been for Red Dwarf, as good as it was.
That land being the whole world you mean?
Shit like Coronation Street, Friends, Sex and the City has always rated better than science comedies simply because there are more brainless drones in the world than there are people who appreciate science enough to get the jokes in science comedies.
It doesn't matter where you are, mass market stuff that anyone can get into is always going to do better than more targetted sciency stuff.
You have to look at why though.
For years browser vendors have done an utterly shit job of supporting the standards, they've just been hopeless at it, largely because they want to do things their way. Previously the W3C and it's members and contributors built the spec, these people were generally software engineers from companies like Nokia, Siemens, as well as from more desktop oriented companies, the browser manufacturers didn't hold the balance of power, they were given a spec that suited the people that actually build the web and aren't interested in platform specific bias. In contrast they wanted a web that suited them and their goals even though these often ran contrary to each other when really they should merely exist to display the web according to the spec designed by the more platform and content neutral developers.
Then came the rise of WHATWG, a group that basically represented the browser vendors and key technology players that long had vested interests, like the browser vendors, in ensuring the web goes the way they want- Apple wants it to work best for Apple's platform, Google wants it to be great at displaying ads whatever the platform and so on. They managed to wrestle away power from the more neutral committee at the W3C and they forced HTML5 onto the world.
The problem is of course, these companies haven't stopped being self-interested, and so what you get is rather than a spec designed to be generic and not specific to any single specific interests, you get a spec which has had everyone's individual interests lumped in as a big mangled mess, and suprise suprise, where interests collide, you get disagreement and refusal to budge. Look what a farce HTML5's video tag has turned out to be whereas in contrast the W3C historically where such issues came up simply specified the tag and was neutral to the format, which is why there are a number of image formats that work well on the web for different purposes and why formats such as PNG have been allowed to rise, the W3C let the market decide and letting the market decide has allowed things to adapt and change over time. This is the route the video tag appears to have been forced into anyway albeit in a much messier less explicit manner that doesn't look set to end well as unlike with images where all browsers implemented the popular market chosen formats, different browsers may well play different video to try and force theirs as the standard, a standard which may not be easily replaced without another HTML5 standards cluster fuck as it becomes outdated and obsolete.
The delay with HTML5 stems entirely from the reasons why WHATWG and HTML5 should never really have been allowed to hijack the web in the first place. Sure the W3C has got itself in on it now, but it knows it's merely there to try and cling on to what little power it has left, rather than the overall custodian of quality web oriented specifications. Letting the W3C lose it's prominent position of covering the views of many many companies to a handful powerful vested interests is probably the worst thing to happen to the web since Microsoft managed to get IE in a position go largely unchallenged for years with IE5 and IE6 causing many years of web stagnation.
"I'm puzzled by these comments. There is no memory leak of that size in Firefox, are you sure it isn't a runaway plug in or extension? Firefox pretty consistently beats out the competition in terms of memory utilization."
How do you really know? I've seen plenty of other people with similar complaints. It could be a plugin or extension certainly but I'm not using anything out of the order- Firebug, AdBlock plus.
"As far as speed goes, it hasn't been this fast since at least the 1.x series, and probably earlier than that. I'm not sure what full featured browsers you've found that are faster, but I'm skeptical. Most of them are larding up because they don't encompass the whole browser experience."
Well, to give you an example, my older spare Windows XP machine running on an Athlon XP 3200+ with 512mb RAM used to browse the web just fine with Firefox, but nowadays it's simply unusable. In contrast, IE runs better than Firefox, but is still a pain, however Google Chrome runs just fine and is perfectly usable. I'm not sure what you mean by not encompassing the whole browser experience, but most of what's missing from Firefox is useless tat- like being able to theme your browser window. This specific system actually has no addons installed for Firefox- it's literally just vanilla Firefox, and a completely fresh install rather than the original upgraded version makes no difference.
"As for the quality of the 2.0 release, this is how I know you're trolling. The 2.x series was crap, serious memory leaks and all sorts of problems. They've come a long way in the right direction since then."
Okay, so you claim I'm trolling despite the fact you suggested there are no memory leaks that could cause the problems I and others have encountered- you make this claim but lets face it, you haven't audited Firefox's entire source tree so if you're really going to make comments like that you should avoid criticising others. The reason I say Firefox 2.0 was better because that was simply the point at which Firefox never crashed for me, and never exhibited any memory leaks. Since then it's got progressively worse- I've seen that "Something went wrong, would you like to restore your tabs?" page many a time since, on different operating systems, on different machines, in different places. As I pointed out above, the browser has definitely become progressively more slow. I'm aware people reported issues with 2.0, and ironically, at the time, I was precisely in your shoes, defending it saying there aren't any memory leaks because it doesn't exhibit any for me, 3.0 and onwards taught me the hard way that with Firefox, just because you don't see a problem doesn't mean others do because as I say, it's just got progressively worse with each release since.
I know the sort of ISP you're referring to, I fell victim to any number of them during the dialup days, but, fingers crossed, have yet to have too much trouble since our neighbourhood finally got DSL back in about 2003. I've had other issues- i.e. Demon who I was with originally one day introduced an arbitrary unpublished cap without a contract change and said I'd be dropped to 128kbps for an entire month as punishment. Needless to say that was roughly about the moment I told a customer service rep to fuck off for the first time. Thankfully, with a small claims court claim they decided not to defend it and accepted payment to me of 2 months of subscription, 2 months of XBox live and Dark Age of Camelot subscription (for 2 accounts) and costs for moving to a new ISP, so hopefully they learnt their lesson there.
There are a few cheap ISPs still, PlusNet has a £6.49 offering which has a 10gb fair usage cap but is well managed in terms of connectivity speeds, contention and so forth so if all you do is browse the web or e-mail then it's a pretty good offering- they have a fairly decent UK support centre too. I think BT still has an offering, and they're really not so bad anymore in terms of connectivity, although wouldn't be my first choice simply because they're BT. There are one or two others but I don't really know anyone whose used them to judge.
Er, no. There's any number of reports across the internet so it's not just me either I'm afraid.
It's also not just my house, I use Firefox as my primary testing browser when building web apps at work, and it happens there too, my colleagues have a similar experience with it.
It's actually one reason we haven't rolled it out company wide yet, coupled with the fact support for corporate networks is still less than stellar so even the IT team agree it's a problem.
Sorry, your fanboyism doesn't alter reality. Firefox has become progressively more buggy and sluggish since 2.0. This is why 4.0 needs to be rock solid, so that it can finally reach a point where there's no longer a reason not to roll it out.
Wrong. I'm using the latest version - 3.6.13, I cited 2.0 as the best because that's the point at which memory leaks and speed were at their peak. Since then each successive release of Firefox- 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 has slowed the browser down more and more, and made it no more stable since the instabilities introduced with 3.0.
Addons are nothing to do with it unless ABP or Firebug cause this, but I've never heard either of them referred to as "shitty". It's nothing to do with my machines as it occurs on multiple machines, and will even occur on a clean install.
Chrome is fine, IE is fine, it's a Firefox problem, period.
"True, I only mentioned that bit because you said decent ISP, if you had said shitty ISP i'd have agreed with you."
Well that was really my point, to these sorts of users those ISPs aren't shitty. I'd personally have said the shitty ISPs are the ones who perform badly even for light users- those that really are heavily oversubscribed for the bandwidth they have available. I think for the price, and for the fact you'll be able to do everything you want to do as a light user on some cheap ISPs it's hard to call them shitty. I suppose it depends where you're coming from, personally I wouldn't call even a low end Porsche a shitty car, but if you're been driving high end Ferrari's all your life your opinion might differ.
"If you don't have a phone line or don't feel you can commit for that long then this governemnt subsidised mobile based deal will probabblly be the cheapest way to get online."
Yes, it's a fair point in that context. That said, talking about shitty broadband, personally, I'd rather take 2mbps fixed ADSL over most 3G connections because I've yet to see 3G coverage where latency isn't a big issue, stability isn't a problem, and caps aren't horrendously low. I'd argue the 3G coverage problem is at least as bad, and almost certainly worse than that of ADSL availability. Will this in itself cause problems? who knows.
"Absolutely untrue. In my age group, almost no one has a landline because mobiles are much cheaper."
What age group is this exactly? I'm in my 20s and whilst I don't know anyone without a mobile phone, I still don't know anyone whose given up their landline either. I just don't know a single person without one.
"No, it's targeted at people who can't afford the Internet. Read their documentation - they claim that being online saves an average of £537/year and that this is most important for people with a very low income"
A figure which came about as part of Martha Lane Fox's role as Digital Inclusion Champion in which she is tasked with trying to get people online who simply weren't interested. The reason being that the government could then shift people to online services and save money by axing offices that were otherwise required to provide those services. The figure was a useful incentive to try and convince people to go online. Whatever the marketing is currently this is her core goal, and this project is clearly an offset of that. Obviously being poor is one of many reasons people don't go online, but note the text in the summary itself and on the Race Online site itself- less than half of those who are not online are in the disadvantaged category, there's still around 5 million they're targetting who are not online for other reasons than simply being poor so it's definitely not just about being unable to afford the internet.
"They are people who are often moving quite often to look for work, so can't afford any kind of Internet access that has an installation fee or requires a long contract in the same dwelling."
Huh? Most people who can't afford the internet are the long term unemployed, the elderly, and minimum wage workers. These are not the sort of people who move around a lot as they tend to be the recipients of council houses, or in the case of the elderly, often already have established homes. Those who are able to move around a lot have much less problem finding jobs simply because they can get away from the places where the job market is poor.
Agreed, Firefox has been on a horrible decline since version 2.0, the last thing they need to do is continue that trend.
Nowadays I find it slower than it's competitors, and I find it less stable, every once in a while it just crashes. It also seems to have horrendous memory leak issues, if I leave it running overnight it's not unusual to find it chewing up 2gb of RAM in the morning and I've even seen it edge pretty close to 4gb on one occasion. Even IE never does any of these things for me nowadays.
The best thing they can do is take their time and produce a release that's of the quality of 2.0 because if they release yet another release that's yet another step back in terms of stability and performance then they're really going to start reversing their trend towards being the number one browser globally.
This amuses me, I can imagine the moment in the Sony/Universal boardroom when someone came up with this idea and was treated like a genius, whilst the rest of the world has been pointing this out as part the piracy problem to them for decades now.
It's a big reason why people pirate music, movies, and even games. The disparity between US and European release dates of films for example has always been a big part of it- if the US has already had the DVD release when Europeans are being told in a few months they'll be able to watch some film with an awesome trailer, then what the fuck do they think people will do if they have the option? Sit waiting patiently, or just acquire a US copy?
Giving people an on-demand option at the same time as scheduled options such as radio based music or cinema based film is bound to help them out- you can't tease people by "setting them up" and then wonder why they went off and acquired the content their own way rather than continued putting up with your teasing. If people want something and you wont give it to them, they'll go and find their own copy from someone else which by and large, will be the likes of The Pirate Bay.
"If you are getting ADSL at that price in the UK and it's not a time limited offer you are on a really shitty ISP, heavilly traffic limited or most likely both."
This is true, but light users, which will be the target demographic here aren't ever going to notice the difference. They don't need an uncontended, uncapped service because they'll never use it. It'll still provide all they need for quick web browsing, e-mailing, youtube videos and that sort of thing.
This is the sort of package the vast majority of broadband users on the country use and are perfectly happy with. The people that this scheme is targetted at will almost in their entirety likely be part of this demographic rather than the low latency gaming, and high bandwidth downloading demographic who need more expensive connections, and besides, what makes you think this government sponsored offering is going to somehow be better than any of these cheap packages anyway? It's not like the government is interested in ensuring these people have better access than the millions across the country that have the cheap packages- they just want them online with basic service so that they can scrap physical services and replace them with online ones.
"And a big fat [citation needed] there. If you are using ADSL, then you have a £10.50 line rental to BT, plus whatever your ISP charges. If you have a LLU exchange, then you might be able to pay £6-7 line rental to some other company. If you go with cable, the cheapest package is £20/month."
It's a bit dishonest to try and factor in BT's line rental, because so few people, even the poorest in society don't have an existing line of some sort. I'll concede however that you're right, you can't get DSL for £5 anymore, as looking at the site of PlusNet et. al. they've upped their lowest package price to £6.49, although they've also upped it to an up to 20mbps package too. I hadn't realised ISPs had upped their prices of their low end packages, but regardless, there's still plenty offering it for below £9 a month, even if it's not the £5 a month style deals they had up until around 6 months to a year ago.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that this is for people living in rural areas where broadband coverage is poor- that doesn't seem to be the goal here and is really a different issue, this seems more targetted at the folks who simply aren't interested in the internet, in fact, it states that disadvantaged people are the core target demographic, and these are by and large live in run down inner city areas or the near outskirts of cities where broadband coverage is at least actually quite good. Whilst there are poor in rural areas, there are much fewer there which is precisely why such areas are rural in the first place- they have extremely low population density.
For what it's worth, I live in rural West Yorkshire and can't get more than 2mbps myself, even that was a push for the last 5 years it took BT to replace my phone line due to high line noise and was for a year towards the point they finally replaced the line stuck in the 512kbps - 1mbps range myself. Despite the fact I'd have absolutely loved faster it didn't stop me downloading movies, using iPlayer, or playing games. For the average person just starting out on the web with web pages and e-mail even 1mbps is plenty enough, they simply wont do anything that requires more- hell, I'm an advanced and heavy user and other than having to just schedule large downloads overnight I really don't find any inconvenience in it at all so a light web user really isn't going to.
Yes, you can get upto 8mbps in the UK for £5 on a decent ISP, or even free with some package deals, so I'm not sure why this subsidised internet still costs £9. That doesn't sound very subsidised to me, I suspect in typical inept British public sector style the government chose some pet contractor like Capita or similar to run the scheme and that pet contractor is trying to milk it from both ends by getting paid by the government to provide broadband to these folk and by running an ISP that turns a profit from these people too.
Indeed.
If someone knows for example, the Zend Framework inside out, then should their boss come along and say right, now I want you to build a web app in ASP.NET MVC, then an experienced developer shouldn't even flinch at the task. Once you understand request routing, the MVC pattern, and so forth, then switching between the Zend framework, ASP.NET MVC, Spring MVC or any similar such thing is, in my experience, a piece of cake. I've found it a very useful point to make on a CV too- to focus on core knowledge, rather than specific frameworks, because it massively increases the number of jobs open to you.
It's been said here before plenty of times, but many people don't seem to grasp it. Good developers are developers who can use the best tool for the job. If someone asked me what my favourite language was, I'd probably say C based purely on nostalgia, but when was the last time I actually used plain old C for a project? I really can't remember. This is the difference between good programmers and bad programmers- good programmers will only use a language if it's the best tool for the job, bad programmers will use their "favourite" language regardless.
The common excuse is often along the lines of "but I can do everything in C++!", that maybe true, but you can't do it as fast, and you can't do it in as inherently secure a manner as someone using a managed language. Sure, absolute performance where even a millisecond or two matters might be an overriding concern and C++ might be the right option, but for 90% of business apps at least the performance benefits of C++ don't outweigh the fact it's easier to make mistakes, and slower to develop with than some of it's more modern alternatives. I'm sure some smartass will also tell us as usual he doesn't make mistakes, so it's not a problem, but I guarantee if you take two equally competent coders and get one to build in a managed language and one in C++ that the C++ app will be more error prone, simply because both progammers are only human, but the managed developer at least had a safety blanket for those times where humans err.
I suspect those developers complaining about being paid less than new "upstarts" are the ones still building everything in whatever their favourite language is, no matter how unsuitable that language might be for the tasks they are assigned.
"Iceland did not bail out its banks, they let them fail (and were branded as terrorists by the UK for doing so)"
Er no, that's not quite what happened. Iceland didn't let them fail, the problem was, the banks were so poorly run and the government so oblivious to the problems that they failed before the government even had time to figure out whether to try and save them or not. Further the UK didn't brand Iceland terrorists for letting the banks fail, they just used anti-terrorism legislation to seize the UK assets of those banks because it was the only tool they had to hand to do that. I agree however, this was a bit of a political fuck up on behalf of the Brown government, and it's easy to see why this upset the Icelandic people, it would've been better to try and pass emergency legislation specific to the issue. The upside is, it's provided a perfect situation to cite in future with regards to laws being used beyond their intended purpose when governments implement unspecific laws that could have grave consequences.
"The economy of Iceland is actually growing again, which is more than can be said for "The Eurozone"."
Well, large parts of the eurozone are growing, and although I can't be bothered to check recent figures I'm sure it as a whole is, certainly France and Germany - the two key economies have seen strong growth.
But despite all this, I do generally agree with your view, that banks should be allowed to fail. The issue is that by propping up you've not taught the people responsible a lesson, this is why we're seeing banks paid silly bonuses even now- because they can, whereas if they had been allowed to fail then they'd instead likely be out collecting their unemployment benefits. When there are no repercussions for failure, there's also no incentive in future to avoid the things that led to failure because they can fail, and still get multi-million pound payoffs. It's really just a typical emergent process like evolution, if you allow the unfit to fail, then only the fit will thrive in the market whereas as is the artificially supported unfit are thriving in an environment where they probably shouldn't be in the long run.
Well this is why they announced it on a US bank holiday when no shares are trading there.
In Frankfurt, Europe meanwhile, Apple shares are already down 7%.
Looks like it's business as usual in the crazy world of Apple shares.
"The US has a very legitimate sovereign concern regarding gathering any information it can on the leakage of state secrets. If that includes the use of subpoena to gain that information from US sources OR use of other methods i.e. espionage to gather it outside the US they are justified in doing so."
Yes, and the EU has a very legitimate sovereign concern in protecting the privacy of it's citizens, and if that includes penalising a US firm for breaching privacy laws of EU citizens if it wishes to continue doing business in the EU then they're perfectly justified in doing so too.
"EU privacy laws are not binding on the US or on information stored in the US, they have no jurisdiction. By acting to hold a private company responsible for the actions of a sovereign power they are behaving like asses."
Yes, but they're binding on US firms wishing to do business and gain ad-revenue from the world's largest economy- the EU. They have every jurisdiction about Twitter's EU operations, and the only people acting like "asses" are the US government for putting their nations firms in that position by trying to snoop on data about citizens - even politicians - living in sovereign nations.
"If the EU wishes to fight this they are perfectly capable of doing so through diplomatic channels."
Perhaps, but they might not win. The EU is a bigger economy with a larger population and greater international respect than the US nowadays.
"Sanctioning Twitter in the EU for obeying laws in the US is stupid. Twitter has no ability to affect the situation."
Other than the afformentioned option of speaking to the leaders of their primary host nation to ask them to try and be a bit more respectful to international law.
The problem for you is you have a deeply nationalistic mindset- you seem to believe US law trumps all other law in the case of an international case. The irony is, you would no doubt be the first to complain if the EU started using all the US banking data it has for it's own personal interests, but the EU doesn't do that, the EU doesn't do it to the US, so why do you think the US should do it to the EU? Whether the US has an interest in doing it or not is irrelevant- the real question is is it worth doing it? Is placing a subpoena on the personal information of a foreign MP and foreign citizens really worth creating international tension over? The most obvious, sane answer, is no, but if the US does otherwise anyway, then they can't complain if the EU responds in kind, they can't complain if China and Russia similarly do things the US does not like.
I agree it's shit for Twitter, but that's for them to take up as a business with the government in which they do business, or if that government isn't willing to budge, consider moving their business elsewhere where privacy is respected more.
"The EU are acting like asses imho. They know full well that Twitter has no options in this case. If they try to impose sanctions on Twitter the US will simply file a case with the WTO, or impose some sort of penalty on a EU company."
Why is it the EU's fault? Why not the US government's fault for making such an absurd request in the first place - let's be clear here, amongst others, the US government is asking for private data about an MP from Iceland whose only connection with the US is the fact she used a service based in that country. I find it incredible anyone would believe it's the EU who are being asses about this simply because they raise concerns about that.
It's also a very slippery slope- what next, the US government demands access to data held by foreign businesses hosted on private server hosts in the US, or on GMail? What if it gets leaked to competing US businesses, where's the hope for US corporations if the rest of the world can no longer trust them to keep their data secure in the face of US government snooping?
It's very much the US government's request that's at fault here, because it's not just bad for rights of individuals such as their right to privacy and interference in their lives from foreign governments, but it's also potentially very bad for US corporations themselves. If the EU makes no noise about this then absolutely everyone loses, if they make a noise then yes it's shitty for Twitter, but at least they're attempting to steer the US away from causing harm to many more people and businesses whether they're based in the US or not.
The WTO would not help because it would side with the EU based on the very fact that the EU is legally in the right here- if a company wishes to conduct business in a region, it must adhere to that region's laws, and if it does not, may suffer a penalty decided upon by that region. There is nothing wrong with the EU's actions legally, in fact, they're doing everything by the book- they've not even out and out said Twitter has broken the law yet, they are merely investigating whether that is the case. If the US were to inflict a penalty in response without any legal basis it would then itself be in breach of international law, and would lose any case under the WTO, if it came down to an out and out trade war the US would almost certainly lose because the EU is the bigger economy, and the US is much more vulnerable to actions by countries like China. It'll never get that far though, at worst Twitter will get fined and lobby the US government, but I'll be suprised if even that happens- most likely as I say, this is just a simple threat with no real substance behind it put forward in the hope that it's enough to make the US government reconsider it's absurd position. The US government may not listen to privacy activists in the US or Twitter itself, but it may well listen to the politicians of it's largest ally at least and that's all they're really trying to achieve here- to make the US government see sense.
Then Twitter can be fined, and if it doesn't pay up, banned from doing business in the EU, and any European assets seized.
Not doing business in the EU would mean no advertising revenue from the EU, which, as an economy bigger than China and the US would massively devalue Twitter. Whilst none of this would stop European users using Twitter, it'd become near impossible to monetize those users.
The US government may find itself no longer privileged enough in European eyes to enjoy access to banking data and so forth for "counter terrorism" purposes and other such privileged data access it enjoys too.
It probably wouldn't ever reach this stage, but it's naive to think that simply because they're a US company, they have no interests in Europe that can't be squeezed if they breach European law. It's also likely if the EU did levy a fine, that Twitter would just pay it anyway, simply because the fine is still going to be less than the long term profits to be obtained from a continued European prescence.
Besides, it's possible that the MEPs in question have no intention of seeing Twitter penalised anyway, more likely they're simply doing this to add pressure to the US government to drop it's request because like many people across the globe, including some in America, they simply believe that subpoena for communication records of a foreign MP just because that MP used an American firm is a step too far. I believe they're probably just sending a message that it's not acceptable, that's all- the US government undoubtedly knows how far the EU could take this if they so decided to.
It's probably worth keeping in mind that even if a language is updated that many developers don't need or wont utilise new features anyway. For example, many people will still be using C++ as it was 20 years ago. Of course, it can also take time for language tools such as compilers to catch up to standards too, so it might be some years post standards ratification before the tools are fully upto the job of supporting the new standard anyway.
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't recall language updates ever having been a frequent thing historically, and rapid updates in more modern languages are born from the release early, patch often mentality that came about with the rise of the connected world and people becoming used to the likes of Windows update downloading 10s, sometimes hundreds of megabytes of updates each month.
This is not to say frequent updates are bad or anything, just that I don't think it should be seen as unusual that updates to older languages like C++ are relatively infrequent.
It's a shame you didn't apply this logic to the person I was responding to, else you may not have completely and utterly missed the point of the paragraphs in my post that you are apparently struggling with.
The OP stated that AMD processors are left and right implying that he believes they are common and perhaps even hold a majority marketshare. I gave a counter example of a personal anecdote with an illustration of my own circumstances where it's not the case that AMD processors are "left and right" demonstrating the point that his experience is not universal to everyone. I'm sorry if you needed this explicitly pointing out to you, most people don't.
My second paragraph merely illustrated the fact that people have their own good reasons to switch from AMD, and whether people have reasons to switch back is neither here nor there, it's merely a point made in the context of the fact AMD is struggling and a demonstration of one of many reasons why they may be struggling.
If you had not jumped straight onto my post with the incorrect assumption that I was trying to use a set of personal anecdotes to prove that AMD has a smaller market share than Intel then you might not have so wildly missed the point of my post. Most people here are already almost certainly aware of the established fact that AMD does not hold a majority marketshare in really any segment of the processor business, most are aware that even for PCs for example - one of AMD's strongest segments - Intel still holds ~80% of the market. Anyone can trivially find this out for themselves with a few seconds of Googling, it's not a point that needs to be proven in a post on Slashdot when it's already fairly common knowledge.
What AMD CPUs left and right? My work laptop is Intel, my Netbook is Intel, both my Cell phones have Qualcomm ARM chips.
I don't even buy AMD chips at home now, since whilst Intel remained more expensive, AMD chips always ended up seeming to require excessive cooling, and AMD chips never seemed to give the performance I'd expect, yet the first Intel chip I bought in 15 years for my home PC did straight out the box.
Apart from extremely low margin budget PCs and laptops from your local electronics superstore I don't see much use of AMD chips at all now, they don't really seem to have done a good job of diversifying into an increasingly mobile world, and don't seem to have made any meaningful headway against Intel on the desktop. I understand they've had some success in the server market, but it alone wont cut it, and I'm not even sure the headway they made here is being sustained?
I'm not wishing ill of AMD or anything, I think it'd be a tragedy if they dissapeared because Intel would be largely competitorless on the desktop and have no real motivation to rapidly improve as they have with AMD in competition, but right now I don't see how AMD has been particularly well managed, they seemed to have largely failed to enter new markets well without improving their standing in existing markets also. In contrast, companies like nVidia and VIA seem to be doing a better job of diversifying into new markets, so I don't really see how AMDs woes can be anything other than bad management- presumably that's precisely why this guy is stepping down.
Where do you live, North Korea?
Christ I live in CCTV land (the UK) and don't share these concerns. Things aren't good, but they're certainly not that bad.
Of course you're assuming there's actually anything at all in the insurance file and it isn't just a bluff.
You seem to excel at reaching conclusions without having thought through the possible explanations. Congratulations on the comparison to Hitler too, very good that. Really adds weight to your argument.
Here's one for you, one on your level:
"Assange's detractors remind me of Hitler, and the spell he was able to cast on the ignorant haters who are jealous of Assanges achievements, obviously all his haters are as foolish and bad as the nazis who fell under Hitler's spell".
You see how that works now I've made a comment more on your level of logical ineptitude?
Really, thinking through something before reaching a conclusion, whilst still accepting that your conclusion may not be 100% correct isn't hard. You should try it some day, you may sound less ignorant.
Me, personally? I'll agree Assange probably is a dick, I say probably because in an interview I read from him with Forbes some weeks ago prior to much of the recent drama he actually came across as well reasoned, and sensible, so I accept that there's a possibility that although he probably is, he may not be. The fact remains though that he's done more in terms of gathering and bringing attention to high profile leaks than anyone else has this last few decades, which regardless of his personality, means he's good at what he does. The fact he has so many haters is evidence enough of that- most people even in technical circles can't even remember the Cryptome guy's name, let alone anyone in the mainstream being able to name a single thing he's published and what relevance it had to anything even though some were in fact quite big and important. You may think he could be a nicer guy or have done things better, and that's fine, but denying he's done a good job already of leaking and bringing attention to material is just fucking retarded.